As Mark Twain said “Man is the only animal that blushes- or needs to.”
But how would the entire Japanese and most of the German porn industry make any money unless we were weird?
I jest, and I agree. Even ignoring the strange stuff, initial sexual encounters are usually a little challenging at the beginning of a relationship. Fun, but… you need to learn a lot about the person in a very short time.
Decades of shopping for antiques have convinced me that many skilled artists in feudal China and Japan spent all their time making various forms of pornography and sex toys.
For one, being able to identify and be identified as a particular gender has historically been important both for the purposes of finding a mate, and dealing with the gender-specific subcultures/hierarchies.
If we didn’t have that drive to exaggerate gender differentiation, we probably wouldn’t have those gender-specific subcultures/hierarchies. So I don’t think that explain it.
And for most of human evolution we’ve been living in small enough groups that sorting out who one could and couldn’t have children with would have been easy enough without such exaggeration. Other species with no more sexual dimorphism than we have manage it just fine. Finding mates for other purposes than child-producing (including for child-rearing after they’re produced) would be made harder, not easier, by exaggerating differences, especially when doing so denies actual abilities because they appear in the “wrong” gender.
Since they are quite common in primates and probably predate humanity, that’s unlikely.
Yeah, I thought of that later.
But theirs manage without artificial exaggeration of differences. So I still don’t see how they require the exaggeration.
At a guess; because humans are more flexible in terms of behavior than animals, artificial exaggeration is needed because there’s going to be a great many people who fail to fit into any instinctive template for male or female behavior.
Not with 100% confidence, but it does make some things more or less likely.
Well, this is exactly my point. Framing it as “this information contradicts those lines” implies that the lines are unidimensional: you’re observing a bunch of independent traits, classifying each one as male or female, and then discarding the ones that don’t fit the overall pattern. That’s different from drawing the lines in more than one dimension.
Of course. Nothing is going to tell you that. But no one said it would, right? The question isn’t “can we predict every aspect of someone’s personality based on their gender”, it was “how do we distinguish between the genders so easily”.
If that were the case, we wouldn’t be able to distinguish men and women at a glance. The existence of those clusters is why we’re able to do that!
That example was an image I grabbed from Wikipedia to illustrate the general point: it showed three groups (red, yellow, blue) distinguished by two traits (X, Y). I thought it would be obvious that the same principle can also be applied to two groups, but maybe I was wrong. So here, I’ve drawn one myself:
The dots form distinct clusters, and it’s easy to draw a line dividing them, but only in two dimensions. (It’s just a coincidence that there are two groups and also two dimensions; you can imagine the clusters existing in some higher-dimensional space instead.)
If you only consider one dimension (trait) at a time, it look like the dots in the middle are hopelessly intermingled:
I don’t think that’s a coincidence, at least for gender, because (as you note) there are also exactly two reproductive roles. Gender is essentially the psychological and cultural extension of sex: it’s how we recognize potential mates, how we signal to others that we might be their potential mates, and how we pass along the behaviors that might lead to reproductive success in a given culture.
That doesn’t mean it always lines up with sex, of course. Just like phenotype doesn’t always line up with hormone levels, which don’t always line up with chromosomes, etc. Each of these is a slightly fuzzy extension of some lower-level version of the same duality.
Because in modern human society, many of the traits we’d use to distinguish male and female are concealed under clothing. The worry that (cis) men would otherwise be perceived as women or vice versa would basically disappear in a world where clothing didn’t exist.
Also because the behaviors that lead to reproductive success in a given culture are often different for men and women, and since they’re culture-dependent they have to be learned anyway.
Exactly this. And that’s why parents who try to raise their kids in a gender-neutral way are often frustrated that they pick up on gender roles by themselves, or that when they try to get boys and girls to play together, they end up segregating themselves, etc.
In addition to what @Der_Trihs mentioned, another possibility is superstimulus. The traits we find attractive in women tend to be the ones that distinguish men and women, and more pronounced versions of those traits are more attractive (within limits).
For example, a lot of what makeup does is about emphasizing those existing differences. Women’s faces tend to have more contrast between the features and the surrounding skin than men’s to begin with; lipstick and eye shadow “work” in part by adding even more contrast.
In other words, human societies add an artifical layer because there isn’t, in humans, much of an actual difference there at all?
Quite possible. But it doesn’t back an argument that there is significant actual difference; it backs an argument that there isn’t.
Not likely enough to direct your interactions with that person for most purposes, however; and, depending on your relationship with them, often not likely enough to direct your interactions with them at all.
No; it was “what are the differences between men and women?” And a very great deal of what’s been suggested as differences aren’t actually differences except in the sense of an overall average, with so much overlap in actual individuals that they’re not in practice usable at all.
