Gender bias will never cease to exist, and for good reasons, the fight for equality happened many times before in history, and never ended well.
Male and female are very dismorphic, we cannot change that easily, male and female have very specialized roles and purposes.
Yes, I am happy that people now in general have more equal opportunity than ever, and that we can have awesome workers on some areas from any background, but we should not push it too much now, society now is already very different, and failing in some aspects, more equality won't make things better, but can make things worse, much worse.
Understand that past societies were not forced to be the way they were, they just changed until they settled on something that works, and it worked for good reasons.
Why several societies in the world are severely against gays, especially male ones? It is because it was very important on these societies to have children, not having children was unacceptable. Today having children became too expensive, so the focus of relationships changed, and now several countries even allow gay marriage or civil union, but the need to maintain your population don't changed.
Some people will argue about over population, yes, I agree that it is a danger, but we must remember that we are not even replacing our populations, we are outright declining, and the result will be some cultures disappearing, and others with higher birth rates taking their place.
The funny thing about equality seeking cultures, is that they tend to erase themselves and give way to totally non equal cultures to take their place.
People forget that we still live in a world, where in many contexts, might make right.
- The fight for gender equality is exclusively 20th century thing (correction 18+ century and limited to the industrial world); never happened before
- Gender equality wasn't imposed in society by an external entity, it was brought about because it was essential (not only on moral grounds but economic as well)
- Most societies for most of history were less hostile to homo/bi-sexuality than the modern (pre-1970s) West (Even in today's islamic countries there's a dont-ask-dont-tell attitude)
You also seem to forget that the Western culture was not invented or developed by the same ethnic groups who maintain it nowadays.
- The fight for gender equality is exclusively 20th century thing; never happened before
As another poster already commented, and you already acknowledged, the fight for gender equality has been continuing for at least three centuries. It certainly isn't exclusively a 20th century thing.
- Gender equality wasn't imposed in society by an external entity, it was brought about because it was essential
It's certainly not yet proven to be "essential" in any sense of the word that I recognise. Positive, perhaps, but the survival of the species doesn't rest on gender equality. For long periods of history the human race has not had gender equality, and we've survived it. No-one has ever proven that our continued existence (or even prosperity) rests on recognising the rights of others.
- Most societies for most of history were less hostile to homosexuality than the modern West
I'm fairly certain that this is simply wrong too. While there have been some societies in history that have been ambivalent or positive towards homosexuality, the vast majority of societies through history have treated homosexuality as deviant behaviour that should be shunned - most societies that are dominated by Christianity or Islam (which, for obvious reasons, tend to be the societies with the best and most available records) have treated homosexuality as a terrible sin. Even if you look at modern societies, the west is amongst the most inclusive - compare attitudes in Germany, Canada, the US and the UK with attitudes in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia, etc.
This isn't to say that the west's attitudes to gender equality and homosexuality couldn't be improved! However, when you massively overstate the scale of the problem, people will generally find it difficult to take seriously whatever else you have to say. We have ways in which we can improve, but things are getting better.
> The fight for gender equality is exclusively 20th century thing; never happened before
No, this is false. All that differed in historical accounts of gender struggles were the methods and the scale, not the goals. Do the names Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony ring any bells (19th century)? Or Margaret Cavendish from the 17th century?
I would not consider a few exceptional single individuals (there were others, beyond the recent anglo-saxon part of history) to constitute a "movement". The social equilibrium at the time did not leave a place for gender equality until the 20th century (industrialization/the need for women to work away from home/the washing machine etc).
WRT homosexuality - you are confusing cause and effect. The Bible was what brought homosexuality to such a negative light in the christian/western world.
Regardless of how Bible affected homosexuality in Rome and later Europe, it does document that homophobia (i.e., automatic death penalty) existed in semitic cultures ~500 BC.
And we have evidence of exact contrary opinions at the same time on the other side of Mediterranean - so this attitude clearly was not something forced by the objective reality of that time, but simply a cultural/traditional choice.
> I would not consider a few exceptional single individuals (there were others, beyond the recent anglo-saxon part of history) to constitute a "movement".
