I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.
Maybe it's based on millions of years of biological differences in their capacities and functions (starting from body strength and role in reproduction), plus differences in social roles, of which some of the latter might be arbitrary, but some are necessary adjustments every historical society understood.
Which of these biological differences in capacities and functions make it so that girls should not be punished by physical pain but it is OK to punish boys with a physical pain using a method that often leaves permanent scars and lasting psychological damage?
It's not even remotely clear to me what this has to do with the topic at hand because insofar as gender plays into bullying girls tend to be more impacted than boys, and secondly corporal punishment and 'disciplining' women by men was historically normalized.
The Singaporean habit of caning is a very modern practice of industrial and military society that has no biological analog, an offshoot of mass discipline society of the 20th century and gender roles of Victorian Britain where groups of men needed to be 'whipped into shape' and women were feminine and pure, but it sure is convenient to randomly invoke biology when one runs out of arguments
>What differences in social roles have been proven "necessary"?
Given that we're in a huge democraphic crisis which will bring untold disaster and misery, a huge depression crisis, marriage crises, and a loneliness epidemic, perhaps we're not the best arbiters of whether they've been proven "necessary" or not.
As for the questions, to some degree they indeed do, so partly yes, but also those differences in treatment are not on a case by case basis, but on average.
If the west would stop vilifying people of different skin color and continent of origin, we'd realize that humanity as a whole does not have that much of a demographic problem. "We are too many" as an argument to keep borders closed and "we are too few, get more kids" are incompatible arguments, unless people are honest about racism.
>we'd realize that humanity as a whole does not have that much of a demographic problem.
Humanity as a whole has a demographic problem. A few countries are just outliers (being still quite above > 2.1), but nowhere enough to offset anything at a global scale, and besides, they're on the decline too, just earlier in the curve.
Second, caring about your ethnic culture is not the same as "vilifying people of different skin color and continent of origin". It's just not treating nations as comprised of interchangable consumer/worker units whose shared culture and history (or lack thereof) doesn't matter.
Most countries have a long history tied to a culture created from one or a handful of ethnicites, they're not just pieces of land for settling associated with a civic contract, like the us has been (and of course even that came at the erasure of the native cultures and populations).
>"We are too many" as an argument to keep borders closed and "we are too few, get more kids" are incompatible arguments
They're totally compatible if you don't treat people like interchangable units arbitrarily exchanged, but as humans with a past, a history, an ethnicity, a culture, and so on, they've build over time.
Same way you wouldn't just exchange one of your kids with another kid, but that doesn't mean you think the other people's kids are inferior.
Ethnicity and culture are not static concepts. They change over time. The culture in central Europe, North America, the Middle East etc. 500 years ago looked very different from today. The ethnicity too. People have always migrated and that's part of where ethnicity and culture are coming from in the first place. And that's a good thing.
Nobody talks about individuals or people as arbitrarily interchangeable units. That's a populist exaggeration.
The "natural state" of a culture and an ethnic group is the continuous exchange and intermingling with other cultures and ethnic groups. It's a success of the nationalist right to make people believe that it's the opposite.
How on earth is that an acceptable argument for physical abuse that is directed purely at boys?
I'm not saying girls should be beaten too. But the ethical blindness here is striking.
Besides, girls are just as much capable of bullying as boys are. Society might have taught them to use different methods, but that doesn't make it any more acceptable or any less vicious.
I always find it really amusing that the most pro trust the science people who are in total agreement with all the evolution theories are often also the ones who are the first to be in complete denial that us humans might actually share some characteristics with our closest genetic relatives (chimpanzees).
>the most pro trust the science people who are in total agreement with all the evolution theories
Like with most religions which "the science" very much qualities for at this point, there believers will just pick and choose what to believe and use to get there way.
Nah, I have girls and there's definitely a biological difference there even at a young age. They're much more sensitive to more subtle negative feedback in a way that boys just aren't.
I'm not saying boys should be beaten whenever they misbehave, but girls are definitely more tuned into the way they're being perceived by others.
