H LV <hveeder...@gmail.com> wrote: You are using the naturalistic fallacy. It is like saying that because > child birth evolved to be risky, we shouldn't intervene with science . . . >
I never said anything REMOTELY like that! That is absurd. I listed the reasons why some male occupations tend to be more dangerous than female occupations, at least in Europe and the U.S. (But not in India, for example, where elderly women weed the median in highways with cars whizzing by a meter away at 60 mph.) The reasons go back to history, tradition, the physical differences and body strength difference between men and women. They go back to what people are trained to do, and grow up doing. No one can just hop onto a small fishing boat and survive. You have to do that for years while growing up. Traditionally in Europe, only men did that. A women who has never done that -- or you or I having never done that -- is likely to be drowned the first day out. There are also natural reasons basic to our primate nature, going back at least 13 million years. Every portrayal of warriors in ever culture on record always shows men. You can't just erase our biology. This did not begin in 1970 with the word "feminist." This is how most human societies have worked for millions of years. My father grew up knowing how to handle small motor craft and sailboats, and how to fire up a triple expansion steam engine, like the one on the Titanic. Firing up was a tricky and dangerous thing to do! The sailors had to climb a scaffold and lubricate those engines while they were in motion, which was another dance with death. There will never be another generation of young people, men or women, who are capable of doing that. It is a lost art. There may be a few people who can do that but we will never again see thousands of them, enough to man all the freighters and troop transport ships of WWII. You can't just pick up such skills overnight. For that matter there will never be another generation of people who can write assembly language or Pascal code the way I can. Every generation masters one technology and loses another. It happens that for all of history down to the present day, men have always taken the lead in mastering the most dangerous occupations. One obvious reason is that such jobs payed better. Women also did incredibly dangerous things by our standards, not long ago. I mentioned the photo of the 6-foot-tall Japanese fishing woman working a windlass in 1949. I said "she was running as many risks as any male fisherman." If you don't see that, look carefully at the photo and think about what she is doing: https://library.osu.edu/projects/bennett-in-japan/images/full/13/12.jpg The caption says: "The young woman on the left was nearly six feet tall! The elderly woman on the right is calling the chant to maintain the rhythm of movement." There are 4 to 8 people turning the windlass, hauling a fishing boat out of the surf onto the sand. They are walking barefoot in the sand pushing heavy logs (handles). Think of what might happen if one or two of these people slips in the sand or accidentally lets go of a handle, or if a wave jerks the fishing boat back into the surf. The handles may whip back with enough force to bash a person's head in. There may be pawl to prevent that, but it can slip or break. This may look carefree, pastoral and picturesque but no man or women in Japan or the U.S. would be allowed to do such dangerous work today. The Japanese Min. of Health Labor and Welfare and the U.S. OSHA would forbid it. That's a good thing. It is simply not true that society looks the other way when men risk their lives at work. Not anymore it doesn't. They still haul fishing boats out of the water in Japan, obviously. They do it with gasoline engine capstans and steel cables. There are still many dangerous fishing occupations in Japan. Elderly women still dive into rough seas and fast currents too, without diving tanks. Just wetsuits. They stay down an incredibly long time. I have often watched them from the shore. Most people would drown trying to do that, even good swimmers. - Jed
