Gender Realism = All Men Only Want Sex = All Women Only Want Money, For Example.

For the uninitiated in basic political philosophy, I apologise for the technicality.

The school of realist thought contends that essentially, countries are keen and only keen on preserving the survival of the state through self-help. This means that nothing else matters other than being wary of your neighbours and you'd only be able to trust yourself, so you build up your own offences and defences. Through a vicious cycle of insecurity between nations, there will always be hostility and inevitably war.

The school of liberalist thought asserts that there is more to it than just the necessity of statism, survival and self-help, because modern politics seems to be moving towards that of peace treaties and goodwill on the sugar-coated side. If we can afford to do these things, then there must be some room for being optimistic about peace and cooperation.

But I'm not writing about what explains why countries want to bomb the crap out of one another or selectively treat one another like gay bosom pals. I'm posting today about gender realism. Along the 'all men only want sex' and 'all women only want money' variety of sentiment, we have others like 'all women secretly want bad boys and fast cars', 'all men are scumbags', 'all women are bitches' etc. Essentially, this is what I'd define as gender realism.

On the other hand, stuff like 'I don't think all men are scumbags, my boyfriend is definitely not one of them' or 'my girlfriend is the exception to the general adage that women only want men with status' belongs under gender liberalism. Likewise, men having 2 ladders under the ladder theory and 'personality is more important than looks' hence also fall under gender liberalist thought by my definitions.

The general conflict between realism and liberalism since the early 1900s is that life for the realist, at the end of the day, is all about protecting yourself in an innately rational and selfish manner. Life for the liberalist would be that we can afford to be genuinely altruistic and life isn't all about self-survival. The lengthened conflict then goes on to debate whether liberalism is essentially sugar-coated realism. Take for example the IMF or the WTO. Liberalists will say that you can draw on these examples to show that countries can indeed seek to further goodwill for everyone's gain. Realists will say that the IMF and WTO are merely tools that America is using to further their personal interests on a global scale, in the process enslaving developing countries and forcing them to play by their rules.

Accordingly, it can then be argued that, for example, men, especially the sensitive new-age ones, are only being sensitive and nice insofar as they wish to succeed in getting into women's pants ultimately. In line with liberalism being disguised realism, a guy's attempt to be nice and sensitive are just more cunning ways to get sex, and a lady's attempt to be a witty and new-age confident woman is just so that she can get men of stature and their dough.

To digress a little, it is like when a company decides to engage in CSR (corporate social responsibility). Liberalists will say that they want to reach out to stakeholders, realists will assert that they're simply doing this just to exploit the CSR channel to market their firm and get more profits.

Fundamentally, anyone who asserts that all men and women are rootedly the same because of a host of scientific, rational reasons - biological, Darwinistic, etc - is a gender realist. As long as the status quo is met, it doesn't matter by what means.




With Congress, every time they make a joke it's a law; and every time they make a law it's a joke.

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