With girls, you'll get the same corrective effect from an uncomfortable grimace as you would a wooden spoon.
I'll also add since this is about bullying, the type of bullying behaviours girls engage in is much less physical and a lot more underhanded. It's much harder to correctly identify who's the victim and who's the perpetrator.
We just have millenia of history, experience in every country and culture, and countless scientific papers on the matter, but please go on with your question...
While I hold the same conclusion as you, individuals chiming in to concur based on their own experience is nothing more than a way to validate what certain people of the time & place commonly believe to be true.
E.g. if people were apt to believe girls preferred green peppers more often than boys, there will always be plenty who say "Well, having both girls and boys, I can concur". It could be true, it could be false, or the cause could be something else. E.g., because people think there are certain differences it shapes differences in development which lead to some of them actually being more common for nothing more than the sum of environmental factors - even if those biases only started as misconceptions.
Whichever it actually is, there will usually be large segments of the populations who would observe it to be conflicting things from an individual at-home view and it takes a lot of work & really good data to be able to make a meaningful claim about what and why differences exist.
> I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.
Which country would that be? Unless you are from a select few Norther European countries your military enlistment/draft laws are likely quite sexist.
I've always found that quite interesting. I agree women should have equal rights and never be discriminated against, but when push comes to shove I imagine men would be the ones called up to fight in wars for most countries around the world.
Should we call up women and put them in equal roles? I don't even know how you'd solve this so keen to hear any suggeations/thoughts
> Should we call up women and put them in equal roles? I don't even know how you'd solve this so keen to hear any suggeations/thoughts
Why the hypothetical? In Israel, for example, women often serve in equal roles during wars, although neither at the same rate as men, nor are laws there completely gender-neutral. I would imagine in Northern European countries with actual gender-neutral military regulations they will be called up similarly to men.
I don't think you can divorce the laws from their application in cases like this. This isn't some nebulous situation where if you squint right it's equal.
one of the many reasons america is so screwed up right now is because of our insistence on ignoring the very obvious statistically significant dimorphism between genders.
that doesn't' mean trans people and nonbinary dont' exist. We need to make accommodations for them where appropriate. However, it doesn't do any one any favors trying to homogenize how we teach kids. you inevitably help one at the expense of the others.
The fact that a small group of special interest groups have made "boys and girls are different" into some divisive political issue is absurd.
> one of the many reasons America is so screwed up right now
Interesting, which metrics are a result of ignoring the very obvious statistically significant dimorphism between genders, and not say political corruption, or corporate consolidation? Which statistical significant dimorphism causes this “screw up”?
well I could start with feminist marginalization of male role models from early education. The school to university pipeline is highly weighted in favor of giving women success. If we recognized that boys and girls are different, we could continue pushing women to success without pathologising male traits by giving each what they need to succeed. instead we have a one size all box that helps one at the expense of the other.
The fact that teenager boys can't tell that Andrew Tate is a characture of failed masculinity or that looksmaxxing is straight up idiotic is a pretty glaring example of that.
The problem is that we treat men and women differently because we don't respect that there's a difference between men and women?
I'm not saying that something is not rotten in the state of Denmark, I just don't think you've managed to clearly articulate it at all, I think it's much more complicated than "we need to respect the differences between the genders" as your word salad reflects. In fact, as usual I think within group differences are much greater than between group differences, and "We need to respect the difference between the genders" is culture war nonsense that gets the prescription wrong.
In fact, couldn't you argue that the problem is too much of a focus on the difference between men and women leading us to help women get to college and not men? Shouldn't we treat them more the same?
> "we need to respect the differences between the genders" as your word salad reflects.
describing my points as "word salad" seems a bit dismissive and unnecessarily pejorative - but I digress. I'll ignore your obvious ideological axe to grind and see if we can at least reach common ground.
Watch any group of boys and girls at play. sure you have outliers but by and large they do tend to conform to one of two specific behavioral groups that historically we associated as ways boys and girls act. And I say this as someone who is fairy noncompetitive which itself made me somewhat of an outlier among boys when I was a kid. it doesn't change that the vast majority of boys found motivation in being competitive and historically pedagogy used that fact in order to motivate boys in their matriculation.
