Nice thread, I don’t know if we are discussing the op or what, but it is interesting.
“Perhaps we should ask Margaret Thatcher or Golda Meier.”
I think the poster’s intent was that a Thatcher would have an female counterpart in Argentina, for example. Two women might work out the problem over tea and cake.
But heck, once a woman reaches “a certain age” she’s running on testosterone anyway, right?
FreakFreely: “a good clean fight” reminded me of the way fights begin - one guy puts his fingertips on the shoulders of the other and pushes gently and says, “Oh yah?” And you know the rest!
I can say that men’s conversations are more number oriented than women’s - when a man would say: 525, 6, 250, a woman would say, too many, not enough, just right!
I’d like to say here that I don’t condone violence. In fact, I can honestly say that I’ve never tried to harm a person in my entire life. I’m not a pacifist, but I’ve never thrown a punch, and I’ve never done more than what was absolutely needed to pacify someone else. However, I do think that damaging someone’s reputation is much worse than damaging their face. I’ve had both done to me, and I know which one hurts more.
Ptahlis, allow me to refine my sentiments. Wherever Strunk and White are now, they are cursing me for the segment of my post that you quoted, which mocks language as a means of expressing ideas. Lemme 'splain what I so was so clumsily attempting to say.
Science, pure science (and damned be he who first cries, “Hold! Too much!”), is at its best a means of gaining knowledge about the universe free from value judgments as to that knowledge’s “goodness” or “badness.” On this, I think, we agree. In the hard sciences, such as physics and chemistry, this ideal is best realized. Psychology also holds to this ideal as long as it concerns itself with measurable biological processes and their relationships to mental phenomena.
The ideal breaks down, though, when psychology concerns itself with the relationships among mental phenomena, sociological phenomena, behavioral phenomena, etc.–all those aspects of psychology which defy objective quantification, and must instead be regarded qualitatively, because they rely on the description of mental states, or worse, a description of the description (“He expressed anger,” or some such). Mental states are always imperfectly described by language, which mitigates and adulterates (Help! I’m channelling Walt Frasier!) subjective experience. Science, the attempt to distill a shared objectivity from patterns in subjective experience, fails to draw useful conclusions in these cases, when consensus can’t even be reached on what the meaning is of the initial premise.
Certainly, we can catalogue frequency, duration, and partner preference in bonobo genital rubbing. As soon as we decide that these and other data indicate that bonobo society is matriarchal, though, I believe that we’ve moved away from science and toward philosophy. And when we use what we’ve learned about bonobos to provide insight into the possible origin of some of our own societal structures, we have pitched our tent firmly in the realm of philisophical speculation.
Science and philosophy can inform and complement each other. But they aren’t the same. Philosophy can make value judgments both implicit and explicit, while science, ideally, cannot. So when I say that it helps no one to speak of inherent differences between men and women, I didn’t mean differences in things like average body mass or longevity. I meant stuff like, “Women cooperate, men compete.” Show me all the statistics in the world to support that statement, and I still won’t buy it (won’t necessarily not buy it, either), because the terms “cooperate” and “compete” are themselves arbitrary.
Sorry about the manifesto. I hope I haven’t muddied the waters further in my attempt to explain myself.
Male and female brains are physically, chemically, neuro-endocrinologically different. Medical fact. The differences are not huge and do not impact on all behaviors, but the difference is there.
Tracer, I am baffled by your transsexual friend who changed her sexual orientation after taking hormones—this is very odd. Perhaps the change in her life just left her more open to exploring what had already been there? Hormones cannot make you straight or gay, certainly not in midlife. Experiments HAVE been done indicating that transsexualism is a neuro-endocrinological birth disorder, resulting from being exposed to hormones in utero. Some transsexuals are straight and others gay; and the male-to-female ratio to the female-to-male is pretty much even indicating it is a physical, not emotional, condition.
I’m babbling again. Short version—yeah, men and women are different. Not all that much, but enough . . .
