What do men want?

[Aliantha]

I have a response to this thread, and i dont think dana will like it much. lol. I will have to open my comp for it though.

More later.

[Aliantha]

OK, here I am again, and so soon!

I think the one thing we all seem to forget about when we discuss issues of nature or nurture are the hormones. They're so different in men and women, and there's really no one I can think of, man or woman, who hasn't obviously behaved in a way which has been predestined by their hormones. Some minor exceptions would be those with gender identification issues, which research has suggested might be due a hormonal imbalance in utero.

Yeah, plenty of men and women are not slaves to their hormones in that they pick a fight with any man who looks at him sideways or become a blithering mess once a month, but that doesn't mean they aren't affected. They've just found a way to control those urges. To my mind, that doesn't mean they're any less of a man or woman, but they're definitely different, and can be fairly confidently predicted to behave in certain manners in certain situations. The only difference is the extremity of those behaviours.

About the child thing, I think most kids aren't really boys or girls till those hormones kick in. Till then, it's about the parents influence one way or another. We try very hard in our house not to influence the kids into any type of gender stereotype, but the boys have still turned out to be much like boys, and the girl is somewhat undecided. lol She's just a little ratbag atm really. You could dress her in anything and not know her gender by her behaviours.

I agree with foot on this one. I think it's a little from column A, and a little from column B as far as the how of us becoming masculine or feminine in our behaviours, but physiologically, it's pretty hard to beat nature.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Aliantha

OK, here I am again, and so soon!

I think the one thing we all seem to forget about when we discuss issues of nature or nurture are the hormones. They're so different in men and women, and there's really no one I can think of, man or woman, who hasn't obviously behaved in a way which has been predestined by their hormones. Some minor exceptions would be those with gender identification issues, which research has suggested might be due a hormonal imbalance in utero.

Yeah, plenty of men and women are not slaves to their hormones in that they pick a fight with any man who looks at him sideways or become a blithering mess once a month, but that doesn't mean they aren't affected. They've just found a way to control those urges. To my mind, that doesn't mean they're any less of a man or woman, but they're definitely different, and can be fairly confidently predicted to behave in certain manners in certain situations. The only difference is the extremity of those behaviours.

About the child thing, I think most kids aren't really boys or girls till those hormones kick in. Till then, it's about the parents influence one way or another. We try very hard in our house not to influence the kids into any type of gender stereotype, but the boys have still turned out to be much like boys, and the girl is somewhat undecided. lol She's just a little ratbag atm really. You could dress her in anything and not know her gender by her behaviours.

I agree with foot on this one. I think it's a little from column A, and a little from column B as far as the how of us becoming masculine or feminine in our behaviours, but physiologically, it's pretty hard to beat nature.

I agree, broadly with much of that. The difficulty though is what behaviours and talents we put under the 'nature' tab. To my mind, way too much of it is bundled in there, along with a general air of 'that makes sense what with our hunter gatherer past and all'.

So much of what we see as just the way men and women are because of what they are, has changed and shifted in different contexts, in different places and at different points in history.

[Aliantha]

I think the biggest problem we have as human beings is the fact that although groups of us display similar characteristics, we're all individuals, so we don't all fit into neat categories. In fact, I'd say none of us are completely one way or another.

When we stop searching for absolutes and become content to let things be as they are, and feel free of judgement and prejudice, life will be much simpler.

[Clodfobble]

In my mind, I see it as a scale from 1 to 100, uber-feminine to uber-masculine. 99% of women fall within the 1 to 75 range, while 99% of men fall within the 25 to 100 range. The 1% of each who are outside their birth range are most likely to identify as transgender. That leaves 2/3 of men and 2/3 of women in the "overlap" range, between 25 and 75.

Statistically, the loading at each end is significant: women on average can accurately be expected to skew towards the uber-feminine end, and men on average can accurately be expected to skew towards the uber-masculine side. Generalizations are indeed helpful when trying to make predictions, at least in the absence of any additional information. But the odds are not so great that I'd ever put money on an individual woman being to the left of an individual male. 50 women versus 50 men, yes. But not one on one.

[DanaC]

*nods* yeah. That seems to be very much in line with what the current research shows.

[lumberjim]

It has always seemed to me that, in the case of sexual orientation, both view points are right, in this argument. I kind of see gender confusion... or disharmony, if that comes off better, as the underlying cause of homosexuality.

In some people, nature makes enough of a difference in their orientation to "make them" what they are, so they end up orienting opposite to the norm. I've seen enough obviously gay kids to believe it.

I also believe that upbringing can have enough to do with a child's orientation. Pretty sure I've seen that too.

So, yes. The answer is Yes.

[DanaC]

A few thoughts:

Yes, there are some differences between male and female brains and experiences. But: they are not as fundamental or as innate as is often suggested.

This is the Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus myth. And it is a dangerous and unhelpful myth. It says we are so different as to represent almost different species. It reduces the common ground we share and emphasizes the gap that divides us.

To go back to Undertoad's point about genetic difference being greater between human males and human females than exists between male humans and male chimpanzees: really? That's where we're at now is it? Are we really saying that we have more in common with a chimpanzee of our own gender than a human being of another gender?

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. The male brain, the female brain. Innate, uncompromising, untranslatable difference.

It flies in the face of almost everything we know (admittedly not very much) about how our brains work, how we process information, how we develop cognitive skills and functions. But it fits with the lived experience of enough people to carry weight far beyond what the evidence tells us.

