Which gender are you?

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Which gender are you?

Female
8
14%
Male
37
66%
Alchemical Androgyne
5
9%
None of your business
3
5%
It's complicated
1
2%
Other
2
4%
 
Total votes : 56

Re: Which gender are you?

Postby tapitsbo » Wed Dec 09, 2015 2:07 am

Project Willow's take may not be the be-all-and-end-all (I was just reading about child abuse prosecutions in Quebec in the 1840s) but it's certainly sorely needed amongst the other posts from both sides that sound like extremely deadpan satire. My impression is that feminism did have an intense phase of confronting child abuse before being hijacked both willingly and unwittingly by the control system during the satanic panic/FMSF psy-ops and the like. Project Willow, what secondary literature would you tell curious people to read about the transition from Janet to Freud? I've read some before but you sound like you'd have some really good knowledge about this.

Guruilla I'm excited to see where you're going to go with some of the ideas you've got here - I think that during for instance the Savile "revelations" period a reductionist gender lens obscured the true dimensions of what was going on to some extent. News media compared Savile's abuse to social unpleasantness while inoculating against the whole organized ritual abuse topic. The female abusers missing from the narrative also don't contradict a patriarchal system (which itself is still worth thinking about even if it doesn't fit some cartoon cliche idea of what a patriarchy is)

I'm excited to see this conversation unfolding freely, as tired as these arguments can get they're bound to go somewhere more interesting here than on a platform like Reddit (infamous for being hijacked site-wide by a clique of transgender entryists who probably don't represent most trans people let alone most other folks - I've never been an active user there but it seems to have, uh, coloured some other posters' belief systems on this message board).

I think these topics have everything to do with parapolitics, high weirdness, and all the rest of it.

To me the really robotic MRA stuff is just as eyeroll inducing and worthy of dissection as currently metastasizing iterations of feminism - it deserves American Dream's "liberal reactionary" label. And I've experienced some pretty brutal double standards first hand (the idea that all accounts of female violence are lies, etc.) Even if some of the diagnosis is dead-on the forest for the trees is missing with that crop of material...
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby brainpanhandler » Wed Dec 09, 2015 4:06 pm

guruilla » Tue Dec 08, 2015 10:29 pm wrote:I don't agree about Freud. Sorry. If you like, I can tell you which books to read so you will understand why.


If you're not already familiar with him, would it kill you to look up Pierre Janet and read at least a little bit about him?

http://www.trauma-pages.com/a/vdhart-89.php

I was unfamiliar with him. Interesting figure.

RI vector:

The experiments that Gibert showed me and that I myself reproduced on Léonie, in particular the provocation of hypnotism from a distance, did not seem entirely conclusive but were, nevertheless, quite strange and worthy of attention and discussion. I had the opportunity of informing of my work a society of psychologists just recently founded in Paris under the presidency of Charcot and Charles Richet. This little discourse, though very prudent and skeptical as to mental suggestion and hypnotism from a distance, nevertheless attracted the attention of the Society for Psychical Research in London who proposed to send one of their members to Havre to verify my work. The experiments which I conducted at the request of this commission and with the precautions demanded have given some very interesting results: 16 times out of 20 somnambulism has exactly coincided with a mental suggestion made at a distance of one kilometer. These experiments, which the representatives of supernormal (supra-normale) psychology have published and popularized in my opinion too soon, have since that time been cited and used in all works on the unknown faculties of the human mind. In viewing these citations and this abuse of my former observations, I have always had a feeling of astonishment and regret. Strange that these authors who reproduce with such confidence these experiments of 1882 have never had the idea of writing to the experimenter who still living and asking what he thought of them! I should have answered that already at that time, and even more so now, I doubted the interpretation of the facts and was disposed to criticize them myself, regarding them as a simple departure from more profound studies.

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Janet/murchison.htm


Rigor and intuition. Sounds like our kind of guy.

From the little bit of reading I've done so far, maybe I'll seek out Ellenberger's tomb, The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970), it appears to me Freud was standing on Janet's shoulders and as with many great men who become great in their own time wished to subsume his intellectual debts into his own system and call them his own.