Understood and emphatically agreed. I am no great lover of pure psychological/sociological studies or theories. In fact, I have an extremely dim view of psychology itself. On the other hand, physiological and pharmacological research on the brain is quite fascinating, and altogether in a different league than the Jungian/Skinnerian/Freudian/etc. psychobabble that walks in the guise of science. I think “discipline” is a better term for the soft studies than “science” anyway.
What I was afraid you were voicing in the earlier post was a reluctance to delve into the whole issue of differences between the genders in any way because it was nonproductive for other reasons. When “The Bell Curve” fiasco came out there was an argument loudly put forth by many that even if there were measurable differences inherent in the races, this was something we should never inquire into because it raises sociopolitical issues people would be better off not having to deal with. The fact that “The Bell Curve” was bad science, and it asked bad questions founded on unwarranted assumptions is one thing, but declaring research off-limits because we may arrive at inconvenient, divisive, or uncomfortable findings is not a course I would recommend. Sometimes the truth is unpleasant.
The above quote is 100% correct. My wife and I attended a dinner where a doctor from the University of Chicago spoke on this very subject. Are men’s and women’s brains different? The answer: Yes. Given that the doctor has made this her field of study for the last decade or so and that she backed up her claims with many facts and some demonstrations at dinner I tended to believe her.
That said certain things can be said has broad generalizations but by no means DEFINES either sex. Man or Woman both can bend or break gender definitions and do so frequently.
Some Generalizations:
Men are physically stronger than women
Women have greater endurance than men
Men have better spatial ability
Women have better language ability
There were actually a fair number more than those but those are what came to mind.
These are NOT socialized traits but defined by our genetics. Male and female brains are wired differently. A man and a woman with identical brain damage (say from a car accident) show very different disabilities afterwards. Two men or two women with the same brain damage will show the same disability. In addition, tests have shown women devote more of their brain to language, men devote more to solving spatial issues.
Some of this can be explained by the way we evolved. When we were somewhere between monkeys and human we had something akin to a hunter-gatherer society. Men would roam far and wide in search of prey (other animals) to kill. Being able to build a good map in your head of where you are and how to get home was a definite advantage. Women stayed at home (for lack of a better phrase…sorry) and gathered food. Socialization was a beneficial survival trait and led to better language skills (or laid the groundwork for them till we got past grunts).
It is interesting to note that the women provided upwards of 80% of the food the tribe ate. Finding berries and what not in abundance was easier than chasing fast moving prey. While this may seem lopsided and unfair to the women it turns out this was a good division of labor. The men provided 50% of the nutritional value in the tribe’s diet (the women the other 50%). While meat was more scarce it had a higher nutrtional content than…say…roots.
So, in conclusion, it is wrong to make sweeping generalizations about men or women to suggest that it applies to all members of that group. You can, however, make statistically relevant generaliztions that will hold up under scrutiny.
Are men more violent than women? You bet but it’s more than the contention that men are nothing more than violent, no good bastards.
Quite simply men are programmed to be more violent. For all our notions of being higher than other animals we’re not nearly as far away from the animal kingdom as many might suppose. There are all sorts of instincts and programmed behaviors in humans. 4,000 years of society doesn’t just erase millenia of human evolution.
The male in proto-human society was responsible for hunting and protecting his tribe (not to mention his desire to hang on to a harem of females). Mother nature gave him greater strength and greater aggression to be better suited to this task. These were desirable traits.
20,000 years later aggressive traits are no longer such a desirable trait. Unfortunately 20,000 years just isn’t that much time in evolutionary terms so for the forseeable future we’ll have to deal with male aggression.
Does this excuse male aggression? Certainly not. But I am tired, as a man, of being labelled as some sort of brute who’s too stupid to act any better. To some extent it’s part of who men are and can no more be removed from them than a woman’s ‘Mystique’ (whatever that is).
It’s also important to note that while men may be quicker to violence than women women can be every bit as nasty and brutal as men. Many times they can even be scarier. Men can go outside and beat the crap out of each other and then be drinking and laughing with each other 10 minutes later. While it may be harder, a woman who is pushed far enough to beat the crap out of another woman is FAR less likely (in my experience) to be so forgiving 10 minutes later and seems far more tenacious in making sure the other person regrets ever having crossed her.
