[VacuumFlux]

I guess this is one of the parts of Christianity that screwed me up the most, even though it was one of the most subtle. Although my parents disagree slightly (my dad is more chauvinistic than my mom) the basic logic goes like this:

Logic and emotions are incompatible opposites.
Logic is how you see the world rightly; emotions lie ("the heart is deceitful...).
Women are more emotional than men.
Therefore,
God created man first, put men in charge (note that men have a y chromosome that women don't; god gave them something special and extra) because women are weak, emotional beings who cannot be trusted to act responsibly.

So yeah, I grew up not trusting anything I felt (my logic and emotions aren't opposites anyway; I can taste/feel math equations, for goodness sakes!). I would try to act unemotional and "masculine" to prove that despite being female I could still think, could still be responsible and intelligent. I did manage to turn off my emotions a few times (well, ok, those were actually emotional breakdowns and really bad, but I didn't know that the first few times) and discovered that logic on its own is incapable of finding truth. Without "feelings" I have no idea if the assumptions I'm starting with match reality. I can convince myself of all sorts of crazy shit using "pure logic". I can't do math or science if I can't feel. I can never tell my parents why I don't believe because if I say "it doesn't feel right" by which I mean "the concepts I was attempting to live by match reality so poorly that it creates mental distress" they won't think I'm presenting reasons. Because, of course, every intelligent logical person who isn't lying to themselves believe in the christian god. I've put up with so much damn shit in my life because I never believed anything I felt was valuable. I'm sick of it. I'm starting to appreciate my self, but it makes me sick when I realize that no christian of my parents' thinking will ever listen to me with something other than contempt or pity.

[Davka]

It's a worldview that has seeped into the larger society. You hear shit like this all the time: "A woman President? What if North Korea started some shit at the wrong time of the month?" It's like guys are somehow rational, logical beings. Huh. That must be why we fight all the time and get stupid every time we see an attractive woman. Good thing all those rational Senators don't do stupid emotional things like run off to Argentina with a lover, or we'd never get anything done.

Thing is, logic and emotion both have their faults. And nobody is all one or all the other. We're a mixture, all of us. Trying to suppress either logic or emotion is foolish. It's like saying "from now on, I will walk only with my right foot!" Can't be done.

If it makes you feel any better, men are screwed up by this false dichotomy as well. But since we get to run the world, I guess that's small consolation.

IMO, the faster women kick men out of power, the better.

[Evolution_beyond]

Davka, on 07 July 2009 - 04:09 AM, said:

It's a worldview that has seeped into the larger society. You hear shit like this all the time: "A woman President? What if North Korea started some shit at the wrong time of the month?" It's like guys are somehow rational, logical beings.

Yep.

What people don't realise is that you could just substitute 'when he needs a wank' for 'at the wrong time of the month' and the same thing would apply to men. Men make very irrational decisions when they are really horny and need to relieve the tension. You rush things because you want to get home quickly, you can't think straight and you get irritable and impatient.

Women get periods - but men get testosterone poisoning when their balls are full.

[Franko47]

Actually, I've always felt (no pun intended) that emotions and emotional intuition were key parts of discovering truths. It's unfortunate that you have been affected by this myth that somehow women are at a disadvantage to men when it comes to intellectual matters, but fortunately in our rapidly advancing world these views are starting to change.

My father was a traditional thinking man, although he wasn't that religious, and he always attempted to win arguments with my mom by playing the "I'm a man, and I'm being more objective than you, because you're a woman and think more emotionally about it (whatever issue)" card.

Fortunately, my mom was as smart as he was, at least at the common sense level, and most women are. In the end, I'm not sure he was even aware of when he was defeated. LOL.

My mom wrestled with this sexist problem a bit, but later in her life, and she became quite interested in reading about successful women; women in leadership roles, police, business, community, and so on.

[buffettphan]

Evolution_beyond, on 07 July 2009 - 04:59 AM, said:

Yep.

What people don't realise is that you could just substitute 'when he needs a wank' for 'at the wrong time of the month' and the same thing would apply to men. Men make very irrational decisions when they are really horny and need to relieve the tension. You rush things because you want to get home quickly, you can't think straight and you get irritable and impatient.

