CH/WI: A Gender Blind Society

[Killer300]

What do I mean by this?

Gender-blind (or unisex) is a term describing activities undertaken and services provided without regard to the gender of those who participate.

Okay, now get an entire society where that applies to every single activity. Hence, any differences in behavior between men and women will be caused by biology instead of culture.

Yes, there can still be differences in regards to age, race, so on, with treatment, but that's another matter.

 

[Falecius]

Well, there some sort of activities like, well, pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding, that tend to be a pretty central concern for any sane and society and by their very nature clash with gender-blindess.
I am rather skeptical about assigning some human behaviours to biology, and others to culture. Everything humans do is cultural, o better said, is framed culturally, while, on the other hand, culture cannot detach completely from biological constraints. Including the aforementioned activities. So, I am afraid that a completely gender-blind society is near impossible.

 

[Alex1guy]

You mean overall or in one small instance? Globally? Hmmmm a hard one, you are fundamentally changing to a point it would be unrecognizable to most of us. for better or for worse, men have dominated and steered human development for thousands of years. Having an equal palying field in a smaller society? I suppose it's possible, perhaps it suffers some sort of die off of men (maybe a war) and the woman are forced to take on more traditionally masculine roles (like in WWII but further back and ona more extreme scale in terms of male deaths). Over time the population recovers but changes permanently, culturally to include women in all roles and vice versa? Even then though it is limited as in pre-modern socities, women tend to be an object to be proteted or fought over (simply due to being physically smaller in most cases and having to carry children). But it's not total gender blindness, because the two are fundamentally different.

EDIT:

 

[Killer300]

Well, there some sort of activities like, well, pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding, that tend to be a pretty central concern for any sane and society and by their very nature clash with gender-blindess.
I am rather skeptical about assigning some human behaviours to biology, and others to culture. Everything humans do is cultural, o better said, is framed culturally, while, on the other hand, culture cannot detach completely from biological constraints. Including the aforementioned activities. So, I am afraid that a completely gender-blind society is near impossible.

Okay, with the first, I thought about that, and I decided that I'm counting that under limitations of biology.

So, I probably should've said as genderblind as biology will permit, which is a bit further than society has done.

 

[willbell]

That would require a biological PoD, humans have evolved with certain imbalances in gender.

 

[Killer300]

That would require a biological PoD, humans have evolved with certain imbalances in gender.

Physical differences in muscle you mean? Perhaps, however that really becomes more and more irrelevant with technological progress.

 

[Orko]

I think it's pretty much impossible for a society to develop gender-blind. As was said, women give birth, and this means that - for a pre-modern society- they must have a role as mothers. This doesn't apply to modern societies, as we have moved away from these things by now, but for a hunter gatherer society, women cannot hunt because they have to take care of children. So the men are the ones who are out hunting, because someone has to, while the women don't really have any choice but to take care of the kids. Inevitably, this is going to go on with the transition to agrarian societies.

 

[Killer300]

I think it's pretty much impossible for a society to develop gender-blind. As was said, women give birth, and this means that - for a pre-modern society- they must have a role as mothers. This doesn't apply to modern societies, as we have moved away from these things by now, but for a hunter gatherer society, women cannot hunt because they have to take care of children. So the men are the ones who are out hunting, because someone has to, while the women don't really have any choice but to take care of the kids. Inevitably, this is going to go on with the transition to agrarian societies.

The problem with this is that,

A. Women had to violently defend their children frequently, which means presumably they would've also had to learn how to use weapons,

B. Women still had to gather food, and in some cases, hunt if the men died or similar.

This isn't even getting into that the concept of having a mother and father is recent, or rather, in the sense that one needs both to be psychologically stable. During the Stone Age, many children won't have even one, much less both of them.

My point? Children were raised by the community, which ties into this because technically, either gender could raise children.

The key is getting rid of muscular differences between the sexes, which unfortunately yes, requires a biological POD.

 

[Alex Richards]

Well, I think part of what he meant was this:

While noticably Pregnant a woman cannot take part in the hunt due to a combination of the increasing physical limitations and the definate psycholigical need for the society to be continued leading to people preventing them from taking part in such a dangerous activity. Furthermore, the child needs to be breatsfed for several years. The woman (or women) doing this may not necessarily be the child's mother, but given biology it's likely that she will be, which also reduces when the mother can return to taking part in activities with the men (the way to avoid this is probably to create some sort of cultural concept of a 'breeding season' so that all the women are available to breastfeed at the same time and can effectively share the job and so rotate who goes hunting, but this seems unlikely to occur).

If we have a small population, say a dozen families occaisionally meeting with other tribes to marry some new blood in, it's reasonable to assume that there will be some women at least who are unable to take part in the hunt for somewhere between 2 and a half and perhaps 4 years, which is a big detriment to building full equality.

