While I agree with a lot of your other comments, I wonder about this one. AFAIK men are simply socialized not to respond too much on the emotional level at all, also not amongst themselves. They are also taught not to show too many emotions. So it is not about a taboo against responding to your girlfriend, but about not being sensitive to emotions or subtext with everyone, including men.
All this is, of course very, stereotypical. AFAIK many men (especially in younger generations) are more open and empathizing. And even traditional men are expected to deal with emotional stuff among each other, but they need to handle it in a roundabout way to avoid being considered a ‘sissy’ or ‘gay’. But they expect that emotions are expressed differently, and may not recognize it if expressed in a subtle way by their partner.
Also, it is possible that U.S. culture is somewhat exceptional or extreme: the whole cheerleader/jock thing for example doesn’t really exist in Europe, to the best of my knowledge.
I agree. Actually the story is somewhat artificial. Even if your girlfriend is merely making a statement, it is rude not to reply at all and get lost in your own thoughts. In a real conversation you are focused also on the response of the other person, and would not leave that person hanging for an extended time. So regardless of the direction of his thoughts, he should say something.
In reality, though, you would also expect facial expressions to convey something of his train of thought. But that would of course take all the fun out of the story.
You seem not to be grasping anything I wrote. I said a question like “Do you realize …” is just a way of communicating information, a rhetorical question, no more and no less than the wording of any other observation. I also said that in human terms, no actual human in the absence of a serious social disorder would fail to respond to a partner’s obviously probing observation about a relationship.
It’s exactly what you said:
Seems pretty arrogant to assume that the long silence should be about her.
As I noted above, it is the farthest thing from “a bland, factual observation”. It’s obviously a very important point to Elaine, who is reaching out for emotional reassurance. Only a socially dysfunctional insensitive clod would fail to respond accordingly. Dave Barry’s story is funny because it tells a basic truth that we all recognize, but tells it in a humourously exaggerated way.
Given that what you said is a matter of record, what I now see is that you’ve backed yourself into a corner with an ill-advised comment are now furiously back-pedaling.
This has always bothered me. I’m a former figure skater, in ice dancing. It involves working together with your partner–in my case, a young lady wearing little more than a leotard. I need to hold her, guide her, and get her where we need to go. In ice dancing, the man leads, always. Mistakes occur, and back in the day, my partner and I did everything from crash into the boards to me ending up holding her boob after a turn. I will admit, I was 16 at the time, and it was a nice accident, but still purely accidental. That wasn’t such a bad thing when I was that age, but it cost us the competition.
I never could figure out why ice dancing was so looked down upon by guys. Um … you’re holding young ladies wearing a leotard, you can hold them, bring them in close, look into their eyes, “sell” the dance–seriously, for a teenage boy, as I was, this was a damn sight better than getting rejected at the high school dance by girls who are wearing a lot more than a leotard.
But it was looked down upon by my contemporaries. Apparently, I should have been in a hockey rink’s locker room, wearing underwear and a jockstrap, with other guys in underwear and jockstraps, and no women in sight. Somehow, being with guys in their underwear was more “manly” than holding and escorting a young lady in a leotard around the rink.
That may be true but that wording appears nowhere in the original post that I was responding to.
And that may also be true but there was no “obvious probing observation about a relationship” in your original post. The exact words you used were “happened to mention”. That wording suggests a casual observation at best. Whilst in the kitchen this morning I “happened to mention” to my wife that there was a woodpecker in the garden. Was that an “obviously probing observation” ? Would it not be arrogant of me to assume that the following silence by her should be as a result of this ornithological probing? Does she not know that birds are important to me?
I suggest you read what I wrote again. You continue to misunderstand.
“Obvious” only because you know the whole made-up story, the exact wording imagined and the internal states of both involved. Not obvious at all in the way you described it in your post and it is your post, not the full story, that I was responding to.
You are right, it is all there in black and white and I’m not back-pedalling one jot.
An offhand comment, shorn of context, described in your words as something that the woman “happened to mention” does not necessarily demand a deep thoughtful response and it is arrogance by any party to imagine that it does.
The first has been subject to a massive push by society, while the second has not. Girls and women who engage in traditonally masculine endeavors are celebrated as taboo shatterers and trailblazers and such. Boys and men who do the reverse don’t have that same type of positive reinforcement.
Traditional male activities are more fun than traditional female activities. Traditionally girls and women were deterred from participating in them. As those barriers have fallen women and girls participate more in the fun stuff. There is no reason to expect that even if all these traditional barriers are broken down that there will still not be a difference in the popularity of certain activities between men and women. On top of that I don’t think it has anything at all to do with the question posed in the OP.
