Meg's Pub..... philosophers club.

[Wandrin]

What you get, once a government has started to give the multi-national perks to move to that country is blackmail - give us more perks or we'll take all of those jobs away and move to another country.

I can't disagree.

[magentaflame]

"Women. They aren't like us, people."* (Comment by a friend's Dad when driving years ago shortly after the map reading instruction, "Take the last left...")

We can go through a list of stereotypes: When faced with a friend's situation, men offer solutions, women offer sympathy. But that just deals with individual cases, it doesn't produce any overarching theory about the whole spectrum of possible behaviours.

I'm told that a girl baby will sit quietly and play when a boy baby will be smashing the table lamp, then that an adolescent girl will sulk for weeks where a boy will sulk for maybe a day. We all know the stereotype that girls spend hours doing themselves up to go out where the boys try to impress them.

So is it all about sex, babies and family, when we actually get down to the differences? I'm inclined to think so. Let's say we've been around as our current human species for 200,000 years. We've gone from hunter-gatherer groups such as are now occasionally still found in the Amazon Rainforest or highland Borneo to modern in the last 10,000 with a lot of that change in the last 150 years.

If those figures can be accepted as a rough guide, then for more than 95% of our existence as a species our individual existence has depended on being part of a small extended family group of perhaps thirty. All the evidence we have, and there's not a huge amount, suggests that the women looked after the kids and picked berries and the men went off and killed something. Fighting women seem rare but not unknown: Boudicca is our British one, and what set her off? The violation of her family. Besides, childbirth was incredibly dangerous. I think it's been calculated that before modern medicine, about 44% of women would die as a result of childbirth. Would you really have risked them in a Mammoth hunt as well? Possibly...but only in a safe role such as waving burning branches in a group to steer the animal in a particular direction, perhaps?

My point is that for almost all our existence as a species, women have been killed by childbirth more than anything else, but they kept doing it. It's an incredibly strong drive, as is a mother's love for her kids. That's not to say there isn't some complaining, but watch almost any Mum...and bear in mind it's only recently that more than half kids born made it to 7 years old. Many didn't make the first year. So either you avoided sex completely, were infertile, or you spent your life with a 50/50 chance of death for every baby and a 50/50 chance that kid wouldn't make it to adulthood. One of the few women I can think of from those times who made a name for herself was St Hilda, an Abbess.

Grim. Though perhaps not entirely so - I love the recent find of 6,000 year old footprints in the mud of the Severn Estuary which show a group moving slowly long a shoreline, while all around them there are smaller footprints going here there and everywhere. It is assumed that these were women collecting shellfish while the kids played around them.

Being a man seemed much more about hunting and fighting. Food and protection.

To survive at all, women have had to be enormously tough, both physically and mentally. Oh, and from a species point of view, for women sex is the start of something. For men (forget love for a moment and just think species) it's the end, job done. If women were spiders we'd be eaten at that point because at no point after that are we necessary. Just potentially enormously helpful because as many have pointed out, raising kids takes a lot of food. Thank heavens for love

Then above and beyond those basic survival-as-a-species functions we have these big brains which appear to be connected with surviving extreme ecological stress but have left us, in combination with those survival instincts, with imagination, empathy, the ability to think in symbols and plan ahead and the ability to recall and reflect on our experiences.

Hmm. Would women want an external womb if they could have it? Literally all done in a test tube and incubator so you just turn up to collect on the due date? What difference if any would it make to how you felt about the kid?


* I've put a comma in the quotation but if it was there, it was only just...

I'm having an issue with your whole premise to be honest.
But I'll get to that later . Meanwhile read this Why men historically propose to women it sort of undoes your fluff and bubbles outlook on females . You've written as a person who's fallen for societal sexism. It's an easy mistake to make. We only percieve what we experience.

[Clodhopper]

The fluff and bubbles was just intro. Look at what I said and you'll find I take women's strength very seriously (even though I get my stats wrong - 44% of female deaths being as a result of childbirth doesn't mean an approximate 50/50 chance of surviving each pregnancy, I suspect). That strength is based in the requirements of children but can be used in any field really.

Women use fluff and bubbles as cover in many cases, good and bad and indifferent. Because they can. Doesn't work so well for men. I'm less often fooled, nowadays

[magentaflame]

I take umbrage of the fluff and bubbles notion of womens' existence ......the 'drive' to have babies? that's a nonsense.

My point is that for almost all our existence as a species, women have been killed by childbirth more than anything else, but they kept doing it.

No, women actually survived more than men because they didn't do the soldiering/protection of the clan/group/........unless of course the men weren't very good at it and the clan/group was wiped out which happened more times than not .....until someone came up with the bright idea of slavery....you kill off the boys and take the girls. this makes your clan stronger and you get to force girls and women to increase your clan numbers.

But in saying all that ....women did take up arms more often than not because they were the back line of defense. (and they basically knew what was going to happen to them if they didn't ...suicide was the better option .

Oh and biologically women only need males for four years after giving birth.

