Feminists

[Seraph]

Gee, now I remember why Sociology is my least favourite subject. We can all argue until we bite our tongues off and no one will be completely right lol

There is only one solution: Kill All Humans.

[Beckwin]

But they aren't started by the poor or close to poor middle class or by non whites. The feminist movement is largely run by white upper middle class women, and so is the LGTB (men & women).

I'm not disagreeing with that really.

Between you, Darus, and myself I think we've just been trying to clarify things for the past 10 or so posts, lol. Originally I believe I was just trying to point out to Metah that it's the ruling group protecting the status quo and oppressed/dissidents offering changes (which especially with the dissident part, as you and Darus have pointed out, can include members of upper classes). and this is a cultural thing that I'm talking about moreso than a political one, so keep that in mind even though there's similarities.

[Penthesilea]

Ok this isn't an argument since you're failing to concede the point on which you're wrong, i.e.
20 years not being enough time to decide women are inferior to men in a particular field.

Nobody is saying women are superior, the point is that saying men dominate all things physical is foolish considering the data suggests that women are naturally more equipped to perform in endurance activities. Also, judging from your responses I know for a fact you haven't read the BBC article I posted awhile back. That being said, I'm done. The point is arguing that men are superior in everything physical (strength, speed, etc.) like you did, just isn't valid.

I'm not seeing any data that suggests women are more naturally equipped with more slow oxidative/fast, fatigue resistant fibres than men.

Skeletal muscle fibers are generally classified as type I (oxidative/slow) or type II (glycolytic/fast) fibers. They display marked differences in respect to contraction, metabolism, and susceptibility to fatigue. Type I fibers are mitochondria-rich and mainly use oxidative metabolism for energy production, which provides a stable and long-lasting supply of ATP, and thus are fatigue-resistant. Type II fibers comprise three subtypes, IIa, IIx, and IIb. Type IIb fibers have the lowest levels of mitochondrial content and oxidative enzymes, rely on glycolytic metabolism as a major energy source, and are susceptible to fatigue, while the oxidative and contraction functions of type IIa and IIx lie between type I and IIb (Booth and Thomason 1991; Berchtold et al. 2000; Olson and Williams 2000). Adult skeletal muscle shows plasticity and can undergo conversion between different fiber types in response to exercise training or modulation of motoneuron activity (Booth and Thomason 1991, Jarvis et al. 1996; Pette 1998; Olson and Williams 2000; Hood 2001). This conversion of muscle fiber from type IIb to type IIa and type I is likely to be mediated by a calcium signaling pathway that involves calcineurin, calmodulin-dependent kinase, and the transcriptional cofactor Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-gamma coactivator 1α (PGC-1α) (Naya et al. 2000; Olson and Williams 2000; Lin et al. 2002; Wu et al. 2002). However, the targeted transcriptional factors directly responsible for reprogramming the fiber-specific contractile and metabolic genes remain to be identified.

If anything that just suggests that fibres can change their function based off of training. The differences you're seeing in times aren't women because women now have large amounts of those fibre types, but because they're actually utilizing them more efficiently and strengthening them. Men have been running all their lives, women not so much, but they'll plateau soon enough, just like men have.

I read the article and all it is is "what if"s and "I believes", not showing anything empirically. Btw, I'll get back to you in 50 years to show you that women still haven't surpassed men in performance in endurance races.

TRIResults.com - Historical Triathlon Results

[Blarg]

Ok this isn't an argument since you're failing to concede the point on which you're wrong, i.e.
20 years not being enough time to decide women are inferior to men in a particular field.

How exactly is the running or throwing or what have you a man did 100 years ago going to improve what a man born now can do? Are Olympians always born from other Olympians or something, is this how their super genes are being passed on? Women and men can be taught the same technique from the same age and yet given the same amount of training more often than not the woman is going to come in second place.

The techniques in how to run and what weights to lift and how to lift them is 'common' knowledge available to both men and women here so what someone did a few generations ago isn't going to favour one person or the other.

A sexist counterpoint... women have generations of learning how to cook yet many of the top cooks are males, shouldn't the 20 years of male cooking mean that men would be far behind the curve? (this point is not meant to say that men are better cooks)

[Metah]

What was? If you want a more detailed argument you are going to have to be extremely detailed in your presentation.

And, speaking generally, that's the point. They may have a biological or physical basis, but they are distorted, developed, and organized by context.

It might help to go back and reread the last several posts you and I have made.

Beckwin: "the question is how much of that competitiveness vs. cooperation is actually natural or is more the product of reinforced gender roles in a society."

Metah: I beleive that people in the past may have fit their gender roles in the first human societies, the reason they became gender roles is because people did fit these roles naturally at one point. The distinction between natural and societal gender role isn't as clear cut as you may think.

Kuya: We do not inherit our gender roles today from what may have been natural in our ancestors. Any traits and roles we are assigned is based off the physical difference alone, and these roles are distorted because not every person in the opposing sexes falls into the set gender role. It is only the society of the current time and place that determines every facet of the gender role. After all, men and women behave different in different cultures.

Metah: That is true, but there are some shared gender roles that are broad across many cultures. Some things are influenced by nature.