**[quote=“MandaJo, post:4, topic:941861, full:true”]
I think women are raised to pay attention to men in a way that men are not raised to pay attention to women. Somewhat superficial example: as a high school teacher, I will tell you it’s absolutely expected for girls to go watch their boyfriends play any Sportsball event, but not for boys to watch their girlfriends play. It’s just how it’s done. Boys are understood to be universally interesting, where girls are interesting only to other girls.
That sort of attitude pervades our culture.
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This. In Junior High (mid-1970s), for a time I was, in the way that 13- year olds can be, “dating” a girl named Amy Jo
She played softball. I went to all of her home games. Got a lot of grief from other boys. I can attest to just how "not done " this was.
This is beyond pervasive and well into Imprinted in youth by both parents. And it never goes away. It is a dynamic that pervades.
I also think boys are bigger showoffs than girls up to some point of maturity and that’s why they want anyone to come see them perform athletic activities. It’s not some all-girls-are/all-boys-are thing either. Anyone might want their parents to come see them perform, and a lot of people who excel at anything want to be seen doing it. I still think boys tend to want an audience for doing anything whether they are good at it or not.
As an aside. lumping sports and athletic activities into the category of ‘sportsball’ is dismissive and insulting to athletes of any sex or gender.
“Celebration” is not the only or, I would suggest, the main response women entering traditional male hobbies receive. There is a lot of well-documented hostility, harrassment and gatekeeping aimed at driving them out. E.g.:
Data were collected from an online discussion forum, and comprised posts drawn from 271 female gamers. Thematic analysis of the discussions suggested that a lack of social support and harassment frequently led to female gamers playing alone, playing anonymously, and moving groups regularly. The female gamers reported experiencing anxiety and loneliness due to this lack of social support, and for many, this was mirrored in their experiences of social support outside of gaming. The female gamers frequently accepted the incorporation into their gaming of specific coping strategies to mitigate online harassment, including actively hiding their identity and avoiding all forms of verbal communication with other players.
The “massive support” you claim these women had from society in general a) I don’t think was much more than vague approbation and b) has to be seen in context of the direct, personal abuse people received for breaking what were, it turned out, deeply held taboos.
Stereotypically male activities may or may not be more “fun” than women’s activities, but they tend to have a lot of perks. They can bring the participant honor, glory, money, prestige, respect, praise, deference, all sorts of stuff. They tend to make one feel tough, capable, triumphant.
Women’s activities tend to earn, at best, camaraderie, and perhaps some respect and admiration from other women who do the same sorts of things.
There is no such thing as a recreational activity which is objectively more “fun” than another recreational activity.
People’s ideas of what’s fun vary greatly from one individual to another. People’s ideas of what’s fun are also affected greatly by their socialization; plus which, if nearly all of a social group appears to greatly enjoy X, quite a few people will go along and pretend to/try to enjoy X anyway, even if they’re actually bored silly.
You are missing the point. There are a lot of things women and girls were barred from doing for a variety of entirely invalid reasons. Plenty of women and girls like sports just as much men and boys do and now they have more opportunities to participate. I don’t care how you characterize the activities, the ones with the overall popular appeal were often reserved for men and boys so it’s no surprise to see more female participation when those restrictions were lifted.
@TriPolar: I’m not surprised to see men take up quilting and knitting and cooking and jumping rope and playing with babies. Or, for that matter, dancing and horseback riding; which were coded female when and where I grew up, although male in some other societies.
And if you don’t care how you characterize the activities, then I wouldn’t characterize them as (not a direct quote, but the sense of it) ‘men’s are fun, women’s aren’t’.
I think there’s an example where the sexes are reversed, dolls. I don’t think many boys wanted to play with baby dolls. But something changed when I was a kid, girls started playing with Barbie dolls. And soon after G.I. Joe hit the market and suddenly things changed. Just like girls who had a toy where they could act out their perceptions of an adult woman, boys wanted to act our their perceptions of adult men. G.I. Joe opened the door to boys playing with dolls, a fun activity they didn’t get to do before.
The OP (me, hi!) posted both questions and consider them to be differing facets of the same phenomenon. After all, if more females migrate to male activities than vice versa, doesn’t that imply that females understand the male world better than men understand the female world? Or, more starkly, this provides indirect evidence that one gender is far more willing to understand the other’s world.
It could be that, or it could be something else as I pointed out. For instance, how do you know the difference is one gender being more willing than the other, or that they are demonstrating innate gender related behavior?
