You wrote: "Anyone who deviates from their role threatens the entire structure and has to be punished. Which, I maintain, is no way to live, even if the rules themselves are perfect (which, if God was in direct control, they presumably would be)"
Would you rather not live in a society where rape is outlawed and punishable?
I think there's a common oversight in analyses of how men are taught to repress their emotions. There's a huge exception, and it's the exception that proves the rule: Anger.
Male anger is accepted, celebrated, and outright valorized in a way that no other type of emotion is (and in a way that female anger never is). While men may be mocked, belittled, and disrespected for expressing sadness, fear, loneliness, or even positive emotions like joy and affection, they aren't looked down upon in the same way when they express anger, even though it's an emotional reaction just like the others.
I've known so many men throughout my life that, because of this cultural pressure and their own predispositions, just automatically shunt every negative emotion into anger. If they're afraid, they express it as anger. If they're sad, they lash out with anger. If they're uncertain, they react with anger. It's a reflection of the fact that their environment has taught them that that's the primary acceptable way to express unpleasant feelings.
Hell, if you get really good at expressing anger you can get a talk show like Alex Jones.
The irony is that men’s emotions, when they break free, often seem to me purer and more genuine (and therefore more moving) than women’s. Women are the emotion experts, after all. We work our emotions, we name them, we even exploit them. Our emotional shtick sometimes seems as tired and mauled and gray as that little ball of dough bread-making mama gave the kid to play with.
The right’s biggest error is to equate male “nature” with what that nature has been twisted into by the evolution of human society into hierarchy and war-making. Human culture until very recently has shaped whatever the raw material of male and female (and other) potential is to serve survival under threat of depopulation. Women were imperatively needed to bear and nurse babies, it took a long time and was energy intensive and vulnerable, so their role was shaped around that and men did everything else that required explosive strength and/or couldn't be done within a small radius of home: defense, hunting, competition for women.
Overpopulation has flipped that. We now need wonen’s ideas and men’s emotions to survive. And they are there to be had but we are still in the thrall of obsolete cultural stereotypes we think are absolute and mistake for “nature.” This is an “adapt or die” situation.
Men and women certainly have their physical, sexual, hormonal, experiential differences, but those are just like a photographic filter that colors common human experiences, and also, individual differences are greater than group differences in every case, including gender. Our ideas about all this are so crude compared to the reality and the potentiality.
You wrote: "Anyone who deviates from their role threatens the entire structure and has to be punished. Which, I maintain, is no way to live, even if the rules themselves are perfect (which, if God was in direct control, they presumably would be)"
Would you rather not live in a society where rape is outlawed and punishable?
I think there's a common oversight in analyses of how men are taught to repress their emotions. There's a huge exception, and it's the exception that proves the rule: Anger.
Male anger is accepted, celebrated, and outright valorized in a way that no other type of emotion is (and in a way that female anger never is). While men may be mocked, belittled, and disrespected for expressing sadness, fear, loneliness, or even positive emotions like joy and affection, they aren't looked down upon in the same way when they express anger, even though it's an emotional reaction just like the others.
I've known so many men throughout my life that, because of this cultural pressure and their own predispositions, just automatically shunt every negative emotion into anger. If they're afraid, they express it as anger. If they're sad, they lash out with anger. If they're uncertain, they react with anger. It's a reflection of the fact that their environment has taught them that that's the primary acceptable way to express unpleasant feelings.
Hell, if you get really good at expressing anger you can get a talk show like Alex Jones.
The irony is that men’s emotions, when they break free, often seem to me purer and more genuine (and therefore more moving) than women’s. Women are the emotion experts, after all. We work our emotions, we name them, we even exploit them. Our emotional shtick sometimes seems as tired and mauled and gray as that little ball of dough bread-making mama gave the kid to play with.
The right’s biggest error is to equate male “nature” with what that nature has been twisted into by the evolution of human society into hierarchy and war-making. Human culture until very recently has shaped whatever the raw material of male and female (and other) potential is to serve survival under threat of depopulation. Women were imperatively needed to bear and nurse babies, it took a long time and was energy intensive and vulnerable, so their role was shaped around that and men did everything else that required explosive strength and/or couldn't be done within a small radius of home: defense, hunting, competition for women.
Overpopulation has flipped that. We now need wonen’s ideas and men’s emotions to survive. And they are there to be had but we are still in the thrall of obsolete cultural stereotypes we think are absolute and mistake for “nature.” This is an “adapt or die” situation.
Men and women certainly have their physical, sexual, hormonal, experiential differences, but those are just like a photographic filter that colors common human experiences, and also, individual differences are greater than group differences in every case, including gender. Our ideas about all this are so crude compared to the reality and the potentiality.