And let's not forget Freud actually referred people to this fellow for treatment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Fliess

I've never followed up my desire to dig more deeply into the origins of psychoanalysis. It's on the bucket list though.
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby guruilla » Wed Dec 09, 2015 7:58 pm

brainpanhandler » Wed Dec 09, 2015 4:06 pm wrote:If you're not already familiar with him, would it kill you to look up Pierre Janet and read at least a little bit about him?

It's now on my bucket list. :)


@tapitsbo: I appreciate the reconciliatory nature of your post and the attempt to bring what’s moving around underneath the surface of these discussions into focus, before it submerges once more into the deep. One thing I’ve tried to bring into the discussion at all the different “gender” threads is the reality of child abuse, because I don’t think any discussion of social injustice or of historical movements (to give two examples central to these threads) will ever really make much sense without including the most deeply formative factors, i.e. what drives our behaviors.

The difficulty with this is that, once child abuse is introduced it becomes hard to think or speak about anything because it IS such a game-changer, internally and externally. I have a ton of material from Lloyd de Mause which I don’t just want to copy-pasta here (especially since some and maybe even a lot of it has already been cited at the forum); on the other hand, I don’t know how else to demonstrate that the ground that most of these discussions are happening on may be false ground, precisely because of this lack of assimilated data (even more important than the data is its internalization as and through recognizing the “symptoms” within ourselves). So there’s a huge difference between citing Lloyd de Mause and trying to really apply his findings, which is what I hope could happen here, for some of us at least.

One of my main complaints at this and other threads has been the prevalence of ideological arguments over information and experience-based ones. The trouble with this argument is that, the way ideology works is that it replaces information and experience with its own versions of them, to the point that, when we’re in the throes of ideology, we really don’t know it. On the other hand, it may be painfully obvious to others, at least unless, or until, group-think takes over as a result of the inherent instability and anxiety that occurs when we start to see that the ideological ground we are standing on is really quicksand. At this point, a discussion group rapidly turns into a mosh pit, as many here have witnessed.

Wombat has posted that he doesn’t see how gender discussions are that relevant to parapolitical analysis. I disagreed, and I think the very fact that these areas are so fraught and divisive is itself a clue to what makes them relevant. Identity politics are far closer to our unquestioned, underlying ideology (the one that controls our thoughts and behaviors) than parapolitics are. But, as I hope I can somehow show without breaking one of Jeff’s golden rules, they are all one “program.”

Calling on De Mause (all quotes from The Emotional Life of Nations by Lloyd deMause):

:
Experiments have shown that adults who were traumatized as children are more susceptible to hypnosis, to group suggestions, to hysterical religious behavior and to paranormal experiences. [ John F. Schumaker, The Corruption of Reality: A Unified Theory of Religion, Hypnosis, and Psychopathology. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995, pp. 82-83, 163.]
. . .
Even though no group is too small to synchronize and act out the group-fantasies of its members, the larger the group the more deeply it can enter into the social trance and the more irrational the group-fantasies it can circulate and act out. [...]

. . . Child psychologists have recently suggested that perhaps “all children have dissociative-like states” and that abuse and neglect leads to the “establishment of centers of experience external to the core self during transient hypnotic-like states” that act as early alters.147 As they grow up, these dissociated parts of their psyche are organized into persecutory social scenarios that are shared with others, which could be thought of as social alters. [...] Rather than living our lives wholly in our private selves, we choose to live partly in our social alters, where ghosts of our past are disguised as social roles in the present. . .

Social alters of individuals collude to produce the social trance and . . . are shared and restaged in historical group-fantasies that are elaborated into political, religious and social institutions.

DeMause has six characteristics or modes of social alters but I just selected this last one, because it pertains directly to the question of ideologies and how they function as a control mechanism within groups (such as this one).

The social alter is the inheritor of earlier dissociated persecutory feelings and has as one of its roles the setting up of group punishments that are “object lessons” to us all.
All groups, even small face-to-face groups, organize group-fantasies out of the pooled social alters of its members. Because even in small groups we feel vulnerable to the shame and humiliation that reminds us of our earlier helplessness, we defend ourselves by switching into our social alters and preparing ourselves for expected attacks. Although groups can also be used for utilitarian purposes, they more often form so that people can act out their persecutory social alters. When people construct a group-fantasy, they give up their idiosyncratic defensive fantasies and become entrained in the social trance. Group analysts have found that even small groups collude in delusional notions
.
As below, so above, this can be applied to RI or any other group space, virtual or not, but also to the entirety of culture from which we receive the ideologies which we go on to defend and propagate so fiercely and, generally, blindly.

