Is the male or female more of a creature of nature, are they equal or not?

[palette]

Who is more of a creature of nature males or females? Males act on natural instinct,just as females do, but sociologically speaking who is further way from their roots? Who is further away from their basic and honest animal nurture and instincts? Male or female?

Can it be determined which one is more of a creature of nature, rather than acting on embedded behaviors, embedded ideas/ philosophies?

Is the concept of man or woman further away from the simple nature of which they were brought up from, from the beginning of sex in race?


Who's more in control and in touch with their honesty of nature, and who is more influenced by "invention"?

This isn't if we should or shouldn't live in a cave, it's asking who's more a person of nature, in touch with the natural world, and who is more of a slave of inventions and a superficial world that rests on our shoulders.

[Ragtime]

I think that men are more away from their 'true' nature. Men historically were the hunters fighters etc. and they wanted to pass on their genes as much as possible. Women on the other hand are supposed to be maternal and caring to their offspring.

Men's primal nature is very much discouraged in modern life. An aggressive man who only uses his fists is not acceptable today and men are encouraged to have one sexual partner (e.g a wife) and only have children with her. Men's primal is very undesirable and immoral by todays standards, so therefore, men fight their natural instincts to fit in with society. Also now that Man can buy food from the shops, men have lost their hunter's instinct (except for some remote places where they do not have access to the shops).

Women's primal nature is encouraged in not only women, but in men too. Raising and caring for children and taking an active part in their upbringing is seen as a morally just thing to do. In the last couple decades or so, men have been encouraged to do some of the duties which have been traditionally the mother's job (such as feeding, bathing and changing a baby). However, this has caused women to 'stray' from their motherly duties because the burden of raising a child has been reduced, so they aim to achieve the things they aspire to be.

All in all, I think men are less in touch with their true nature than women because a man's nature is more influened by the change in society and technology than a woman. No matter how much society and technology advances, women will always have that maternal part of them because women will always (at least I hope so) go through the 9 months of pregnancy, give birth to them and breast feed them (although this is becoming less and less popular).

[Furore]

It depends on the individual, I've met people of both genders who seem to go either way and sometimes the majority of people in a specific area will be quite different to those elsewhere. Country men and city men here for instance with more of the country men enjoying the odd brawl or going hunting or whatever with the guys from some cities I've been to seeming like I always pictured a stereotypical homo would in some ways.

Myself, I think I'm not too far removed from the old roles of man. Though I hate the idea of forced fighting (like in a war for example) or unlawful assault, there's just something so appealing to me about ramming my knuckles into something that makes me crave a good fight occasionally. I can also kill and prepare some animals for consumption if need be, though I prefer not to kill them when meat is available through other means and am not a fan of killing animals for 'sport'.

[Che]

I don't think either gender has strayed very far at all from their animal instincts. Both genders still do the same shit, but we have more stuff to play with now.

[palette]

Thanks for sharing guys/ girls!

[Jin]

sociologically speaking who is further way from their roots?

Do we have a definition of these roots?

It's rather difficult to answer this question without knowing what is natural and what is "invention", as you put it. The argument could be made that invention is natural for humans and that we are therefore perfectly within our nature. But you may have meant something more specific?

As far as the gender differentiation, that further complicates the situation as gender itself is one of these inventions that you speak of. Essentialists would disagree, but gender is a completely invented cultural construction. Why we dichotomize society based on sexual organs rather than the length of one's nose or the colour of one's hair is a cultural matter. Though no doubt being derived from real biological differences, gendering itself is an invention of humanity and it's hard to pinpoint exactly what the "natural" difference is between men and women. This makes it extremely difficult to say which gender is closer to their "nature".

[palette]

Do we have a definition of these roots?

It's rather difficult to answer this question without knowing what is natural and what is "invention", as you put it. The argument could be made that invention is natural for humans and that we are therefore perfectly within our nature. But you may have meant something more specific?

As far as the gender differentiation, that further complicates the situation as gender itself is one of these inventions that you speak of. Essentialists would disagree, but gender is a completely invented cultural construction. Why we dichotomize society based on sexual organs rather than the length of one's nose or the colour of one's hair is a cultural matter. Though no doubt being derived from real biological differences, gendering itself is an invention of humanity and it's hard to pinpoint exactly what the "natural" difference is between men and women. This makes it extremely difficult to say which gender is closer to their "nature".

Well wild animals in their natural habitats have been having sex for centuries. They don't seem to have a hard time identifying with male/ female animals. I don't know if sex is socially created, when there are so many "instinctive" behaviors that supposedly exist around the subject.

Different animals of different sex have different instinctive behaviors built around their sex. They have different roles and behaviors. Instead of being defined, you could argue that some things are just observations that have been defined as observations. Knowledge.

