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I don't know about that. Ever since we bet on interchangeability of men and women, we can't seem to reproduce ourselves and have to make up for the shortfall by importing people from more fertile parts of the world, hoping that interchangeability works out this time.
What's the upside it's supposed to have brought us?
If we saw it in the 50's and we're seeing it today, I have to ask if the term has any meaning.
Industrial processes work best with other industrial processes, so I guess it's a race to industrialize that biology as we have various other forms of organic production. I'm not saying I'm a fan, but it's weird for a community as virtualized, urban and seemingly techno-optimist as the Motte to come down so hard in favor of artisanal methods in this single area.
The interesting and under-discussed thing is that male roles got liquidated by modernity way before female roles did. Watch some living-history documentaries about preindustrial farm life, or read about crime in early cities and roads, and it becomes extremely obvious why it would be helpful to have someone around who's taller with a lot of upper-body strength and greater potential for physical aggression, and why a smaller-bodied person might willingly relinquish a certain amount of autonomy to retain that alliance. Once men deliberately technologize themselves out of the hard-labor-and-physical-defense game, to which their biology is naturally suited, it becomes much easier for women to look at their desk-jockey vidya-playing husbands and brothers and ask why they get to demand so much and give so little in return.
Speaking of hotfixes:
I used to take this for granted too but then you look at something like student loans where women hold more debt and take longer to pay it off and student loan forgiveness is argued for specifically as a salve for women and I wonder.
If all of these jobs better fit a woman's temperament why can't they just pay their loans?
Male roles may have been liquidated by modernity but not necessarily just because the inevitable march of technology making lifting things and whacking people less useful. The modern liberal state may have given us a little push.
Yeah, as I pointed out a few weeks ago, men's roles are not obsolete. What's obsolete is giving men credit for their fulfilling them. Instead they're either generally taken for granted (as with various blue collar roles than are still 90-99% men) or men are actually criticized for doing it (as with engineering and other lucrative male-dominated white collar professions).
I think people are pretty good at giving credit for real, visible contributions, where the reality is clear and concrete (as opposed to a statistical construct, a historical artifact, or an abstract case that somebody could maybe make if they wanted to).
In the subsistence-agriculture conditions that birthed The Patriarchy, and in a world where physical strength is a valuable resource overall, it seems extremely clear why an able-bodied adult man wrangling a yoke of oxen, carrying stones for a wall or fighting with hand weapons is both taking on extra personal risk and rendering irreplaceable value for his family, and why the usefulness of having him in that role might justify investing it with extra privilege versus the females and immature males of his household.
Fast-forward to modern industrial/financial democracy, and sure, construction workers and other male-dominated industrial roles are great and necessary, but:
(a) superior brute strength is no longer the money-maker, thus no longer the source of high status, that it once was;
(b) availability of mechanical aids and automated tools means there's at most a small disparity between male and female capacity to perform those roles (realistically, a country of Amazons could do all their plumbing and engineering just fine)
(c) ergonomics and safety tech improvements mean that these roles are much less dramatically taxing/ uncomfortable, and that men performing them no longer take on substantial daily risk of bodily injury and death, vs. in a preindustrial context
(d) society is much less casually violent, so the utility of physical strength is restricted to a very limited number of workplaces, not experienced daily in street life; and finally
(e) even women married to physical laborers experience concrete benefit from the labor only in the form of a paycheck, which could just as easily be derived from white-collar work; hence there's no particular reason to regard the man as rendering irreplaceable value to the family through his biological form.
Ultimately, I think humans reason about respect in extremely concrete, embodied ways, and with open self-interest. Making some abstract argument that engineers are broadly good to have around, and that like 80% of engineers are men therefore all men deserve some credit for the existence of engineers (?!), is simply not the viscerally compelling case for male privilege that "need this tree chopped down and carried over there? great, I'll get on it" seems to have been.
Contingent on the definition of "Amazons", I do not believe this is the case. If "Amazons" is just ordinary women who don't need no man, it seems very unlikely they could do these roles... because if they could they would in greater quantities than they are. If by "Amazons" you mean women 3 sigmas above the current mean in whatever manly traits are necessary for that, then perhaps, but nowhere has that. This is what I mean by refusing to give men credit.
This is very weird logic. To take a parallel case: 75% of pediatricians and 90% of speech-language pathologists are female, give or take. Therefore on a male-only island children would die in droves, and stammerers wither into mutism, because obviously men can't perform these roles, or else they would do so in greater numbers?
I'd predict far greater numbers of women entering engineering in an Amazon society, because you're removing the substantial downside that is having to work with male engineers.
Thank you for perfectly exemplifying my point. Men get blamed for filling roles in engineering. The problem's not with men, or men's roles. The problem is the catch-22 imposed by those who dislike men.
I think I specified male engineers. (And in all fairness, many of the older ones I interact with IRL are great people; it's mostly the remarks one sees from nerd-id'd young and middle-aged men on sites like this that have recently made me feel very sorry for the young women trying to work in those spaces.)
However, we weren't discussing whether current male engineers should feel bad about their character, their social skills or their workplace culture. I was questioning your reasoning above that because somewhat fewer women than men currently choose to enter engineering as a profession (an observation consistent with a wide variety of underlying causes, including that talented women have more options or that the current cohort of men in the field is unpleasant to interact with), therefore we can conclude (a) engineering is inherently, as you term it, a "men's role", (b) that biological females can't do engineering, and an all-female society would have inadequate personnel to complete its necessary engineering tasks. (That's setting aside the broader claim you were trying to support, which was, if I read it correctly, that since engineers are also so incredibly valuable, the current gender balance of engineering partly justifies the existence of patriarchal social norms.) Could you say more about the reasoning that you feel justifies (a) and (b), if I'm getting those correct?
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You may be mischaracterizing the Motte as a community, but even if you're right on average, you've run into the resident unironic Luddite.
I don't think you answered my question though, I still don't see any specific upside that, one can point to, to society as a whole treating everybody as though they are interchangeable. Definitely nothing that can counter the downsides of interchangeability that I mentioned.
I'm aware of the "industrialist" arguments for standardization, but the retort is simply that you're driving a square beg into a round hole, and breaking all sorts of things in the process.
Last I checked, men still tend to be the ones supporting the households, so that question seems to be misplaced. And you seem to be simply confirming what I said - interchangeability does not enhance liberalism, it drives it's extinction.
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