I was all set to take up Dave’s defense here, but I see that Starbury has already done a dandy job of it.
I don’t get to watch football anymore. She makes me play tennis instead.
Now I don’t like football and would much rather play tennis anywhay even though I never picked up a racket before I met her.
Like I said: She’s changed me stem to stern.
Starbury, I’m not objecting so much to the OP’s stereotyping of women as I am objecting to the OP’s stereotyping of men. According to him, my husband is a “woman-with-a-penis” because he dosen’t care about sports, care about cars, and thinks Van Halen is one of the signs of the end of civilization. He seems to suffer from the sort of provencial mind set that says “most guys are like me and the guys in my immediate social circle, and while there may be other types of people with penises out there,they aren’t MEN.”
He seems to feel that these differences in opinion are male/female when in fact they are just normal ranges of difference between individuals.
My post was mostly in response to what fierra said. It seems to me that the posters who found Dave’s statement so outrageously sexist (toward women) would only have been happy if he had excluded all the women he wasn’t talking about by name. As it is, he specifically delineated the group of women he was referring to. (I won’t argue with your gripe about the “women-with-a-penis” comment because it was more generalized)
But I am kind of in disagreement with that last part of your post I quoted. Do you feel that it is impossible to make any generalizations based on gender? I realize that there is always going to be at least one exception to everything, but I don’t know…in my experience there are observable differences in the behavior of men and women. I don’t feel that acknowledging these differences makes me a chauvinist.
Yeah, pretty much. I hope you and your wife are very happy together.
(this is just a joke, Manda! I love you to pieces, really!)
Wow. What a firestorm. (in a teapot)
So if I take back the woman-with-a-penis comment am I ok with the stereotype police?
Starbury:
On the macro level there are a few slight differences in behavior between men and women. However, there are massive differences between the behavior of individual men and individual women. Because of this, making predictions about any individual man or any individual woman based on these macro differences is impossible.
Let me try and draw you a picture. Imagene that the ----- marks some range of behavior and that … are just place holders.
…--------------------… Women’s range of Behavior X
…---------------------… Men’s range of Behavior X
Now, you see, on the macro level slightly more women might be engaging in a given behavoir (or whatever) but if you were to pick one dash on the women’s row at random and one dash on the men’s row at random, they are almost as likely to be the reverse of expectations as the opposite. The vast, vast majority of people fall into the overlap.
And Dave, no one here is the “Stereotype Police”. We’re all here to be Ignorance Police (and Ignorance Policed, on occasion)
I think your “few slight differences” is a significant understatement. Beyond this, no one has made any predictions in this thread. The OP merely siezed on the more common scenario.
Like rmariamp, I don’t ever seem to meet any of these women who regard men as “fixer-uppers.” However, I’ve met plenty of men who felt it was their divine right to “fix” the woman they were dating/marrying.
Side note: I had a boyfriend once whose chosen method of getting me to cut back on swearing was to publicly sneer, “Do you eat with that mouth?”
To which the immediate response was, “I suck you off with this mouth and you don’t seem to have a problem with that!”
Dave - not if it is taken back with that attitude. If it is taken back because you didn’t mean to offend anyone & realise that you’ve grossly over-generalised, fine. But if it is taken back flippantly like that (an “anything” police comment automatically points out disrespect for the opposite point of view and an indication of an unwillingness to listen to them simply because you can pigeon-hole them into some nice, convenient PC, do-gooder label & forget them).
Starbury, I have only posted in 22 pit threads before this one, and never to initiate a flame of a poster for something before. I don’t knee jerk react on things, nor am I usually overly dramatic. I didn’t click on the title thinking “hmmm, that sounds sexist”, I was expecting a rant about his girlfriend or ex, or one of his friend’s experiences, or something similar, rather than a massive generalisation and some assumptions that I found personally offensive in his thinking.
