In which ways *are* men and women indeed (mentally, emotionally) different?

In My Humble Opinion
1

With the recent trend of blurring the differences between the genders (such as some Cracked articles, and also other sources making the case that men and women think much more similarly than previously believed,) I wanted to have a discussion thread about which ways men and women are indeed different vs. similar.

Just to throw out a few for discussion (although the thread by no means needs to be limited to these:
There is the perception that the two genders are different in terms of attraction; that men are primarily *visually *drawn to women’s outward appearance and body features, whereas women are attracted to men on the basis of less-visible inner characteristics such as success, confidence, wealth, personality, humor, etc;
There is the perception that women are more nuanced, subtle, complex and indirect than men, whereas men are more direct, simple and overt; and also that many men are attracted to submissive women whereas many women are attracted to dominant/leader-type men;
There is the perception that men have a higher sex drive and want to have sex with many different women, whereas women are much more choosy and selective in this regard;
There is the perception that, with regards to dating and relationships, that women tend to be more passive (in the sense of having men be the ones to initiate to them, rather than be the ones initiating to men), and that women much prefer to be asked out than to ask out, to be proposed to than to propose, etc.;
There is the perception that women seek consensus in a group when it comes to group decision-making, whereas men are more likely to argue it on the basis of their individual unilateral beliefs or opinions as to what is good or right;
There is the perception that men are more drawn towards technical trades or objects (aviation, mechanics, engineering, etc.) while women are more drawn towards relational or people-oriented fields (nursing, psychology, teaching, social studies, etc.);
There is the perception that men are more interested in martial or combat/action things (such as sports, firefighting, joining the military or police, or watching combat/war movies,) whereas women lean more towards less violent or action-paced things such as more ‘peaceful’ movie/fiction genres and activities.

And, of course, this is almost a genre unto itself (hard to believe *Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus *was written 20+ years ago). And then there are plenty of Internet articles contradicting each other hereand hereand hereand hereand hereand here and hereand here and here.

2

I believe there are virtually no mental/emotional ways in which all men are different from all women. Instead it’s a situation where men average 4 on a certain dimension while women average 6–but there is a massive overlap where a lot of women measure lower than a lot of men on this dimension.

3

There are biological differences between the sexes, not one can doubt that. Some of those biological differences will translate into emotional and mental ones, while others are socially mandated. In fact in many cases its a mixture of the two. Men are more agressive, that’s undoubtedly based on our higher levels of testosterone, but no one can deny it’s socially encouraged as well.

4

There are really very few ways that men are absolutely different than women. Men impregnate, while women menstruate, ovulate, gestate, and lactate.

All the rest of the ‘differences’ are relative, and quite variable from person to person and culture to culture.

5

The nature vs nurture issue is fairly intractable here. I think one can fairly say more testosterone produces more aggression and bigger muscles. Other than that it is all shadings.

6

I agree: there are genuine differences between men and women in the aggregate/average, but they don’t necessarily apply to individuals. (In the way that, for example, men on the average tend to be taller then women, but some men are shorter than some women.)

7

Not quite the real world IME. In private or a setting where they feel comfortable (often an all girl setting) women are just a visual as men if not more so, and then the additional filter requirements (humor, confidence etc) apply. Women, like men, will make adjustments to required baseline attractiveness as their own attractiveness wanes. People are as picky as their options.

True"ish" but this can be a negative or a positive depending on circumstances and from what I’ve seen women in group leadership roles are or tend to become more direct and overt than women further down the food chain. Also, there is often a* subtlety* to male “directness” that men tend to grasp better than women. Men appear more direct than women but IME there are often just as many games within games from men as women.

Overall “yes” but women can be just as sexually aggressive as men if they have identified a man they want. Getting pregnant is a huge physical resource commitment so this choosiness being wired in is understandable.

I think “passive” is the wrong word here. If a woman wants your sexual attention she will find ways to let you know.