<nitpick>
Our lineage branched off from the one that eventually became monkeys long before any monkey-like traits appeared. You might be able to make the case that the common ancestor between us humans and our nearest relatives qualified as a Great Ape, but in no way do any human ancestors qualify as monkeys.
</nitpick>
While we may have split off on the evolutionary tree some time ago I think I can be forgiven the somewhat loose use of referring to proto-humans as being somewhere after monkeys. We do, afterall, share a great deal of common.
[/nitpick]
Again, it was loose use of the language and I suppose I should know that that doesn’t fly on this message board. Still I hope, for better or worse, that the gist of my post was unaffected by this error.
See? You just did what Lux Fiat was talking about. The leap from science to musing on the unfalsifiable is almost impossible to resist. We know nothing about the life styles of our immediate ancestors–we can make some good guesses, but whenever someone starts throwing around percentages you can bet the barn that they are extrapolating more than they probably ought. How do you think they possibly came up with “Women gathered 80% of the food by weight, but only 50% of the calories.”? Sure, we can look at modern hunter gather societies, but there has been alot of water under the bridge in the last 100 millinia. Modern hunter-gatherer societies are actually charecterized by a bevy of different eating styles–Humans are incredible omnivores, with the enzymes required to digest insects, all sorts of plants, all types of meat, fungus, everything short of grass and rocks. We can operate on diets of almost pure animal fat (Inuits) or completly vegiatarian. I suspect we could live on termites. Because of this incredible versitility it is impossible to make any statement that even approaches certanty about the way the society of early man functioned. For example, early man may well have subsisted mainly on carrion, throwing rocks at hyenas to drive them off a lion’s leftovers. Being cunning and quick would certainly be the desirable trait. We won’t ever really know, though, because all we have are some extremely limited bits of physical evidence.
There is another problem with these facile evolutionary theories: Men and women get there DNA from both men and women–most traits are not sex-linked, and though dramatic cases of sexual dimorphism do exisit, it is still the exception, not the rule.
Lux Fiat, I have really been enjoying your posts–anyone who envokes Strunk and White impresses me, and then you go on to say some terribly insightful things. Welcome to the STMB!
Is there really anything wrong with John Gray’s book? Let’s face it, it has seemed to help some people in their relationships. Anyone that questions it’s validity or finds it offensive need not buy the book or his tapes. I just don’t see how it is “dangerous”. It isn’t like it has been taken seriously by anyone in the scientific community. It’s kinda fluffy don’t you think? But if a couple of people get a little something out of it, perhaps something as simple as learning to listen to each other, then what’s the harm?
I’m sure this was my mistake and not the doctor I listened to nearly a year ago. I have a feeling that the message she was relating was more rigorously based in science than my simple post on this board. I remember her saying this but she was probably referring to current hunter-gatherer tribes.
I also noticed that I have a problem in my post discerning between early humans and our earlier, pre-human (when we were more animal-like than human) ancestors.
However, you said it yourself, we can make some good guesses. I see nothing wrong with speculation based on reasonable assumptions as long as it isn’t trying to be passed off as fact. It seems that is half the fun of this board…to speculate on various issues. If you think the assumptions made are unreasonable you’re free to say so and perhaps post an alternative.
It is dangerous because it perpetrates stereotypes. When people read this stuff they develop expectations about how people are going to act based on their genitalia. This is especially problematic when it comes to raising children–for instance, if you expect your boy to be mindlessly aggressive and a poor comunicator, and your girl to be uninterested in solving problems, just inetrested in bitching, and to only like sex once in a while when it is slow and sweet, this is likely what you will get. The problem with the stereotypes in Gray’s book is that they reflect poorly on both sexes and hold them to very poor standards, and the fact is the vast majority of people never rise above the level of other people’s expectations.