Please read the post to which I replied -- no mention of "movement". The post said "The fight for gender equality is exclusively 20th century thing; never happened before." That's false -- this is not a new fight. All that has changed is the scale, a factor I addressed by using that word.
> WRT homosexuality - you are confusing cause and effect. The Bible was what brought homosexuality to such a negative light in the christian/western world.
The Bible is a historical record of old values and practices, and homophobia is included in that record for a reason. The Bible's influence on modern history is an effect, but its contents allude to causes that were present in ancient times.
I doubt that people are taught by the Bible to be homophobes, or to be intolerant in any other way -- that comes naturally to people with poor educations. All the Bible does is encourage the natural intolerance of the illiterate.
You mean sexually dimorphic. This is actually the subject of significant controversy (esp. with regards to intelligence), so you cannot state this so carelessly. An uncontroversial case of sexual dimorphism is a male spider which is three times smaller than its female counterpart.
> It's only controversial with regards to sensitive issues like intelligence.
Granted.
> Of course humans are indisputably sexually dimorphic
Only in a trivial/technical sense, i.e., there have to be differences for there to be distinguishable sexes. But for a biologist, humans as a species are not known for and do not stand out for their sexual dimorphism, compared to other species. Which leads me to conjecture that the differences and problems with sexism are more related to the social construct of gender.
Homosexuality exists for a scientific reason. Specifically, the genes that make a male gay, when expressed in a female, make her hyper-fertile, 3-5 children as opposed to the 1-2 on average. The homosexual males then assist in the raising of the additional siblings. So your position that homosexuality leads to population decline is an ignorant one. It's a boon to population, in fact, our entire evolution engineered it to insure the survival of the species. Gender bias may never cease to exist, but the idea that equality can be a bad thing was dead on arrival. No equality seeking culture has ever erased themselves. Name one, and point out what makes that an equality seeking culture that killed itself because it was seeking equality and not because of hundreds of more relevant reasons.
I downvoted you because I don't think the post was very coherent. It rambles, it doesn't make any effort to directly connect to the original story, and in general comes across more as a rant than a piece of thoughtful commentary.
Well you didn't really change your argument or raise any interesting points half way through. I mean, you're probably better off that people don't finish it if you want to avoid downvotes, considering that you suggest discrimination against gay people is due to societies wanting to maintain a population.
Your points suffer from the is-ought problem. Your last sentence about "might makes right" even reveals you are aware of this, without any attempt to address it. This takes away the foundation of your whole post.
> I love HN, I make a huge post, and when the page finishes loading the tread again it is already downvoted
Posts aren't judged based on size, but content. And anonymous voting is often completely unfair -- just like life.
I suggest that you take this as useful feedback to improve how you express yourself. Your post has word usage issues (as other have commented), a problem with length versus content, things like that. At risk of quoting a cliche, make lemonade.
It was downvoted in the time between me hitting submit and the page loading again, how it was a judgement of content? The guy can read the whole wall of text in the three seconds it took my 3g to reload?
Male and female are very dismorphic, we cannot change that easily, male and female have very specialized roles and purposes.
Yes, I am happy that people now in general have more equal opportunity than ever, and that we can have awesome workers on some areas from any background, but we should not push it too much now, society now is already very different, and failing in some aspects, more equality won't make things better, but can make things worse, much worse.
Understand that past societies were not forced to be the way they were, they just changed until they settled on something that works, and it worked for good reasons.
Why several societies in the world are severely against gays, especially male ones? It is because it was very important on these societies to have children, not having children was unacceptable. Today having children became too expensive, so the focus of relationships changed, and now several countries even allow gay marriage or civil union, but the need to maintain your population don't changed.
Some people will argue about over population, yes, I agree that it is a danger, but we must remember that we are not even replacing our populations, we are outright declining, and the result will be some cultures disappearing, and others with higher birth rates taking their place.
The funny thing about equality seeking cultures, is that they tend to erase themselves and give way to totally non equal cultures to take their place.
People forget that we still live in a world, where in many contexts, might make right.