I guess it is a instinctive ability for certain "intelligent" animals to create. Animals such as apes and humans. Apes create homes in tree tops, make tools to open things, Apes can learn sign language and Apes can paint. Similar to Elephants who too have learned to be creative thinkers and utilize their ability to create and expand on top of ideas rather than instinct.

I think a interesting thing to explore in all of this would be the training of animals, bears, dogs, cats, etc etc...

I think you've asked the same question I've originally asked, or at least one implied layer of it. I didn't qualify too well what i meant, I'd say that's because it's more of a question than it is a statement. I asked a question after all.

I feel that that is a core question you should ask when appropriately answering a question.

It's more of a philosophical question that I believe has a few layers to it. I think you're right in questioning what is instinct as opposed to a conditioned response to instincts.

I guess you could easily say that learning was an original survival instinct. Then again I imagine that self dependence was throughout our history.
I think that you're question has really opened the path to be traveled to get the answer here. I think you can answer this question entirely if you can define what's instinctive through out and what is of a more civilized and tamed nature. We've are creatures that are more nurtured than before. Throughout history life has gotten easier with technology and other advances. We aren't role playing our natural instinctive behaviors because the world around us has responded to those and made life a lot more easier. We've become creative, intelligent individuals and have adapted.

The way I see it is that the question that is this question , may be entirely irrelevant anymore, hard if not impossible to truly answer.

Thanks for sharing!
I thought both Ragtime and Silver posted a good response to this question.

[Jin]

Well wild animals in their natural habitats have been having sex for centuries. They don't seem to have a hard time identifying with male/ female animals. I don't know if sex is socially created, when there are so many "instinctive" behaviors that supposedly exist around the subject.

I'm not saying that sex is a construction. I'm saying that gender is. Gender is a category in the same way that race is. People of different races and genders are biologically different from each other(albeit in different ways, obviously), but the category of differentiations (He's black, she's a woman, etc.) is a product of culture. The first thing you think of other than a vagina or breasts when someone uses the term "woman" or likewise the first thing you think of other than a penis and testicles when someone uses the term "man" - this is gender. It's a way to categorize people, not to label them as being simply anatomically different (why do we not categorize people based on foot size?), but to label them as essentially different beings. To be able to say "men are like this" or "women are like that" is to use gender. When these terms are used, specific images immediately come into our heads that differ based on our personal cultural conditioning. Animals don't do that. Animals just follow their biological precedents, they don't categorize themselves using discourses of gender.

Also, I think it would be interesting to study the ways in which humans actively gender animal activity. There's no question that we categorize male and female actions in animals ourselves, but the extent and the specifics to which we do it would likely be fascinating.

I hope this is making sense; it's a really complicated topic when you get down to it and I'm not the most qualified person to make the case. For more (and better) information, I recommend reading some of the works of Judith Butler, Joan Scott and, to a lesser extent, John Tosh.

[palette]

I'm not saying that sex is a construction. I'm saying that gender is. Gender is a category in the same way that race is. People of different races and genders are biologically different from each other(albeit in different ways, obviously), but the category of differentiations (He's black, she's a woman, etc.) is a product of culture. The first thing you think of other than a vagina or breasts when someone uses the term "woman" or likewise the first thing you think of other than a penis and testicles when someone uses the term "man" - this is gender. It's a way to categorize people, not to label them as being simply anatomically different (why do we not categorize people based on foot size?), but to label them as essentially different beings. To be able to say "men are like this" or "women are like that" is to use gender. When these terms are used, specific images immediately come into our heads that differ based on our personal cultural conditioning. Animals don't do that. Animals just follow their biological precedents, they don't categorize themselves using discourses of gender.

Also, I think it would be interesting to study the ways in which humans actively gender animal activity. There's no question that we categorize male and female actions in animals ourselves, but the extent and the specifics to which we do it would likely be fascinating.

I hope this is making sense; it's a really complicated topic when you get down to it and I'm not the most qualified person to make the case. For more (and better) information, I recommend reading some of the works of Judith Butler, Joan Scott and, to a lesser extent, John Tosh.

I get where you're coming from.
It's definitely a well thought out concept and it is a creative.


It's a whole perspective though that I'm not disciplined in. I don't really believe in absolutes, but things can be defined. I'm just curious in one approach to the next.

I think we're kind of onto a new topic of itself though. Or a aspect that could fit into 3 books.

I think that I'd be in danger of getting too far into the abstract if I went on any further with my personal insights.

You bring up an interesting point that I think is worth looking into, so I decided to look into related material to possibly progress this further. This isn't necessarilyabout sex but I found it to be pretty interesting.