This is kinda-sorta trueish if a woman needs consensus, but honestly IME women are just as likely to be dictatorial and unilateral if they have the power to do so.

Again true-ish. I think as a baseline men and women are wired somewhat differently intellectually, especially at the highest outlier levels of math ability, but this dichotomy is not nearly as strong as was thought years ago and now you have a number of female engineers, scientists etc.

“More” yes but still a lot of overlap.

8

When I was in the Army, I noticed two differences between the way women and men behave that were so consistent, it was hard to believe they we completely sociological, especially since they are things I don’t hear talked about a lot, so they don’t seem like things that are overtly encouraged.

One was that women find it really difficult to work with women they do not get along with, even on a short-term task with a definite ending point-- like taking 10 minutes to form a fireline to load a truck. They will NOT form a fireline, and insist on the more backbreaking walking back and forth individual method of loading, or they will even refuse to load the same truck as someone they don’t like. Men will work with people they don’t like, especially on a short-term task with a lot of structure, like someone shouting “Fireline!” They seem to have an easier time grasping the idea that the sooner you get too it, the sooner you get it over with.

The second was regarding reprisals for behavior. Women and men both knew the rules. Women and men both knew there were consequences-- at a minimum, you’d get dropped for 20. Women wanted to avoid reprisals, not your for the unpleasantness of the reprisal, but because they did not want to receive a reprisal. It really didn’t matter what it was. You could get dropped for 1, and women would still avoid the behavior. Men, on the other hand, did mental calculations, and determined how much they wanted to do whatever it was, vs. how much they disliked the punishment. For example, you never saw a woman spit in formation. It was forbidden, and that was enough for women. For men, they’d subtract their desire not to do 20 pushups from their desire to spit in formation, and if they came out with a positive figure, they’d spit.

The second one went a lot toward explaining why there are more men in prison than women. I don’t think it’s just testosterone-fueled aggression. I think it’s a whole different mindset, that punishment is just the price of something, and not a thing to be avoided in and of itself. Women attach much more of a stigma to having received a punishment. Heck, I think you could punish women in Basic with giving them a piece of candy, and as long as you labeled it punishment, so it carried that stigma, women would avoid it.

Now, personally, I found the first one to be annoying, and I was a woman who would form a fireline with woman I didn’t like, so I crossed the gender line there, and there was generally a spectrum. But the gender difference was still really obvious.

I’m not sure what the implications are-- as far as I know, no one has studied these.

9

Are there no gender differences (in terms of how men and women think, etc.) that hold true across, say, 95% of cultures?

10

There are obviously OBSERVED differences between males and females. To some extent some of those differences may be due to innate physiological differences and, at the same time, to some extent some of those differences may be due to socialization, social pressures, socially influenced interpretations by the observer, etc.

People often ask how much of the observed difference is due to innate differences and how much is due to culture.

I have a question for you, now: how many gallons of water from yon swimming pool are due to its length, and how many are due to its width?

Yeah, I know, smartasses, all the gallons are really caused by its depth

Seriously, it’s ultimately an unresolvable question. Even when you can do cross-cultural comparisons from widely different cultures, it may still be the case that all human cultures have enough in common that the same social context may be said to be in operation. And even when you can identify genetic or neurochemical or other apparent hardwired behavioral determinants, you can’t really isolate how they express themselves except by seeing how they express themselves in a social context.

And now i have yet another question for you: what do you consider to be your motivation for asking? Do any good things come out of having such a discussion and causing a consensus (weak or strong) to emerge about which differences are the built-in, non-culturally-dependent, “real” differences? How about bad things, bad outcomes of such a consensus? I speak (well, write, actually) here as a genderqueer individual and I can tell you that a lot of bad comes from people in general reinforcing each other’s notions about the differences between the sexes. It may never be your purpose to marginalize the misfits, the exceptions to the rule — in fact I’d be amazed if that were in any way your deliberate intent — but that tends to be the result.

