Is Society everything it COULD have been?

[Decade]

Kass actually gave me this brainfart in "The Salary Problem" thread.


Throughout history, all great achievements have been done specifically by men (with few, small exceptions). This is primarily because women were held back and not allowed to do many things men could do.


My question I wanna present to the thread is:

If women were not restrained throughout history, do you believe society today (any society) would have been better off/more advanced (say in all aspects: Arts, technology, architecture, music, etc) or just the same as it is now?

My reasoning for asking this is, if only half the population of mankind has created THIS much by today, could we have been much better off if we had used almost 100%? :watson:

[Jay]

I think it would have been better off - women who walk around with a chip on their shoulder because they're women in a man's field are few and far between for the most part, so if women had a genuine contributing role, I think it'd be better off.

Visually everything might be a bit more... fussy, to put it lightly... so I dunno if that's an advantage or not... :watson:

[Angelyne]

Voted "Not Sure". The world could be better, or it could be a lot worse. It's just something we'll never know the answer to :watson:

[Praetorian]

Why are threads showing the contrasts between men and women so popular on Outpost Nine? I'm not saying this thread started out this way, but it'll inevitably lead to it.

[Decade]

I dont mean for something like that to happen in this thread, but it's something interesting I did think of. I dont think we would have been worse off, I just dont know if we would be better or about the same.

I also didn't include the fact that stupidity isnt sexist, men and women are equally worthless in that sense (as we've seen numerous times by people on these forums...not to name names...or "name" in this case).

[Jay]

That was amusing.

[FOBulous]

All I know is that missiles would look very different if women ruled the world.

[Jay]

"Oh, do you like my flower-shaped missile, Betty?"

[Bob]

Yes. You have to be weak to be restrained

[Jai]

The implication that mankind would have advanced further if women rather than men had been doing the grunt-work through the past 2000 years is completely silly. Most work in the times was physical labour, and men are simply better suited to it. Its only been more recently, with far more work intellectual rather than physical, that it hasnt mattered who does job x, all are similarly capable.

Ill also point out we still did use 100% (mostly). There was no childcare after all. Someone had to raise the next generation. Hell, just by implying women from BC to 1980 did "nothing", youll probably start a feminism shitstorm (HOUSEWORK IS UNPAID SLAVERY! KILL ALL MEN! kind of thing)

[Decade]

Im not saying if it was women INSTEAD of women, I'm saying if it were men AND women both working on the sames thing (philosophy, arts, science, etc)

[h2orowe]

I think, intelectually, and possibly scientifically/medically, we'd be better off. Otherwise, it'd probably be the same. We'd have gotten alot more varied religious views, and philosophical views, though.

[gyoza]

Well, for most of history males and females had to do things that satisfied their gender roles, regardless of their individual traits or abilities. Even intelligent independent women would have to be housewives, and more sensitive, less decisive men would have to be breadwinners, etc. So if not only women, but men, were less confined by their 'roles', then more people would do what suited them as individuals, hence society would probably have been more advanced.... my $0.02

[Geat_masta]

no the very brain functions differently, and women can't have such a big impact because they're brains arn't programed for it, a man's brain is made so he obsesses over something, so he's more likely to finish the project, where as a womans is made so she has some intelegence about everything, which is more usefull than alot of intelegence about one thing. on the other hand most of sciences discovorys have been accendental, it was from such an unlikely beginning as an unwanted fungus accidentally growing on a sterile plate that Sir Alexander Fleming gave the world penicillin. James Watt watched an ordinary household kettle boiling and conceived the potentiality of steam power. Would Albert Einstein ever have hit upon the theory of relativity if he hadn't been clever? All these tremendous leaps forward have been taken in the dark. Would Rutherford ever have split the atom if he hadn't tried? Could Marconi have invented the radio if he hadn't by pure chance spent years working at the problem? Are these amazing breakthroughs ever achieved except by years and years of unremitting study? Of course not. What I said earlier about accidental discoveries must have been wrong.

[M.Laird]

no the very brain functions differently, and women can't have such a big impact because they're brains arn't programed for it,

So... you're suggesting that somehow women are biologically incapable of concentrating on a single subject long enough to form scientific breakthroughs? If so, I suspect Marie Curie, Maria Goeppert Mayer, Irene Joliot-Curie, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Gerty Radnitz Cori, Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, Barbara McClintock, Rita Levi-Montalcini, Gertrude Elion, Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, and Linda B. Buck would all like to have words with you. (All Nobel prize winners in scientific fields. Twice in Marie Curie's case)

[Decade]

To be fair here, tests have shown that in some problem-solving activities men are better than women and vice versa

I think they said for spacial dimension examples (or something) men generally do better than women when tested various times.