Culture is probably not rare in animals, although hard experimental evidence is lacking. The strongest case for culture is found in the species most amenable to experimental manipulation, rather than in nonhuman primates. Human culture is much more likely to be cumulative than animal culture, but the reasons for this are not well established. At this point, there is no reason to assume that cumulative culture depends critically on teaching, imitation, language, or perspective-taking. Currently, animals are being judged according to stricter criteria than humans.

What is culture? Can animals have culture just as humans do? Although many anthropologists have come to accept the idea, this is still a topic of debate between many anthropologists and primatologists. Most primatologists define culture as exhibiting learned behavior. Chimp societies are based on learned traditions, as discussed in a previous post about Jane Goodall and her book Through a Window. The chimps in Gombe learned to use tools from watching their mothers.

In the documentary The New Chimpanzee, a chimp mother approaches her baby who was struggling with a nut cracking tool, takes the tool from her baby’s hands and re-positions it for better leverage. The baby was still too small to be able to use the tool efficiently, but it always held the tool the right way after being shown by its mother.

Chimps in West Africa use stones and pieces of wood to crack open nuts for food, but this has never been observed in chimps living in East Africa. There are 39 different behaviors that vary at group level and have ruled out biological or environmental factors for variation. We know nut cracking is a cultural occurrence because nuts are found in both locations.

Tool use is not the only example of culture in chimp society. There is also a culture of sharing the kill. As stated in Craig Stanford’s article “Got Culture?” Chimps at Gombe share the meat they kill with their mothers and brothers but not their non-consanguine relatives (unless of course they are female with a sexual swelling). At Tai, Stanford says hunters share their kill with all “members of the hunting party, whether they are consanguine or not.

So why do chimps show this kind of behavior but other big-brained animals do not? Many other big-brained animals don’t have the anatomical features necessary for tool use or the like. Some cultural anthropologists argue there must be symbolism in order for culture to exist. To that, primatologists would argue there is symbolism in non-human primate species…take the example of leaf clippings. Some chimps make leaf clippings to show they want to be groomed. Although this differs from human symbolism in many ways, most of the other 39 indicators also point to chimps and other non-human primates having culture. Cultural anthropologists are being forced through logic and scientific evidence to expand their definition of “culture” to encompass the non-human primates as well as humans.

[tetsu346]

i say equal but we all have strayed far but we still have some instinct like protecting family
but we dont have the same hunting and survival skills as before

[ExQuentin]

Do we see animals different if one is female and the other, male? I'm my opinion I think every HUMAN on Earth that has earned equality is equal to another. (my short opinion)

[ultimatekupo]

I'm going to use a comparison. When choosing a pet rat, for example, you look at the pups squirming in the box, all running around. Pick a few up. The calm ones are the male rats, while the female rats don't stop squirming. They explore, and take a little longer to trust their beholder. Male rats on the other hand, when you first hold one, that is not familiar with you, will sit in your hand for a minute and look at you, feel you beneath his feet. He trusts instinctively. Male rats are also somewhat lazier. One could debate whether it is trust or laziness that makes a male rat a calmer pet. But Rats are like any other animal. Their behavior related to a dog's, they are equal companions and just as intelligent. I am not going to even bother with organs. But as animals are in nature, humans are much the same. Whether or not you choose a male/female rat does not matter, you will be happy with whichever you choose, because you can train any pup from young age. Its called adaptation. For this reason, humans remain close to nature because we, as nature intended adapt to our surroundings. Whether or not it is a male or a female, does not particularly matter.

[Block]

At first I thought this was going to be a topic discussing if Men or Women are responsible for more inventions / creations just based off the topic title. In that case I'd say men, but wholly just because we held women away from being able to do things like create and control for so many years.

In the context of this argument though I think that women are further from their natural calling. Men still do the same shit we've always done, whatever we can to impress and obtain a suitable mate to procreate our specific gene pool. Women on the other hand have begun to take care of themselves in a way that for thousands of years was considered the mans role. For example women with jobs (not saying they shouldn't have them or anything, but by design they were intended to spend the latter parts of life caring for offspring and not providing for them in a purely material way). It's an interesting argument though, because men don't exactly run around using physical prowess to provide for their families like they used to, and while some men do now take the role of child care provider I don't think it's nearly as many men as there are women whom are now working for the material support. That being said, I am one of the men whose sole purpose is going to be the care of our children (whenever we get around to having them) while my wife will be our bread winner so to speak.

In conclusion (aka if you don't want to read all that), I think women have strayed further from their natural evolutionary path than men, but not by that much.

[fragdemon]

"Creature of nature", eh?

See, one thing about exploring such a question anthropologically (you don't want to say "sociologically" unless you're talking the science. If you do, then we want to be quoting studies or specific and precise "models" at each other) is that the whole idea of "nature" in general is its own construction.