No I’m not; I’m refusing to do that. Large portions of the society, including as near as I can tell you, are doing that. I’m pointing out, or trying to, that those traits cannot be classified as male or female, because even if there’s an average difference the overlap is so large that they tell you nothing about any individual.
I’m aware of the society’s classification of them, and it’s in that sense that I’m pointing out that they’re very often contradictory – because I’m trying to point out that that classification does not work.
And I still don’t see how chopping things up into a hundred groups instead of two will accomplish anything useful.
No, it obviously isn’t; because even if I’m dressed in entirely male clothing so far as it’s visible and I just came out from under a tractor covered in grease with a wrench in my hand asking you aggressively what the hell you want, you’re still going to see me as female.
OK, I think I see what you think you’re trying to do.
But you’ve started with two groups that actually are distinctly separate on the three-dimensional graph; and you appear to be concluding that all of the different human traits associated by any given society with gender differences can be separated in that fashion, if you just add enough dimensions to draw the lines in. I don’t think they can. No human trait – not even genitals – separates out that clearly on a three-dimensional graph; and I don’t think most of them are going to on a hundred-dimensional graph, either, though if you’re not superfussy about detail the genitals might.
Plus which, again – even if it works, you won’t wind up with two genders. You’d wind up with a hundred of them.
In humans; and insofar as producing the baby. Once the baby’s out of the womb, even in humans there are lots of them. (And in other species there are lots of variations in producing babies, though I’ll grant that as we’re talking about humans here that isn’t very relevant.)
Mates as far as producing children. Mates for having sex with, not always. Mates for living with, not always. Mates for raising the children, not always.
And I don’t think there’s any human culture in which any and every person one could produce children with is considered a suitable mate. Humans in all cultures are capable of using multiple factors, some of which they need to be told about by others (“that person’s part of your lineage!” for instance) in order to select mates.
I agree that in the very long-term evolutionary sense, that probably is why most people are good at telling male humans from female humans under most circumstances (though note that there are multiple well-attested cases in which people who lived in societies that were strongly against crossdressing and also strongly against nakedness lived most of their lives as a different gender than the one their society would have assigned them. People saw the clothes and the body language and were fooled. Not an occasional person – thousands of people over multiple years, some of them living at close quarters.) But how useful it is in modern life, when the question of potential childbearing needs for multiple reasons to be discussed in words, is another matter.
And as far as a strong tendency of humans to divide things into two categories whether or not they fit – I see that all over the place involving things having nothing to do with reproduction, or nothing to do with it directly. Not all humans’ heads work that way – mine doesn’t – but a lot of people’s heads do. Whether, somewhere way way back in our heads and our evolution, this developed as a response to two-gender reproduction, I have no idea; but it causes a shitload of problems.
To the extent that they’re culture dependent, they’re not inherent. Which is my point. There is nothing essentially male or female about any behavior which different human cultures code differently.
Probably true to a point that it’s superstimulus; but unlikely that it works by exaggerating actual physical differences, as the particular traits stressed for a given gender vary from culture to culture and from time to time within a culture. For your specific example, in some cultures men wear the makeup.
Yeah, most humans lump everything into to categories- food/not food, friend/stranger, friend/enemy, action movie/ horror movie. Some of these categories are useful. Some are not.
The human brain also tends to see patterns even when there are none.
I don’t see why those two facts would not apply when dealing with gender.
If a Nancy Mace tried to put me on the spot with the gotcha question “What is a woman?” I’d answer:
“No true Scotswoman puts sugar on her porridge”
and leave it at that.
A lot of them are highly useful in some circumstances, and not useful or even harmful in other circumstances. The problem arises when people keep insisting on using them when they’re harmful.
I agree that there’s so much overlap in most individual traits that you can’t reliably classify someone as male or female based on that alone. But, as I think you may have realized below, that’s not what I’m suggesting.
In that graph, if you only know the X coordinate of a dot, or only the Y coordinate, you can’t reliably predict whether it’ll be red or blue, because although there’s an average difference, there’s so much overlap that it doesn’t tell you much about an individual. But if you know both coordinates, you can predict its color very reliably.
Another way to think about this would be that there is a range for each trait that you can use as a classifier, but the range of one trait depends on the value of another. For example, maybe for X<1, the dot is always red (there is no blue range); for 1<X<2, the threshold dividing red and blue increases along with X; and for X>2, the dot is always blue (there is no red range):
…but that becomes harder to think about as we add more dimensions.
That doesn’t contradict what I said. There are very few cases (perhaps none) where wearing men’s clothing and working on a tractor would make the difference between classifying someone as male and classifying them as female. If we call that a dimension, then there would be ~100% overlap between the male and female clusters in that dimension.
I’m not saying any one trait can be separated like that. In that graph, there are two traits (X and Y position), and neither one can be cleanly separated… on its own. But when you consider both traits at once, it’s easy.
