According to some Margaret Mead.

I felt obliged to post this again in this forum because this is after all pertinent to politics. But the fact that most TA females frequent the COR, I posted it there too, as I'd like to know their belief on the subject. You will thus hopefully pardon the iteration.

A couple of excerpts from the text:

"...an invention that lends itself to certain types of personality, to the exigent needs of autocrats, to the expansionist desires of crowded peoples, to the desire for plunder and rape and loot which is engendered by a dull and frustrating life."

"Warfare is frame for such prestige-seeking merely because it calls for the display of certain skills and certain virtues: all of these skills -- riding straight, shooting straight, dodging the missiles of the enemy and sending one's own straight to the mark -- can be equally well exercised in some other framework and, equally, the virtues -- endurance, bravery, loyalty, steadfastness -- can be displayed in other contexts."

"The tie-up between proving oneself a man and proving this by a success in organized killing is due to a definition which many societies have made of manliness."

My question is very simple. In your opinion, if there were only women existent would wars still occur? Or are women ultimately driven by the same passions as men are?

Last edited by AlphaStarred on Oct-23-2006 at 05:43

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Originally posted by AlphaStarred According to some Margaret Mead. I felt obliged to post this again in this forum because this is after all pertinent to politics. But the fact that most TA females frequent the COR, I posted it there too, as I'd like to know their belief on the subject. You will thus hopefully pardon the iteration. A couple of excerpts from the text: "...an invention that lends itself to certain types of personality, to the exigent needs of autocrats, to the expansionist desires of crowded peoples, to the desire for plunder and rape and loot which is engendered by a dull and frustrating life." "Warfare is frame for such prestige-seeking merely because it calls for the display of certain skills and certain virtues: all of these skills -- riding straight, shooting straight, dodging the missiles of the enemy and sending one's own straight to the mark -- can be equally well exercised in some other framework and, equally, the virtues -- endurance, bravery, loyalty, steadfastness -- can be displayed in other contexts." "The tie-up between proving oneself a man and proving this by a success in organized killing is due to a definition which many societies have made of manliness." My question is very simple. In your opinion, if there were only women existent would wars still occur? Or are women ultimately driven by the same passions as men are?

The mere suggestion of males being the only humans capable of organized killing, and not females lets you know that this is just a cover up for extremist feminist views. Warfare has been with us humans since the beginning of our socities. Obviously its an invention, just like time, money, and loads of other concepts and abstractions that we use everyday. Noone would buy a book if its hypothesis was, "time is socially constructed", the only reason this book has seen the light of day or her ideas for that matter is because it wants to prove that females are in some ways more peaceful then men, and if they were in charge the world would be a better place which in my humble opinion is the biggest load of crap a giant elephant could ever evacuate.

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Poetry>Byron//Blog>TheMean

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Orbax At that point you kind of crossed the rubicon and you might as well lay siege to Rome

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Originally posted by AlphaStarred My question is very simple. In your opinion, if there were only women existent would wars still occur?

you would have to accept the false premise of the question, but IMO, yes.

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Or are women ultimately driven by the same passions as men are?

not all of the same passions, but the ones most endemic to violence and retribution, yes.

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Originally posted by venomX The mere suggestion of males being the only humans capable of organized killing, and not females lets you know that this is just a cover up for extremist feminist views. Warfare has been with us humans since the beginning of our socities. Obviously its an invention, just like time, money, and loads of other concepts and abstractions that we use everyday. Noone would buy a book if its hypothesis was, "time is socially constructed", the only reason this book has seen the light of day or her ideas for that matter is because it wants to prove that females are in some ways more peaceful then men, and if they were in charge the world would be a better place which in my humble opinion is the biggest load of crap a giant elephant could ever evacuate.

i know we don't agree on most things but i like this.

The worlds best assasins are females. IT IS A FACT. Haven't any of you played MGS, sniper wolf??

yes, i do believe there would be less war if the world was dominated by women. however, these societies would still have the same needs, and governments the same problems as they do today. thus warfare would definitely still occur.

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"The tie-up between proving oneself a man and proving this by a success in organized killing is due to a definition which many societies have made of manliness."

shit like this is typical feminist ranting that makes little sense. its interesting that feminists see some kind of over-arching male "conglomeration", with men having the exact same desires and motivations across the globe, yet women are fractured and separated in comparison. which is just an idiotic assumption.

war is a tool for use by government, it has little to do with insignificant issues like masculinity. we have female troops, commanders, politicans, suicide bombers etc. they perform their roles in the same way that men do.

edit: though if there were no men, i dont know who would do work like setting the VCR to record "days of our lives" if troops were in the field in the middle of the day.