THE PSYCHOGENIC THEORY OF HISTORY

The psychogenic theory of history is a scientific, empirical, falsifiable theory based upon a model that involves shared restagings of dissociated memories of early traumas, the content of which changes through the evolution of childhood. It is based upon the conclusion of experimental and clinical psychology that psychic content is organized by early emotional relationships, so that psychic structure must be passed from generation to generation through the narrow funnel of childhood. Thus a society’s childrearing practices are not just one item in a list of cultural traits but are the very condition for the transmission and development of all cultural elements. Childrearing therefore is crucial because it organizes the emotional structure that determines the transmission of all culture and places definite limits on what can be achieved by society. Specific childhoods sustain specific cultural traits, and once these early experiences no longer occur the trait disappears or is modified. It is the first social theory that posits love as the central mechanism for historical change—not because I happen to value love as an exemplary trait, but because the clinical, experimental and social sciences of the past century have shown that love produces the individuation needed for human innovation—that is, for cultural evolution.
. . .
This psychogenic theory is contrasted with the sociogenic theory of all other social scientists which sees all individual change as merely a reflection of social change. It instead views adults as having developed new kinds of personalities due to new childrearing modes, and then as projecting onto the historical stage earlier traumas and feelings in such a manner that events appear to be happening to the group rather than being internal, creating shared dreams, group-fantasies, that are so intense and compelling that they take on a life of their own, a life that is imagined as happening in a dissociated sphere called “society”—the group-fantasy sandbox of adults.

Group fantasy sandbox. Ouch.

De Mause’s overriding point (I think) is that history and human behavior cannot be understood separate from an understanding of child abuse trauma and, I would add to that, at least the beginnings of recognizing the impact child abuse has had on our own psyches and lives, and how it has shaped our most tightly held beliefs and values—those points which we most virulently defend. It’s like we are fighting in our sleep to stay immersed in the dream state. But what are we actually fighting, besides our own nightmare projections?

If this doesn’t relate to global control and the oppression of the human soul, I don’t know what does.

And so how, in the midst of this, are we really supposed to start deciding what sort of “identity” best fits our needs? How are we not being moved about by our own trauma-based social alters as they constantly try to navigate a position of power and control—of identity-reality—within the ever-shifting sands of that traumatized dream state?

And how or why would we honestly think that any sort of ideology (mentioning no names, please note) could be relied on to direct us back to wholeness or reality?

I realize this paints a bleak picture, but the truth ain't pretty, and the worst thing to do with it is avoid it.

Social scientists have rarely been interested in psychology. Using the model of Newtonian physics, they have usually depicted individuals as opaque billiard balls bouncing off each other. That individuals might have their own complex internal motivations for the way they act in society-that they have emotions that affect their social behavior-has rarely been acknowledged. The most interesting question about any group, one which we asked even as children—“Why are they doing that?”—is rarely asked in academia. Durkheim, in fact, founded sociology with studies of suicide and incest that claimed these very private acts were wholly without individual psychological causes, claiming that understanding individual motivations is irrelevant to understanding society.1 By eliminating psychology from the social sciences, Durkheim laid down the principle followed by most social theorists today: “The determining cause of a social fact should be sought among the social facts preceding it and not among the states of individual consciousness.”2

Unfortunately, the anthropologist’s central concept that “culture determines social behavior” is simply a tautology. Since “culture” only means “the total pattern of human behavior” (Webster), to say “culture is what makes a group do such and such” is merely stating that a group’s behavior causes its behavior. Even if culture is restricted to “shared beliefs,” it is purely tautological to then speak of “cultural causation,” since all this could mean is “a group of individuals believe something because they all believe it.” Culture is explanandum, not explanans. Ever since Kroeber launched cultural determinism as the central anthropological theory early in the century,9 tautological explanations have dominated the social sciences as is apparent in Lowie’s claim that culture is “a thing sui generis, the formula being omnia cultura ex cultura.”10

Only the recent disciplines of political psychology and psychohistory have begun to consider inner meanings and motivations as the focus of causation in social theory.
15

Simplifying all that, I hope not overly: child abuse is not just one especially important aspect of culture, but the means by which our culture has been formed. Ideology (or social change that it promotes) can never address the problem of oppression and abuse, because ideology is a defense against and a suppression of/disconnecting from our own experiences of being abused.

