From: ddfr@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com
In article ,
"Suzanne Blom" wrote:
> "David Friedman" wrote in message
> news:ddfr-2466C0.15015519082008@CA.NEWS.VERIO.NET...
> > In article ,
> > "Suzanne Blom" wrote:
> >
> > 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.
I don't see a response to this. I'm reluctant to give credence to your
claims about Hopi and Iroquois, about which I know little, when you
appear to be talking obvious nonsense about Bedouins, about whom I know
a good deal.
Would you like to point me at some source for the claim that Bedouins
have marriage marts where the women choose the men and that it is the
men, not the women, in Bedouin culture who are veiled?
> >> 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.
> >
> As usual when suffering whiplash from where you're taking my statements, I
> came at it the wrong way around. The first question is, what is a separate
> society? I would say all the lands around the Mediteranean have been one
> culture from at least the time of the Roman conquest.
Including the Bedouin? I don't think that's even close to true.
If your definition of "lands around the Mediterranean" is narower than
that, we are left with the Bedouin, as well as the Persians, the
Chinese, the Indians, the Japanese, ... . But you solve that problem by
...
> Hopi and Iroquois,
> OTOH, are two different societies, both less oppressive of women than
> western society. Whether there is a pan-Eurasian society, whether the
> Woodland Indians formed a society that is harder to figure out. I am
> inclined to go for the broad scope society because, for instance, China &
> Europe have the same kind of land tenure systems, because of the conquests
> that middle Asians made in both directions & so on & on.
Or in other words, in order to defend your claim, you first lump most of
the population of the world throughout well recorded history into a
single society, thus eliminating the possibility of getting data
contrary to your claim from any well known civilization save the South
American ones--about which we have very limited knowledge.
In the future, would you like to rephrase your claim as something like
"The pan-Eurasian society of which Western society is a part is more
oppressive of women than several known New World primitive societies?"
At this point, that seems to be the strongest claim you are willing to
defend.
--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
Published by Baen, paperback in bookstores now
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* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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