Awhile ago I read "Eve's Seed", and the author made a great case that men and women are not opposites, we are way more similar than dissimilar, but there are a few significant differences that matter. Let's just say I love that framing and wished it was more widespread.
This was very interesting. The characteristics of biological masculinity are also the biological basis of warfare in the human species, so they used to be important for military history students to understand. However, I am personally acquainted with tenured professors of military history who no longer teach this vital predicate to understanding intergroup violence because angry young things get very very upset if you tell them that women's bodies are not optimized for warfare. As Dr. Byrne points out here, this is the deranging, aggressive side of feminist magical thinking. Academic feminism understands warfare solely as a product of patriarchal exploitation, i.e. capitalism run amok, and rejects any theory of intergroup violence based in historical or social or political reality. I have watched in dismay as this all-conquering, malevolent ideology further encroaches into my field. I now see calls for papers focused on "self-care" and "mental health" at conferences which promise to deliberately ignore questions about hierarchy, economy, or even tactics. I frequently write about topics that would seem "woke" -- the emergence of a female archetype of civic resistance in the European Renaissance, for example -- but I am unacceptable to my field right now because I refuse to use female pronouns for Bree Fram. There have always been bias problems in military history, to be sure; it was impossible to get a paper published in a certain American journal if it was about the Eastern Front in the First World War. But now there are questions which had never been asked before, that will remain un-asked and un-answered, because the woke do not think they are valid questions at all.
Such an interesting comment. I wondered, what you said about "academic feminism," which universities/departments is it based on? I've been of the understanding that lately it's called "gender studies" and that "old school" 2nd wave feminism has largely disappeared from the academy. I've been a radical feminist for years and don't see "warfare as solely a product of patriarchal exploitation." There's way more to it than that. The realities of intergroup violence over the centuries is undeniable, but the best of feminism tries to find causes for this violence. For example, if most men/male adults are inherently violent/aggressive, how do you account for so many pacifists being male? Another example, from a book I read about the Caucasus, was of women hurling their infants down the mountain at invaders who were climbing up to conquer the mountaintop fortress (I don't think it specified whether the infants were still alive or already deceased). There is warfare in women too, though not the same as in men, but it's there in its own unique capacity, and that's indisputable. But there's so much cultural and individual variation in the world today and historically to come to specific conclusions about male and female social behavior. I agree with Kassandra's comment above, that most men and women are more similar than dissimilar, that we're meant to be allies (within the same tribal group at least), and somehow along the way that healthy, survival-based inclination has been undermined, not sure quite how, though I have some ideas. The influences of natural environments and the personal characteristics of each individual human can be very hard to measure, but it's worth thinking about. Thanks, Matt, please carry on asking questions and good luck in your field. Is the academy all it's cracked up to be anyway? Maybe wait till the wokists get finished then rebuild?
By "academic feminism" I am referring to the feminization of academia. The school that I chose to pursue a masters still had a "women's studies" department, which for me was a selling point.
To answer the rest of your question: I have a photo of Dugum Dani people having a battle with spears ca. 1960 on the island of Papua New Guinea. Everyone involved in the battle is male. According to the anthropologists who've studied autochthonous societies in the region, it is very common for women to be spectators, cheering on the men as if attending a sporting event, but they do not take part in the battles. There are occasional women leading in battle, but I have studied numerous battles and never found a combat unit composed of women. One might cite the Amazons of Dahomey, but they were a praetorian guard used for slave-raiding rather than battles and were destroyed in battle by the French. I have found plenty of examples instead where women supported men in the field. Likewise, siege warfare features men doing almost all of the fighting, with exceptions in extremis; a woman defending a wall has a leverage advantage over a man, so this motif appears in Western Europe three times that I have found between the 15th century and the 18th. The region is easily the most thickly-fortified on the planet during this period. The rest of the time, women bear mention for bringing stones to throw, carrying off the wounded and caring for them, bringing water and supplies and ammunition, etc. Finally, Ukraine today has women flying combat drones and filling innumerable support roles while men do all the fighting and dying as infantry. Sex difference is absolute throughout the archaeological and historical record. By the end of the 2nd millennium BC, women were buried with swords like men sometimes because it had become a symbol of rulership rather than a marker of sex. But first, there is a period in which the newfangled "sword" (history's first unambiguous tool of homicide) was exclusively male.
