Posted by Seiji on 03.13.2008, 05:26 PM:
quote: Originally posted by TubbieToeter
I am curious what would happen if you would take babies out of these societies and swap them with babies from the opposing tribe. If it is really only learning and no genetics (I'm supposing here that these tribes have lived like that for generations) the babies would become normal members of those tribes.
Women in men roles were not unknown before these tribes though, if one can believe Wikipedia.
I have to disagree, sorry.
Probably ten years ago (maybe it started some years earlier) this issue was often found in the media. The situation has improved a lot lately, but in the 90s women were often excluded from the studies, just as older men. Even for medicine that was for sicknesses that primarily women suffer from.
Even though it has improved a lot, the old medicine is of course not retested on women. Heart attack initiatives still complain that doctors know too little about the specifics of heart attacks for women, since women have totally different symptoms. They also complain the medicine should be specifically retested on women.
ASS has been retested by Canadians, and they found out that it is only as good as propagated as a heart attack medicine for men ... for women it doesnt seem so well.
And it was 1998 when Dr. Helen O'Connell, of the Royal Melbourne Hospital discovered astonishing facts about the size and tissue specs of the female clitoris ... her studies showed that until then there was never someone studying this part of the female body in detail until then. I hope they corrected the anatomy books in the universities by now.
With regards to the first part, that's either another part of that article or another similar article altogether, but if I remember correctly, babies raised in different societies in general from that of their biological heritage grow up just as any other child in the culture they were raised in. So, if I grew up with the Mundugumor, even if I had Arapesh biological parents, I would most likely be socialized and behave like the majority of Mundugumor males.
With regards to the second part...well...when you're wrong you're wrong, and I feel you made a plenty good case to discredit my quote. Apparantely it is, or was, more recently than I had thought, an issue that there was insufficient testing on females for certain drugs.
Also, to add to the bits about the clitoris, it seems to me that we are seeing a lot more research on all aspects pertaining to female sexuality and the sex organs than ever before because there are more women in the various fields of science than ever before. Makes sense. I'm not sure that it can be extended to a more general issue with all of research on female physiology or anatomy though. Maybe. I just don't know.
I haven't been able to find any recent articles on corporal punishment in Japan, but I have read some articles that discuss the issue of spouse, and to a lesser extent child, abuse in Japanese society, and how few outlets victims of such abuse have available to them. For example, apparently a lot of abused end up fleeing to homeless centers because there are no abuse centers. It could be infered then that Japanese mainstream society does not have abuse, or hitting in general, in its mainstream consciousness if they have a lot of domestic violence but no abuse clinics. But to be honest, I don't know enough about the subject to make a quality inference. And I realize that it doesn't directly relate to child hitting.
In the United States however it is extremely frowned upon, but that is a very new attitude. It wasn't a big deal to hit your kids as punishment when I was a kid (about 8 or 10 years ago), but now parents can get arrested for it very easily. It was completely normal to say, be in a store and to see another kid misbehaving only to get slapped really hard or to have their pants pulled down and get spanked for a few minutes. Just to be clear, it wasn't okay to BEAT your kids when I was little, and certainly not now. (or ever that I know of), though I guess a lot of people today would call slaps and spankings beatings. I know you didn't ask for this information, but I felt it was pertinent to illustrate the point that societal norms can change extremely quickly, so it might be difficult to pin down.
I'm not going to comment on Roarkiller's post since Saddles has already done an excellent and thorough job of that.
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