Kuya: If that were true, then please state some examples. If these gender roles are indeed influence by nature at least partially, then we would see them across various cultures, but alas they do not.

Metah: I can convey some examples, if you wish. It is not unheard of to think that a person's father would be more strict when it comes to abiding rules, and that a person's mother would be more sympathetic towards them. These are some traits of the gender roles. I have traveled to a few other countries and have spoken to people there. Through our conversations I've come to know that these gender roles seem to be somewhat universal, although not true for all people. That is kind of obvious, no gender role is completely true for all people. Even among my own close friends where I currently live now, I can tell that indeed a fair amount of my friend's parents do display these traits. My father and mother are the complete opposite to these traits, and yet I find myself to be very strict when it comes to following rules in general. Is that not natural then, because it can be conveyed across cultures?

Kuya: No, it is socialization. Socialization is constantly changing everything, but because you cannot see it, you must think it is natural. Socialization can be hard to detect and even harder to determine, but it shaped you as you are, at least in your strictness. The reason is because you are physically different, and as such we assign roles to your difference, as I've mentioned before. The stereotypes just reinforce each other.

Metah: Maybe I was socialized. But, how did the gender roles become naturalized? Was it not true for our ancestors at some point in time, and was passed on to us? My point is not that society doesn't affect us, its that the gender roles that society enforces may have had some natural truth to it, at least for some people at some point in time. Again, the distinction between nature and the gender role isn't completely cut from each other. They influence each other.

Kuya: You aren't being specific enough. If you want me to reply to you with a little bit of specifity, you'll need to type up a long report with EXTREME specifics (I'll need it on my desk by Friday), which I'll glance over and remain stoic in my unwavering position of 100% correctness. Oh, "And, speaking generally, that's the point. They may have a biological or physical basis, but they are distorted, developed, and organized by context."

Metah: Great! I was never arguing that they are correct. I was never arguing that they are completely natural. I was arguing that the reason they exist is that they naturally existed at least partially at some point in time, and still surface today. Again, the distinction between gender roles and natural roles are not so clear cut.

[Kuya]

A+ in execution, you pass the test.

And, yea, sure, it's a bit of a lame duck of an argument, but i inevitably have to agree that it is not clear cut, assuming that's all your argument really was.

[Metah]

Kuya actually... relented on an argument? I've never seen this before... what do I do?



Maybe I should start writing my actual essay for my English class. All this debate has me fired up.

[Beckwin]

Metah, it's a natural instinct to leave the weak/crippled to die. It's natural instinct to make as many babies as possible. It's natural instinct to self-preserve. But we're not man in nature, we're man in society, and that gives us a lot of choices and allows for much greater self-determination. We choose how to act on those previously/theoretically natural givens. There's nothing wrong with certain gender roles (which may be based on natural/biologic differences, but goddam are certainly not biologically canonical- nothing in the genome about women wearing pink or men liking games with balls) until you force them on someone, and thus it would be fallacious to make generalizations about biologic potentials when it's social engineering fueling the perceptions.

man I was all over that a page and a half ago.

[Ryany]

Everything equals out in my opinion. Certain strengths/weaknesses of different aspects of life are magnified more/less depending on gender. The best way to say it is just hope your strengths are the ones that work out for your gender and your weaknesses aren't the ones that hurt your gender.

[Kuya]

Screw this thread; this shit is awesome and i need to find a way to play that Lost Oddessey song!

[Charla]

To add something further, the idea that men compete because it is natural for them is not being said in context. Compete in what and why? I would say that men compete for status, and that status is their masculinity. The male gender is generally unstable as it is something that you have to fight to maintain, but this is generally the quality of a gender system that is polarized and binary.

This touches on something that I tried to mention on page 1 (but got ignored for obvious reasons), so I'll go into it more now.

It seems to me that it's not masculinity one tries to maintain by competing for status, but rather the value of that masculinity. I'm not going to be any less male if I end up in a gutter, I'll just be a worthless male. A woman, on the other hand, is considered worthwhile without having to compete for it. There appear to be certain areas in which a woman would be at least as interested in competing as a male would (although possibly for something other than status, but that's an argument unto itself). And while the women who lose that competition might lose their value in the eyes of the other women they competed against, it doesn't seem to affect how men think of them (for better or for worse).

In short, a man is expected to spend his whole life fighting for "status", and anyone who doesn't gets thrown out with the rest of the trash. A woman, by contrast, is encouraged to fight for something if she wants, but as long as she's moderately attractive it's not such a big deal. We call this guy a worthless slacker, but when a woman does something similar, the word slacker doesn't even cross our minds. As such, the natural conclusion is that women have inherent value (most likely by virtue of being considered attractive, although I've considered other possibilities as well) while men compete to obtain and maintain their value. This in turn would seem to indicate that women are "better" than men, to the extent to which the term is objectively meaningful.

[Neosutra]

I wouldnt say men competing is a degradation of their value, but rather the simple observation that even after all of our social evolution, our main goals/insticts still come back down to ensuring we find ourselves the best mate.