Before even starting to post, I viewed his profile & other threads he’d posted to recently and couldn’t see him acting like a jerk anywhere. So I decided to handle it lightly and flippantly until SuaSponte called me on my comment. When I cited about 1/3 of my original reasons for fuming, he agreed how I could have reached my point of view (I won’t try to mind read and assume that he agrees that it is sexist or at least gross over-generalisation).
I’m not even bothered by the implication that it is only women that do this, for this issue is, at the very least, semi-covered in the closing line:
It was, in part, his gross stereotyping of male and female interests that outraged me, but also the last part of the post, which I’m going to cover below. Manda JO, thanks for picking up on that (“woman-with-a-penis” comment). I was going to post that point as part of a response to Starbury, but you beat me to it.
Green Bean’s initial post & Manda Jo’s chart of differences expressed the range of overlap between male and female genders between interests/abilities far better than I ever could. I want to tackle the second half of Dave’s post now.
Dave, as Manda Jo said, “woman-with-a-penis” devalues both men and women. It assumes that individual differences in tastes and activities are solely predicated on possessing (or lacking) a penis, or being oppressed by their wives/SOs not on personal choice, or experience. That any male who enjoys say, home furnishings, or does not like watching or participating in group sports, is not a true male, despite still, miraculously being possessed of a penis.
There is so much more to human sexuality than the mere presence or absence of a penis (and not just tits/vaginas/whatever, I know that’s an easy flippant answer to that, I’ve read the biology books). Likewise, there is so much more to individual choices, tastes and abilities than simply the genetic accident of having an XX or XY pair of chromosomes.
Anything that rights off the differences between people that make us so interesting to get to know as being this simple and this generic, devalues everyone, male and female alike. Men should be able to tapestry if they want to or play or watch base ball without being thought any more or less of a man because of it. Likewise, women should have the same freedom to do so without being thought any less feminine because of it. They should not have to put up with being called “women-with-a-penis” (or conversely for a woman who does what you seem to consider masculine hobbies, presumably, “men-without-penises”) and be derided for it.
Now to your last comment:
Women aren’t attracted to men because they may have the same taste in curtains. Whether you believe it’s pheromones or some other reason, that is not why women are attracted to men. Likewise, women that are attracted to women (or to both genders, or men to women, or men to men), aren’t attracted to them just because they can go shopping for chintz together! That one statement is so ignorant, that I was unable to address it earlier for sheer disbelief at the scale of the assumption made.
As well as underpinning the massive generalisation you made before that a male couldn’t possibly have the same interests as a woman, it displays an ignorance about sexuality, hetero, homo, bi or other that is just staggering and seems to have passed most posters by.
If you are a predominantly heterosexual female, you can’t and won’t just turn round & say “I know, I don’t think men suit me, we can’t talk about fluffy things on a Sunday because they’re always watching the game, I think I’ll go out and find me a nice lesbian”. It doesn’t work that way. If you are not physically attracted to them and sex is not involved, there will be no relationship as it was being discussed earlier. You can be damn good friends, or very uncomfortable fuck buddies, but that’s it.
Xcheopis, I love your response to that pud-puller!
You sound like me responding to my soon-to-be ex, who often thought I was not “feminine enough”. 
Are you saying that if you picked a 100 men and 100 women at random, that there would not be significant differences between the 2 groups, in the number who are interested in the topics that are mentioned in the OP (or at least most of them)? If you are not saying this, then I don’t see what your criticism is. If you are, then I think you are dead wrong, and need to provide some substantiation for your assertions.
Your points about the statement “Then you should have dated a girl (or man, if she’s saying it)” are valid, but are only relevant to the OP itself, not to your accusations of sexism etc.
IzzyR - how large a degree are you calling significant? If you said, out that 100 men there would be none who were interested in “feminine” pursuits, and out of that 100 randomly chosen women, there would be none who were interested in “masculine” pursuits, then yes, it is wrong. The men’s and women’s results wouldn’t be that different. If you are saying, will a slightly larger proportion of women say that they like choosing china, and a larger proportion of the men say that they like watching sports, then I’m not going to quibble with that (I haven’t seen any recent surveys). Manda JO already posted a sketch to try to illustrate that. By the way, regarding your question to her about predictions - I believe she was addressing Starbury’s question to her about whether it was possible to make any generalisations about gender, not impying that people would be making predictions about people based on this type of stereotyping (although ad-executives have done it in the past).
