660. Mavericks, Outsiders, Misfits And Gender Roles

660.  Mavericks, Outsiders, Misfits And Gender Roles


Gender roles are a subset of social norms.   Gender roles accentuate those differences between the genders, which represent instincts.  Gender roles prescribe behaviors caused by these instincts and which enhance the breeding success.   This is not restricted to those instincts leading directly to breeding, it includes also those instincts, which aim at long-term benefits for all future bearers of the own genes.

Gender roles sometimes override people's innate inclinations and cause them to damage their own best interests.  

I consider the dire burden of procreation on women's bodies as biological abuse.   I am aware, that this is a drastic point of view, which can trigger hostility by some people, even though it is a very rational way to look at it.   

Whenever a person has a tumor somewhere in the belly and has it removed by an operation, most people would agree, that this is an ordeal, that nobody in his or her right mind would choose, if there were an option.   
In the case, when it is not a tumor, but a parasite like a worm, the situation is still the same.   This attitude does not even depend on the weight of what is an unwanted growth to be removed.   

But as soon as the parasite is a fetus, which is either removed by a Cesarean session or expulsed by a very painful procedure, then all of a sudden this is not called an ordeal to be avoided, even though a child's birth weight and size is much higher than tumors and parasites usually are.    Instead of recognizing, that this is an atrocity for women, which in contrast to growing tumors can be avoided, many people of both genders have the delusion, that breeding is the purpose of the existence of women.    They are mislead to believe, that having a womb is the same as being meant to use it.  

When comparing the suffering and damage to the afflicted body alone, the distinction between a child at birth and a tumor of the same weight and size makes no sense at all. 



When animals copulate, they follow their instinctive urges without any cognitive ability to anticipate the consequences.    Female (non-human) mammals have no option to avoid the ordeal of giving birth and raising offspring, because they cannot foresee it.  

The instincts leading to human breeding behavior had evolved in the animal ancestors, long before cognition and especially the included ability for anticipation have started to evolve.    As long as the evolution of cognition was evolving as a merely serving tool enhancing the success of the dominant instinctive behaviors, cognition could evolve towards enabling the human brain to amazing progress without causing disruption.   
Only when this evolution reached a ceiling, the conscious experience of individual wellbeing started to bifurcate from the wellbeing experienced as the consequence of maintaining the homeostasis of those instinctive urges, which lead to the survival of the species.  

A slight mutation. a haphazard genetic combination, and the result were and are individuals, whose cognition is not under an instinctive power strong enough to determine the goals and objectives of these persons' behavior.   Either their cognition has advanced one step further or their instinctivity is too low to override their cognition.   
As women, they fully anticipate the unwanted long-term consequences of breeding and they refuse such self-harm.  As men they are considerate and responsible enough to feel morally obliged to refrain from harming women by making them pregnant.   


Those, whose breeding instinct is still stronger than their cognition, but who nevertheless can also anticipate the harm of breeding, experience some cognitive dissonance.   The subconscious urges of the instincts are experienced as strong but vague, on the conscious level they are converted into attitudes, which are congruent with the instincts.   When there are also disparate and incongruent cognitive needs, this causes cognitive dissonance.  This is often solved by the impact of two distinct social influences.   

• Religious belief systems of any content promise rewards for procreation and threaten with punishment for the refusal.    The delusion of a god's power to do so in the afterlife is one example.
  
• Gender roles add artificial and irrational alleged value to instinctive behaviors and those traits favoring such behaviors.   In entry 647 I declared the gender role of masculinity as an obsolete anachronism.   The gender role of femininity is of course just as obsolete.    

Gender roles accentuate all those traits and behaviors, which are based upon physical traits and not on intellectual achievements.     To fulfill and comply with the gender roles does not require any intelligence or education.    Gender roles appeal especially to those, who are deprived of any choice, because they have a suitable body for the gender role, but no brains for anything better.

All those interests, skills and achievements, which require intelligence, creativity, education and sometimes maturity, are gender neutral.    To be a mother by choice requires femininity, to be a warrior by choice requires masculinity.    But the dedication to science, art, literature, languages, technology and other intellectual pursuits is favored by a predisposition, which can be labeled psychological androgynity.  


By unfortunate logic, only breeders continue to contribute their high instinctivity to the gene pool.  The conscious non-breeders do not contribute their more advanced cognition, unless they breed by accident or otherwise against their own wish.   Therefore the evolution towards a more dominant cognition has not completely stopped, but it is very slow.   