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if there were no men women would have evolved to take over the things we do. our needs structure our socities and our social relationships, if "men" werent the ones with the physical strenght to wage war, women would had evolved the same strenght and violence prone character. the "its all the mens fault" argument is utter bs in my opinion.

conflict over finite resources such as food, land, water, will always have the posibility to denegerate into violence. i think that regardless of having a one world sex or "socially equal", it has no bearing on the fact that it is our nature to divide ourselves into them and us, and due to the nature of our environment there will always be conflict over finite resources, hence in theory there will always be violence. now this is not to say that we can not override our desires, it is possible to leave without war but i dont think sex socialization or tendencies has anything to do with it.

PS: i severely dislike the whole "its all the mens fault" undertones of the book you mentioned.

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Poetry>Byron//Blog>TheMean

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Orbax At that point you kind of crossed the rubicon and you might as well lay siege to Rome

Last edited by venomX on Oct-23-2006 at 00:37

Well, its a bit hard too judge the whole book by just a paragraph but if you look at the whole length of human history its typically been men that start the crap and sometimes egged on behind the scenes by a woman so at least statistically its men starting wars.
That said a few points of my own observations.
Theres always been some kind of war going on over the course of human history, people are very tribal animals and we do tend too want the best for 'our' society and have no compunctions about taking what we want off others when our own territories get too small too contain the population.
When that happens everyone gets tangled up in the one brawl, strongest, technologically advanced or simply the ones that want too win, do so and subsume the survivors into the tribe as one and get bigger. After enough time they've eventually become known as countries, dozens of tribes allied with each other on one big land mass with clearly marked territories and the laws, morality and societies within abiding more or less along those lines.
Wars get a lot bigger then and sometimes its not always men behind the massing of armies, long gone now is the countries leader who has too marshal the troops personally and lead them into battle. Its all push-button and orders from afar with very little personal danger too whoever is doing it. So woman can wage wars just as effectively as men now at least from the top down, Thatcher in the 80's when she took on Argentina was a good example of that, Argentina was this close > < to being a nuclear wasteland.
Socially at least though women have not been popular as leaders in most civilisations and even now it has its own 'glass ceilings' for women as theres been something of a 'boys club' where its very hard too get anywhere in a position of power. Equality of the sexes often gets bagged on a lot but in the places I've lived and I name a few-
South Africa, Britain, US, Zimbabwe and Australia
All have varied levels of 'equality' in their own little ways at least socially and to some degree constitutionally, other places I've visited such as-
Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia
Have much harder social and constitutional rights for sexes where you simply arent allowed too advance beyond your position because of gender.

So, historically a great majority of wars have been started by men moreso than women, hypothetically at least I think if both genders where considered equal as we can use by example, say Celtic Britain where people like Bodicea where allowed equal oppertunity and both men and women where equal socially, economically and militarily, then wars would have been started by either gender.

Currently in the modern world, the oppertunity is there in a couple of countries for women too have the chance too start a war, using Thatcher again as an example. Are quite capable of starting wars with the popular support of society and democratic vote without a lot of hesitation or restraint.
Depending very strongly however, which country you live in.
Modern Great Britain- yes
Modern US- yes
Modern Iran- no
Modern Saudi Arabia- no

Tradition in the last two countries means, no, in the first two countries there, its probably more of a 'maybe' rather than a definate yes. I am all too aware of the glass ceilings in place in most western countries at least from an economic point of view. If I was too walk out into the workforce again I would probably only be able too earn around 55k a year at the very most, given my (high school) education, social standing (peasent refugee hehe!), age (26), experience (I'm a qualified beauty therapist... lol!) and so forth.
Working for myself however, which has not corporate ceiling I've managed too amass for myself four times that a year from a mix of shares, three apartments and a house.

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edit: though if there were no men, i dont know who would do work like setting the VCR to record "days of our lives" if troops were in the field in the middle of the day.

I can do that

The real crux would be, who's going to mow the lawns though!

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Originally posted by AlphaStarred My question is very simple. In your opinion, if there were only women existent would wars still occur? Or are women ultimately driven by the same passions as men are?

