@chimeric Men historically are expendable. Men historically fight and die gruesome deaths in war.
The sad truth is that if you take a nation: kill 70% of the men and leave the women protected, the 30% of remaining men can take multiple wives and the population will grow the same as if there was 100% of the men; yet with less of a gene pool though and the next generation can fight another war unabated. If you kill 70% of a nation's women and have 100% of the men, only 30% of the next generation will be born and handicap the next generation's war. This explains in part why polygamy was so common back in the day when war was common life and also why many women are gold diggers these days (poor men die more in war than rich men and dead men provide nothing to a family). History and life is a bitch is what I have learned. This is what 'won the race' for thousands of years. If you are alive to read this then you have this truth in your genes. War has always been Human nature. This is also in part why there are less men then women on average at any given moment; men take more risks and this is an effect of boys and men doing stupid risks. Men at every step of life are more prone to die than women. This is what 'won the race'. Also men are more likely to die alone and unloved than women due to this. Perhaps this is what makes nature create male homosexuality when there is an excess of men; human-beings demand affection.
So with adventuring I want more women to die like men before their time in high fantasy instead of living to 90 unfulfilled in a house. I feel that women are wasted in a kitchen and jailed in a house. Life is to be lived and experienced. Women on average tend to be more risk averse than men. 9 months to bare a child for female reproduction verses one night and 9 months of (hopefully) protecting the woman for a man's angle of reproduction. Also if the man is gone or leaves or dies during a pregnancy that leaves a single parent and same is not true if the woman 'leaves' during pregnancy. This also explains why some women are more intimately social with 'themselves' and why most women are open with other women raising their children than men; single moms need help. Also a great deal of women like to feel 'safe' around their spouse; this is not common with men. There is a practical reason for this; women have pregnancy and are left raising small children while men traditionally took the risks in the wild to provide and safeguard for the future. These are nothing to be shameful of. This is our history, what has worked for thousands of years and what 'won the race'. Women have just as much potential as men. Yet no matter what sex you are you have to sacrifice to capture your dreams! Men have a leg up on this for they tend to take risks instinctively while on 'autopilot'; men die more while on autopilot. I try for a One woman in Three men ratio of N.P.C.s and adventurers to give balance to both ends of the spectrum; history and fantasy.
The expendable male theory does explain a heck of a lot of human history and culture, though it's very controversial these days because it runs against the current trend in academia, which is to view patriarchy as a zero-sum game, created via an undocumented conspiracy, in which men have everything and women have nothing.
That being said, I'd like to warn folks to tread carefully around this topic, because this suddenly-necro'ed thread has gotten very heated in the past when we discussed real life gender issues.
The expendable male theory does explain a heck of a lot of human history and culture, though it's very controversial these days because it runs against the current trend in academia, which is to view patriarchy as a zero-sum game, created via an undocumented conspiracy, in which men have everything and women have nothing.
That being said, I'd like to warn folks to tread carefully around this topic, because this suddenly-necro'ed thread has gotten very heated in the past when we discussed real life gender issues.
I have willingly walked into a minefield to try and give a risky but truthful answer to dispel some misconceptions instead of 'taking the knee' and being 'politically correct'; even if no one likes to hear it.
You can hide from lies but you cannot hide from truth. Life is very fair; it shits on us all. I wish more people were after their dreams and were willing to fight and sacrifice for them. I am not against men nor women nor hermaphrodites; people are people. I am an equalist in that I wish for all people and groups to reach their latent potential and believe in themselves instead of falling short within the flow of the mediocrity.
If you cannot successfully diagnose an issue you cannot solve the issue. Some people currently have personal ailments yet take a false treatment and never cure themselves; they take fruit flavoured Flintstone's vitamins labeled penicillin. At critical times of life and death you have to be prepared to lop off an arm off to save the body or cauterize the wound to stop the bleeding. Just because something is convenient, lucrative and feels pleasureful does not always mean that it is at the end of the day in truth whole, moral or fulfilling. If too many things are empty, morally bankrupt and without fulfillment life will crush these areas and there will be great suffering for the innocent and or the children. I wish for people to succeed over adversity, not fail beneath adversity; even if what I say is an inconvenient truth.
the current trend in academia, which is to view patriarchy as a zero-sum game, created via an undocumented conspiracy, in which men have everything and women have nothing.