[Elcura]

Mostly because the periods of time for which they were recorded are different, while men have increased at a steady rate over a given amount of time, women have progressed much faster over a shorter period of time, so of course the variance among the velocities and forcing all those values to be bunched up in the shorter time period, is going to result in a large discrepancy among the velocities.

I've wanted to say something about this, feel free to ignore since I don't have all the facts but...

Is it fair to say that women haven't really tried to be competitive in long distance running until a while ago, while men have been doing it for al lot longer?

If that's the case, then isn't it natural that women would improve at a much faster rate?

Basically, if you have a single male who just started running, inexperienced and doesn't really know what to do then his times would be slow but eventually he would improve. He makes mistakes, isn't efficient etc. Slowly, those things are retified and eventually he finds the correct (or more efficient) methods to run/train/diet and so on and his times steadily improve.

Then a women decides to do the same thing, but instead of going through the whole trial and error process the man did, they can look back and see what he did wrong and what yielded the best results, so naturally in a shorter amount of time they improve at a greater rate than the man (easier to catch up). And because they don't need to make the same mistakes or find the optimum methods to be efficient they don't need as much time to get to the same level (or close) as the men.

So is it fair to say that women progressed better because they are women? Or because the thing they were doing had already been done?

[Churchill]

So you're saying that because of people like Arnold, and science, etc...I can research how to lift weights and get huge as fast as humanly possibly and be like Arnold?

Well I guess part of that is true, I can use the trials and errors of men before me to aid in being more efficient at getting huge...but my genetics will always keep me from being the size that Arnold was.

But I'm sure women are going to totally smoke Usayn Bolt someday.

[Maguspk]

I've wanted to say something about this, feel free to ignore since I don't have all the facts but...

Is it fair to say that women haven't really tried to be competitive in long distance running until a while ago, while men have been doing it for al lot longer?

If that's the case, then isn't it natural that women would improve at a much faster rate?

Basically, if you have a single male who just started running, inexperienced and doesn't really know what to do then his times would be slow but eventually he would improve. He makes mistakes, isn't efficient etc. Slowly, those things are retified and eventually he finds the correct (or more efficient) methods to run/train/diet and so on and his times steadily improve.

Then a women decides to do the same thing, but instead of going through the whole trial and error process the man did, they can look back and see what he did wrong and what yielded the best results, so naturally in a shorter amount of time they improve at a greater rate than the man (easier to catch up). And because they don't need to make the same mistakes or find the optimum methods to be efficient they don't need as much time to get to the same level (or close) as the men.

So is it fair to say that women progressed better because they are women? Or because the thing they were doing had already been done?

If that were the case we'd see similar exaggerated progressions in other activities which is not the case.

[Elcura]

So you're saying that because of people like Arnold, and science, etc...I can research how to lift weights and get huge as fast as humanly possibly and be like Arnold?

Well I guess part of that is true, I can use the trials and errors of men before me to aid in being more efficient at getting huge...but my genetics will always keep me from being the size that Arnold was.

But I'm sure women are going to totally smoke Usayn Bolt someday.

Obviously, you wouldn't be as big, but you could reach your potential (dictated by genetics) faster and more efficiently.

If that were the case we'd see similar exaggerated progressions in other activities which is not the case.

How many other activities? Perhaps it's not the rule, but in the case of just running (considering the fairly large gap) it seems like a possibility. Logically speaking, being able to look back at past instances and mistakes lead to faster results since you don't have to discover them for yourself...

Anyway, last post from me, I just wanted to throw my previous post out there and so I'm done.

[Neosutra]

Really? We dont build on the accomplishments/inovations of our previous generations? And you still havent provided ANY data that women have more "potential" for physical activity than men. Are you just making this shit up?

[Maguspk]

Obviously, you wouldn't be as big, but you could reach your potential (dictated by genetics) faster and more efficiently.



How many other activities? Perhaps it's not the rule, but in the case of just running (considering the fairly large gap) it seems like a possibility. Logically speaking, being able to look back at past instances and mistakes lead to faster results since you don't have to discover them for yourself...

Anyway, last post from me, I just wanted to throw my previous post out there and so I'm done.

Well in that case you're just arbitrarily saying running different from the other sports. Also, if one were to assume women were looking at the past experience of males and that was the source of their improvement then you'd see a start at a higher point and a similar slope as the males have as far as improvement goes.

edit because I didn't have the pleasure of noticing the post above mine:

Really? We dont build on the accomplishments/inovations of our previous generations? And you still havent provided ANY data that women have more "potential" for physical activity than men. Are you just making this shit up?

Hi, my name Neosutra, I make strawman.

[Ryany]

So you're saying that because of people like Arnold, and science, etc...I can research how to lift weights and get huge as fast as humanly possibly and be like Arnold?

Well I guess part of that is true, I can use the trials and errors of men before me to aid in being more efficient at getting huge...but my genetics will always keep me from being the size that Arnold was.....

Even Arnold didn't have the genetics to be Arnold at his peak naturally. The steroid use in the past that he admitted to doing raised the bar on his potential.

[Charla]

So just to be sure, this is a derail, isn't it? Nobody's seriously contending that physical attributes are directly useful in the pursuit of success in modern society (statistically, professional athletes do not count) right?