Er, no. Imagine that graph extending into three dimensions, so that the dots form a cloud in 3D space. You can still cleanly separate them, but now you have to do it in three dimensions: the border between them isn’t a line, it’s a plane (though possibly a bent plane, just like the border between clusters of 2D dots is a line but not necessarily a straight line). But there are still only two colors.
Right, that’s the main kind of mating that’s relevant to evolution. If you can’t identify which other humans you’re capable of reproducing with, you’re not going to pass on your genes; if you just can’t identify the ones who make good long-term partners, you’ll still pass on your genes as long as your children survive long enough to have kids of their own.
Of course. Being able to tell that you’re capable of reproducing with someone (and letting them tell the same thing about you) is necessary for reproduction, but not sufficient.
Of course. I’m arguably one of those people myself.
It’s still just as useful, because each person is only capable of reproducing with one sex, and most of them are only attracted to that gender. If there were no way to tell whether someone was male or female without talking to them, wouldn’t that be one of the first topics of conversation on every first date?
There may not be anything inherently male or female about a specific behavior, but the idea of coding behaviors as either male or female is inherent (just like the capacity for language is inherent, even though we have to learn the specifics from those around us). In other primates, we can observe young males learning behaviors from older males and young females learning behaviors from older females, just like we see in humans.
I’d predict that in cultures where men wear makeup that emphasizes feminine features, there’s more focus on vanity and men competing on looks: they’re wearing it mainly for the male gaze. (I’m currently burning one of my ChatGPT Deep Research credits to see if there are sources confirming that.)
In the Gerewol festival of the Wodaabe people, the men are totally doing it for the female gaze. They’re trying to attract wives.
Which is to say that using any of these characteristics – as well as nearly all the characteristics coded male or female in any given culture – is useless for that purpose. Which is my point.
You can if your dots are chosen to be clearly separable in that fashion. You wouldn’t be able to if they were also mixed along the third dimension. And I can easily imagine your two colors mixed also along the third dimension. I can’t imagine a hundred dimensions clearly, but I doubt that you can either. (And for that matter: aren’t you presuming that you’re starting with two colors? What if you started with a dozen, or a hundred? Of course if you only allow for two colors you’re going to wind up with two colors!)
You can imagine human traits as neatly spread out along a line, sure. For some purposes it can be useful to do so. But those lines themselves are imaginary, and those lines themselves can be crossed up with each other.
If you have sex with enough other people, you probably will.
But I’ll grant that it improves the chances; and also that in most cases most people can do it, at least as far as correctly identifying the likely externally visible sex even if it’s not at that moment visible.
However if your primary intent in modern society is to produce children – you’d better also ask your partner if they’re fertile, and not doing their best not to be.
But they’ll have a lot poorer chance of doing so, at least through most of human evolution. Which is probably why so many (but not all) human males have evolved so much childcaring behavior.
And the amount of energy a human chidbearer puts into producing a child is huge; and risks their own life. If the child will have a poor chance of survival – why bother? With humans, picking the partner (if one has a choice) who will be a good long term partner is massively important – at least, in the cultures in which it’s the physical father who’s supposed to do the job, and not the maternal uncle.
Quite possible; it’s certainly widespread. I don’t have it, though; and there certainly appear to be other humans who don’t.
No, there’s a tremendous difference; it’s just that most of it is hidden. A man and woman’s brain differ at least as much as two different species of animal, but almost none of that difference is apparent even to the people in question, much less anyone else. All we see is a paper thin illusion presented to the outside world, a social interface that we mistake for our actual selves.
Yeah, looks like I was wrong about that.
In case anyone’s interested, here’s my AI overlord’s research report on men wearing makeup throughout history: ChatGPT - Men's Makeup and Gender
(The Wodaabe are mentioned toward the end.)
Say what?!
Cite, please?
Not interested; since I don’t know how much of it the AI, ah, made up.
That’s only the case for people who can’t be identified as either male or female - the truly androgynous. Such people exist, I suppose, but besides their rarity, I think they’re also a bit outside the scope of this thread about distinguishing men from women.
The overwhelming majority of people can be identified as either male or female, and that means there’s some separation between those clusters. That’s not even an argument, it’s a tautology: if someone can be unambiguously identified as male, they’re within the bounds of the male cluster and not the female cluster; if they were in both, it wouldn’t be unambiguous.
Obviously there are all kinds of other choices and factors that influence whether two people will procreate together. But identifying the opposite sex is a universal requirement for sexual reproduction in mammals, which means our ancestors needed the innate capacity to do it, which means we almost certainly still have it.
Hmm. Do people often mistake you for a prepubescent boy on the phone? Because a lot of what distinguishes (young) male voices from female voices is gender-specific learned behavior.