Wars still would occur, that is extremely obvious. Men were for a long time, the ones trained for, and sent to war due to the fact that they were... MEN. Out of both our genders, it made more sense to use the men for war rather than women. So if men didn't exist, by default women would be used.

Men == Women in a vacuum. The reasons men fight for, would be the same reasons women would fight for if men did not exist. It's not black and white, masculinity for men, and femininity for women are not natural, they are artificial. Look at 'tomboys' and effeminate men, that's what happens when someone doesn't adhere to social constructs. Not to say that we'd all switch sides if the traditional ideas of gender were abandoned, but nurture usually has a major say in deciding which side of the gender spectrum our sex ends up on.

edit:

To clarify, I would put it this way:

Logically, men were the 'perfect' sex for War. The human race doesn't need as many men as it needs women, and men are born physically larger and stronger than women most of the time. So before we had guns , tanks, missiles and so on, it just made more sense to 'waste' men in war, and get them excited about war, then women. Both men and women can agree on that.

Why send a ton of women to a war leaving your country with less women and more men? Why not more women, and less men?

Although... we usually send our best to war... leaving behind the 'rejects', so to speak... it's kind of bad either way.

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"If she's old enough to crawl, she's already in position." -- Pedobear

Last edited by Akridrot on Oct-23-2006 at 03:52

men fight because women piss us off.

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Whoops saw this first in the COR and posted there. Here's my cut and paste:


If you can definitively state that violence is an "invention" among all male animals than I will grant you the possibility that warfare is an invention of human males. The reason why I say this is because if warfare is a biological byproduct of evolutionary design and innate nature, can it be truly categorized as an "invention"?

Let's start with a few basics. It's not like female mammals are incapable of violence. Simply look to a few notable cases such as the female grizzly bear protecting cubs. However, most offensive cases of violence are perpetrated by males whether it be among homo sapiens or others within the animal kingdom. Why is this? Being as simplistic and brief as I can, since sperm can be made in vast quantities, and with little mandated physiological follow-through, it is possible for males to have large numbers of offspring, the actual output limited by the number of females they succeed in fertilizing. By contrast, females are more likely to maximize their reproduction by producing successful offspring, rather than by outcompeting other females for the sexual attention of males.

Thus females play a direct role in contributing to an environment where male success is likely to crown those who outcompete their rivals, and so, in species after species, it is the males who are larger, nastier, more likely to be armed with lethal weaponry and a violent disposition to match who succeed in procreating. Males typically threaten, bluff, and if necessary fight one another in their efforts to obtain access to females. Among many mammals, males tend to be relatively large, endowed with intimidating weapons (tusks, fangs, claws, antlers, etc.) and a willingness to employ them, largely because such traits were rewarded, over evolutionary time, with enhanced reproductive success.

Now granted violence among animals is a far cry from outright warfare among humans, but considering several million years of evolutionary upbringing, is the nature of warfare among humans really that different from the nature of violence among animals? Granted human warfare is a far more complex concept in comparison but isn't nearly everything else about us far more complex? Are nations engaging in combat against one another not typically societies fighting to preserve a common, shared lifestyle or expand success, wealth, or well-being? To make a reference to economics it seems almost analagous to macro-economic behavivour on one end of the spectrum (human warfare) and micro-economic behavior on the other end (mammalian violence).

Those are my thoughts on the matter. I'm rather disappointed with the lack of female contribution in a thread that could clearly benefit from said perspective.

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Retro ...

Well, whether her exact reason is the case or not, what she says is true.

Men and Women are genetically different in a few key ways regarding the amino acids they produce, each of which has different effects on the reality of the organism.

In a lot of species the "alpha male" of a tribe revolves around the three S's: strength, size, and sexual drive.

This was probably evolutionarily present to ensure that our species met optimal potential for diversity (and thus survival, assuming that what is smart for survival would come in first place). It no longer comes in first place.

I can't even pretend to explain why we have wars... I don't know or understand at all.

Usually it is the government, a few select people, that decide to go to war... the population is usually content without such things.

When you all were told about North Korea allegedly "butchering babies" and testing nukes, I'm sure you feel inside of you that urge to go to war.

Do you understand it?

Can you explain it?

How can we minimize the abuse of that emotion that causes the need for it (if we even can)?

Last edited by DJ Shibby on Oct-23-2006 at 09:17