Between The Genders – Changing The Vocabulary
“Traditional gender roles?! You just want to return to the 1950s where women were housewives and trapped at home!”
I read this often as an argument against recognizing the enormous impact of evolution-based biology and psychological behavior of male and female human beings. It’s not much of an argument, it’s merely a straw man fallacy. But it is used frequently enough to be addressed.
As Americans, we have a cultural repulsion to looking at the past for tools to cure social ills. Social “progress” is all about advancing through time and that any social change or shift is this “progress” It’s most often perceived as a positive thing, at least by progressives. This is closest to politics as I will ever get in this blog.
The term “traditional general roles” is perceived as something awful because it harkens back to an era of our history that has been determined (by consensus, it seems) to be a very bad time socially. The problem is not with the concept, but the word “traditional”. So, by using a political debate tactic, it’s time to change the vocabulary to change the debate. Behold this new phrase:
“Natural gender roles”
Eliminate the word “traditional”. Replace it with the word “natural” and the connotation of the phrase shifts to something far less likely to cause knee-jerk negative reactions. The conversation spawned by the new phrase might even avoid the intellectual tar pit of political correctness. Wait, strike that last sentence.
Let’s start using the phrase “natural gender roles” from now on. This, I decree!
The Private Man 
How is it natural though?
If you have to ask that question, there’s no way in hell you’d understand the answer.
Returning to natural gender roles is the problem. Men naturally want to run soft harems, women naturally gravitate to the harems of the top alphas. The monogamy that built civilization by getting every man invested in the society his children would be inheirit is a profoundly unnatural cultural construct, or tradition. Certain gender roles within a given relationship might be natural, but the larger social gender roles absolutely cannot be natural if society is to function.
By understanding natural gender roles we can constrain their potentially harmful effects through working with them instead of against them.
Men and women naturally want different things. Today, people like Ashley (above) don’t get this, pretend it isn’t the case, and our society is disintegrating.
When we understand what men and women naturally want, we can come up with solutions based on reality instead of nonsensical hopes and dreams. Neither men nor women will change if we just pretend hard enough and make them play with different toys in nursery school.
However, if we acknowledge male seed-spreading instincts, female hypergamy, etc., we can work within that reality and properly focus it.
It’s never been perfect, and it never will be, but it sure as hell can be better than it is today.
Hooray!
i personally think ‘political correctness’ has gone a bit mad(!), well it certainly has in the UK.
-speaking as an old-fashioned girl, i say bring back traditional values: when men were men and women were allowed, and encouraged, to be feminine!
the problem with ‘progress’, is that it always seems to hand-in-hand with sacrifice.
…tradition -was- is good. 🙂
“If you have to ask that question, there’s no way in hell you’d understand the answer.”
😉 As predicted.
I predicted you’d say that.
You’ve obviously got some weird and morbid obsession with the manosphere in that you’ve been trolling around for God only knows how long asking the same dumb questions you were months ago.
The only way you’ll ever understand any of this is to have it drilled into you (literally) by somebody who can SHOW you how this stuff actually works.
Letters on a computer screen aren’t going to cut it. So, either do what it takes to meet one of the guys who can show you how “natural” gender roles really work, or accept you won’t get it, give up, and go away.
Actually, the manosphere found and started trolling me. I didn’t even know what “the manoshere” was until I was asked by one of them to start readin, so if you don’t like me around then maybe you can just ignore my comments.
You’re more than welcome to post and/or comment (Private Man’s choice here, obviously). However, when I see the same person asking the same questions on multiple blogs, I have every right to call them on it.
Do you seriously not understand what’s “natural” about gender roles after all the time you’ve spent at Rational Male, Alpha Game, etc.? Even if you don’t agree that they’re “natural”, do you still need somebody to spell out the basis for their reasoning?
I’ve seen discussions in which multiple posters have tried to get you to understand some very basic points (not agree with, just understand), and it never seems to work. Sometimes they’ve even been nice to you.