Like the lines between races... and like the lines between gender itself (which Jin talks about), the line betwen "cultural" and "natural" is also pretty arbitrary. Cultures emerge in specific locations and are as shaped by the topography, climate, and local resources as any given species of animal... perhaps more so in some ways and are very much a natural object. On the other hand, nature itself is constantly being constructed and produced by the creatures that live in it: The soil is where it is because fungi produced it, trees crunch rocks over time, the bird pulls random elements from afar to create a nest in a precise location, animals drink water out of one stream and piss it into another...

Somehow we've decides as a whole that cities are unnatura and forests are natural... even though the forest has been utterly reshaped by every creature in there. The idea of a "forest" itself is a location utterly bounded by the life that lives in there; where the trees stop, the forest stops.
____________

But, yeah. Avoiding the issue of whether we should be using the word "nature" as some sort of distinction. I do want to try and play with your question some and some of the answers:

By Ragtime
All in all, I think men are less in touch with their true nature than women because a man's nature is more influened by the change in society and technology than a woman. No matter how much society and technology advances, women will always have that maternal part of them because women will always (at least I hope so) go through the 9 months of pregnancy, give birth to them and breast feed them (although this is becoming less and less popular).

This is OLD SKOOL.

Basically from the Classical (Greek/Roman model) until... umm... something like last week... people have been playing this game of Childbirth -> NATURAL.

Childbirth is no more a biological process than eating, breathing, or pooping, but we tend to make an extra special deal about it.... perhaps a bigger deal than our instincts do. Watch the way your body and mind reshapes itself around missing a day or two of water. Affects me wayyy more than months without sex. Affects women wayyy more than a LIFETIME with out childbirth.

Things were Classically construed like so:
There are two kinds of production available to humans:
1) The production of other lives (have sex, wait a few months, have child)
2) The production of cultural products (tools, cities, art, knowledge, etc.)

The division was then gendered. Producing children is a feminine act. A male that runs around making his life having sex with many women would be regarded as "sensuous" (which is a gender-loaded idea). He's doing the most biologically male thing, of course, but he's simply fulfilling his role in a feminine process.

Producing stuff became a masculine act. And when you have ideas like that, you can easily imagine men continually doing their masculine thing of invention and creating as somehow getting "further" from nature as each future production is made within the context of previous productions.

What emerged from this constructed distinction is a centuries long subjugation of women and in the end not taking them really seriously until the 20th century. Even big deal feminist tracts like Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the rights of Women had to nest pleas for women's education in the performance of mothering roles.


But like I said, nothing about childbirth is inherently more "natural" than fulfilling basic survival needs. In the ways that we are all bound by hunger, thirst, aversion from pain, and the desire to assure those things before we move onto other concerns, we are all still "creatures of instinct" across gender and do so more than others.

Also, in the way that we use cultural tools to fulfill needs, there is nothing less natural about the cultural resources we use to facilitate nutrition (farmer, farm, FDA, factory, truck, supermarket, thoroughly-modern-kitchen) than the resources we use to facilitate childbirth (OBGYN, pain meds, hospital, bed, chair, baby courses, maternity leave, maternal yoga, maternity wear, artificially induced contractions, C-section)

Moving on.

By palette
We aren't role playing our natural instinctive behaviors because the world around us has responded to those and made life a lot more easier. We've become creative, intelligent individuals and have adapted.

Can I say, before I respond, that "palette" is a really cool screen name?
Anyways:

Instinct and the natural world are always in dialogue. Being physically capable of a huge range of behaviors, primate bodies don't have much shifting to do in order to be able to fulfill the requirements of natural selection. Instead, natural selection has been mainly reshaping the behaviors of primates. If a given creature does not have the appropriate behavioral equipment to maintain proximity to parents (in psychology, we call these instinctual behaviors: "Attachment behaviors"), then it won't learn adult skills or maybe even won't survive to the age where it could.

Also, there's the issue that our culture is formed by us as instinctual creatures. So many cultural notions will form around instinctual processes. I'm the most familiar with attachment research, so let me use that as an example again:

As soon as the baby can reliably identify faces, it starts to prefer "familiar" faces and starts to feel distressed by "unfamiliar" faces. A mom can pass a newborn around to any visitor to coo at it. But only a year later, the baby suddenly becomes terrified of strangers.

Humans observing, "Hey! It seems the baby gets on better with the mother," will produce cultural notions that support it. An idea of "motherhood," Hallmark cards, poetry, skills, training, dolls for babies, etc.

It won't easily produce an idea of "passing that baby around-hood" (though, if the environmental concerns that might make such a behavior work are pressing enough, then maybe it will)


So because of those two ideas, you can consider that humans are never far from their instincts. The culture we exist in grows out of our instincts, so even in "complex" cultures, our instincts persist. And to the extent that a culture might "stray" from a given instinct, our instincts will then adapt.
_______________


My wrists are tired, and I'm hungry. But I suppose that's enough for now.