Are we making a mistake to not value what we feminize?

Just in case anybody was laboring under the delusion that I had a life, I had to drop in for a quick visit on Christmas Day to post this question. I can handle waiting a day or two for answers as the rest of you enjoy Christmas gatherings and time with family.

Misogyny is a bane on all human beings. We do not value “female attributes” that are really just human attributes. We do men a disservice by taking the whole range of human emotions from them and by doing so, we make the world a harder more difficult place to live.

@SwanSwanHummingbird Welcome to Fluther, and thanks for your reply. I totally agree.

Perhaps gender related differences genetically predilected become incorporated into cultural norms, exaggerated by ritual and prolonged by tradition. Repression of emotion is destructive to self and others. Hopefully conservative forces will not forestall the rise of freedom for an individual to be who they are, and not someone else’s notion of who you should be, or your notion of their notions.

Merry Christmas @ETpro

I have to say, it bugs me how much I appreciate men who step outside the “traditional” gender roles.

An acquaintance of mine posted a photo on Facebook of her Christmas gift: A pair of house-slippers lovingly crocheted for her by her husband. He has a pair for their 4 year old and a pair for their baby-on-the-way (due any day!) in the works.

I don’t necessarily wish my husband were into that sort of thing (I think I have enough arts and crafts supplies in the kitchen to sate a small army of 1920s housewives and a few Renaissance portrait artists) I do wish I didn’t have to worry about how he would react to my son wanting to spend his holiday gift money on a baby doll.

I wanted girly dolls so bad that I stole my sisters barbies. They were evil aliens that deserved having their heads ripped off and the necks stuffed with fire crackers. My G.I. Joe’s thought that was pretty funny. My sister didn’t.

she deserved having her head ripped off and the neck stuffed with fire crackers. Your Joe would have found that funny, too. Your mother would not have. She deserved to have head ri

@Seek_Kolinahr You solve that by going species neutral and getting your son a pet goose. lol

How about a puppy?

I have been meaning to ask you for, like, years… can you house-train a pet goose?

You can buy Duck diapers.Really. lol

The human characteristics we ascribe to females are found in men too (at least the really good guys). We have to watch how we and others use language to denigrate women. Don’t do it and don’t stand for it when others do.

I think that the fundamental problem is the caring, nurturing, empathy, and relationships should NOT be considered feminizing traits, but should be universal values.

It’s a shame that society has considered them feminizing.

I have a personal opinion. Maybe someone will prove me right or wrong, I couldn’t care less. I find that men care more about feeling respected than loved. On the other hand, women care more about feeling loved than respected. That just to say, men and women are wired differently. It’s not natural to presume the same emotions or ways of thinking upon both. I’m all for equality and all that but at the same time equal does not mean similar and I think people need to realize that.

Is there a war against boys to alter their behavior in this country? I’m giving you a link to a book I’ve actually read and found very enlightening.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sommers-war.html

@Bill1939 Thanks for your excellent thoughts on this, and for the Season’s Greetings. Same to all here.

@Seek_Kolinahr Take hear. There are more of us here now than there were 50 years ago. More then than 100 years ago. And as a percent of the population now, we far outnumber what you’d have found 500 or 1,000 years ago. It just highlights what Dr. Martin Luther King reminded us of, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies Guess you already grew a pair.

@ragingloli Don’t know for sure where you were going with that thought before it got truncated, but GA for a good beginning.

@Dr_Lawrence GA! How very true.

@elbanditoroso I heartily agree. Now that we are technologically capable of exterminating ourselves, we need to shift glory from the lone heroic warrior who kills everything that moves to those who care, nurture, relate and empathize. If we don’t, we will spell our own doom.

@DWW25921 War on Christians, War on Wealth, War on Whites, War on Men. I am so tired of hearing right-wingers try to regress us to a past we left for good reason by claiming that the Alpha set in our culture is so threatened they need extraordinary protection. No question some feminists go too far, but so long as women make $0.76 for each $1.00 a man earns for the exact same work, boys are probably not at risk of destruction.

@ETpro Raging a war on waring are we? Yeah… ok…

@DWW25921 Might be about time for a War on “War on” as self contradictory as that may sound.

Wars will end when we conquer selfishness. Under the commonly held belief that demand exceeds supply, this seems unlikely.

@ETpro

I just read a brief book on this topic. It was published for free by a scientist/philosopher. You can read his point on the subject here link

According to him, the opposite of what you said holds true. We’re actually becoming extremely feminized and it is not a good thing at all.

I am not going to sift through that wall of text.
In any case, human history is defined by murder, rape, war, genocide. All while men were “manly” and in charge. It is time to change that.

Well I didn’t quote your name, so I don’t expect you to…

@ragingloli, warrior women have existed since the beginning of time. Because the loss of a woman in battle means a diminished capacity for reproduction, men resisted their recruitment.

@eno Thanks for the link, but I really haven’t the patience to read something that is a wall of centered text, is posted on a blog, and purports to be from a scientist who omits their credentials and is known only as a Satyr, and begins his “scientific” treatise with a bold assertion like, “Everything ‘new’ is based on something(s) old, because the temporal division of before and after is a flawed concept alluding to a gap that is not there.
What has been is present in what is, as it is an extension of it, a continuation of it.” without bothering to offer any proof that’s true, or even any links to the research that established it.

Since you weren’t talking to @ragingloli, I’ll post that conclusion for her.

But welcome to Fluther, and thanks for the interesting link.

@Bill1939 I bet there is something to that. One man produces over 500 billion sperm cells in a lifetime and is sexually fertile from puberty into old age. A woman is only fertile from puberty till menopause, and during that time will release about 400 egg cells. Women have a far, far higher reproductive value than men. But still, it takes two to tango.

What I get a kick out when I hear traditionalist right wingers whining about school shootings, increased suicide rates among males, the knockout game, etc is that many of these types of people oppose the concept of teaching boys to be empathetic, compassionate and more caring. Those are the very traits, that if installed in both males and females, that would end most of these damn problems (head slap).

Perhaps our mental images of an ideal world really is different amongst us, and it appears that many people want to continue to perpetuate the violent culture from generation to generation. Maybe we need another great wall.

@Paradox25 How true. Logical consistency is not the strong suite to the highly compartmentalized mind, and right-wing authoritarian followers have highly compartmentalized minds.