Wait wut?
It is called systemic oppression. If you do not understand the basic tenets of it, stay the fuck away. Trust me. Because you cannot put human society in a test tube and because this stuff is multi-factorial you can make opposing theories that both are scientifically valid. Add on top of that the desirable outcome depend on your viewpoint. Then add on top of that that emotions run high when privileges are laid bare.
The problem you see is that nature and nurture is a feedback process; a professor from a privileged family is not undeserving of his status, nor is a base criminal undeserving of their prison sentence... but had the professor been born to the criminals family and vice versa, in what roles in society would either part have ended up then? If one were to claim there is an injustice there, for yet to be born children of underprivileged families, one would not be wrong, however, if one were to claim it is fair that achievers get to transit their success to their children, one would not be wrong either. Therefore, is it, or is it not, a solution to allocate by quotas, resigning resources and stature traditionally belonging to the already propertied and foregoing meritocracy... only, unconscious bias will predispose even members of underprivileged to view the privileged as more competent, should everything else be equal, so meritocracy is not really foregone with quotas. Knowing that, it is of course easy to sympathize with the underdog, until your realize your own position is in jeopardy of being granted to the underdog! It takes no genius to understand why there is so much tensions between the propertied and the underdogs and why the fight so often gets so very ugly. Now, sprinkle some naturalistic fallacy on top of that, and you have a minefield.
Now, this example was about poverty and / or racism, but the principles are the same for all manner of systemic oppression, such as the historic and current systemic oppression of women.
Contrary to popular sentiment, science SHOULD be politicized, or worded differently, make the connections between cause and effect visible for all to see, REGARDLESS of who's toes one thus step on. That is, after all, why we bother doing science. For instance, Darwin's work was VERY political for that time and place. It is actually the opposite that is a danger, when politics are (pseudo)-scienceified. Which creates a problem for social sciences due to their lack of objective optimal outcomes. Underdogs becomes emboldened by smelling blood in the water and later frustrated and nasty if their ambitions are foiled and the propertied subsequently respond with vitriolic backlashes to real or perceived threats. Ergo: drama runs rampant, beware!
the current trend in academia, which is to view patriarchy as a zero-sum game, created via an undocumented conspiracy, in which men have everything and women have nothing.
To clarify: Most feminist criticism in academia over the last few years portrays the institution of patriarchy as a unitary system which is designed to preserve male power, and that this requires women to be made subordinate. The same theory holds that much of our culture, our values, and our ideas--basically, all of the stuff we do and think everyday--is based on and influenced by this patriarchy, and that that's why our society remains unequal despite equal rights laws and the progress of the women's movement. The idea is that sexism is built into many facets of our society; not just our official laws. Hence the continued need to fight for gender equality (female suffrage and the like are not sufficient to correct all of the corrosive influences of the patriarchy).
I have three complaints with this theory: First, it treats all societies as part of the same patriarchy, when in reality there are multiple different kinds of patriarchal societies that we cannot simply lump together. Second, regardless of which patriarchy model you look at, virtually every model assumes that patriarchies are intentionally designed, when in reality, cultures are the product of many people and does not have one single, unified direction. Third, it portrays patriarchy as a static construct, when in reality, human cultures have changed dramatically over time.
(If all of this seems extremely vague, that's typical for the discourse around patriarchy today. Feminist criticism these days is one of the most theoretical and abstract fields in academia, much more so than history or even economics or political science. A lot of the discourse never even touches on real-life examples; it sticks to the realm of theory).
I blame Foucault. Foucault was very big on the idea that every aspect of our society, down to the words in our language, is intentionally designed to preserve the elite's power. It's a pretty consistent picture across these models: A long time ago, on an unknown date in an unknown location, a bunch of nameless people, all men, got together and conspired to set up a system to make themselves powerful, and that this system persists to the current day.
I find this unconvincing because nobody ever cites any documentary evidence for the notion that the system was designed to be the way it is--nor could anyone cite documentary evidence for this, honestly, because we're talking about an institution, patriarchy, that's believed to predate written history. It's not hard to find parts of our language, say, that reinforce a patriarchal idea of one kind or another (a good example is the fact that the word "slut" contains heavy negative overtones and applies strictly to women, and that there is no equivalent term for men), but the dominant attitude in academia today is that there's a single motive behind everything.
