Modern philosophy - can there be a feminist and masculinity movements that don't divide and de-naturalise men and women?

“We’re designed to be hunters and we’re in a society of shopping. There’s nothing to kill anymore, there’s nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created.”

David Fincher

The lioness does not try to be the lion. She embraces her role as the lioness. She is powerful, strong, and nurturing. She does not mistake her meekness for weakness. The world needs more kind, compassionate, humble, faithful, persevering, confident, fierce, bold, pure, and tender-hearted women. Be one of them.

Sarah Vogel

'We buy things we don't need, with money we don't have, to impress people we don't like... We're the middle children of history man, no purpose or place, we have no great war or great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives...'

Tyler Durden

My choice of quotes is based on the fact so many popular masculinity and feminist movement niches are really corporate dribble designed to detach us from our nature and to replace that gender realness felt within us with a false and neutral egoistical pride in ourselves. This gender neutrality is falsely dressed up as gender fluidity but in reality gender fluidity requires us to embrace the animus-anime within our own gender whilst teaching us genderlessness really doesn't exist.

Thus, woman are encouraged to work like men, despite having different biological needs and abilities to men, frankly hurting both men and women. For instance, the lives of transvestites, if you look without rose-tinted glasses, are usually most tough (besides the fact to ignore your body permanently surely must be almost as rough as to ignore your mind permanently) . Men meanwhile are told to be like machines, cliched self-improvement addicts who otherwise are told they would be never enough, and above all, silent about their feelings, as the film Fight Club most popularly expressed.

Thus in a twisted sort of joke both genders are taught to be more materialistic, and more slave-like, in almost a battle against one another. A person's self-worth ends up often equating to their ability to win petty corporate hierarchical battles, earn higher wages and to be "cool" non-emotional judges, as in pacific, stubborn and weak at all times in the face of injustices. This last type of emasculation and elimination of femininity is more often seen being exercised by money-orientated lawyers and judges of both sexes (though mainly men) serving corporations and money, or in women typically in human-resources corporate disputes and in overly hierarchical academic institutions in both genders, rather than on the street.

Worse, far from liberalising the world and especially young people, popular feminist and masculine movements have clearly completely failed as most men and women can't or don't want to attract the other sex, especially face to face. The US is culturally the most dominant country in the world, and yet two-thirds (63%) of young guys (who logically should be the most experimental, free and relationship-oriented ) in the US are single according to a survey of 6,034 U.S. adults. The odd thing is only a third of women reported themselves single (33%), making this seemingly more to do with wealth, freedom and a few men having multiple partners- as whilst it's known women tend to like older men, in the age group of 18-29 to have twice as many single men is unexplainable socially for that reason (older men are simply not that much more attractive, especially in the 20s). Over half (53%) of single people were using online apps to find a date, showing that simply attracting people day-to-day must be very hard, as everyone knows online dating apps aren't that great, so there is a serious issue with attraction. In fact, the study showed most singles (between both sexes) had given up. Of those singles, 57% were “Not currently looking for a relationship or casual dates”, 7% were looking for “Casual dates only”, only 13% were interested in “a committed romantic relationship only" and 22% were interested in “Either a committed romantic relationship or casual dates”. Other studies show that people are having sex less and less. It's simple there has been a total loss in social attraction between women and men in general.

Now I'm not just bashing gender movements here, for instance there are different types of feminism; some more emotionally intelligent than others but unfortunately little is made of the different types of feminism. Take Postmodern feminism, a movement led by women who rejected common, traditional feminist ideals and instead focused on postmodern philosophy, post-structuralism and a French feminism. They rejected a universal female subject, which is clearly correct. These women focused more on individuality and how women experience oppression is vastly different ways and are molded politically from birth. Again this is nuanced and intelligent, treating people as one cult is a mistake no man and no women is the same. Despite being a far more nuanced philosophy, the goal of both popular feminism and postmodern feminism remain similar: to destabilize the patriarchal norms entrenched in society that have led to gender inequality and imbalance, and to criticise culture and society for harming women.