I glossed "patriarchal exploitation aka capitalism" because power and interest are commonly cited as variables leading to war. Men however are keenly aware of status because of testosterone. Young males without status or resources will act out in hopes of gaining status and resources. (Note that young females on T will often exhibit aggression.) This is why criminality comes on in adolescence and aging is the primary antidote to recidivism. Understanding war requires understanding hierarchies, so a military history approach which flattens and ignores hierarchies will be misleading, pointing to false conclusions about the nature of war itself. Think of American idiots trying to teach Afghan women about transgenderism in 2018. This is in fact the reason I decided to resume politics and take up the fight against "gender identity," is that I realized these fools will kill us all unless we stop them.
Oh well. You have your way of seeing things and that's fine. I don't have to agree, of course, not that I disagree with everything you said. Also I don't think I ever tried to say women should participate as "men" on the battlefield. I was seeing war as a survival strategy, rather than the destructive "game" it's become. And you left the example of men as pacifists unaddressed. I should have mentioned Societies of Peace, but comments tend to go on and on in situations like this, so better left alone. One thing may be certain that, with most wars, the end game tends to be someone's enslavement or annihilation sooner or later. Best wishes anyway.
Interesting to hear some of Mr. Byrne's points of view on gender, but that's pretty much all it is from what I can see, his point of view, which is fine, except when broad statements about feminism are made. When and where was he privy to 2nd wave feminist philosophical discussions? And which feminism is being discussed here? There are numerous feminisms. Part of the comparison of other philosophies to "feminist" philosophy is that 2nd wave feminism was grounded in the reality of women's lives, whereas my impression of other philosophies is that they distance themselves from real human lives. I never read any 2nd wave literature that didn't acknowledge the reality-based differences between men and women, in fact that was the whole point. Judith Butler, btw, is not a 2nd wave feminist. I'd put her in a class by herself, not sure what class that would be, and she's a poor writer and communicator in my opinion. In any case, thanks for being willing to discuss this topic, it's a worthwhile one.
Dugin’s idea is that we are arriving at the terminal station of the ideology of Liberalism, the core of which was Individualism, from a journey we began 500 years ago.
He defined Liberalism as "A kind of historical and cultural and political and philosophical process of [the] liberation of individuals of any kind of collective identity".
He ran down our track to separating ourselves from all collective identities over the last 500 years, to the last two we have left - Gender - and Humanism - both now under assault.
Awhile ago I read "Eve's Seed", and the author made a great case that men and women are not opposites, we are way more similar than dissimilar, but there are a few significant differences that matter. Let's just say I love that framing and wished it was more widespread.
This was very interesting. The characteristics of biological masculinity are also the biological basis of warfare in the human species, so they used to be important for military history students to understand. However, I am personally acquainted with tenured professors of military history who no longer teach this vital predicate to understanding intergroup violence because angry young things get very very upset if you tell them that women's bodies are not optimized for warfare. As Dr. Byrne points out here, this is the deranging, aggressive side of feminist magical thinking. Academic feminism understands warfare solely as a product of patriarchal exploitation, i.e. capitalism run amok, and rejects any theory of intergroup violence based in historical or social or political reality. I have watched in dismay as this all-conquering, malevolent ideology further encroaches into my field. I now see calls for papers focused on "self-care" and "mental health" at conferences which promise to deliberately ignore questions about hierarchy, economy, or even tactics. I frequently write about topics that would seem "woke" -- the emergence of a female archetype of civic resistance in the European Renaissance, for example -- but I am unacceptable to my field right now because I refuse to use female pronouns for Bree Fram. There have always been bias problems in military history, to be sure; it was impossible to get a paper published in a certain American journal if it was about the Eastern Front in the First World War. But now there are questions which had never been asked before, that will remain un-asked and un-answered, because the woke do not think they are valid questions at all.
Such an interesting comment. I wondered, what you said about "academic feminism," which universities/departments is it based on? I've been of the understanding that lately it's called "gender studies" and that "old school" 2nd wave feminism has largely disappeared from the academy. I've been a radical feminist for years and don't see "warfare as solely a product of patriarchal exploitation." There's way more to it than that. The realities of intergroup violence over the centuries is undeniable, but the best of feminism tries to find causes for this violence. For example, if most men/male adults are inherently violent/aggressive, how do you account for so many pacifists being male? Another example, from a book I read about the Caucasus, was of women hurling their infants down the mountain at invaders who were climbing up to conquer the mountaintop fortress (I don't think it specified whether the infants were still alive or already deceased). There is warfare in women too, though not the same as in men, but it's there in its own unique capacity, and that's indisputable. But there's so much cultural and individual variation in the world today and historically to come to specific conclusions about male and female social behavior. I agree with Kassandra's comment above, that most men and women are more similar than dissimilar, that we're meant to be allies (within the same tribal group at least), and somehow along the way that healthy, survival-based inclination has been undermined, not sure quite how, though I have some ideas. The influences of natural environments and the personal characteristics of each individual human can be very hard to measure, but it's worth thinking about. Thanks, Matt, please carry on asking questions and good luck in your field. Is the academy all it's cracked up to be anyway? Maybe wait till the wokists get finished then rebuild?