I find it more plausible that cultures evolved organically over the course of generations, and some of those cultures became dominant largely due to evolutionary pressure. For one reason or another (probably multiple reasons, really), patriarchal societies were inordinately successful over the last several thousand years.
(A religious example: the closely-knit Jews, united by a common tradition with a common text to establish a set of laws that could not be quickly changed, survived to the present day despite all kinds of persecutions, whereas other Semitic societies vanished. There aren't a whole lot of Moloch worshippers around these days, probably because making a practice of sacrificing your children to appease your god is an evolutionary dead end.)
Only in the modern day have we started to discard a lot of key patriarchal ideas. I credit birth control, stronger hygiene, better education, the Industrial Revolutions, and the rise of intellectual labor with the crumbling of patriarchal structures today.
For many academics today, patriarchy is a gigantic and massively complex system designed to more or less enslave people into arbitrary gender roles in order to benefit male elites.
For me, patriarchy is a word for a society in which most of the key leadership positions are filled by men, a structure which was functional for much of our history but has become all but completely obsolete over the past one or two hundred years.
Anyway... the reason I mention all this is because the expendable male theory came up, and while I find the theory convincing, I wanted to point out that the theory is extremely controversial because it contradicts some parts of the dominant academic perspective on patriarchy. Mostly because the expendable male theory suggests that not all aspects of our culture are to men's benefit, and that patriarchy arose naturally instead of artificially.
This is a problem because there are folks, both feminists and non-feminists, who believe that what is natural, as oppose to artificial, is good or unchangeable. Haven't we all heard at least one person say that gender equality is impossible because gender differences are innate? That's why so many academics emphasize so very often that gender differences are strictly artificial constructs: because in their eyes, if patriarchy is natural, it cannot be fought.
Personally, I have absolutely no moral respect for nature or evolution. Nature and evolution gave me appendicitis and would have made me die a slow and painful death at age 21 if it weren't for modern, artificial medicine. So the idea that patriarchy is the product of evolution does not strike me as problematic as a feminist.
TL;DR,
Patriarchy is like my appendix. A long time ago, that organ had an important evolutionary function. Now, I'm better off without it--to the extent that it was worth undergoing invasive surgery to keep it from killing me.
Fair enough. It does make sense that aspects of our world tend to work in the interests of the "elite," however you may define them. Otherwise, the "elite" probably wouldn't stay the elite for very long!
And it shouldn't be too surprising if there are plenty of feminists who don't see patriarchy as a designed system. I just haven't run into as many of them in my own reading--I've gotten the impression that the designed patriarchy idea is more popular among academics.
For those who are interested, Roy Baumeister discusses the expendable male theory at length in his book Is There Anything Good About Men? It's a surprisingly easy read for an academic work.
@semiticgod, I found your essay very interesting. I read a hypothesis once that patriarchy arose at the same time as agriculture, and was related to the fact (?) that physically operating a primitive plow causes women to become injured and have miscarriages. Thus, men took control of agriculture and therefore the food supply and economy of the society, while women became relegated to a division of labor that supported pregnancy and managing the home in ways that were not dangerous to childbirth.
I wonder what you think of that or if you ever heard of that hypothesis before? If there's any weight to it, I think it supports your argument that there were likely good reasons to establish a patriarchy at one time in human history, but that those reasons have changed or no longer exist.
@DrakeICN there's a bunch of kids around here. I think you're smart enough to express yourself forcefully without dropping F-bombs everywhere. Just sayin'.
Wouldn't it make more sense for the women to start a matriarch if the men were occupied by agricultural labor? That way both genders have the time to manage their own separate competence.
This thread doesn't need to go off course in gender theory. Let's get back on topic. There's a simple way to make there be more female characters in Baldur's Gate: for each character, flip a coin. Depending on the outcome of the flip, make the character male or female. There are two challenges: one is the soundsets. Since there are many characters with unique soundsets (there isn't a female substitute for "I be Thalantyr, mighty mage of Beregost.") you might end up restricting this to minor characters like commoners and guards and so on. The other challenge is to make sure that any dialogue lines that refer to the character's gender are changed as well.