It is also blatant we are living in a male-dominated world - where the lead protagonists are all largely men, and women are shoe-horned into unrealistic male parts - like Hunger Games. Angela Jolie herself said 'female characters in films should not have to be portrayed as physically tough in order to be considered strong' and she herself has starred as 'Salt', 'Lara Croft: Tomb Raider', 'Hackers', 'Taking Lives' and 'The bone collector'- all tough stereo-typically masculine roles. Women are not nearly as violent as physically violent as men; 90% of rapes are committed on women, the vast majority by men and men kill far more than women - 'In 2022, there were 15,094 murder offenders in the United States who were male, in comparison to 2,107 who were female'.

Caroline Criado Perez in her book 'Invisible women - data bias for men' reveals how a '2007 international study of 25,439 children’s TV characters found that only 13% of non-human characters are female (the figure for female human characters was slightly better, although still low at 32%). An analysis of G-rated (suitable for children) films released between 1990 and 2005 found that only 28% of speaking roles went to female characters – and perhaps even more tellingly in the context of humans being male by default, women made up only 17% of crowd scenes. Men don’t just have more roles, they also spend twice as much time on screen – this rises to nearly three times as much when, as most films do, the film has a male lead. Only when the lead is female do men and women appear about as often as each other (as opposed to women getting, as you might expect, the majority of screen time). Men also get more lines, speaking twice as much as women overall; three times as much in films with male leads; and almost twice as much in films with male and female co-leads. Again it is only in the few films with female leads where male and female characters drew even on screen time.' The issue is mammoth, and is the same in literature and almost all areas of society.

She also shows that the working class is predominantly female as blue collar male jobs are outnumbered according by the likes of the cleaning, housekeeper, secretaries and other low paid jobs in advanced economies. Furthermore, she shows clear social issues like that women are far less likely to own cars compared to men but routinely make more trips than men, having to rely on public transport. Simple things like that are so irrational.

However, the notion men and women are the same and therefore should be treated the same I find wrong, not because one's better than the other, but because there are clear differences - be they hormonal, neurological, physical - we're live different ages, have puberty at different points and above all are fertile for different periods. Probably the most telling fact showing women and men are very different in their essence lies in human's sexual habits themselves, and that men are over ten times more likely to use a prostitute than a woman, and that woman are significantly more likely to be prostitutes- they make up 92% of all sex-workers according to the self-help organisation 'English Collective of Prostitutes'. Looking at differences from one of the most basic, fundamental human drives as an angle tells us exactly how different we are. It is insane to live in a world which treated us like we are the same, and where popular feminism is so wrong is it indoctrinates women to study and work as hard as possible and neglect relationship at exactly the age where they should be more focused on having a family, biologically - and make out like there is a competition for every job between females and males. In that way it is a commercialised and gender-killing monster. Take for instance woman's rights. I believe it is perfectly acceptable that woman want to earn equal pay than men when working, but not that they really ought to be doing the same jobs. That doesn't make me more traditional, but more controversial.

Considering the maternal instincts in woman, is it any surprise females make up 97.6% of preschool and kindergarten teachers and 94% of childcare workers. I don't feel that's wrong. What's wrong is that these sorts of jobs aren't paid well, despite being very important - nurturing children at the most impressionable times of their lives. Lastly if women are the main shoppers in the economy, then why are they not filling up micro-economics and personal finance courses in universities- I can affirm from experience. I know it sounds odd but it's really more common-sense.

Of course builders and the military in my mind should be mainly work for men. However, it is not that every stereo-type is correct. Take the police for example, who can be hated for being overly testosterone-filled, (which is worsened by the fact in some countries like the US, police candidates can be rejected for having high IQs such as was Robert Jordan's case of being rejected for having an IQ of 125). In more peaceful countries, like Iceland, Sweden and Norway the police-force is full of women comparatively with other countries and there even have been female chief of polices. What happened? Well, crime has stayed lower than other developed countries.

All this being said, let's be as scientific as possible and show that it is a myth woman and men are basically suited to similar professions because we are neurologically and probably even spiritually different:

Men's brain aren't so evenly lateralised as women as science shows and that is a result ' 'at least in part, to the action of sex hormones, especially testosterone.' Moreover, 'emotionally charged memories is once again right-lateralised in men, left-lateralised in women'. Additionally, 'men show greater right hemisphere activation in tasks assessing global attention. In women, global choices are slower than local choices, whereas in men they are faster. Testosterone is positively related, and progesterone negatively related, to the use of global strategies. Oral contraceptive users show enhanced global advantage compared to women whose menstrual cycle is natural. It has repeatedly been demonstrated that men tend to remember the gist of an emotional story more strongly than women, while women tend to remember the details of the same story more strongly than men.'

