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The unresolvable contradiction is that sociopolitical equality can't be built on biological inequality unless one explains away or minimizes those biological differences enough that the law doesn't have to actually distinguish between men and women as groups.
You can't have both men and women with equal social authority when society calls upon men to go forth and kill and/or die to protect the tribe, whilst the women are expected to bear the children to maintain the tribe. Literally unresolvable: send your women forth to fight, even alongside the men (which implies training them and equipping them for the task, a massive resource investment!), and you risk no children being born to maintain the tribe, the tribe dies, even if they do successfully fight off the invaders.
The law (formal or informal) must therefore say that only men (with perhaps narrow exceptions) are allowed to be warriors! And once the law recognizes at least that one distinction, all sorts of consequences inherently result as warriors will necessarily have a heightened prestige in that society (lest who would bother to join up?).
Were that the ONLY meaningful distinction (men fight and die, women live and birth life) we could probably keep things in balance but nature did a LOT more work on the distinct psychology and physiology of men and women than that.
Right...? I'm not sure if we're disagreeing here, lol. That's basically a huge chunk of The Second Sex.
I suppose we differ in that I don't think it's an unresolvable contradiction. There is a technological component to feminism. The division of labor in a primitive, undeveloped economy cannot as easily support women's equality due to the vast amount of resources required to meditate the "biological functions" you identify, breeding, fighting, feeding, and so on. Luckily, in our society, male bodies do not necessarily fight (drones and guns do) and male bodies do not necessarily work (computers and robot arms do). There's nuance to be had, but largely, maleness as a biological necessity for certain social functions has become fungible. Thus, women can make choices that are counter to their historical roles. If it wasn't already clear, I believe this is an overall positive development for human liberty and self-actualization. At this point, the only non-fungible biological difference between men and women that retains its original importance is that of the womb, and transhumanists are seeking to "equalize" that eventually, as well.
Yeah.
But the deeper I get into understanding technology, the more I think technology is inherently a result of male specialization that most women can't comprehend on the same level.
Remember that infamous water glass test. If (most) women don't have an intuition for how gravity and fluid dynamics work on a basic level... how could they invent, e.g., sailing tech?
Men produce new tech, maintain old tech, and, ultimately, make that tech comprehensible enough that women can use it in their everyday lives. The whole edifice requires male psychology to operate.
So you can say "men don't fight, drones do." But men build the drones, maintain the drones, mostly fly the drones, and innovate new drone tech and tactics.
And, who fights if the tech fails? If we have mech suits that bring combat capacity about equal, we're still reverting back to sticks and stones if the mech suits break down.
I think the triumph of technology in the 20th-21st century is making war and combat less central to the average person's life. The warrior is less critical now than before, so fewer people will specialize as warriors, and we can elevate other classes up.
It did not erase the distinctions that make men better warriors, and, critically, has not erased the core, basic problem that makes warriors necessary, as Ukraine has discovered.
Off-topic, but what the fuck? How did they get into college? I thought the catch was you had to grok that the tilted cylinder has less volume at the bottom and draw the new water level slightly higher than the old one, but fifteen percent of men didn't draw a horizontal line?!
Oh, that goes into my OTHER rant, the one about 1993:
That's the year it was made an explicit policy to get more women in college and they made it easier to get loans to get in.
Not just them, how did these men who don't understand how water works get admitted?
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Sure, technological developments will not de facto equalize sex distributions among all careers. As you say, men are likely to remain the predominant sex working in drone technology, for example, due to many psychosocial factors. However, the fact that particular women are now allowed to work in aerospace engineering and are recognized as being capable of it, even if you believe the median woman is too female-brained for the field, is a tremendous advance.
If we are living in a society where tech fails, we will obviously re-organize how society is run. Thankfully, we are not in that world, and our women do not need to live doomed, constrained lives.
As someone with high risk aversion, I think it behooves us not to build a society that depends heavily on female labor when we know full well that this isn't sustainable without the relatively fragile technological base we've built up.
The time of relative peace and prosperity we have known for the past 80 years is not a historical norm, and could revert without much notice (with the caveat of AGI making this impossible to predict).
The society that optimized towards giving women full parity with men will find it much, much harder to adapt to such a reversion than one that kept the basic gender role ideals in place.
If society reverts back '100 years' then we don't have to re-establish slavery or anything, but we better have a sufficiently large labor pool (and high birthrate) to keep from falling back much further.
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