 

[Killer300]

Okay, this to me begs two questions.

1. How do matriarchal structures arise then with other animals? Despite having the job of breastfeeding, and the like, where women are not only equal to, but dominate their male counterparts? (Hyenas I've read are an example of this at certain points.)

2. Why does this not start to collapse with the rise of agriculture?

The latter does have a good answer, tradition, however what I'm asking is for AH.Com to find a way around that.

 

[Zireael]

Somebody upthread said children have to be breastfed for several years. What if we limit the breastfeeding to several months (i.e. until the child is one year old or thereabouts)?

Then the biological limitations on the women are limited to late pregnancy and breastfeeding - around a year, give or take a month.

The society can happily be unisex, especially if we assume children are raised by the community.

 

[kasumigenx]

Actually, the Taiwanese Aborigines had late marriage and abortions or marriage taboos perhaps their society could easily evolve into a Gender Blind society.

 

[Killer300]

Somebody upthread said children have to be breastfed for several years. What if we limit the breastfeeding to several months (i.e. until the child is one year old or thereabouts)?

Then the biological limitations on the women are limited to late pregnancy and breastfeeding - around a year, give or take a month.

The society can happily be unisex, especially if we assume children are raised by the community.

Yes!

Now, question is to see such a society dominate.

 

[Sven]

1. How do matriarchal structures arise then with other animals? Despite having the job of breastfeeding, and the like, where women are not only equal to, but dominate their male counterparts? (Hyenas I've read are an example of this at certain points.)

I don't think you'll be able to derive a universal rule for how sex-based hierarchies work, because there's a dizzying amount of variation across animals. Females may become larger than males in some animals in order to better cope with the additional demands of pregnancy, or possibly in order to help her force males to take care of her while she's pregnant.

In all likelihood, humans probably emerged from a female-oriented social structure: the entire concept of human society probably derives from the social bonds between women, with men having kind of tagged along. Human females who worked together didn't need males to help them take care of children, because they had other women. So, the men served ancillary roles as protectors and hunters, while women were always the core of human society.

2. Why does this not start to collapse with the rise of agriculture?

Because, even with agriculture, we are still biologically humans. There still is a legitimate gender divide in terms of abilities and characteristics: men and women tend to excel at different things (note the word "tend": it's a broad generalization, not a hard-and-fast rule).

Even if society wanted to go completely "gender-blind" at the emergence of agriculture, it would take many generations, probably thousands of years, before the biological differences could be selected out and make such a "gender-blind" approach make sense.

But, in modern societies, in which physical power becomes less and less important, a truly gender-blind society is probably possible, since most professions traditionally dominated by men (such as academia, management and engineering) see little actual gender differences in ability.

 

[Endymion]

Excluding a modern, industrialised nation-state, the only way that this would be possible would be in a hunter-gatherer society--the survival of the group is paramount, so egalitarianism prevails; while gender associated divisions of labour do crop up to some degree, there are no actual roles in this regard per se. For example, with the Aka peoples of central Africa, everyone hunts, gathers and shares resources, and though men may tend to hunt more, women and children often accompany and assist them.

Other than that, this is largely impossible.

Once agriculture develops and the society settles, it's only a matter of time before patriarchy also develops. Both sexes may be fully eligible to hold any position in society, but anatomy makes this irrelevant. Human males just tend to be larger and physically stronger than than females, so they'll naturally make better candidates for specialised activities and roles that require a great deal of strength, especially when it comes to soldiers and warriors. As there is no birth control, women are also going to be often incapacitated by pregnancy and nursing.

Even if you had a fully egalitarian society, the birth rate is going to be very, very low, as women are not going to want to risk death in childbirth, especially if they happen to hold very crucial positions in society. Add to this infant mortality rates, and you have a pretty small population. This means that the society in question will be rather slow to adopt any forms of technological innovation, as their current mode of production easily enough serves their needs and numbers.

And, even if you had a military recruiting pool of, say, fifty males and fifty females, in the village, odds are, there will be more males in this population that better fit the criteria for a warrior, inevitably leading to the role becoming a male dominated one--and that's just one example.

Compare this to a patriarchal society, where men fill all the roles of leadership and protection (i.e. soldiers) and the population is far greater, due to a higher birth rate. When it comes to competing for resources, they'll definitely have an advantage over any purely egalitarianism society, as they have both the numbers and strength to seize what they need, as well as more of a reason to adopt technological (particularly agrarian) innovation in order to accommodate a growing population.

My point is, even if a 'gender-blind' society existed, it probably wouldn't last very long in the long run. And, even if it did, given very fortunate circumstances in terms of isolation and available resources, such a group would probably be limited to simple farming societies, without a great deal of the need for the specialised labour complexity that the OP asked for.

