"Leadership and Enterprising-ness are mainly masculine qualities"

Defend the affirmative. Holy shit. I mean, seriously, how am I supposed to do that without using a Chewbacca Defense? It's blatantly false! It makes my brain hurt to even consider this! And that's for the presentation, I don't even know how I'll deal with the refutations!

"Sweets are good. Sweets are justice."

Well, they used to be masculine... but only because men made them masculine by ostracizing women.

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! ~ GOD

....so, the fact that there's plenty of female leaders and entrepeneurs means... what to these people?

^ That said women are "masculine" women, presumably.

Well, who were the people throwing around terms like "man up" and "grow a pair" in the last election? Women, that's who. They have to out-man the men to succeed.

Under World. It rocks!

You could argue that, while such qualities are not limited to men, they are associated with the masculine gender role in most societies, because men were expected to be the breadwinners. That should be pretty easy to defend.

"All pain is a punishment, and every punishment is inflicted for love as much as for justice." — Joseph De Maistre.

Oh! Yeah! Man as a gender role rather than Male as sex. We could say that, while the "woman" role can provide interesting innovations to the system, it's still like using a knife to unscrew a screw, it's not really fit for that, and you're taking it out of its comfort zone. Still, as a priviledged white wealthy man I might be missing some stuff. I mean, how do we define the role of "women", exactly? Isn't this a thing that changes from society to society, from era to era? What is left of the "woman" role in modern westernized societies nowadays to justify that leadership and enterpreneurship isn't really for them?

It's also interesting how this creeps into the language and pervades works that are otherwise very progressive. The theme song for the Star Trek movie is called "Enterprising Young Men". It is also fucking epic, but that's beside the point. Here's a live performance.

I mean, you know what I really don't want to do? Go to The Thinking Man Minefield. I beg of you. Anything but that.

"Sweets are good. Sweets are justice."

"Well, who were the people throwing around terms like "man up" and "grow a pair" in the last election? Women, that's who." - Ralph Crown

What do you base this on?

Just to be the devil's advocate... Heck, maybe they are "mainly masculine qualities". It's not like all women are 100% 'feminine' and 0% 'masculine'. It kind of makes sense I guess...

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

Unless possessing "masculine" and "feminine" qualities are social constructs, which I separate from biological and evolutionary differences between men and women. And even then, not all people match up to what is typical evolutionarily or biologically.

"Without a fairy, you're not even a real man!" ~ Mido from Ocarina of Time

Well said.

We need a better understanding of what the REAL psychological differences between men and women are. Unfortunately, plenty of PC-people are so used to traditionalists misrepresenting gender differences that they "throw the baby out with the bathwater" so to speak, and make gender differences out to be entirely a result of social conditioning... which kind of raises the question as to where this social conditioning came from to begin with.

I'm at risk of seeming crazy here, but John Zerzan has a theory [1].

edited 22nd Feb '11 6:14:47 PM by LoveHappiness

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

I could not see the above link (stupid pdf fail), but my theory is that it can be boiled down to extending from basic biology and behavior of primitive humans. Like so:

Only women have breasts, therefore only women can nurse small children. Small children must be protected, therefore they must stay in Safe Place (TM). Women must also stay in Safe Place (TM) in order to nurse small children, so they are limited to only doing other tasks in and around Safe Place (TM). Since women can't perform tasks away from Safe Place (TM), those roles fall to men. And so on.

While I doubt that's exactly how it happened, it's a good rough approximation. (It would be funny if that's what the pdf file actually said, and I somehow thought of the same thing independently.)

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

I suppose Ambition is also a masculine quality?

♥♥II'GSJQGDvhhMKOmXunSrogZliLHGKVMhGVmNhBzGUPiXLYki'GRQhBITqQrrOIJKNWiXKO♥♥

Eh, possibly. Internet Dictionary: ambition- an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honor, fame, or wealth, and the willingness to strive for its attainment. Example: Too much ambition caused him to be disliked by his colleagues.

This seems to be associated with a dominant personality, which conceivably could be a "masculine quality".

edited 22nd Feb '11 6:24:15 PM by LoveHappiness

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

Well, there is limited empirical support for the position:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11519935

http://www.signalpatternslabs.com/?p=38

http://www.gl.iit.edu/reserves/docs/psy504i.pdf

Opinions regarding what is causing the average differences between the genders across cultures vary (basically nature vs. nurture), but the existence of small average gender differences seems well established. If you look at the list of things that men are found to score higher on they include things that we tend to associate with leadership qualities and risk-taking.

Here's one that finds reliable differences in the leadership styles of male and female leaders, across four countries.

"Enterprising-ness" isn't a real term, but here is a study that finds differences in motivation, skills, and occupational levels, as well as the process that leads up to the start-up between male and female entrepreneurs.

edited 22nd Feb '11 6:27:54 PM by DeMarquis

They're "masculine" traits only in that they're typically associated with men rather than women. By dumbasses and/or assholes.

Personally, I'm not too fond of linking skills and personality traits with gender or sex at all (although I recognize that most people, even me, are going to implicitly do it whether I like it or not). Tends to do more harm than good in my experience.

The primary sexual selector in any species is the more conservative. Holds true across all species. Males tend not to be the sexual selector. In humans while both sexes select vigorously females are the more selective. Ambition and enterprise are risky behaviors. Attention grabbing behaviors. Thus while both genders in humans have these qualities they are generally stronger in men.

In a sentence. Men are more likely to do dumb things to impress women than the other way around.

Of course, some men are impressed by ambitious women as well, so there are always exceptions. I like exceptions.

♥♥II'GSJQGDvhhMKOmXunSrogZliLHGKVMhGVmNhBzGUPiXLYki'GRQhBITqQrrOIJKNWiXKO♥♥

I thought being enterprising was more about impressing and dominating other men, leader and follower style?

"Sweets are good. Sweets are justice."

Being enterprising? From the entrepreneurs I've meet, no. It's much easier to model as a big attempt to show off who has the biggest dick.

@Sparky- as I pointed out in the articles I linked to, there is empirical support for stable behavioral and personality differences between the genders.

@Ard- part of the problem, what does "Enterprising" actually mean? You cant argue for or against something that isn't defined. "Entreprenurialism" is more like a willingness to take risks in return for a high potential payoff.

Oh, so that's the word! Yeah, that's right. Entrepreneurialism.

Huh? Please Elaborate.

"Sweets are good. Sweets are justice."

This is kind of... sad. I don't even know where to target the sadness, but I think you know where I'm aiming it at.

Anyway, it's all just gender roles. It makes sense that people consider things like this to be "masculine" or "feminine". People form a gender role for every part of life, cooking in the kitchen, feminine, cooking on the grill, masculine. The whole concepts, the whole social construct of gender, is all around silly and unnecessary. And I'm for doing away with it altogether, for reasons like stated in the thread. Almost everything of "masculinity" and "femininity" is related to something other than ownership of a penis or vagina, and only serves to restrict women and men, such as saying that leadership is a "masculine" quality. We'll be better off in this world if we can drop the very concept of masculinity and femininity.

Wait what, source this statement, person I quoted. This sounds outrageous. Gender implications aside, it's considered pretty vulgar for a politician to talk like that.

Genkidama for Japan, even if you don't have money, you can help![1]

Gender is not a construct. It is influenced by upbringing but it has biological roots.