Van der Kolk believes that often these memories [of child abuse] are dissociated because they were never really stored in consciousness in the first place.93 Moreover, the “lack of secure attachments may produce the most devastating effects,” he says, “because consistent external support appears to be a necessary condition in learning how to regulate internal affective states….Dissociation is a method of coping with inescapable stress [allowing] infants to enter into trance states and to ignore current sensory input…”94 As Eigen puts it in his book, The Psychotic Core, “The aggression perpetrated on the young in the name of upbringing is often tinged with or masks madness. Both parent and child live out this madness in a trancelike state akin to dreaming.”95 It is these early trance states that are repeated in the social trances of history.

I think I will leave it at that, it’s already a monster of a post and I don’t even know how welcome this will be as a contribution, since, well, I am caught up in my own RI-social alter with its attempts to fit in and feel safe here, and possibly show off, and no doubt suffering from all sorts of delusional beliefs while I do all that. There’s a lot more where this came from, though, and I still didn’t get to my main point! D’oh!
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby guruilla » Sun Dec 13, 2015 5:06 pm

Well, that was a thread-killer!

So how to resurrect the dead?

Regards gender, transgender, and mimesis, a (woman) friend emailed me the other day something that made me laugh out loud:

in the mid 1990s this "wimpy male" archetype hadn't really come onto the world stage(as seen expressed in many young men today in their 20s and younger), and one would have thought that once it emerged those young men would grow up & not want to join the army and therefore.....it would assist the breakdown of the Armed forces.......for wanting to go to War.

BUT now look....the "effeminate men" are not joining the Army, they are changing into women instead......."missing the point" of why they are born effeminate...........Arrgg.......and then joining up as women lol



Transgender officer in the Army hails 'positive attitude'
30 November 2015 Last updated at 14:03 GMT
The most senior transgender officer in the Army has said there has recently been an increase in the number of transgender soldiers.
Hannah Winterbourne, 28, who has served in Afghanistan, acts as a mentor for many of them.
And she said Army colleagues had displayed a ''really positive'' attitude towards her own transition.
''They have seen it as something that allows me to be who I am,'' she said.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-34966216


Regarding women in the military, this came up:
The Guardian review of Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs and Kayla Williams' Love My Rifle More Than You

Still one of the guys

For much of the book she writes in a journalistic style that allows the people she is observing to express themselves, a style that is more New Yorker than Andrea Dworkin. In doing so she builds up a sharp picture of a culture that is incredibly over-sexualised and yet weirdly unsexy.

One of her prime targets is the US phenomenon Girls Gone Wild, which consists of men following college girls around and getting them to take their clothes off for the camera. The style the girls fall into is one of bemused, affectless boredom as they shake their breasts. "Is that enough?" they demand. "Whoo hoo," they chant drearily while smacking each other's bottoms.

This absence of genuine sexual pleasure is all the more chilling when you realise, as Levy argues, that the women are hardly being forced into these poses; this is no longer something that we can just blame on the men. The phrase "female chauvinist pigs" is exactly right; there are a lot of women out there who have so thoroughly taken on the traditional masculine view of what makes a woman sexy that they can envisage no alternative. She quotes women who work in the pornography industry saying: "If you can show you're one of the guys, that's good."

Perhaps the strongest part of the book is its dissection of high-school culture in California, a world in which 12- and 13-year-old girls snap their thongs at boys and make out with other girls to get boys' attention, long before they feel comfortable with their own sexuality. "Since seventh grade [age 12] the skankier, the smaller, the more cleavage, the better," one girl says. Levy tells this girl that things have changed since she was at school, when it would have been embarrassing to look slutty. "Anne looked at me, baffled. So how did you get the guy? Charm?"

The reviewer goes on to contrast/compare w/Love-Rifle:

Or the episode where she tells the most anti-woman jokes she knows, to keep in with the guys: "What's the difference between an onion and a hooker? No one ever cried cutting a hooker." Did Kayla cry when she told the joke? Hardly - she reserves her hatred not for the guys who grope and bully her, but for the women who show any weakness at all in this macho world. When she herself reduces a female senior officer to tears, she thinks, "You bitch. I have even less respect for her now, if that's possible."