Women get periods - but men get testosterone poisoning when their balls are full.

Ahhhhhh.....but we women only get our periods once a month!
Can't say the same thing about that 'need to wank'

:wicked: :lmao: :wicked:

[Neon Genesis]

I think it's hypocritical of your parents to bash you for using your emotions. If your parents were truly using just pure logic, then they would not be xtians because xtianity is illogical and based solely on emotional feelings. And their justification for being sexist is one of the most illogical claims I've ever heard. If your parents value logic so much, they should try using it themselves before they start preaching to others that they claim are not using it enough

This post has been edited by Neon Genesis: 07 July 2009 - 08:57 AM

[finally_done]

VacuumFlux, on 06 July 2009 - 07:42 PM, said:

God created man first, put men in charge (note that men have a y chromosome that women don't; god gave them something special and extra) because women are weak, emotional beings who cannot be trusted to act responsibly......it makes me sick when I realize that no christian of my parents' thinking will ever listen to me with something other than contempt or pity.

Yes, this is exactly the way most Christians think, and because I have never agreed with this idiocy, even when I was caught in the middle of the fundamentalist web, first my father and then my husband labeled me a subversive, rebellious feminist.

In my thread discussing having a fundamentalist spouse (how I'm dealing with him, and how he's dealing with the fact that I'm an atheist), I just posted a long email he sent me last night. One of his main themes is that I should never read or consider anything without having him there to advise me and guide me through the deceptive waters of the world. He is convinced (as are almost ALL Christians) that women are incapable of thinking wisely for themselves.

You know, we're all just "Eves" waiting to be duped. Vulnerable, weak, and wicked. That's us. So, of course, no Christian in his or her right mind will ever listen to us now that we have eaten of the apple. We might lead them to SIN as well.... :wicked:

Congrats on seeing the reality of things though, VacuumFlux. That's a big step down the right path.


finally_done

[woodsmoke]

finally_done, on 07 July 2009 - 08:52 AM, said:

You know, we're all just "Eves" waiting to be duped. Vulnerable, weak, and wicked. That's us. So, of course, no Christian in his or her right mind will ever listen to us now that we have eaten of the apple. We might lead them to SIN as well.... :wicked:

Assuming you ever get tired of corrupting godly Christians, y'all can lead me to SIN anytime. ;)

[Ozymandias]

To deny the emotions is to deny half of our humanity. And it's when those emotions get suppressed that outrages before our very eyes--like the idea of a loving God creating an evil world and punishing his human victims--no longer seems so outrageous. I think Davka hit the nail on the head: reason without emotion is dead, but emotion without reason is foolish.

[Dhampir]

As it happens, it's said that without an emotional component to one's logic, we could never make a decision. We'd constantly go back and forth weighing the aspects of any set of choices, never being able to choose which one was the best.

[RabbleRabble]

Ugh. This drives me crazy. First I would like to say that I would argue with the idea that men are not ruled by emotion. They might try to use logical arguments to defend their emotionally biased position, but even that is not something limited to men. I'm perfectly capable.

I'm reminded of a study I read about not too long ago in which they monitored brain activity of people as they were shown information that both contradicted and supported their political beliefs. Here's a link. To sum things up...

Quote

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts."

Men and women are both ruled by our emotions. This might explain why, for many of us including myself, it required a cooling off of our emotional connection to Christianity before we were able to even look at logical arguments against it.

Now that I've got that out of the way I can comment on how sick it makes me that Christians are still using this un-fact to justify the bible's discrimination against women. I heard this many times from the pulpit during my xtian days. Men and women are just fundamentally different and that's why we have different roles suited to us. (If the role of being submissive and silent is so suited to me then why does it feel so much like oppression?)

I ended up going to a CoC church this weekend with my sister since she was in town. At the end of services when making the announcements one of the men in the audience stands up to say, "We'd like to thank the women for the wonderful job they have done preparing the food and getting everything set up for our potluck." The man up front says, "Yes, everyone has a work they can do in the church." In my mind I answer, "Yes! Men can preach, teach classes, lead singing, be elders, be deacons, lead prayer, and make announcements. And women... they can cook and make babies. Fabulous."

