I found this

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

But if gender is a social fiction, why does it linger across almost all societies, even those largely disconnected from the world? Did they all make it up, or are their actual biological differences that lead to a different psychology which is then mined over generations? If it's a fiction, who wrote it and enforced it for century after century until it became rote?

And Joe, here's one for ya: why feel particularly anxious about not meeting this social standard, and not others? Why was this of critical importance to your psychology?

And mine. I was raised an only child, by a single parent mom, who's a feminist. I have always felt totally awkward about my role in masculinity.

Well it's totally OK to be me and you. We now know biology produces male and females with vastly different levels of various hormones, from vastly different genetics. Male and female psychology is different well before society gets to them. We're born with it.

Psychological sexual differences are the reason for the survival of all species on earth. Why would we imagine we don't have them?

And establishing dominance in a social structure happens with almost all living creatures. What we call "machismo", in other animals, leads them to maim and kill each other.

We think we're above all this, because we can reason and we've come up with a culture to lay over our reptile brains. The fact is we're pretty much chimps, and chimps are disgusting assholes, and we need to spend all our time remembering to not be like that. Overcoming this shit is the height of humanity. Guys like you should be rewarded.

How gender has been delineated is not uniform across the world, nor has it followed a straight path through history. Understandings of gender and expressions of that within society have been through many shifts and turns and continue to do so.

The eighteenth century understood gender very differently to today, and also very differently to the fifteenth and sixteenth century, who in turn understood it very differently to earlier and later centuries.

The notion of the workplace as a male preserve and the home as a female one, for instance, which still underpins much of our current gender norms, was a relatively recent development in western culture. The idea that women are emotional and men are rational can be traced to the enlightenment. Prior to that the belief was actually the opposite in some ways: men were seen as 'hot' and emotional, passionate etc. Women were seen as 'cold' and comsumptive.

How we have lived as men and women in the world has been ever-changing. Nor is it a straight line in one direction. We have had looser and tighter definitions of gender as responses to social and cultural factors throughout.

It is an immensely complex subject once you start delving into it, and quite aside from modern understandings of hormones and brain chemistry, history and anthropology both show gender to be a far more fluid and contextual affair than you might think.

[xoxoxoBruce]

How gender has been delineated is not uniform across the world, nor has it followed a straight path through history. Understandings of gender and expressions of that within society have been through many shifts and turns and continue to do so.

But it has always acknowledged a difference.

[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by DanaC

It is an immensely complex subject once you start delving into it, and quite aside from modern understandings of hormones and brain chemistry, history and anthropology both show gender to be a far more fluid and contextual affair than you might think.

Yes. Our current society, and any historic society after moving on from our hunter-gatherer stage, is a much different environment than the one we evolved into. If we want to determine any "true" (true probably should be taken with a huge grain of salt) biological gender roles, we would need to look at what it meant to be a man or woman in a prehistoric hunter-gatherer society.

I'm guessing this means that both manhood and womanhood meant having strong traits that led to the survival of the clan, but just in different ways. Also, I'm going to guess that prehistoric hunter-gatherer gender roles are not the stereotypical ones we think of today.