Around this scary narrative is another, even scarier one: about what these messed-up men and women are actually doing in or for Iraq. Williams isn't a typical soldier - she had an Arab boyfriend before joining up, speaks Arabic and actually likes many of the Iraqis she meets. But even so she descends to the depths of what the army is doing there - all the way to a grim interrogation session in which the prisoner is assaulted, has cigarette butts flicked at his naked body, and in which Williams is used as a kind of prop to humiliate him. She says that she complained informally, but, as she admits, "I did not go higher. I did not do anything to stop those interrogations . . . So how morally culpable am I?" At least she asks that question. Where are the books by British soldiers asking similar questions?

But these flashes of self-awareness are rare. Overall, Williams is kept busy asking herself, just like the women selling porn in Levy's book, how she can best turn herself into one of the guys. It's a sad, lonely journey, and it leaves you wondering how long it will be before men value women enough to want to turn themselves into one of the girls.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/f ... tion.news2

Uh, hello? That's exactly what's happening! Dude.

Transgender (man to woman) in military = a man imitating a woman, imitating a man.

Crisis of mimesis?

EDIT:
The mimetic cycle begins with desire and its rivalries, it continues through the multiplication of scandals and a mimetic crisis, and it is resolved finally in the single victim mechanism, which is the answer to the question asked by Jesus: "How can Satan expel Satan?"

Rene Girard http://girardianlectionary.net/res/iss_ ... _32-38.htm
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby jakell » Mon Dec 14, 2015 10:10 am

guruilla » Sun Dec 13, 2015 9:06 pm wrote:Well, that was a thread-killer!

So how to resurrect the dead?....



Maybe not 'dead' but resting.
This has been an enjoyable thread to read, and that in itself makes it worthwhile. I'm not qualified to comment much, but I think it helps to consider the lurkers as well as the posters.

Here's a positive spin I sometimes consider when I find myself expressing what you did here... Understanding is not only comprised of the rushes of thought and activity, but also of appreciating the 'sticking points'. The former tells us of the (ideological) energy available, and the latter informs us about the environment they exist in.
If this sounds a bit familiar I think I pulled it out of a talk by John Michael Greer concerning how 'limits' are sometimes more valuable to us than we appreciate.

To put this in one word I would say that sticking points give us the opportunity for reflection, and in that spirit I am going to use this hiatus to go back and reread the thread...
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby zangtang » Mon Dec 14, 2015 10:58 am

The Lloyd deMause 'emotional life of nations' looks vey interesting.

46 quid used copy, twill be on the backburner for awhile yet!
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby American Dream » Mon Dec 14, 2015 11:15 am

I personally have mixed feelings about the evidentiary basis for some of the claims but you, can read it all for free on-line:


http://psychohistory.com/books/the-emot ... f-nations/
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby Karmamatterz » Mon Dec 14, 2015 2:32 pm

Slomo wrote:

"The majority of men are not testosterone-poisoned monsters."

Interesting. So are you saying that men are poisoned because our bodies produce a hormone?

Are you saying testosterone is bad?

Are men with higher levels of testosterone bad?

Is there scientific data that proves men with more testosterone are bad/evil monsters?

WTF!

Slomo, you probably didn't quite mean it that way. And in this thread you seem to be a person of reason who isn't afraid to take on a cultural movement just because it's politically correct to do so. I could give a rat's ass about feminism or some dipshit from the men's rights movement. I will however never be ashamed to be a man. Nor am I ashamed to be white. Nor am I ashamed that my body NATURALLY PRODUCES testosterone. My gawd, are we men supposed to feel shamed all the time? FUCK THAT! Some people need to grow a pair, apparently the ones you were born with got chopped off.

Funny the comment about the zombie FOX TV thing and a man coming to the rescue. Oh the irony and cognitive dissonance that runs rampant.
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby tapitsbo » Mon Dec 14, 2015 2:45 pm

The rescuing thing was elaborate bait by a humourist, fwiw.
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby guruilla » Mon Dec 14, 2015 3:51 pm

jakell » Mon Dec 14, 2015 10:10 am wrote:This has been an enjoyable thread to read, and that in itself makes it worthwhile. I'm not qualified to comment much, but I think it helps to consider the lurkers as well as the posters.