[PhucWadGawd]

Check out this book, The Natural Superiority of Women by Ashley Montagu, who was an anthropologist. It was first published in 1952.

http://www.amazon.co...u/dp/0020351283

I can only imagine how this book, written by a man of science, was received by the general public in the early 1950s.

[gwenmead]

Speaking of testosterone poisoning... check out this link. It's a Swedish study noting that levels of androgens are higher in women who suffer from PMS. In other words, what causes that stereotypical bitchiness - that raging hormonal swing at "that time of the month" that male chauvinist pigs are so fond of using against women to prove our irrationality and unfitness to function - is male hormones. Which said male chauvinist pigs have coursing through their veins 24/7, every day of the year.

Seems to me that if anybody is going to be deprived of responsibility and leadership because of hormonal issues, it should be men, not women, if we go by said male chauvinist "logic". Oh yeah, and that Extra Special God-given Genetic Bit™ that makes men special, the Y chromosome? It ain't much to write home about.

I do find it rather interesting that with the whole logic vs. emotion thing, society sort of decides what human qualities it's going to value and which it's going to devalue, and then assigns the less valuable ones to the less valuable portion of the population.

Women aren't actually more emotional than men, but we have been socialized to be more expressive of our emotions - except for anger. Women get to express every emotion but anger, men aren't allowed to express any emotion but anger. Generally speaking, anyway. Which is crap for everybody, especially when you realize that the reason why women are socially allowed to express just about any other emotion is because our emotions are so devalued. It simply doesn't matter what we feel... until we creep over into holy masculine territory and dare to feel and express rage or anger, then we get vilified, cast as dangerous, thrown into the Angry Woman™ stereotype, and voila! Suddenly we're all Valerie Solanas. Or else we get dismissed with the whole "she's just on her period" bullshit. :Wendywhatever:

Whereas men get totally degraded for being weepy or sad or joyful or whatnot, because that's too much like a girl and That's Bad™. Can't have men acting like women now, can we - can't have them tainting themselves with the vile pollution that is femininity.

I fucking hate gender roles and stereotypes. I really do. :vent: <--- little blue Angry Woman™

I gotta wonder what the world would look like if emotional expression of any kind were valued more highly, regardless of whether it came from a man or a woman. I'd love it if women wouldn't be dismissed for our emotions and men weren't degraded for theirs. It'd sure be a sight healthier than what's culturally expected of us now.

[VacuumFlux]

Thanks for all the replies.

After thinking about it some more, I realized another thing that bothers me with the logic/emotion false dichotomy is that it seems to ignore our capacity to choose. When I first started dealing with puberty, I'd get angry and depressed and have no idea why. Eventually I learned (well, still working on it, really) to separate out mostly chemically induced emotions (these emotions do bring up bad memories that I have a right to be upset about) from emotions triggered by actual events, and adjust my responses accordingly. I try to think of emotions as thermometers telling me what's important in life, logic as a tool to tell me how to accomplish what I want, and my will as the part that actually gets things done. That way, even when I am feeling a strong emotion, I can ask myself what it means and what result I want most, and figure out whether expressing the emotion will get me what I want.

I have a male friend (non-christian, he picked up gender role concepts from comic book heroes) whole deals with the opposite set of issues. He's more of the arty/emotional mindset and is constantly worried that people will look down on him for not being man enough. He feels guilty whenever I'm having a bad day and he can't be the knight in shining armor who makes my world sparkly happy rainbows. I've tried to tell him that I don't care if he's "man enough" and I certainly am not "feminine enough", but sometimes instead of making him drop those expectations of himself he feels compelled to comfort me by telling me that I am capable of being feminine. He also thinks I'm an extreme feminist for not wanting a man to rescue me from... anything and everything. I hate seeing how much he beats himself up for not living up to what he thinks society wants him to be.

[OpheliaGinger]

I try to avoid letting emotions cloud my logical thinking (I look for pure cold facts), but since I am human, it is damn near impossible to not think without some kind of emotion.

