Do you think women are on average more altruistic and compassionate than men? Men murder many times more often than women and studies have shown that women are more generous and have more empathy.
How about sharing what you think about this? That might be a good starting place!
And people may be more inclined to participate in your thread if you are actually participating and not just proposing topics for everyone else to hash out.
Just a suggestion, Good Luck!
No, men are caught many times more often than women.
When men go bad they become violent. When women go bad they become vicious. Violence is more visible, and since historically in Western societies the decisions about relative levels of immorality have been made by men, the failings of the males have been given more weight than the failings of the females. (Who cares if they are nasty to each other, it’s just women.)
People are moral and immoral in various ways and varying circumstances. There is no single scale of “morality” which would make a sweeping judgment like you propose be a useful measurement.
You know, the sooner everyone understands that women are human beings just like men are human beings and thus have more in common with men than have differences, the sooner people will stop making nonsense statements about half the human race.
How do you define “moral” behavior? Do you think every culture in the world has the same definition? Do you really think it could truly be the case that those with XX chromosomes universally behave more “morally” than those with XY chromosomes, as though the morality genes are on that little tail of the second X chromosome that bio-men lack?
“Paging Miss Andry… Miss Andry to the white courtesy phone…”
Roughly 40% of murders go unsolved. Maybe those are the ones committed by cunning, careful, immoral women?!
Preach it brother/sister, though a lot of people seem to like the sort of divisive reasoning as seen in the OP, for whatever reason.
In fact a couple of years ago I was watching a BBC discussion panel of academics and other worthies when one of them stated, “Its becoming increasingly clear that women are better people than men”, the entire panel nodded sagely at this pearl of wisdom, including the men!
Altruism? Societies throughout history have never found it difficult to raise literal armies of men willing to die for one cause or another. Men sacrifice themselves for their families all the time. And there’s an awful lot more male martyrs than female ones; men will generally fling themselves in front of a woman to protect her, not the other way around.
Empathy? Women aren’t more “empathic” than men; they just care about people’s emotions more which isn’t the same thing. A woman who likes someone will be concerned with making them happy; a woman who hates someone will enjoy making them unhappy. Male murderers will kill the person they hate to get rid of them; female murderers will kill the loved ones of the person they hate to make them suffer. Another favorite is to poison someone with something radioactive or carcinogenic; to make the victim live in fear of cancer or having birth defects in their children rather than to kill them. And then there’s the women who poison their children to get the sympathy of others (“Munchausen syndrome by proxy”).
Caring about the emotions of others doesn’t make someone nice. Or sane for that matter.
This reads like someone whose entire experience with women comes from watching stand up comedy.
…What on earth is this?
That is Der Trihs. I presumed you had met him before.
Sounds like part Louis C.K. bit and another part The Sixth Sense.
Thank you.
In answer to the OP, since who knows when men, have decided that women were too fair, too dainty, too delicate to go to war or at times even leave the house. Being kept on a pedestal only to be tumbled down at the slightest hint of a flaw doesn’t make us more moral or nicer or any such thing, it just takes our normal human emotions and puts them underground, so as others have said, we respond with viciousness. Not that I think we should be able to just deck each other now and then like many men do, but we’re certainly no better or worse.
I wish we could be acknowleged as human beings just like men but I guess that’s still not in the cards.
No. Women are not on average more altruistic and compassionate than men.
The thread can be closed now.
More altruistic and compassionate eh? You guys don’t get out much.
On the other hand, I just saw this on my twitter feed:
You don’t often see shit like that coming from women. So who knows.
The lack of violent acts is not altruism.
As long as we’re throwing out WAGs…
Women are more emotionally expressive than men. A man and a woman could be feeling the same feeling, but a woman is more likely to show it and verbalize it. Especially compassion.
Women are more likely to put more stock in “being good” and pleasing others. We are trained from an early age to “be good”–which ultimately boils down to doing what other people want you to do. Guys are held to a less standard than women in this regard. If a man breaks from social convention, he gets the “Good ole Bob. He’s a character, isn’t he?” pass. If a woman does the same thing, she considered defective and bad. Every time I went against my mother’s opinion as a kid, she called me “hateful”. My brother might be called “difficult” or “willful”, but not “hateful” (unless he mouthed off). Women are expected to conform and not be individualistic. Men are encouraged to go against the grain and be as much of a “character” as they want to be.
Both of these things may explain why women come across as more compassionate and “moral” than men.
Both women and men get my nerves with this shit. Some women shit a load of bricks over the smallest “wrongs” and seem unable to differentate major crimes from the minor. While some men drive me crazy with the Mr. Spock I-don’t-get-why-you’re-so-hurt act. To be honest, BOTH of these extremes seem like put-ons to me. I think some women think that if they aren’t the first to squeal and cry, someone will revoke their “feminine” card. And I think some men think that if they show the slightest bit of sensitivity, they aren’t “manly” anymore.
I think you’re on to something that the perception of women as more sensitive and men as more distant is significantly impacted by social expectations for each gender.
I look at this in myself. I enjoy writing fiction, and without fail the men I write have anger management issues and I relate to them more than my female characters. Why? Because I have rage. I was raised in a household with a woman who was completely unable to control her highly destructive temper. I have her anger in me, I just know how to control it because I learned at an early age how destructive and hurtful it can be. But there are times I just want to destroy everything within sight.
So yesterday I was thinking about this and I asked myself, ''Why aren’t the women I write so destructive?"
And the only answer I have to that is that if it was the woman, that would make her a heinous bitch. I think it’s weird I can have all this empathy for male characters with violence problems, but not women. That’s a failing I see in myself.
Incidentally my current female protagonist is a straight-up murderer, so maybe I’m making progress.
I’m no more altruistic or moral than men as a whole. In fact, if we want to talk about particular men, I fail by comparison to Sr. Weasel. He is a better person than I am. I don’t mean that in a self-deprecating way, just a matter of fact one. I will devote a large amount of time feeling empathy for others, and he will just go out and do things to help people. Case in point, not a week after I had a miscarriage a friend of his called him up on the phone who had not heard the news. He knew she was going through a hard time so he sat there and listened to her and supported her for a good hour before he finally told her about the miscarriage. He said he knew if he told her right off the bat, she wouldn’t have felt comfortable talking openly about her own stuff. I know a lot of guys like that. Empathy is all well and fine but at the end of the day what matters is whether you can effectively act on it.