[Clodhopper]

Sorry, the drive to have babies is NOT nonsense. Some may not have much drive, but others have it bigtime. Really, how many women are indifferent to the idea of having children? Take it or leave it? Then, when even the indifferent actually HAVE a baby, how many shrug and say, nothing has changed? Or do they look into the baby's eyes and realise everything has changed for ever?

I wasn't arguing that more men or less died. It's irrelevant. I'm saying that the very rough figures are that nearly half of women died of childbirth, historically. Yet even knowing that childbirth was very dangerous they kept doing it. There's a very strong reason then for it to keep happening. What is that reason?

Oh and biologically women only need males for four years after giving birth.

That long? I didn't think they needed them at all after conception - it's just convenient. Also there seems to be some evidence from long distance running in particular that childbirth actually makes women physically tougher in the year(s?) after giving birth.

[magentaflame]

Do you know what a pelvic floor is?

[Ahso!]

What you get, once a government has started to give the multi-national perks to move to that country is blackmail - give us more perks or we'll take all of those jobs away and move to another country.

That is true all too often, however, should the company pull out what remains should be well-trained people capable of picking up the pieces and potentially putting things back together unless they transfer out with the company.

[Ahso!]

Sorry, the drive to have babies is NOT nonsense. Some may not have much drive, but others have it bigtime. Really, how many women are indifferent to the idea of having children? Take it or leave it? Then, when even the indifferent actually HAVE a baby, how many shrug and say, nothing has changed? Or do they look into the baby's eyes and realise everything has changed for ever?

I've often wondered how much of the reproduction of the past was due to what we now call rape along with other types of forced sex. My guess is that it could have been pretty significant considering how prevalent it is now even with legal (and other) consequences.

[Clodhopper]

I've often wondered how much of the reproduction of the past was due to what we now call rape along with other types of forced sex. My guess is that it could have been pretty significant considering how prevalent it is now even with legal (and other) consequences.

I think we can get an idea of the amount of rape by looking at modern "primitive" tribes. Within the tribe it is rare - there tend to be strict social structures. We are talking people with the same size brain as us over a period many times longer than our approx. 8,000 or 10,000 years-ish of known human history: These people were not stupid or incapable but there were not many of them so my guess - and it is no more than that - is that rape was rare because there wasn't that much opportunity until comparatively recently as populations began to fill the land from Japan to Portugal and Australia to Finland (Africa being where we started). Once we stop being family groups related to all the neighbouring family groups and start being tribal and settled and people have resources in considerable amounts that can be taken, then I suspect warfare and rape became more common. Apparently anthropologists have recorded instances of tribal warfare in New Guinea (iirc. Might have been Borneo) where the men line up facing, there are individual combats very much as described in Homer, there may or may not be a general engagement, and it's rare to have a conclusive result since the engagement is spears at a distance and not close order infantry combat. However when you DO get a conclusive result the winners rush into the losers' village, nick everything they can and run, after raping all the women who then let THEIR men know precisely what they think of them for letting it happen (you don't get many actual deaths even in the battle).

So I think what I'm saying is that until we had moved past the hunter-gatherer stage rape was rare because the opportunity was rare, you knew your neighbours who might be 30 miles away or more and were often related to them. I would imagine that in early times the issue was more of finding people you were NOT related to, since the dangers of inbreeding have been known a long, long time and the taboo is very strong (with Egypt a curious and very successful exception - I don't know of any other culture which encouraged incest. I also saw a report somewhere that modern Egyptians have a lower incidence of genetic disorders than other populations because they weeded out a lot of bad genes in the times of the Pharaohs...). The history of Stonehenge era Britain might be an example of this, where much of the population met up at Stonehenge for the winter solstice but lived dispersed the rest of the time. Once you have settled villages you have high concentrations of resources in single locations, plus competition for resources with neighbouring villages if your population expands. It's not just rape on its own, either, that's when we start seeing slavery for the first time we can be sure of in Britain, for example (slave chains look much the same across culture and time, it seems). Slaves seem to have been a bronze age Celtic British export business. Slavery and rape are closely linked...


...and I have to say, your Voltaire quotation seems to have gained bite in the last year or so...

edit: The existence of neanderthal genes in the human genome strongly suggests rape to me. I find it hard to believe there were marriage alliances going on. I do wonder if human legends of trolls are in fact a distant memory of neanderthals...

edit edit: I'll have to check up on Viking or maybe Anglo-Saxon fines for rape and where it stood in the scale of offences. Something is ringing bells there...

edit x3: If we take terms of modern rape then a lot would count. Arranged marriages, for example? Sex under 16? I think what we call rape would have been endemic in the Dark Ages because local warfare was endemic. Horrible, brutal times.

[Clodhopper]

Do you know what a pelvic floor is?

Enough to know where you are going with this. I don't think it needs a male though. Some one, an aunt or a sister preferably both would probably be better though because their understanding is likely to be better. In fact, thinking about it, wherever there seems to be a choice isn't it the case that the women throw the men out around the time of childbirth?