It is utter bullshit that women are more emotional than men. Society has dictated that women are to express more emotions and men are to ball them up inside--the whole damsel and cowboy. Women are encouraged to cry all the time but men are shunned for even shedding a tear at a funeral. This sexism is what the church is based off of.

[Thurisaz]

OpheliaGinger, on 08 July 2009 - 02:53 AM, said:

It is utter bullshit that women are more emotional than men. Society has dictated that women are to express more emotions and men are to ball them up inside--the whole damsel and cowboy. Women are encouraged to cry all the time but men are shunned for even shedding a tear at a funeral. This sexism is what the church is based off of.

Word!
I don't know how it is in the rest of the world, but over here, in pretty much every story (be it of a book, movie, or just the crappy pseudo-"theme" of any worthless afternoon talkshow) that is mostly aimed at women, the message is clear: If you use your brain too much you will go wrong eventually, or at "best" you'll no longer be a true woman. Listen to your heart and only your heart. Most revulsive example I ever saw was in some teenie magazine I started reading on a long boring medic assignment, in an article about the Only Important Question In The World for a young female: How to know whether he's cheating on me? The article almost literally said "Don't look for evidence [translation: Don't use your brain you silly!] because there won't be any. Read between the lines and interpret [translation: fantasize about the worst possibility] what you feel".

I'm not sure how well I'm qualified to judge the opposite side of this (are men constantly encouraged to forget about emotions?) as I can only look at that "from the inside" but as I see it, there's quite a bit of truth to that also.

[OpheliaGinger]

I don't know if it is just me, but I am starting to get disgusted with home security commercials that show women cowering in fear when a guy knocks down a door.

[Davka]

On the physical/biological side of things, I suspect that this misunderstanding can be traced to actual differences between men's and women's brains. In utero, the brain of male babies is bathed in testosterone at a certain point in gestation. This results in the connection between the right and left hemispheres of the brain (the corpus callosum) being significantly diminished. The upshot is that men have fewer neural connections available for cross-brain communication - IOW, we tend to compartmentalize right-brain and left-brain thinking.

On the upside, this makes it easier for guys (IMO) to simply ignore the emotional input during certain types of decision-making. Our eyes see the puppy-dog eyes and our right brain is processing all the cutesy-cuddly emotions, but our left brain is saying "just club the damned thing, we don't need any pet seals - and besides, they taste good." We wrongly interpret this split-brain thinking as the ability to think rationally, when in reality it is the ability to suppress and ignore emotion.

On the downside, this makes it a lot harder for us to see the whole picture. Guys are notorious for lacking empathy and being emotionally stunted - which isn't really true, it's just that most of us don't have the tools to deal with emotion, or to incorporate it into whole-brain thinking. We've been taught to suppress it, and that's easier than trying to process it.

Another difference between male and female brains is that the male brain is larger on average than the female, but the female brain has more dendritic connections between brain cells. There is speculation that the larger size of the male brain is a way of compensating for fewer connections, sort of like stringing two slower computers together instead of using one faster one. So women not only have better connections between the two halves of their brains; they also have better connectivity between individual brain cells. This tends to reinforce the holistic thinking v. compartmentalized thinking model of male and female thought processes.

So perhaps the reason we often view the opposite sex as "irrational" is that, in reality, they process things so completely differently from the way we process things that the rational pathway is unfathomable to us. I've had conversations about how we get from point A to point B with my wife (who is a natural math whiz), and it fascinates me that she sees connections I would never think to look for, and vice-versa.

In our historically patriarchal world, this inability on the part of men to fathom how women think has translated into "women are irrational." If women ruled the world, I'm sure the opposite stereotype would hold.

[OpheliaGinger]

Well, there have been matriarchal societies out there. I haven't studied them in any depth so I don't know what the gender roles are.

[Onyx]

Some of the worst outbursts of emotions I've ever seen (I'm talking hyperemotionalism) was from men so if any men who accuse women of temper tanties should look at themselves and conclude that their harmless ol' bar brawls are as bad, if not worse.

Logical men, they aren't all. Not all women are emotional. Gender stereotypes based upon these lines are absurd and false.

Humph. Now it's time for me to whine about that missing cookie biscuit and ruin a night over it I guess.