@DrakeICN there's a bunch of kids around here. I think you're smart enough to express yourself forcefully without dropping F-bombs everywhere. Just sayin'.
With a woman, you are going to have to adjust the dynamics of your mod, consciously or not, because sex is more than cosmetics. And we need this refreshing change of angle. With a mod full of dudes, they will more likely than not end up doing the dude thing, which in the games comes down to being rude and killing things. Just look at Sarevok and his all-boys gang: Tazok, Angelo... Don't get me wrong: I appreciate the dude thing, but I've done quite enough of it to last me.
You are talking about the "dude thing" so i guess there is the "woman thing" counter part? It's like you hold a reasoning that is actually the source of the "problem" you are pointing out.
I do get your point but I don't think that this is gender related.
the current trend in academia, which is to view patriarchy as a zero-sum game, created via an undocumented conspiracy, in which men have everything and women have nothing.
Wait wut?
A form of unspeakable madness, not understanding is a good thing.
One thing that one can complain about is that the women in the game are all well adjusted. Even Safana, which has like, a tendency of a bi... uh female dog, streak, is at the end of the day pleasant to be around. Which is not wrong per se, girls like that DO exist (albeit rare to find), but it should be balanced out by hysterical, abusive, constantly rude, loudmouthed, double-standard, unhygienic, screams for no reason and finally accuse you of wanting to get inside her pants all the time* ladies. For more realism.
*Which to be fair, probably was true the first time you were accused, but by the 20:th time she accuse you, you are thinking more along the line of drowning her in the nearest river.
One thing that one can complain about is that the women in the game are all well adjusted. Even Safana, which has like, a tendency of a bi... uh female dog, streak, is at the end of the day pleasant to be around. Which is not wrong per se, girls like that DO exist (albeit rare to find), but it should be balanced out by hysterical, abusive, constantly rude, loudmouthed, double-standard, unhygienic, screams for no reason and finally accuse you of wanting to get inside her pants all the time* ladies. For more realism.
*Which to be fair, probably was true the first time you were accused, but by the 20:th time she accuse you, you are thinking more along the line of drowning her in the nearest river.
This is what mods are for
But with all seriousness, I doubt not-adjusted people (men or women) would survive for a long on the road.
Comments
The sad truth is that if you take a nation: kill 70% of the men and leave the women protected, the 30% of remaining men can take multiple wives and the population will grow the same as if there was 100% of the men; yet with less of a gene pool though and the next generation can fight another war unabated. If you kill 70% of a nation's women and have 100% of the men, only 30% of the next generation will be born and handicap the next generation's war. This explains in part why polygamy was so common back in the day when war was common life and also why many women are gold diggers these days (poor men die more in war than rich men and dead men provide nothing to a family). History and life is a bitch is what I have learned. This is what 'won the race' for thousands of years. If you are alive to read this then you have this truth in your genes. War has always been Human nature. This is also in part why there are less men then women on average at any given moment; men take more risks and this is an effect of boys and men doing stupid risks. Men at every step of life are more prone to die than women. This is what 'won the race'. Also men are more likely to die alone and unloved than women due to this. Perhaps this is what makes nature create male homosexuality when there is an excess of men; human-beings demand affection.
So with adventuring I want more women to die like men before their time in high fantasy instead of living to 90 unfulfilled in a house. I feel that women are wasted in a kitchen and jailed in a house. Life is to be lived and experienced. Women on average tend to be more risk averse than men. 9 months to bare a child for female reproduction verses one night and 9 months of (hopefully) protecting the woman for a man's angle of reproduction. Also if the man is gone or leaves or dies during a pregnancy that leaves a single parent and same is not true if the woman 'leaves' during pregnancy. This also explains why some women are more intimately social with 'themselves' and why most women are open with other women raising their children than men; single moms need help. Also a great deal of women like to feel 'safe' around their spouse; this is not common with men. There is a practical reason for this; women have pregnancy and are left raising small children while men traditionally took the risks in the wild to provide and safeguard for the future. These are nothing to be shameful of. This is our history, what has worked for thousands of years and what 'won the race'. Women have just as much potential as men. Yet no matter what sex you are you have to sacrifice to capture your dreams! Men have a leg up on this for they tend to take risks instinctively while on 'autopilot'; men die more while on autopilot. I try for a One woman in Three men ratio of N.P.C.s and adventurers to give balance to both ends of the spectrum; history and fantasy.