Well, not so much for me, now, because I now have a sense of self specifically as a gender misfit, so in conversations like these where the emergent conclusions about males are a batch of generalizations that don’t fit me well, and the emergent conclusions about females are generalizations that DO, that verifies and corroborates my sense of self. But surely you can see that “genderqueer” is an ameliorative response, a corrective to a social tendency to make a generalization and then treat it as a FACT with no concern or consideration for the exceptions to the general rule?

11

I think what you’ll see is that women’s roles are largely defined by child rearing.

In primitive cultures, they have larger numbers of children and rely on breast feeding for longer. This is why they’ve traditionally been home-makers, gatherers, farmers, knitters and not so much hunters or soldiers.

In modern cultures, we have fewer children and more options to make women independent from their children (formula, nannies, etc), and I think this shows fewer differences between men and women than we might have expected by looking at primitive cultures.

12

Wet-nursing has been around for a loooong time.

13

Behavior like that would have made recess at my school pretty shitty for everybody involved; it wasn’t acceptable. There’s a lot of games we played where a lot of the fun came from the large group sizes and from the unexpected, such as discovering that a girl who was terribly clumsy at foot-based games happened to be a damn good hand thrower. As for the actual group work part, we started a lot earlier than my American students did, and current students are expected to be doing group work even earlier, and even more intensively, and no picking partners because you’re besties.

14

Mice.

There’s something about the presence of a mouse that will have women jumping up on chairs or getting the hell out of the room, while men shrug and contemplate a run to the hardware store for mousetraps.

I don’t understand it, and it isn’t just some stereotype from 1950s sitcoms. I keep on seeing this phenomenon in action. Otherwise strong, smart, independent women are vanquished by the presence of a mouse.

15

Nope. The presence of an actual rat once famously sent Mother Frauca to climb upon her chair and from there to her desk, but her female students were sitting in place wondering what the fuss was about and how was the Mother managing to keep her composure while doing something that most people can’t do without looking completely unhinged.

Please do not confuse TV Tropes with Reality Tropes.

16

Couple years ago, when I realized there was an actual mouse sitting on my desk next to my computer mouse, I jumped up and ran outside the house. (Where I called an exterminator to deal with it.) And I’m a guy.

Yeah, that’s not determined by whether you’re a girl or a boy.

17

While it’s true that mice and spiders can startle/scare people of either gender, I do think **RTFirefly **is on to something in that women seem to be, overall, *more *afraid of mice and spiders than men.
I was once asked by several women to deal with a tiny spider in the kitchen. One of these was a woman who had lived in Africa for a long time and had encountered a variety of unsavory organisms. And even then she wanted me to deal with a tiny spider.

18

I ask because I’ve noticed a lot of “equality bias” in such discussions (for lack of a better term - namely, that when Category A and Category B of people are brought up in a particular context, there will invariably be people insisting that the two categories are similar or the same) - and when it comes to the claim that men or women are the same deep down inside, that just really does not jibe with the evidence, IMHO - the many, almost countless areas in which men and women do behave and act differently.

19

That’s cultural. Seriously. In Costa Rica, asking locals to “deal with a spider” gets you a pissy local who wants to know why do you want to kill the nice, mosquito-eating, almost-a-house-pet.

My mother freaks out at roaches. Who does she call? Her daughter, of course.

Seen on the subway in Barcelona:
“Mom?”
“Hm?”
“Why is that rabbitfoot keyring moving?”
“It’s not a rabitfoot keyring, dear, it’s a mouse.”
“Oh.”
…
“Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“Is it ok that the mouse is there?”
“Yes, because it is not inside people’s homes. Subway stations count as being outside people’s homes.”
“Oh.”
The train arrived then and I did not hear further information about the behavior of tiny subway mice.

20

I’m probably towards the end of the spectrum; I think my capacity for emotional drama/trauma before I’m full is,like 5gig. The average woman it seems to me has terabytes of processing capacity.