Yes.

jakell » Mon Dec 14, 2015 10:10 am wrote: Here's a positive spin I sometimes consider when I find myself expressing what you did here... Understanding is not only comprised of the rushes of thought and activity, but also of appreciating the 'sticking points'. The former tells us of the (ideological) energy available, and the latter informs us about the environment they exist in.
If this sounds a bit familiar I think I pulled it out of a talk by John Michael Greer concerning how 'limits' are sometimes more valuable to us than we appreciate.

To put this in one word I would say that sticking points give us the opportunity for reflection, and in that spirit I am going to use this hiatus to go back and reread the thread...

Agreed, and I had the same feeling about it. The last post wasn't so much motivated by a desire to save the thread as because I found some new material, then chose to introduce it in that slightly jokey way. I think...

zangtang wrote:The Lloyd deMause 'emotional life of nations' looks vey interesting.

46 quid used copy, twill be on the backburner for awhile yet!

I have a ten hour audio version of Origins of War but having trouble making a link to it at my site so far due to the size of the file. Will keep working on it.

Karmamatterz wrote:"The majority of men are not testosterone-poisoned monsters."

Interesting. So are you saying that men are poisoned because our bodies produce a hormone?

Slomo can speak for himself but I wouldn't have chosen to interpret that the way you did. It could also be read as a refutation of the idea of testosterone as poison.

But thanks for the comment anyway, because it reminded me of something I just came across in an old Psychology Today (2003, Susan Sarandon on the cover), with a review of The Unnecessary Sex, by Steve Jones (quoting Jones):

Man himself may in the end become redundant, for his sperm can be grown in animal testes, and in mice at least an egg can be fertilized with a body cell from another female, which cuts out the opposite sex completely. . . Males are, in many ways, parasites upon their partners. Their interests are to persuade the other party to invest in reproduction, while doing as little as they can themselves. . . . [edit:] Men, it seems are diminished females, and if nothing else, that should be of interest to half the population."

No misandry here!

tapitsbo wrote:The rescuing thing was elaborate bait by a humourist, fwiw.

What rescuing thing?
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby slomo » Mon Dec 14, 2015 4:40 pm

Slomo can speak for himself but I wouldn't have chosen to interpret that the way you did. It could also be read as a refutation of the idea of testosterone as poison.


Yes, that is correct.

Regarding males as irrelevant because of sperm in test tubes. I don't think we know enough about what happens in gametogenesis, especially epigenetically, to be sure about that. Genomic imprinting is a very core mammalian process, and thus it speaks to the biologic importance of both sexes.
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby American Dream » Mon Dec 14, 2015 4:44 pm

http://boingboing.net/2015/12/13/mra-sc ... s-and.html

MRA Scott Adams: pictures and words by Scott Adams, together at last


Image


You may have noticed that Scott "Dilbert" Adams is a colossal asshole.

The MRA Dilbert Tumblr combines Adams's awful, unrepentant sexism with his comic strips -- it's a good reminder that Dilbert isn't Adams's avatar; that's more likely to be Catbert.



MRA Dilbert


Image


Image
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby guruilla » Mon Dec 14, 2015 4:45 pm

It gets worse. I found the book online here

The passage continues:
"Males are, in many ways, parasites upon their partners. Their interests are to persuade the other party to invest in reproduction, while doing as little as they can themselves. Like all vermin, from viruses to tapeworms, they force their reluctant landladies to adapt or be overwhelmed."

The Descent of Men By Steve Jones

\<]
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby slomo » Mon Dec 14, 2015 5:05 pm

guruilla » 14 Dec 2015 12:45 wrote:It gets worse. I found the book online here

The passage continues:
"Males are, in many ways, parasites upon their partners. Their interests are to persuade the other party to invest in reproduction, while doing as little as they can themselves. Like all vermin, from viruses to tapeworms, they force their reluctant landladies to adapt or be overwhelmed."

The Descent of Men By Steve Jones

\<]

This book was written in the early 2000s, before much detail was known about epigenetics. I haven't read the book, though, so I can't comment about the detail. I do wonder about what his purpose in writing a book so derogatory towards the male half of the species.

Here are some wiki pages, that (to me) speak to the biological importance of males.

