I encourage you to actually read the story that I linked to you before on how gender indoctrination affects neural plasticity from birth and results in it appearing that boys are like this and girls are like that. As a top neurologist who studies this points out:
If you learn a skill your brain will change, and it will carry on changing.” This is shown to be the case in studies of black cab drivers (in London) learning the Knowledge, for example. “
The brain is waxing and waning much more than we ever realised. So if you haven’t had particular experiences — if as a girl you weren’t given Lego, you don’t have the same spatial training that other people in the world have. If, on the other hand, you were given those spatial tasks again and again, you would get better at them. “
The neural paths change; they become automatic pathways. The task really does become easier.”
Stereotypical toy preferences are the result of gender indoctrination as well as the fact that young children seek to make sense of their world by fitting themselves into recognizable categories. Since they typically aren't interested in ones like "Republican" or "golfer" they instead seek for ways to fit themselves into the categories that are most often presented to them by their surroundings. Even parents who think they are trying to be "gender neutral" find that they are subconsciously adhering to societal gender norms. This has been studied extensively and shown time and again to be an issue. You know who gravitates to blue? All babies. Little girls only start favoring pink later on when they learn it is what they "should" like. And, on top of that 75 years ago pink was for boys (it was considered light red) and blue was for girls.
What anyone older than a very new born does or does not do can in no way be assumed to be innate so all your anecdotes about your experiences with gender differences simply prove the depth and breadth of gender socialization. Nothing more... particularly if you are talking about a conservative Christian environment where strict gender binaries are strongly enforced and demanded. Writing about that as if your experiences are indicative of anything more universal than just your experiences would be pretty ascientific.
Patriarchal cultures value heirs - they don't actually value mothers (or even individual children really) which is why we see things like reducing school lunches and aid to women on welfare at the same time that women are being forced to bear children that they cannot afford to feed or adequately care for.
Through time, a fixation with chastity can take on a symbolic and institutional life of its own, so that tremendous mental energy and effort gets channeled into policing and controlling female sexuality and convincing women that it is essential for their own and their children’s sake to be “good” (that is, chaste, dutiful, submissive, and self-sacrificing) mothers.97
It’s not that men and their mothers in these societies don’t care about children. They do, often desiring lots of them, especially several sons (an heir plus a spare). But preservation of the patriline and patrilineal institutions still takes priority, even to the point of depriving children of grandmothers.
Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. Mothers and Others (p. 265). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.
We don't have any actual matriarchal cultures - because those would be reverse dominance hierarchies with women holding more power. Matrilineal cultures - of which there are currently 6 - actually honor motherhood but also value balance between men and women as a fundamental aspect of their respective cultures.
"To call these matriarchies is a misnomer, however, because they are centered in balance and egalitarianism. Gender roles may exist but they don’t have the same kind of rigidity that we see in patriarchal cultures, where men doing “women’s work” is often looked down upon, and anything feminine is considered less than."
Monogamy is another social construct that is only a few thousand years old. People can certainly choose that, but it isn't evolutionarily very sound or supported and there is little evidence that it is "more stable." There are a ton of cultures around the world that have some sort of pair-bonding but don't actually expect sexual fidelity.
In truth, this ought to be enough right there. If sexual monogamy were “natural” and something that most people were innately inclined to, we would never have had or needed the social and sexual control of women that only arose 6–9 thousand years ago. But even beyond this, there are other ways that we know that sexual monogamy is a relatively new human expectation.
“A female who mates with several different males will have more genetically diverse offspring, boosting the chances that at least some of them will thrive.” Source This goes for human females as well as other non-human animals and it is confirmed in the anatomy of both human men and women.
The coronal ridge of the human penis is specifically shaped to displace semen left there by another man or men. In addition, animals that engage in mate competition prior to copulation (like gorillas) tend to have small testes and penises. Animals that instead engage in sperm competition are more well endowed relative to body size (like chimpanzees and humans) because they need to have a large supply of semen on hand to inseminate multiple partners.
I'm a bit sorry to have left you with so much reading, but since you brought up all of these topics that I actually know a lot about and where the facts are contrary to many of your beliefs, I felt like I didn't have a choice. I would ask that if you wish to have a continued discussion that you do actually read each of these before responding. They are all packed with research and citations as well as a synthesis of the data.
