{"id":2944,"date":"2016-08-11T11:51:28","date_gmt":"2016-08-11T10:51:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2944"},"modified":"2016-08-11T15:26:18","modified_gmt":"2016-08-11T14:26:18","slug":"ainu-a-feminist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/2944\/","title":{"rendered":"Ainu a Feminist"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t come across many hardcore feminists in person\u00a0either in my line of work or social life, but I had the occasion to do so in the form of my artsy friend Angela<\/a> around February this year. \u00a0One of the things she said to me in the early stages of our brief acquaintance\u00a0was that she was a feminist and, after I probed that statement, she told me she believed behavioral differences between men and women were wholly the result of social conditioning. \u00a0To support this theory she said she used to play with trucks as a child, and not dolls.<\/p>\n

My response was to ask her to imagine a set of men and a set of women being assigned the following task: each person has to wrap a Christmas present of an awkward shape, such as a pair of socks. \u00a0Let each go away and do so, and then view the results. \u00a0I said the presents wrapped by women would be very neat with the ends folded into little\u00a0triangles and Sellotaped in place, whereas the men’s would be an utter mess of crumpled\u00a0paper and excess tape.<\/p>\n

The likely results she did not dispute, but our reasons for them differed: my theory was that men simply don’t care about the presentation of gifts they receive<\/em> – especially things like socks – possibly because they know it’s going to be ripped off in a second anyway, and so don’t see the point in putting in effort to wrap things nicely for others. \u00a0By contrast, women tend to care about the presentation of gifts – both given and received – and so put more care and attention into the wrapping. \u00a0Angela wasn’t convinced. \u00a0Her hypothesis was that society places an expectation on women to wrap presents well and so they do, whereas men have no such expectations placed on them. \u00a0I didn’t press the point any further, and took a slug of the strong cocktail I was holding at the time.<\/p>\n

If Angela’s hypothesis is true, then seemingly disparate societies are a lot more similar than we think. \u00a0Back when I was working in Sakhalin for an oilfield services company which did, among other things, industrial insulation of pipework we set up a training centre in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. \u00a0One of the conditions of us being granted a quota for bringing foreign workers into the country was to hire and train local labour, which was fair enough only anyone who was unemployed on Sakhalin between 2006-2008 was incapable of holding down a job. \u00a0An exception to this was a handful of Ainu<\/a> women who we brought down from the north of Sakhalin and put through our training centre.<\/p>\n

From what I could tell, the Ainu had only partially integrated into Russian life. \u00a0They spoke Russian, ate Russian food, and dressed in non-traditional clothes, but were treated by the Russians as an altogether separate people (as Russians are wont to do with their ethnic minorities). \u00a0I’d probably describe them best as looking like Eskimos, with one or two being rather attractive, but the rate at which they aged showed they lived hard lives. \u00a0Almost every one had a husband who was either an alcoholic, had taken off, or was in prison, although I never found out if they were ethnic Ainus or Russians. \u00a0Anyway, what we found when we put the Ainu women to work insulating pipes was that they worked very slowly but very accurately, and the result was insulation around the bends of pipes which was incredibly neat. \u00a0And they did so with more than a little pride. \u00a0By contrast, the (Russian) men who we were training turned in work which looked as though it were done wearing boxing gloves. \u00a0None of us involved was particularly surprised by this outcome. \u00a0(Incidentally, the Ainus were the only women we put through the training centre: ethnic Russian women simply wouldn’t sign up to this kind of work.)<\/p>\n

So if Angela was right in her thinking, the tiny<\/a> Ainu society – which would know about the wrapping of presents only insofar as they have seen their Russian neighbours do it and adopted their customs – imposes such gender-based expectations on its womenfolk that they will go to a yard run by foreigners and wrap a piping spool in\u00a0fibreglass with more care and attention than any number of men. \u00a0And if I was right, it is simply because women – of any ethnicity, society, and background – are simply pre-programmed to care about this sort of stuff more than men.<\/p>\n

I’ll leave it to my readership to choose which theory they support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t come across many hardcore feminists in person\u00a0either in my line of work or social life, but I had the occasion to do so in the form of my artsy friend Angela around February this year. \u00a0One of the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17,79,46],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2944"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2944"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2944\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2948,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2944\/revisions\/2948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}