In my own experience, I tried to get my nieces more into tech and programming. trying to motivate them from a "hey isn't systems based thinking about how these things interact is cool" did absolutely nothing. Showing them how they can make a cool website design to show their friends (with a bit of vibe coding) absolutely got them more motivated.
But if you want to go further, lets start with the entire generation of boys who were told to sit still and listen and got medicated when they couldn't. We expected them to behave like girls and because we changed pedagogy to favor girls, we didn't notice when boys fell behind.
consider the two statements
- boys and girls exhibit dimorphism in behavior, motivations and interests.
- two boys can be more different from each other than between a boy and a girl.
These are only contradictory on a 2 dimensional graph. at 3 or higher, you can definitely have groupings of traits heavily skewed towards one group or another while having a different distribution on other traits.
I don't think the issue is us focusing on getting women into higher education. We changed the way we pick our educators and tuned our methodology primarily to benefit women. Its only a problem because we expect boys to excel in that system. its no more fair than what we had before when women were excluded at every level.
treating them the same means shifting our methodology will inevitably benefit one at the expense of the other.
Boys and girls being different does not mean one sex deserves corporal punishment and one does not. Girls are equally capable of cyberbullying (which is covered by this law), why should they only get detention while a 9 year old boy has to suffer physical violence? What does this teach girls - that they can get away with more? That they're more fragile than even a prepubescent boy?
If the law punishes one demographic less severely for the same actions, that's injustice. No different in principle from pre-modern practices where if a noble maimed a commoner, they'd just need to pay a fine, while if a commoner did the same, they'd be put to death.
> Boys and girls being different does not mean one sex deserves corporal punishment and one does not. Girls are equally capable of cyberbullying (which is covered by this law), why should they only get detention while a 9 year old boy has to suffer physical violence?
In many systems of law, the punishment should mirror the crime. You gouge out an eye -> the government gouges out one of your eyes.
In every country, men commit almost all violent crimes. In school, boys physically bully other boys. Hence the physical punishment for them.
> What does this teach girls - that they can get away with more? That they're more fragile than even a prepubescent boy?
Yes, for homo sapiens, the female is more fragile than the male. This is basic biology. I'm sure that in praying mantis society, females get harsher punishments.
> In every country, men commit almost all violent crimes. In school, boys physically bully other boys. Hence the physical punishment for them.
As I've said, and @echoangle repeated, caning is used for cyberbullying, which girls do too (at a rate relatively close to boys actually). If the law was caning in response to physical bullying, and it just so happened that the vast majority of offenders were boys, I would not object on the basic of sexism (I still would not approve of schools being allowed to physically punish students).
> Yes, for homo sapiens, the female is more fragile than the male. This is basic biology. I'm sure that in praying mantis society, females get harsher punishments.
There's no way the typical 16 year old girl is more fragile than the typical 9 year old boy, yet only the latter is subject to this punishment. Until children reach the age of 12 or so the strength difference is quite minor (and there's even a brief period where girls are taller and heavier).
Also it's absurd to punish demographics differently based on their statistical averages. Redheads are less sensitive to pain, should your hair colour determine how many strokes of the cane you get?
This comment explains absolutely nothing and it feels utterly irrelevant in either direction and probably shouldn't have been posted. It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?
> It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?
This part I really do not understand. The undeniable fact that boys and girls are different in several aspects does not make either superior or inferior in value or in dignity.
On the other hand, anything can be read negatively if you put enough will and effort into it, as so many people around here demonstrate.
How about being a bit more constructive in our criticism?
"but perhaps boys and girls are different" should be interpreted as a joke; specifically satire on people who actively push that there are no differences between the sexes.
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To bring some context:
I have a friend who called up other friends in the group and repeats over and over that there's no difference between the sexes, that it's artificial, ect. He did this when he dated a trans woman, yet didn't seem to realize that his partner felt so strongly about their gender that they changed it.