On the other hand, women for example have MUCH better short-term memory. For example, when both men and women are given only a minute to memorize as many things in a room as possible, the men generally only remember maybe 5-6 things while women consistently remember at LEAST twice that amount.

I will agree men and women are biologically different and that yes, there is probably some things men are better at than women, but you cant ignore the fact that there are things women are just better at on average then men (and no, I'm not talking about cooking and cleaning).

[Geat_masta]

first of all, why did you make that list M.laird? i didn't state that they couldn't, just that its rarer for a woman to focus in on a subject as much as a man does. also i didn't say men actually were more likely to cause an impact than a woman, most men don't because they're lazy and focus in on and obsess over something pointless. its more likely for a woman to actually come up with something usefull, as their brains are wired to know some things about everything, if you only know one thing you can't have a big breakthrough, no its impossible. also a scientific breakthrough != an impact, no thats wrong, look at leonardo da vinci, did he have an impact? no. but he was hundreds of years ahead of his time, you know why? because he obsessed over biological functions, he noticed things no one else bothered to. an impact can just be caused by an idiot being repedative, and thats what i was reffering to, as i feel that most things in current culture are from idiots being repedative. if a man tells a joke and no one gets it, he's going to repeat it every 5 minutes or so until someone forces a laugh, most women don't do that. thats my point, i never said that the man obsessed over something usefull. also decade got the point i failed miserably to make in my previous post.

[Jai]

Its a true generalisation with many obvious exceptions. Its the same as saying "women arnt as strong as men". its completely true. BUT there are women who would walk down a city street most days and be able to kick the ass of EVERY man they passed. Exception to a true generalisation.

[darknessoftwilight]

im going to be a bastard here and blame the random coincidental isolations of europe and asia, you know the random periods of time ("mideval" times) where everyone got paranoid and clammed up, also religion played a huge roll in screwing europe out of science for a few hundred years, thought if you think about it would we really want to be more advanced? i mean sure we would have all this cool spiffy stuff,but if you actually sit and look at how most humans are, we are still stuck in a pre-historic mindframe but we know how to work computers and shoot guns...by pre-historic i mean more or less without morals not that we can work well together, we really cant...

everything needs to be "PC" now and if you dont say things the right way youre going to get a lot of stupid things coming your way and why because we all make these standards we think are right, now yeah sure this is my opinion but i mean if we cant even learn how to restrain ourselves from invading countries, blowing ourselves up and screwing everyone over for personal gains... im sure we are better off being where we are for the moment

[slinky]

The implication that mankind would have advanced further if women rather than men had been doing the grunt-work through the past 2000 years is completely silly.

I didn't read the question as an either/or but more as a if women were allowed to participate more fully in certain aspects...

If it was an either/or it may be different but not necessarily better.

If both sides, with the complementary traits were working together? I'd think, again, that things would definitely be different. Better? Tough to say. Certainly there would be a broader range of choices and solutions due again to the differing strengths and focuses of the genders. Would it have resulted, untimately, in a better world?

Tough to say. Because for all of the good things that each gender embodies, there are drawbacks as well.

Frankly I think it's a pointless speculation that's more likely to lead to, as Prae said, gender grandstanding at the expense of the other than any sort of meaningful and useful conclusion.

[Geat_masta]

thank you darknessoftwilight, that was horrible [/sarcasm]

[ZaichikArky]

I dunno really. How many women have won nobel prizes? How many women have discovered/invented something that benefitted mankind as a whole? Very, very little. I can only think of Marie Currie(sp) right now. And it was nearly impossible for her to get the recognition she deserved. Mainly, it was because her husband was a respectable scientist.

Women were mentally opressed by society's expectations for year and years. Only in the last 100 years or so there has been movements towards women's liberation and equality and we still have a long way to go.

So yes, society would have been a better place had women been given the opportunity to intellectually explore their potential abilities instead of having the responsibility of child-rearing a lot of kids.

[M.Laird]

I dunno really. How many women have won nobel prizes?

33, and Marie Curie won it twice.