I may or may not ignore you, but these forums are for discussion. When I see willful ignorance instert itself into multiple forums on multimple occasions, it’s perfectly valid to call it out.
You are right that there are things I will never understand. I asked the initial question because I was curious as to how he would explain it, personally, as opposed to everyone else. I can see a big issue with the “natural” term if it were to catch on. Millions of people would argue that’s not in our dna to go to work or stay home cooking and cleaning. I won’t ever get why it matters so much to people in the manosphere what other couples are doing when it has no affect on their own lives. The idea that “men should do this and woman should do that” will always have the same or similar reaction no matter what name or spin anyone tries to put on it, because people are becoming better at recognizing they are miserable because they are trying to live up to everyone;s standards but their own.
“I won’t ever get why it matters so much to people in the manosphere what other couples are doing when it has no affect on their own lives”
It matters because we live in a society. What people do as a group has big effects on you personally. For instance, If I’m allowed to get 5 girlfriends, there will be 4 guys out there who will be without one. Multiply that by 100 000 and you got yourself a large bunch of sex deprived men.
PrivateMan, are you in a posistion to say why wordpress shut off your blog for a few days? What exactly do they claim you did? And was it hard to get it reversed?
I was pretty surprised by the disappearing of your blog since it is pretty tame by manosphere standards.
The previous post about international online dating contained a link to dating website that does copious ads all across the Net. The link was automatically detected by WordPress and that is what got the blog suspended. Both me and that dating website’s PR firm sent a message to Facebook and I had to wait a few days until a real person at Facebook actually reviewed that post and my blog to determine that was indeed legit and so they lifted the suspension.
There is something wonderful about witnessing people of a certain age having the patience, wisdom, and gravitas it takes to speak the truth and be an agent of change, not trying to hone in on your genius but I’ve been thinking the same thing for a while now. The human experience is like water. Sometimes it is smooth and calm like a mountain lake and at other times it resembles a tsunami. But in the end it seeks its level and remains unchanged from its true nature, a life giving, life sustaining, and life changing intricate element of our world.
Being a Red Pill woman of a certain age I ask young people to try not to romanticize or demonize the past. Not to be mean, but you lack perspective. Yes, some things were better but not everything was and to say that we should go back to what was is an impossibility; like the beach after a hurricane the landscape has been irrevocably changed. The feminist movement was like a tsunami, something I think we inevitably had to go through to gain that perspective I mentioned. Most of the time humans don’t know what is good and right until they don’t have it any more. We also have a tendency to turn a blind eye when we are not the ones being affected. That being said, now is the time to bring about a revival of the right and good about gender roles and to do that it requires changing the adjective. The word “traditional” has too much of a negative connotation with it to reach the young. It is also has the hint of being old verses being young and hipster sounding. Re-branding traditional gender roles as Natural Gender Roles is a sign of sheer genius Privateman.
As always, excellent points Martel.
@Ashley
Get over yourself honey. Grow up and learn some humility. It is a nice trait no matter what your gender is.
“This, I decree!”
So let it be done.
I like “natural gender roles”. The old traditional ways would be impossible to maintain these days, and I’m just thinking back to what I remember from the 60s & 70s. I’m sure my grandparents had completely different gender roles than my parents did, and I think of my parents as pretty traditional. Hell, I’m pretty “traditional” by today’s standards!
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Reblogged this on oogenhand and commented:
The right words are very important.
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Sorry but most feminist types have an equally strong knee-jerk reaction to the idea that genetic gender differences don’t suddenly cease to exist in the brain. In fact, their entire ideology falls apart if you stop assuming that people across all cultures have independently concocted the same baseless expectations of what people born with a vagina should be like.
In short, the ‘natural’ thing won’t go over well either.
I argue that it’s more palatable than “traditional”
Oh I agree with that. And I’d add more accurate, too. But still likely to provoke a massive unison of shrieks from the you-know-who crowd.