That being said, I'd like to warn folks to tread carefully around this topic, because this suddenly-necro'ed thread has gotten very heated in the past when we discussed real life gender issues.
You can hide from lies but you cannot hide from truth. Life is very fair; it shits on us all. I wish more people were after their dreams and were willing to fight and sacrifice for them. I am not against men nor women nor hermaphrodites; people are people. I am an equalist in that I wish for all people and groups to reach their latent potential and believe in themselves instead of falling short within the flow of the mediocrity.
If you cannot successfully diagnose an issue you cannot solve the issue. Some people currently have personal ailments yet take a false treatment and never cure themselves; they take fruit flavoured Flintstone's vitamins labeled penicillin. At critical times of life and death you have to be prepared to lop off an arm off to save the body or cauterize the wound to stop the bleeding. Just because something is convenient, lucrative and feels pleasureful does not always mean that it is at the end of the day in truth whole, moral or fulfilling. If too many things are empty, morally bankrupt and without fulfillment life will crush these areas and there will be great suffering for the innocent and or the children. I wish for people to succeed over adversity, not fail beneath adversity; even if what I say is an inconvenient truth.
The problem you see is that nature and nurture is a feedback process; a professor from a privileged family is not undeserving of his status, nor is a base criminal undeserving of their prison sentence... but had the professor been born to the criminals family and vice versa, in what roles in society would either part have ended up then? If one were to claim there is an injustice there, for yet to be born children of underprivileged families, one would not be wrong, however, if one were to claim it is fair that achievers get to transit their success to their children, one would not be wrong either. Therefore, is it, or is it not, a solution to allocate by quotas, resigning resources and stature traditionally belonging to the already propertied and foregoing meritocracy... only, unconscious bias will predispose even members of underprivileged to view the privileged as more competent, should everything else be equal, so meritocracy is not really foregone with quotas. Knowing that, it is of course easy to sympathize with the underdog, until your realize your own position is in jeopardy of being granted to the underdog! It takes no genius to understand why there is so much tensions between the propertied and the underdogs and why the fight so often gets so very ugly. Now, sprinkle some naturalistic fallacy on top of that, and you have a minefield.
Now, this example was about poverty and / or racism, but the principles are the same for all manner of systemic oppression, such as the historic and current systemic oppression of women.
Contrary to popular sentiment, science SHOULD be politicized, or worded differently, make the connections between cause and effect visible for all to see, REGARDLESS of who's toes one thus step on. That is, after all, why we bother doing science. For instance, Darwin's work was VERY political for that time and place. It is actually the opposite that is a danger, when politics are (pseudo)-scienceified. Which creates a problem for social sciences due to their lack of objective optimal outcomes. Underdogs becomes emboldened by smelling blood in the water and later frustrated and nasty if their ambitions are foiled and the propertied subsequently respond with vitriolic backlashes to real or perceived threats. Ergo: drama runs rampant, beware!
To clarify: Most feminist criticism in academia over the last few years portrays the institution of patriarchy as a unitary system which is designed to preserve male power, and that this requires women to be made subordinate. The same theory holds that much of our culture, our values, and our ideas--basically, all of the stuff we do and think everyday--is based on and influenced by this patriarchy, and that that's why our society remains unequal despite equal rights laws and the progress of the women's movement. The idea is that sexism is built into many facets of our society; not just our official laws. Hence the continued need to fight for gender equality (female suffrage and the like are not sufficient to correct all of the corrosive influences of the patriarchy).
I have three complaints with this theory: First, it treats all societies as part of the same patriarchy, when in reality there are multiple different kinds of patriarchal societies that we cannot simply lump together. Second, regardless of which patriarchy model you look at, virtually every model assumes that patriarchies are intentionally designed, when in reality, cultures are the product of many people and does not have one single, unified direction. Third, it portrays patriarchy as a static construct, when in reality, human cultures have changed dramatically over time.
(If all of this seems extremely vague, that's typical for the discourse around patriarchy today. Feminist criticism these days is one of the most theoretical and abstract fields in academia, much more so than history or even economics or political science. A lot of the discourse never even touches on real-life examples; it sticks to the realm of theory).