It doesn't stop - 'men are more likely to display verbal deficits after left hemisphere lesions and non-verbal deficits after right hemisphere lesions, whereas the deficits are less predictable for women. Additionally male brains exhibit greater intrahemispheric, and females greater interhemispheric, structural connectivity... In normal adults, sex differences in functional cerebral asymmetries have been reported in wide range of areas, including decision-making, as above, but extending to areas such as language, working memory, spatial orientation, spatial attention, face perception, verbal and musical creativity tasks, emotional ‘processing’ and appreciation of beauty. Except in the case of language, males have generally been found in every one of these areas to be more reliant on the right hemisphere than females.'

There's evidence of differences from young age, showing it to be a trait not totally served as a study on 800 children by Deborah Waber and Jane Holmes showed. They asked 'girls and boys simply to copy the Rey-Osterrieth figure (see Fig. 13 above). They found that at the youngest age, females reproduced more parts of the design (i.e. scored higher on accuracy) than did males. This difference was accounted for by the presence, in the girls’ designs, of internal details absent in those of the boys.

In addition, females drew more discrete parts than males, even when the total number of parts was statistically controlled. Males the external configuration of the design seemed to be more salient … They further found that, at age 11, males drew their designs in long, sweeping, continuous lines, while females drew theirs part by part.

The male superiority in spatial ability appears on three kinds of tests. The first is spatial visualisation … The second is perceptual dis-embedding … The third is mazes …These differences do not appear reliably until adolescence. The language abilities at which females show an advantage are clearly associated with left hemisphere function.'

According to Belinda Pletzer, researcher of 'Hormonal Modulation of Brain and Cognition' -  there is ‘a stronger focus on the global level (holistic processing) in men and a stronger focus on the local level (decomposed processing) in women’. Also, ''females do better academically where material is familiar and prepared. Finally, in rats, too, it has been found that the right cortex is thicker than the left in males, but the left thicker than the right in females'.

Thus it is clear, females generally have greater verbal facility and males better visuo-spatial, whilst females are more detailed-oriented and men more holistic. Of course, taking a leaf out of post-modern feminism it is clear not all woman are the stereotype, not all men either. However, the world is dying from the over-masculisation of women and over-feminisation of men, to the point where gender neutrality is taught in some schools. Moreover, what is considered feminine like the colour pink was not considered feminine beforehand at all but actually masculine, showing how there is so much misrepresentation of what is masculine and feminine in society today - the culture switch just happened without any real thought.

Related to this if you consider contrast as a vital aspect of life, and believe in the Yin and Yang, then understanding that black is Yin and considered feminine and is just as vital part of life as the more glorified Yang (white) popularised by the enlightenment movement, then the colour black won't be neglected.

Finally, sadness in men is too often considered a weakness, as the 1979 song 'Boy's don't cry' testifies but is a masculine human trait, and men need to look after their anima, that is their softer side, as Carl Jung stated, to preserve fluidity and trust. What's more, sad people have been shown to be deeper and therefore better judges. Finally some very simple rules are being put in place - such as that a woman has all the power to decide whether to have an abortion. It is clear it is there body, but women have special relationships with their sons like men with their daughters and the sexual act so long as it was consensual always ran the risk of pregnancy. Finally, the consideration that a man can't be an adequate caretaker when gays are allowed to adopt and single mums are all abound is not very rational in all honesty- it borders on heartless. In short, it is not too tricky to pick apart the weaknesses in populist feminist and masculinity movements and how they are making us more dumb.

References

(1) 'Invisible women - Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men', 2019, Caroline Criado Perez

(2) Sex Differences in the Processing of Global vs. Local Stimulus Aspects in a Two-Digit Number Comparison Task – An fMRI Study, Belinda Pletzer, 2013

(3) The Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure: A Process-Oriented Test, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23461460

(4) Angelina Jolie: Strong women are 'shaped by men around them' 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-50006000

(5) 57% Of Single Adults In U.S. Not Looking To Date, Survey Says, Bruce Y Lee, 2023

(6) The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, Ian McGilchrist, 2021