 

[Avitus]

Doesn't testosterone play a large role in development of traditionally masculine features like size and muscle tone? A genetically dominant testosterone production mutation attatched to the X chromosome in a small isolated location might be able to even the playing feild by giving women more, which is essentially what happens with hyenas.

The big forseeable problem (aside from some freaky looking uber testosterone women) is probably birth rates. In mamals where the females have high levels of testosterone (again going by hyenas) births tend to be more difficult, and thus both mother and child will survive less, and with human intelligence these women are unlikely to want something that dangerous often.

Honestly, in a species like humans that have low birth rates the nurturing maternal aspect is so incredibly important that any change or reduction in that aspect is far more likely to hurt a society than to help it, so this society is once again unlikely to hold a candle to OTL humankind for an indefinitely long time. While it might make women and men equal, women from the OTL renaissance would probably have a better quality of life on average than those of TTL's 21st century, regardless of sexual equality.

 

[Killer300]

Aha! That's what I was thinking of with Hyenas.

But actually, okay, what would happen if women had equal amounts of testerone to their male counterparts? Birth may be harder, however wouldn't this be made up for by women being able to defend their children better?

Additionally, do Hyenas have population problems from this?

 

[Killer300]

Doesn't testosterone play a large role in development of traditionally masculine features like size and muscle tone? A genetically dominant testosterone production mutation attatched to the X chromosome in a small isolated location might be able to even the playing feild by giving women more, which is essentially what happens with hyenas.

The big forseeable problem (aside from some freaky looking uber testosterone women) is probably birth rates. In mamals where the females have high levels of testosterone (again going by hyenas) births tend to be more difficult, and thus both mother and child will survive less, and with human intelligence these women are unlikely to want something that dangerous often.

Honestly, in a species like humans that have low birth rates the nurturing maternal aspect is so incredibly important that any change or reduction in that aspect is far more likely to hurt a society than to help it, so this society is once again unlikely to hold a candle to OTL humankind for an indefinitely long time. While it might make women and men equal, women from the OTL renaissance would probably have a better quality of life on average than those of TTL's 21st century, regardless of sexual equality.

With the last, the nurture aspect isn't as strong as people think it is. Proof? There's a reason babies cry when they're left alone, and the evolutionary one is that during this time, that's the only thing keeping them frequently from having the parents leaving them to die.
My point with this is that women clearly were willing to overcome maternal instinct to the point of letting their children die to live.

But, to make this matter here, I don't think it has to be as high to make it matter. After all, as above, children may gain adaptations to encourage people to take care of them, among other adaptations. Additionally, children were frequently raised by the community, because of something a lot of people forget. During the Stone Age? A child having both their parents survive was very rare. Heck, having even one parent survive wasn't exactly common. Hence, most children were raised by the entire community.

Besides this, is there no way for a stone age or early agricultural society to prevent so many deaths from childbirth?

 

[Avitus]

Admittedly I'm only going by the Animal Planet shows I used to watch, but yeah, the hyenas do have reproduction issues.

I didn't mean that maternal instinct was too strong for them to abandon their children, nor do I mean it in a psychological way. Before modern formulas milk was obviously necessairy, as would be all sorts of types of care in the first three years minimum. In addition, children need their parents to give them language if there is to be any sort of progress in this society, in additional to psychological issues that can or can not (depending on the individual) make problems for them if no close relationship is made with a mother figure. With increased testosterone, you likely also have increased agression, which might mean that postpardom depression or anger at a crying baby result in accidental infanticide more often. That said, such a society could be made, and made to function, but I think that some level of gender roles (at least in the past) existed because it simply worked best, so while interesting, a preindustrial society without gender roles would probably not be a truly viable option if a gender roles based alternative exists.

I actually think it would be a better (for the society anyway) situation if, rather than getting rid of the roles, you get rid of the negative stigma associated with the roles. If people can still think of women as frail and needing protection, but at the same time notice that that means men are far more expandable and less biologically valuable, you could see respect for the differences and equal treatment that blossoms into near genderblindness after industrialization.

 

[Kaptin Kurk]

What do I mean by this?



Okay, now get an entire society where that applies to every single activity. Hence, any differences in behavior between men and women will be caused by biology instead of culture.

Yes, there can still be differences in regards to age, race, so on, with treatment, but that's another matter.

I can only imagine that being possible in a dystopian culture, in which dominance and sumbission are the only realities publically acknowledge. Sex, Violence, Lies, ect. all perfectly usable by either sex. And thus, if and when a woman can kill, sleep, and lie her way to the top, no one will bat an eye. After all, that's what it means to be alive. I don't necessarily see as many female ruthless warlords and men walkign around this world, but I can see the ones existing being quite good, and the men, similarly thinking, lying, stealing, cheating, and killing for her if the pays better than the next guy's.