No point answering if natural means nothing to you. The point of the use of the word was to point out that by no natural means could a man breastfeed, therefore cannot be a natural nurturer. I elaborated earlier on how gender roles are usually defined by an animals sex. I did also say that humans have gone past being wild animals as well.
Just an aside, but I remember being prescribed medication in my late teens (anti-depressants, for the record) that warned me that lactation was a possible but rare side-effect. In the end I didn't experience it, but it shows that a male body and female body are not as different as they appear.
Gender roles have evolved over time, and there is a reason why they exist, they did not happen by chance.
Therefore, they will continue to evolve...
No, they really do.
I’m going to bet that if the debate was about feminism you would broadly support feminists - because gender IS important and *so many* things rest on a person’s gender role or sex. I cannot imagine you contributing to a thread about feminism saying that gender doesn’t really matter.
If there was a thread about feminism on here (that'd be... well, interesting I guess!) then yes, I'd express support for feminism because I'm supportive of the core aims of the movement. What you've neglected though is that some things are fluid depending on the situation. In terms of the genderqueer movement, the ideal situation would be that the concept of gender was irrelevant to the point of being obsolete. I don't think such a situation could ever arise, and indeed if I woke up tomorrow in that world it'd be hella weird at first.
From the point of view of feminism, gender is not irrelevant because it's the very source/reason for the inequality that the movement is working against. Even the most radical feminists (other than those in the middle of the Venn diagram with the genderqueer movement) don't wish to destroy the concept of gender: they just wish to make it irrelevant in terms of what opportunity an individual has in life. At least that's my take on it, and yes there are a tiny minority of uber-radical feminists who really hate men, but they're no more representative of the movement at large than Thomas Mair is representative of those on the right-wing.
The contraceptive pill was absolutely revolutionary. What are you on about? It gave women some power at last to control their reproduction. Access to birth control empowers women in all sorts of ways, not least economically. Women since the 1960s have attained better and better educational standards and achieved much more in the workplace because they had the opportunity to control when they had a family. It’s revolutionised the type of work women do. The empowerment of women in this way was one of the greatest changes in western civilisation in the 20th century.
Im not sure why you're arguing from a position we are in agreement on. My point was that there were powerful and influential groups and individuals such as religious leaders who warned society of the terrible consequences of the contraceptive pill, yet society coped and in fact improved (becoming more equal and more free) as a result.
What counts as progress can vary a great deal. It’s not good enough to say “society always copes”. At present, the West is in disarray, with a lack of political leadership, low birth rates, a confusion over identities in every sense of the world, and is under threat from powerful patriarchal societies with much less concern about “issues”. Western civilisation as we know it is probably coming to an end within the next hundred or two hundred years. There are a number of reasons why that’s the case, and gender is but a tiny piece of the pie.
I don’t agree that a genderless society is progress. Progress to me involves empowering people to manage themselves. It doesn’t involve seeking to deconstruct society to accommodate a tiny minority.
The issues facing Western society (is it glorious or crumbling? Probably a bit of both...) are primarily environmental and economic. The chickens of neo-liberalism are coming home to roost and they all have bird-flu, but that's off-topic.
The idea of a "post-gender society" seems to terrify you and I'm not sure why. It's so unlikely to ever come to pass that you might as well worry about the flying spaghetti monster coming to Earth and holding a Pastafarian Rapture because it's just as likely to happen. Therefore for me it's not something to fear, it's just a thought experiment: and yes it would be weirder than Vincent Gallo's performance at ATP2004 at Camber Sands... but if it actually did happen, I believe society would adapt, adjust and survive in some form. I guess I'm a cynical optimist!