I never said that were no differences, in fact I said that the differences (between individuals, not just between the sexes) is what makes people so interesting. What I was objecting to is that, combined with the tone of the rest of the post, there is an implicit assumption that all women (or all men) are like a particular, outmoded, group of stereotypes and less than masculine or less than feminine if they break away from these stereotypes. They’re not. Even the ones most similar to the stereotypes probably differ somewhere or rebel occasionally ;).
I would think there’s a lot of room between none and slightly larger. Like ** a whole lot larger**. To pick a number, I would think that if twice as many men as women are interested in something or vice versa there is justification for calling it a typically male or female interest. I would think that most of the pursuits mentioned in the OP surpass that ratio.
This does not imply that only men are interested in “male” pursuits, or that only women are interested in “female” pursuits. It also does not imply that there is anything “wrong” with someone who is interested in pursuits that are more commonly pursued by those of the opposite gender. But it does mean that if you were chosing to illustrate a typical scenario it would make sense to chose the one that fit the sterotype, as it is likely to be a lot more common. (Sure there may be husbands out there who are trying to tear their wives away from the football game on Sunday afternoons. But it would be silly to pick such a case as a typical example).
If you will look at the final sentence of manda’s words that I quoted, you will see that she says specifically otherwise. If she meant something else, she can no doubt clarify it.
Izzy, I was explicitly addressing Starbury’s question about differences between man and women. hte very last line of that post was addressed to Dave, but that was a change in topic, which is why I offset it into it’s own paragraph.
manda, I don’t see where starbury (or anyone else in this thread) dealt with the issue of “making predictions about any individual man or any individual woman based on these macro differences”, hence my comment.
Nononono… All wrong. It’s: OK dear, go ahead to the mall, I’m busy playing with my computer…
Actually, it’s quite funny. If we’re not playing DiabloII, we’re watching football (she’s a Bears fan, I go for Denver). She prefers to drink hard cider rather than beer, but will drink beer in a pinch.
It’s cool being married to an NCO. She knows just where I’m coming from, becuse she’s there herself.
No, I didn’t deal specifically with that issue, but she definitely was responding to the question I asked directly of her. So its all good, right?
fierra (and Manda JO, too…I disagree with your individualist vs gender-specific argument): (let me preface this by saying I’m not trying to get into a contest of flames with you…I’m interested in getting an honest response from you, which may mean that this is not the right forum for the discussion) Again, the comment that got my attention was “rampaging sexism.” I still am unable to see how defining certain pursuits of interests as either male- or female-oriented is sexist.
To use your own example, in my own personal experience I would say that “choosing china” is predominantly a female activity (specific numbers out of 100? Well, I don’t know 100 women to be honest, but I’d say 96 out of 100 people interested in choosing china would be female)
So if I started a pit thread saying “Man, I hate it when women expect me to be interested in shopping for China over at the local Pottery Barn” instead of replacing “women” with “people”, I don’t see how that makes me sexist. Because the majority of people are going to be able to associate this activity with one gender, I think they are going to be able to overlook this generalization.
At worst, I think that would make me a rampaging generalist rather than a sexist.
There is a huge difference between these two statements:[list=A][li]96 out of 100 people who like shopping for china are women; and[/li]
[li]96 out of 100 women like shopping for china[/list=A]Maybe 96 out of every 100,000 women like shopping for china compared to 4 out of every 100,000 men - that fulfils statement A but is still less than 0.1% of the female population.[/li]
So let me just ask who has a quibble with the following statement?
“Assuming you can guess what someone enjoys doing based on their gender alone is stupid”
pan
Damn! I wish I knew how to spell the sound of a whip cracking. Cuz’ thats what I would put right here.