They Are Still Different

And, I suspect will remain so until the human race no longer exists... and then the "lower animals" (who do not contemplate any of this silliness) will continue on their gender-oriented way. As will insects... who will likely be the last creatures to exist on this planet.

I want to expand on what I wrote earlier. My mother had three children, I am the youngest. I had a brother and a sister, the latter now deceased. My mother described it this way: "I had three mistakes in my perfectly planned family." One might think that a cruel thing to say to an impressionable child, such as I was (and remain), but I thought it funny and still do.

My mother was a strong but flighty woman who raised us mostly as afterthoughts. My father, a distant and quiet man, seemed not to take a great deal of interest in us. My brother was my main tormentor throughout my childhood; a bully who seemingly existed just to make me miserable. It's one thing to face a bully at school on a regular basis, I think, and quite another to live in the same house with one.

But it was part of what made me who I am today; a mishmash of anxieties, conflicts, and insecurities. If I was rich, I could make a psychiatrist very wealthy. But probably wouldn't since I am too cynical to think such a professional could help me.

A question I have pondered for many years, beginning in my teens, is how I fit into the world. This question is one pondered by the great philosophers of history. I believe it is pondered by all great thinkers (thereby inflating my own ego) and not just those deemed philosophers.

Let me briefly explain my thinking on culture and gender:

Sometime, back in the days when humans were little more than foraging animals, we discovered that women got pregnant and had small (tiny, initially) humans. It amazes me that we put together enough facts to determine that a few moments of physical pleasure led to this phenomena but, apparently, we did.

Another thing humans observed was that they are made up of two different forms (genders); something that seemed essentially universal among all the animals around them. And, that these animals had different functions/behaviors that were inherent to their genders. To some extent, humans followed the same patterns but they also differed in some ways... as all other animals did. Lionesses, for example, were hunters, not scavengers or gatherers. In humans, the female was a gatherer (more in line with scavenging) and the male was the primary hunter. in tigers, there appears to be a more egalitarian approach but there are still behavioral differences that persist along gender lines. It is only natural that humans would establish gender roles.

These gender roles influenced the evolution of human civilization.