Can you first define what you'd be comfortable considering as evidence before I spend time on this? I don't want to provide research just so the other party complains that there's still some cultural bias somewhere.
Also, what kind of humans do you generally interact with? How many of these are children?
I have kids. Children are not a tabula rasa. Boys and Girls act very differently almost right from Birth, and it becomes so much more pronounced as they grow.
Hormones don’t raise kids in particular gender norms, don’t carve them a place in society, don’t feed them gender-based culture 24/7. They do have a physical impact, impact on sexual development, their sex, reproductive function, temperament, but gender is a human invention.
All those differences do impact roles in society. They let women breastfeed. They give men greater physical strength. Other biological differences make women become pregnant. These will affect roles in society.
I am a proponent of paternity leave. The counter argument is always based on biological differences. So are the arguments for not having women in many roles in the armed forces.
Where exactly is the physical strength of males necessary in modern society?
The only circumstance in which there are men strong enough to so something that women can't do is at the most elite level of athletics. Any role relevant to society that would require that level of strength, we have machines for, because the majority of men and women are not elite powerlifters, and because they probably need way more strength than is safe even for those elite athletes to require all the time.
And then yes women can give birth and breastfeed (though it doesn't seem like being raised on formula alone is much of a problem these days). I don't see why those biological features need to affect roles as much as (some) people seem to think they should.
People with different skin colours have different resiliences to sun exposure, but just because the sun is a big part of our life doesn't mean we NEED to shape society around those biological differences.
> Where exactly is the physical strength of males necessary in modern society?
Bricklayers? Much manual labour. Some women can do it, some men cannot, but far more men can do it than women.
> People with different skin colours have different resiliences to sun exposure, but just because the sun is a big part of our life doesn't mean we NEED to shape society around those biological differences.
We have very simple fixes for that - such as clothing and protective sun creams. The same does not apply to physical differences between men and women.
> I don't see why those biological features need to affect roles as much as (some) people seem to think they should.
Not as much as some people think they should. It really depends what specific views you are thinking of. There are important differences: for example, women do initially need more parental leave to recover from giving birth. I think its a good idea to give men as much, but with different timing. Pregnancy has huge physical effects for quite a long time.
It goes both ways too. There wold be real social advantages to having more men becoming nurses (which can benefit from physical strength) and teaching (so boys, especially disadvantaged boys, have male educated role models).
There's lots and lots of jobs where physical strength makes a fuckton difference. I don't see construction workers, garbage people or figherfighters using exoskeletons yet.
Also, ask women how their mood and abilities swing during their cycles. Both menstrual and life cycle with menopause and stuff. Some have it easy, but many women I know have quite big swings in both cases. And yet modern society requires one to perform the same day in day out. Which works out pretty well for men, but for women... I'm not so sure.
There are women construction workers, garbage people, and firefighters. There are much better reasons why these fields have disproportionately fewer women than a biological barrier to the required level of strength.
I am interested to hear what career or societal role you think a women cannot or should not do because of menstrual related mood swings. Because it clearly isn't President of the United States or billionaire CEO.
There're always exceptions. But so far what I see it's 100-to-1 if not worse. And I'm not at all surprised that women ain't exactly keen of lugging around heavy weights. Especially due to damage it can do to women-specific health. Or reduced abilities abilities after childbirth for many women. Of course nowadays many women don't care about their reproductive health nor give births, so maybe we don't need societal norms around this anymore?
I don't think that women cannot or shouldn't do something. I see they don't exactly enjoy to suck it up and do the job regardless of their body needs.
We as a society used to tell boys to „man up“. Now that's frowned upon (and that's good). But now we started to tell girls and women to „man up“ and ignore their cycles. And both are just as bad. At least we should give teenage girls and young-to-middle-age women few extra days off school/work in a month. Scheduling might become a nightmare with irregular cycles though. Dealing with menopause for significant portion of women is awful too. But I've no idea how modern economy could deal. Besides giving them much more lax during that period in life. But on the other hand, if they get same pay, it's quite natural that their colleagues wouldn't be happy about it.
