From: ddfr@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com
In article ,
"Suzanne Blom" wrote:
> > I don't think that answers the question. Do you believe that non-western
> > societies--contemporary, or historical ones that we know a lot
> > about--are exceptionally oppressive wrt women and sex?
>
> Aha! You want societies we know a lot about which means those influenced by
> us, which since I will not accept such a narrow definition means you're not
> going to accept what I say. Cute.
We know a lot about traditional Chinese society, traditional Indian
society, traditional Japanese society, Plains Indians, ... in each
case, with information before they had been much influenced by us.
> > Traditional Chinese society emphasized gender differences, with male
> > treated as clearly superior and in authority over female, much more
> > strongly than modern American society does. I think that's true of
> > traditional Indian society as well. Both of those societies were
> > probably more open wrt sex than western society has been at some times,
> > but not more open than it is now.
> >
> Don't know enough about those to except to say that there probably never has
> been one Indian culture & that the role of women varied between castes &
> wealth.
>
> > Traditional pre-Islamic bedouin society seems to have had sharp gender
> > role differences as well. My understanding is that Muslim restrictions
> > on the number of wives and Muslim inheritance rules represented a shift
> > towards more nearly equal treatment, although it's possible that that's
> > merely a claim made by modern Muslims to rebut western criticisms. In
> > traditional Islamic society it was possible for women to be legal
> > scholars and there are a few, possibly fictional, accounts of women
> > warriors (as in medieval European literature, of course), but the
> > general picture from the literature is of a gender role division much
> > stricter than ours.
> >
> If you are talking about capital B Bedouins, then you are talking about a
> society in which there are marriage marts where the women chose the men &
> where the men wear the veil.
Are you confusing Bedouins with Tuareg? Aside from the fact that they
are both desert cultures, they don't have an awful lot in common.
> If you are talking about about Arabic society, then again there has been
> wide variation. From what little I've read, the role of women in commerce
> appears to be downplayed.
Women are quite active in commerce in western society too, and have been
for a long time. But traditional Islamic society, Arabic, Iranian,
Berber, ..., made sharp legal distinctions between men and women, made
divorce much easier for men, allocated inheritance unevenly between sons
and daughters, was in lots of well established respects less gender
equal than modern western society.
> > Are you limiting your claim to the specific issue of female reluctance,
> > seen as justifying male aggressiveness?
>
> Not at all what I was replying to.
> Please note that we appear to know about different cultures. I have the
> feeling this could easily become a "but in the culture(s) I know about..."
> I feel like you missed about half of what I was saying.
Whereas I feel that you are evading. You first object that all societies
we know much about have been heavily influenced by ours and so don't
count, which is obviously false. You then express ignorance about the
non-western societies I suggest. You then make a throwaway claim about
bedouins which is, so far as I can tell, untrue.
If you believe that western society is unusually oppressive of women,
you ought to have some basis for that belief that you can offer. On the
evidence so far, you don't.
--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
Published by Baen, paperback in bookstores now
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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