What about men’s supposed incompetence in dealing with babies - even their own infants?

To me the one gender stereotype that no one questions is that the mother/infant bond is instinctual and universally present, and that the father/infant bond is, well - surprising when it occurs.

I wrote about my experience of this here. Both men and woman reinforce this stereotype. I won’t characterize why women reinforce it, but men do because a) if they really are lazy and distant, they have an handy excuse, and b) they consider care of babies “woman’s work” and “not manly.”

As a supposed universal gender truth it serves no one. I’m sure there are some woman that really don’t react well to the burden of those first few months, and they feel some shame as a result. And because there is no expectation that fathers should provide hands-on baby care every bit as well and as often as mothers, fathers miss out on some early bonding that helps build a good foundation for the father-child relationship.

Indy: Roy F. Baumeister. up there 10/14/2:44- I’d really like to see that DNA study you mention- it does not appear to be referenced on your website, or on the websites of the 15 or so approving links from various idiots like John Tierney. Don’t bother; statements like “today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men” are meaningless. Is he talking about the Identical Ancestors Point? Some kind of ratio of the number of males to females at a given level of ancestry? If so, it doesn’t make any sense without picking a level of ancestry–and giving a good reason for selecting that one in particular. (As an example, I assure you that I have the same number of male and of female grandparents and great-grandparents. So suck that, Roy F. Baumeister!)

Sina: Polygamy is an example of how patriarchy oppresses men?! Well, yes, it is. Saying that patriarchy oppresses (most) men doesn’t mean that it doesn’t oppress women more. I can understand that the MRA motive in this case is to try and garner more oppression points than women get, but it’s a perennial topic around here that most men have more common cause with women than they have with elite men.

So, patriarchy oppresses some men because they don’t have instant sexual access to as many women as they want, because women sometimes choose who they want to have sex with. Or, alternatively, because some other men take away their access to these women.

None of this means that patriarchy, especially polygamy, doesn’t oppress women worse than it oppresses men, and it certainly doesn’t mean that patriarchy doesn’t exist. But even though it’s pretty clear that the people making these arguments are doing so in bad faith anyway, it doesn’t mean that patriarchy doesn’t hurt men too.

….but Harvard didn’t go co-ed until 1972, so during 1970 and 1971 women could only go to Radcliff (and various graduate schools) but from 1972-1974 they could go to Harvard itself.

Princeton and Yale both went co-ed in 1969. The main college at Columbia University didn’t go co-ed until 1983. The military colleges went co-ed in 1976.

The draft ran from 1969 to 1973.

So, technically, the most recent draft and women being allowed into Ivy Leagues happened about the same time, which is what I understood the quote you pulled out to mean. (And I don’t think the overlap of those dates is a coincidence. Which, again, was rather the point, I thought.)

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I also point out that it is mostly men who are armed with weaponry and war machinery and trained by The State to defend themselves.

People in general seem to have a hard time with the concept of an oppresive system. The point of a system is first of all because it is adaptive in the sense that it enables a society to survive and perpetuate itself–but this adaptiveness hardly equates to moral good. Some possible ways of doing things would be both robust and morally decent, others the former but not the latter. In fact a general respect for Murphy’s Law would indicate that it is harder to achieve both than one or the other, and nice but not feasible is not going to happen except in the imagination. So that leaves nasty but persistent standing; the only reason our social systems are not total hell is that human beings still want the nicer way if they can get it.

Of course a social system also defines what is good and bad, in terms of what perpetuates itself–but there too, there is a struggle with humane perceptions, so it can’t totally define it.

So dominator, aka patriarchial, society is a game we all have to play, because it frames how we organize how we meet our material and basic social needs. In its own terms there are “winners,” but there is no contradiction to say that even these elites are often quite miserable in various ways.

But when this spreading of misery is used to try and discredit a sensibile and useful analysis of the basic governing dynamic of the system, that person is not being helpful. Perhaps they are confused; it is hard to get perspective on how one’s own society works without being caught up in its self-perpetuating ideological whirlwinds again. Or perhaps they are disingenuous, but the ideology exists to give them mental cover, both in their own doublethinking minds and in argument.

“they have to reach for a practice that hasn’t been activated in the U.S. since women weren’t allowed into the Ivy Leagues”

I went to college between 1970 though 1974 just down the street from Harvard. Women were in Harvard then, and men were being drafted. I know; I met the women and was doing everything I could to not get drafted.

Betamale: “The patriarchy oppresses the majority of men at least as bad as women. The extreme example of this is polygamy, if you will. Poor men not only live in suffering, but are also deprived of any chance to make a contribution to the next generation.”

Polygamy is an example of how patriarchy oppresses men?! So, patriarchy oppresses some men because they don’t have instant sexual access to as many women as they want, because women sometimes choose who they want to have sex with. Or, alternatively, because some other men take away their access to these women. And then it’s dressed up with some fancy evo-psych-esque language about “contributing to the next generation” as a means of misdirection.

This, I think, is the baldest example of the nasty root of the MRA position. I mean, wow.