I somewhat agree with you, but I think there is an underlying cause. We are generally not accepting of individual differences, needs, and commitments outside work. We have improved in some ways (e.g. with regard to making adjustments for disability) but there is a long way go.
> Besides giving them much more lax during that period in life. But on the other hand, if they get same pay, it's quite natural that their colleagues wouldn't be happy about it.
I think individual specialty and massive group specialty is somewhat different.
For individual specialty (be it skills/abilities or lack of them), people can choose career or life paths accordingly. E.g. I’ve met a dead/mute constructions dude. He specialized in line of work where he works solo. If I accidentally wasn’t home while he was here, I wouldn’t have ever noticed.
On the other hand when you have massive groups with some specialty that match similar pattern… Over time it becomes a „norm“. It's not like some people decided what gender norms we should have a millennia ago and rolled with. It was rather a society trying to accommodate some groups of people with some skills and abilities and gender norms becoming a thing were a side effect.
As for more lax working conditions all round, it would be nice. But I’m not sure how modern economy would handle that in a fair way. And once you start institutionalizing more lax conditions for certain groups… I want to see that shitshow.
Our "gender based culture" wasn't imposed on us by space aliens; it's something we humans came up with ourselves. And given that basically every culture divides people by gender (as opposed to by height, hair color, or fingernail shape), it very much indicates that there is a biological component to gender.
> but gender is a human invention.
So you don't believe a person can be transgender, right?
What you call „gender norms“ is the result of society trying to contain said differences.
Physical possibilities are differences, drives are different, temperament and it's swings are different. Also many other differences. But hey, let's hide all the differences, strengths and weaknesses... And pretend everyone is equally good at everything.
We need equality, not sameness. Brute-forcing equality-through-sameness sucks on both sides. I'd say girls and women are more affected though. But men ain't taking it easy either. It's a hill I'm willing to take downvotes on.
Perhaps, but they [imposed gender ideology] are all orthogonal to the thing that actually makes boys/girls different. And for most of them, that isn't changing.
> I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.
It's kind of a weird take to say that the issue here is that girls aren't being whipped too.
It doesn’t really matter. Most likely your indigenous population that was targeted to believe such terminal things like males and females being the same, will not be in power for long, let alone possibly even be around at all in the future. This modest puppy have is just a tiny little blip on the timeline where your society and culture was poisoned with a mental viruses to self-exterminate.
Your society will become an extinct group of people that probably will not even be remembered in another 200 years. If there is another advanced civilization yay attempts to understand the past like Europeans did, they will have an impossible time understanding what happened over the last 80 or so years when people lost the ability to tell the difference between males and females.
Have you ever heard the term “functional extinction”? It’s when a population still exists and it may even be reproducing, but the surrounding conditions and characteristics make it effectively inevitable that the population will go extinct over time. Being unable to differentiate between males and females and treating them the same is clear evidence of a terminal mental virus in humans. This very idea that males and females are the same will invariably die because it is not a successful reproductive strategy by definition.
both. the map has many detailed settings which you might change once in a while.
there are also certain things you’d want to change (or activate) often - we could argue those are controls. Like muting, changing volume, or finding a nearby gas station.
You probably don't want to be setting up Maps on either a touch screen or a with keys while driving. But navigation and media selection are the two functions I'm generally happy to interact with via voice.
Was a little disappointed that this didn't result in the agent playing Doom itself over MCP.
Still this is very cool! (And if that had been what you'd implemented, my disappointment would have been that it wasn't the reverse. :P Can it do both?)
Just run everything as root to circumvent security problems.
Seriously, it is as if there would be a CVE because sudo allows privilege escalation.
Of course such widely spread tools should be audited and have eyes on them. On the other hand many people are tired of security strategies because half of the time it is about a platform doing it for market domination. Our thoroughly shitty mobile OS come to mind. This age verification crap isn't too different, just slightly different goals where real security isn't really considered too much.
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