By "academic feminism" I am referring to the feminization of academia. The school that I chose to pursue a masters still had a "women's studies" department, which for me was a selling point.
To answer the rest of your question: I have a photo of Dugum Dani people having a battle with spears ca. 1960 on the island of Papua New Guinea. Everyone involved in the battle is male. According to the anthropologists who've studied autochthonous societies in the region, it is very common for women to be spectators, cheering on the men as if attending a sporting event, but they do not take part in the battles. There are occasional women leading in battle, but I have studied numerous battles and never found a combat unit composed of women. One might cite the Amazons of Dahomey, but they were a praetorian guard used for slave-raiding rather than battles and were destroyed in battle by the French. I have found plenty of examples instead where women supported men in the field. Likewise, siege warfare features men doing almost all of the fighting, with exceptions in extremis; a woman defending a wall has a leverage advantage over a man, so this motif appears in Western Europe three times that I have found between the 15th century and the 18th. The region is easily the most thickly-fortified on the planet during this period. The rest of the time, women bear mention for bringing stones to throw, carrying off the wounded and caring for them, bringing water and supplies and ammunition, etc. Finally, Ukraine today has women flying combat drones and filling innumerable support roles while men do all the fighting and dying as infantry. Sex difference is absolute throughout the archaeological and historical record. By the end of the 2nd millennium BC, women were buried with swords like men sometimes because it had become a symbol of rulership rather than a marker of sex. But first, there is a period in which the newfangled "sword" (history's first unambiguous tool of homicide) was exclusively male.
I glossed "patriarchal exploitation aka capitalism" because power and interest are commonly cited as variables leading to war. Men however are keenly aware of status because of testosterone. Young males without status or resources will act out in hopes of gaining status and resources. (Note that young females on T will often exhibit aggression.) This is why criminality comes on in adolescence and aging is the primary antidote to recidivism. Understanding war requires understanding hierarchies, so a military history approach which flattens and ignores hierarchies will be misleading, pointing to false conclusions about the nature of war itself. Think of American idiots trying to teach Afghan women about transgenderism in 2018. This is in fact the reason I decided to resume politics and take up the fight against "gender identity," is that I realized these fools will kill us all unless we stop them.
Oh well. You have your way of seeing things and that's fine. I don't have to agree, of course, not that I disagree with everything you said. Also I don't think I ever tried to say women should participate as "men" on the battlefield. I was seeing war as a survival strategy, rather than the destructive "game" it's become. And you left the example of men as pacifists unaddressed. I should have mentioned Societies of Peace, but comments tend to go on and on in situations like this, so better left alone. One thing may be certain that, with most wars, the end game tends to be someone's enslavement or annihilation sooner or later. Best wishes anyway.
A great complement to this talk is Heather Heying's Genspect talk from last fall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SVbN6tIySc
Can someone link me up to the article mentioned with Moti Gorin?
Interesting to hear some of Mr. Byrne's points of view on gender, but that's pretty much all it is from what I can see, his point of view, which is fine, except when broad statements about feminism are made. When and where was he privy to 2nd wave feminist philosophical discussions? And which feminism is being discussed here? There are numerous feminisms. Part of the comparison of other philosophies to "feminist" philosophy is that 2nd wave feminism was grounded in the reality of women's lives, whereas my impression of other philosophies is that they distance themselves from real human lives. I never read any 2nd wave literature that didn't acknowledge the reality-based differences between men and women, in fact that was the whole point. Judith Butler, btw, is not a 2nd wave feminist. I'd put her in a class by herself, not sure what class that would be, and she's a poor writer and communicator in my opinion. In any case, thanks for being willing to discuss this topic, it's a worthwhile one.
Another issue is the differences between boys/men and girls/women with autism.
This topic, overall, is so interesting.
I saw Carole Hooven's TED talk an it was fantastic!
I would love to have a longer episode on this topic. Very interesting
Try this Tucker Carlson interview with the Russian writer/philosopher Aleksandr Dugin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIULmTprQ6o
Dugin’s idea is that we are arriving at the terminal station of the ideology of Liberalism, the core of which was Individualism, from a journey we began 500 years ago.
He defined Liberalism as "A kind of historical and cultural and political and philosophical process of [the] liberation of individuals of any kind of collective identity".
He ran down our track to separating ourselves from all collective identities over the last 500 years, to the last two we have left - Gender - and Humanism - both now under assault.