Persons, whose psychological androgynity is strong enough to not be overridden by irrational beliefs and non-fitting gender roles, are therefore not only a minority, but they are also under the strong pressure to conform to a majority's expectations.   
In spite of the difficulties of this adversity, it is nevertheless much better to accept being a non-conforming outsider than to suffer from the self-inflicted harm, which follows conforming to what is not suitable for the own innate identity.  


Therefore those who are mavericks, loners and outsiders are this for very good and valid reasons and not at all due to lacking any desirable quality.   They are not the allegedly flawed misfits, as whom they are not only treated, but also pressed towards accepting themselves as such. 
Not all of them have the awareness and self-confidence to understand, that they are lucky to be free from a biological burden.   They are made to feel excluded, while in reality they are spared the breeders' self-destructive and harming inclinations.   Feeling excluded is a fallacy of those, who have themselves very good reasons to avoid to be included.                

205. Childfree by Mutation?

Childfree by Mutation?
The instinct triggering sexual activities and the instinct to procreate are not the same.   Animals without an consciousness for consequences are driven by instinctive urges to copulate, and when the offspring appear, this then triggers the instinctive behavior to raise them.  

Humans can be aware of their urges and they can consciously distinguish between the wish to mate for being a couple and the wish to procreate.    Therefore there could be mutations eliminating only the wish to procreate without inhibiting either the sexual instinct nor the physiological ability to breed.  

There is a big difference between the consequences of possible mutations leading to the evolution of a non-breeding phenotype and of a non-breeding disposition in the brain.   
When a mutation impedes a person physically to have offspring, that gene dies with the person and it cannot spread.  

But when a mutation of the disposition in the brain changes the balance of the relative strength of the instinctive urge to breed and the rational comprehension, that life without breeding is preferably for the individual, this does not automatically impede breeding, it only deletes or reduces the wish to breed.   
Men with such a mutation may continue to be promiscuous without any wish to have offspring.  Their instinctive choice of a mate may become different, not guided anymore by the preference of a mate promising healthy offspring but for more personal benefits.    If contraception is not available or fails, they may still breed and spread their mutated genes.   Maybe breeding men are only those, who provide for and raise their offspring, and if they want to spread their genes, they do it in variations of polygynous arrangements.  
All men, who for whatever reason succeed to avoid to care and to provide for their offspring, may not have an urge for procreation in their genes.   
Women with such a mutation may be forced, manipulated or bought to breed without wishing to do so.  

Therefore it is possible, that such a mutation would not get extinct, but would become a recessive gene, that is spreading slowly.   Only when two of those recessive genes are transmitted, the person would become someone, whose conscious choice is the preference to avoid breeding.    But since they are physiologically able to breed, some of them again are handing on their genes by involuntary and accidental breeding for the same reasons as the already mentioned women and men, who first had that mutation.

Maybe that gene already exists and has just never been acknowledged by the mainstream culture, in which breeding is considered as the norm.   

All through known history, there has been infanticide, abandoned children, children delivered to the orphanage, and men knowingly not providing for their progeny.   It seems very plausible, that many of them were non-breeders by the same genetic disposition as the conscious proclaimed non-breeders of today, but their bodies and their ignorance of basic biological facts had got them into a horrible dilemma.    Many of them wanted to be good, responsible people, and yet they faced the choice, whose life was irreversibly destroyed and damaged, that of the progeny or the own life sacrificed for the slavery of raising the unwanted progeny.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Therese had five children and they brought them all to the orphanage.   Rousseau wrote a long book on education, and he is often attacked for what they did.    Today, they would be a couple of childfree intellectuals, because today being childfree is an acceptable and possible lifestyle.      

People with no wish to procreate had no chance to do so without committing crimes, social transgressions or sin in the definition of their religion, until the availability of modern methods of contraception, especially the pill, finally allowed people to refuse breeding and remain decent, responsible people in the eyes of society.    Only when there were socially acceptable methods could it become possible to admit and proclaim the decision to remain childfree and not be punished and marginalised.  

There was also a second effect, the spreading of ideas by the mass media like TV and the Internet.   If only one person feels no wish to breed, and never even hears of any likeminded other, that person may well feel as an defective outsider of society attempting to conform.   But if many people know of each other, then they can much better have the self-confidence to not only accept themselves but also demand to be accepted as different but not defective.