It is also inherently divisive, and makes it seem like the most important thing about a person, the main way to classify them, is thier sex, and suggests that true communication is impossible, or at best possible only through a translator. Imagene if Grey had written a book entitled Black people are from Jupiter, White people are from Saturn. Even if it helped racial tension in some schools, it would still be a bad thing.
Jeff_42:
This sort of specualtion is of course fun, and can atthe very least serve as a sort of inkblot to tell us what we think human society is like now, but there are two problems. The first is that we have so little evidence of early man–literaly a few skeletons and some extraordinararily simple stone tools that almost any theroy is as reasonable as any other theroy. Because of that, there is just no way tou can legitimatly look into the misty distant past to come up with an explanation for why women don’t score well on math tests and hope to get an answer that is any more likely to be relevant than any other answer. In short, it is fine for something to be shooting the shit about at a party, but it has no relevance when facing real social problems.
The second problem is what I like to think of as theory laundering. It is alot like those columns Ceciul ran 2 and 3 weeks ago where he showed how easily a bad piece of data could be inadvertently quoted in more and more trustworthy sources–each quoting a source slightly less trusteorthy than themselves–until finally a fact has a such a prestigious petigree that no one would think to question it. The same thing happened here–a woman you know told you some stuff. She was almost undoubtably simplifing it because you are a non-specialist, and one of the inevitable results of that sort of simplification is that you inadvertently come across as sounding more certain than you are (pausing to wade through the technical objections really slows down the story) and then you restated it to us sounding even more certin, and so on and so forth. This leads people to believe that we know alot more than we do and to think, perhaps, that certain things are inevitable when they are in fact the result of socialization.
I’ve been champing at the bit for the last day or so to find time to roll up in here and post. Good thing I waited, 'cause it turns out that my sentiments have already been expressed, and a fair piece more eloquently than I expect I would have managed. So: What Manda JO said.
Speculation isn’t always harmless. Especially if you preface that speculation with actual facts and numbers, and then extrapolate. Makes it seem less like harmless speculation and more like you’re laying it out as truth. And when the conclusion you reach is along the lines of, “Don’t piss a chick off, man, 'cause they can get nasty!” we have exactly the sort of thing with which I had a problem from the start. Emphasis placed on difference and otherness, to the point of dismissal.
Sorry about that (paraphrased) remark…by trying to be funny I end up being antagonistic. My main point was that while men may me more disposed to violence women are perfectly capable, if less likely, of being just as violent.
Manda JO:
Nature vs. Nurture?
While socialization has a huge impact on the people we grow to be I still feel there’s more nature here then it seems people are willing to admit.
I certainly don’t have a looking glass into the past. I do, however, think it is clear that nature (or evolution) has built greater aggression into males. Can I say with any certainty how our proto-human ancestors lived? Nope…as you pointed out I cannot.
However, I look around the animal kingdom today and see over and over again that it tends to be the male of the species that is more aggressive than the females. I read modern medical studies that show if you inject anyone with testosterone (females included) they tend to get more violent.
So, I still feel safe in saying it was proto-human males that started the hunting and it was the females that did the gathering. I feel safe in saying that evolution favored aggressive traits in males. Do I know this with any certainty? None at all. My speculation is, however, supported by observable facts in the present so it is hardly a random guess that I feel I can safely propose because it is sneekily undisprovable (does that count as a real word?).
When people argue today that it is socialization that makes men more violent I have some problems with that. If anything, socialization tends to restrain men (really anyone in the society) from undesirable behavior. It’s male nature bubbling to the surface when they get violent. Look at a group of violent criminals. On the whole they seem to be a less socialized group than ‘peaceful’ males.
Obviously someone can kill for cold, calculated reasons that have nothing to do with nature. Also, I by no means suggest that nature giving men a predisposition to violence is any excuse for that violence. Part of the human condition is to grow beyond what nature simply started us with.
Last, but not least, stereotyping is clearly wrong. Individuals can easily break stereotypes and frequently do. Still, some things can be truthfully stated of some groups as a whole even if many individuals in that group diverge from that ‘norm’. E.g. Males tend to be more violent than women. Are all males violent? Certainly not. In fact, most aren’t. But the statement is still true.