Genomic Imprinting
In diploid organisms (like humans), the somatic cells possess two copies of the genome, one inherited from the father and one from the mother. Each autosomal gene is therefore represented by two copies, or alleles, with one copy inherited from each parent at fertilization. For the vast majority of autosomal genes, expression occurs from both alleles simultaneously. In mammals, however, a small proportion (<1%) of genes are imprinted, meaning that gene expression occurs from only one allele.[4] (some recent studies have questioned this assertion, claiming that the number of regions of parent-of-origin methylation in, for example, the human genome, is much larger than previously thought).[5] The expressed allele is dependent upon its parental origin. For example, the gene encoding insulin-like growth factor 2 (IGF2/Igf2) is only expressed from the allele inherited from the father; this is called maternal imprinting.


Conflict Theory
Parent–offspring conflict (POC) is a word coined in 1974 by Robert Trivers. It is used to describe the evolutionary conflict arising from differences in optimal parental investment (PI) to an offspring from the standpoint of the parent and the offspring. Here, PI is any investment by the parent in an individual offspring that decreases the parent's ability to invest in other offspring, while the selected offspring's chance of surviving increases.

POC occurs in sexually reproducing species and is based on a genetic conflict: Parents are equally related to their offspring and are therefore expected to equalize their investment among them. Offspring are only half or less related to their siblings (and fully related to themselves) so they try to get more PI than the parents intended to provide even at their siblings' disadvantage. However, POC is limited by the close genetic relationship between parent and offspring: If an offspring obtains additional PI at the expense of its siblings, it decreases the number of its surviving siblings. Therefore, any gene in an offspring that leads to additional PI decreases (to some extent) the number of surviving copies of itself located in siblings. Thus, if the costs in siblings are too high, such a gene might be selected against despite the benefit to the offspring. The problem of specifying how an individual is expected to weigh a relative against itself has been examined by W. D. Hamilton in 1964 in the context of kin selection. Hamilton's rule says that altruistic behavior will be positively selected if the benefit to the recipient multiplied by the genetic relatedness of the recipient to the performer is greater than the cost to the performer of a social act. Conversely, selfish behavior can only be favoured when Hamilton's inequality is not satisfied. This leads to the prediction that, other things being equal, POC will be stronger under half siblings (e.g., unrelated males father a female's successive offspring) than under full siblings


IGF2
In humans, the IGF2 gene is located on chromosome 11p15.5, a region which contains numerous imprinted genes. In mice this homologous region is found at distal chromosome 7. In both organisms, Igf2 is imprinted, with expression resulting favourably from the paternally inherited allele. However, in some human brain regions a loss of imprinting occurs resulting in both IGF2 and H19 being transcribed from both parental alleles.[2]

The protein CTCF is involved in repressing expression of the gene, by binding to the H19 imprinting control region (ICR) along with Differentially-methylated Region-1 (DMR1) and Matrix Attachment Region -3 (MAR3). These three DNA sequences bind to CTCF in a way that limits downstream enhancer access to the Igf2 region. The mechanism in which CTCF binds to these regions is currently unknown, but could include either a direct DNA-CTCF interaction or it could possibly be mediated by other proteins. In mammals (mice, humans, pigs), only the allele for insulin-like growth factor-2 (IGF2) inherited from one's father is active; that inherited from the mother is not — a phenomenon called imprinting.The mechanism: the mother's allele has an insulator between the IGF2 promoter and enhancer. So does the father's allele, but in his case, the insulator has been methylated. CTCF can no longer bind to the insulator, and so the enhancer is now free to turn on the father's IGF2 promoter.
...
It is sometimes produced in excess in islet cell tumors, causing hypoglycemia. Doege-Potter syndrome is a paraneoplastic syndrome[5] in which hypoglycemia is associated with the presence of one or more non-islet fibrous tumors in the pleural cavity. Loss of imprinting of IGF2 is a common feature in tumors seen in Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome. As IGF2 promotes development of fetal pancreatic beta cells, it is believed to be related to some forms of diabetes mellitus. Preeclampsia induces a decrease in methylation level at IGF2 demethylated region, and this might be among the mechanisms behind the association between intrauterine exposure to preeclampsia and high risk for metabolic diseases in the later life of the infants.
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby yathrib » Mon Dec 14, 2015 5:14 pm

Epigenetics is a thing, like quantum mechanics is a thing. But I think it's becoming the biological equivalent of "quantum physics.." In other words, when the speaker or writer wants to pitch some woo about biology or genetics that isn't supported by the known data, it becomes "epigenetics."
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If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
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