Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Man, woman: male, female, destiny

Moraline has written extensively on the topic of men and women. His explorations have included direct experimentation with women of all colors several nationalities. He has traveled Europe and South American to explore, and, indeed, on the way, has made observations of culture, but more importantly, how mate selection, gender roles, and child rearing play crucial roles in forming human conduct.

Yet the ‘world’ is often seen as one aggregate, some pantheistic God, connected by the internet, television, air travel, and large industrial concerns which sell similar goods and services to men and women (read: families) around the world. Within this leviathan of a creature, we like to parcel out ‘men’ and ‘women.’ And then the hilarity ensues. We call Chinese men unmasculine. We call Chinese women masculine. We call Indian men emasculate, we call Indian women, well, Indian women are hot as fuck, Jesus. We call the Colombian men macho, their women maternal (yet prone to Western consumerist wants), we call German women masculine and hyper-sexual, we call Australian women sluts. We say that American men are kept creatures (‘betas’) or empty skirt chasers with ‘game’ (‘alphas’). We say that American women, as gate keepers to the lead economic force, are selecting against the good of the family, and are leading their culture to ruin. (But what if we were at a zoo, and had zebras, elephants, lions, and monkeys in a cage, with just one name, ‘lion,’ or just one name, ‘animal.’ We would call the zebras very unlion lions: ‘they are ruining the lions with their unlion behavior.’)

But I do not think these American women have the power to do otherwise. They are weak creatures who follow trends, who deal in vicious gossip driven by deep-seated biological insecurities. How, then, do we call them gatekeepers, how then do we blame them for their sudden turn to fickle mate selection during their prime mating and breeding years?

It would be obvious and convenient to place blame on the ‘males’ for their being ‘unmanly.’ In the spectrum of gender attributes, the observation would be relatively meaningless. It would explain everything but reveal nothing. I would offer—and this point is perhaps consistent with Moraline’s observations, and pardon me if he as already offered this—that there is a simple economic advantage for wealth holders—the billionaires, the large hedge funds, etc.—to blend the gender roles, to mute competition, to raise levels of government to just the tipping point, to control and maintain their wealth, to maintain the perfect balance of human productive factors, to create the generation of autistics that Moraline speaks of. We blame men and women for this, indeed, but in many ways this is like the lions, in the zoo, blaming each other for their captivity.

1 comment:

  1. a. "the power to do otherwise" is the overcoming. it is to live beyond or outside or to bend institutions or to choose new ones to live within; it is to live other than one's upbringing and genetic inheritance; it is to not be held captive to some traumatic experience that altered one's development. it is a power available to the great saintly creator, and he is in most cases a man.

    b. i have not remarked enough on the oligarchy of economic interests that support and provide the pathways for how men and women act within in your zoo metaphor. the oligarchs set the rules and dimensions of the captivity, and indeed the animals blame each other for the cages.

    ReplyDelete