I blame Foucault. Foucault was very big on the idea that every aspect of our society, down to the words in our language, is intentionally designed to preserve the elite's power. It's a pretty consistent picture across these models: A long time ago, on an unknown date in an unknown location, a bunch of nameless people, all men, got together and conspired to set up a system to make themselves powerful, and that this system persists to the current day.
I find this unconvincing because nobody ever cites any documentary evidence for the notion that the system was designed to be the way it is--nor could anyone cite documentary evidence for this, honestly, because we're talking about an institution, patriarchy, that's believed to predate written history. It's not hard to find parts of our language, say, that reinforce a patriarchal idea of one kind or another (a good example is the fact that the word "slut" contains heavy negative overtones and applies strictly to women, and that there is no equivalent term for men), but the dominant attitude in academia today is that there's a single motive behind everything.
I find it more plausible that cultures evolved organically over the course of generations, and some of those cultures became dominant largely due to evolutionary pressure. For one reason or another (probably multiple reasons, really), patriarchal societies were inordinately successful over the last several thousand years.
(A religious example: the closely-knit Jews, united by a common tradition with a common text to establish a set of laws that could not be quickly changed, survived to the present day despite all kinds of persecutions, whereas other Semitic societies vanished. There aren't a whole lot of Moloch worshippers around these days, probably because making a practice of sacrificing your children to appease your god is an evolutionary dead end.)
Only in the modern day have we started to discard a lot of key patriarchal ideas. I credit birth control, stronger hygiene, better education, the Industrial Revolutions, and the rise of intellectual labor with the crumbling of patriarchal structures today.
For many academics today, patriarchy is a gigantic and massively complex system designed to more or less enslave people into arbitrary gender roles in order to benefit male elites.
For me, patriarchy is a word for a society in which most of the key leadership positions are filled by men, a structure which was functional for much of our history but has become all but completely obsolete over the past one or two hundred years.
Anyway... the reason I mention all this is because the expendable male theory came up, and while I find the theory convincing, I wanted to point out that the theory is extremely controversial because it contradicts some parts of the dominant academic perspective on patriarchy. Mostly because the expendable male theory suggests that not all aspects of our culture are to men's benefit, and that patriarchy arose naturally instead of artificially.
This is a problem because there are folks, both feminists and non-feminists, who believe that what is natural, as oppose to artificial, is good or unchangeable. Haven't we all heard at least one person say that gender equality is impossible because gender differences are innate? That's why so many academics emphasize so very often that gender differences are strictly artificial constructs: because in their eyes, if patriarchy is natural, it cannot be fought.
Personally, I have absolutely no moral respect for nature or evolution. Nature and evolution gave me appendicitis and would have made me die a slow and painful death at age 21 if it weren't for modern, artificial medicine. So the idea that patriarchy is the product of evolution does not strike me as problematic as a feminist.
TL;DR,
Patriarchy is like my appendix. A long time ago, that organ had an important evolutionary function. Now, I'm better off without it--to the extent that it was worth undergoing invasive surgery to keep it from killing me.
And it shouldn't be too surprising if there are plenty of feminists who don't see patriarchy as a designed system. I just haven't run into as many of them in my own reading--I've gotten the impression that the designed patriarchy idea is more popular among academics.
For those who are interested, Roy Baumeister discusses the expendable male theory at length in his book Is There Anything Good About Men? It's a surprisingly easy read for an academic work.
I wonder what you think of that or if you ever heard of that hypothesis before? If there's any weight to it, I think it supports your argument that there were likely good reasons to establish a patriarchy at one time in human history, but that those reasons have changed or no longer exist.
https://www.sciencealert.com/swearing-is-a-sign-of-more-intelligence-not-less-say-scientists
Just doin' my part in preventing the dumbing down of the next generation!
I do get your point but I don't think that this is gender related.
There's no gender theory, there's only gender studies.
...I contributed!
*Which to be fair, probably was true the first time you were accused, but by the 20:th time she accuse you, you are thinking more along the line of drowning her in the nearest river.
But with all seriousness, I doubt not-adjusted people (men or women) would survive for a long on the road.