Time and again, initial studies will come out, get a mass reading in the press and become accepted as incontrovertible proof of absolute difference, and a bestseller book is born (for instance the recent: The Female Brain, followed shortly after by The Male Brain). And so the notion that women are genetically more competant with language, multi-tasking and emotional interaction, whilst men have evolved super computer, highly focused math and map reading brains takes root. It fits our existing prejudices (or rather our own lived experiences) and seems to make sense when set against our hunter gatherer past (about which, by the way, we all assume a certain set of gender roles which may well have been very different). And it comforts us, because it confirms our own sense of what it is to be male or female. Then the book gets revised (as with The Female Brain) and the headline fact about male and female language use and development that got everybody so excited gets removed because further study changes or even reverses the findings. But that gets a lot less press.

There is a comradeship in gender. When we laugh at the comedian who jokes about typical male or typical female behaviour, we include ourselves in that bigger picture, we fit a stereotype we want to to fit. And our partner fits a stereotype we want him/her to fit.

It is the ultimate confirmation bias.

But Men aren't from Mars, and I am not from Venus. And Undertoad does not have more in common with a chimpanzee than with me.

The war of the sexes hurts both sides. Why do we accept and embrace this perpetual conflict? The logic of a male brain / female brain model is deeply flawed. It is neat and tidy and simple. We have different brains, we think differently, we are different. And that difference is an unbridgeable gulf. It's not just a myth it is a dangerous myth.

In countries where there is a commonly held perception that males are naturally more suited to mathematics and science than are females, girls do badly in maths and science subjects and are largely missing from the higher levels of those fields. In countries where that is not a commonly held view, girls and women are well-represented in those fields. It isn't a case of girls not being allowed in (except for a few places), but rather they do badly. They are not good at maths and science.

In one study (which I can't recall the details of now, but will try to find it at some point) two groups of high performing maths students, of mixed gender, were given a maths test. One group were given information that showed boys to be naturally better at maths than girls. The other group was not given this information. In the group that was told boys are better at maths, the girls performed worse than the boys. In the group which was not told this, the girls did as well as the boys.

But this isn't just about the impact on girls. Think about what we tell our boys. That they are less emotionally intelligent than their sisters. That they are socially clumsy, and linguistically challenged. Whilst their sisters (they are told) share themselves and experience femaleness as some sort of warm and fuzzy love club, they're to be thrust out into the world, with their emotions battened down, never showing weakness, silently carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.

There are differences between our brains and our experiences which stem from whether we are male or female (or where we are on that spectrum). But there are also differences between our brains that stem from your specific genetic heritage and lived experiences and my specific genetic heritage and lived experience. Why do we put so very much into the thing that divides us a little?

Men: you do not have more in common with a chimpanzee than with your wives and sisters.

[footfootfoot]

Wow. Someone has a lot of free time.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[DanaC]

Someone has a chapter on interpersonal violence between soldiers, to write :p


I really, really have to stop getting distracted with this stuff

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Someone has a chapter on interpersonal violence between soldiers, to write :p


I really, really have to stop getting distracted with this stuff

Honestly, I'd be 10x more fascinated to read that than this discussion only because I haven't heard or learned anything new on this topic.

Sign me up for your other work though.

[regular.joe]

Originally Posted by footfootfoot

Honestly, I'd be 10x more fascinated to read that than this discussion only because I haven't heard or learned anything new on this topic.

Sign me up for your other work though.

My experience points at more interpersonal violence between soldiers of different nations. Especially different nations with different religious populations.

Sent from an undisclosed location.

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by regular.joe

My experience points at more interpersonal violence between soldiers of different nations. Especially different nations with different religious populations.

Sent from an undisclosed location.

cracking me up, Reg.

[Undertoad]

To go back to Undertoad's point about genetic difference being greater between human males and human females than exists between male humans and male chimpanzees: really?

And Undertoad does not have more in common with a chimpanzee than with me.

Men: you do not have more in common with a chimpanzee than with your wives and sisters.

This is the point that you have already debunked, I admit, and so I wish you had not used it as your jumping-off point, center point, and end point.

From before:

If societal, learned gender roles predominantly determine genderish behaviors, where did society learn them from?

From our forebears. From their forebears. From their forebears. from ourselves and from each other. Because they are, on the whole, useful to us.

Turtles all the way down?

Where did the ideas/practices begin, and why do they exist across cultures?

Time and again, initial studies will come out, get a mass reading in the press and become accepted as incontrovertible proof of absolute difference ... The logic of a male brain / female brain model is deeply flawed.

Well dang! Here comes another one, from last month:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1202161935.htm

In one of the largest studies looking at the "connectomes" of the sexes, Ragini Verma, PhD, an associate professor in the department of Radiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues found greater neural connectivity from front to back and within one hemisphere in males, suggesting their brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action. In contrast, in females, the wiring goes between the left and right hemispheres, suggesting that they facilitate communication between the analytical and intuition.

"These maps show us a stark difference--and complementarity--in the architecture of the human brain that helps provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks, and women at others," said Verma.

I don't think you should ignore that, and I don't believe you could debunk this one if you worked it full-time with the facilities and colleagues of the University of Pennsylvania.

This post is getting long, so let me address my next point in another one.

[DanaC]

Yes. I read about that. I also read a lot of the criticisms of that study and the implications that were drawn from it.

Here's one that rounds up some of the criticism:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health...e_imaging.html

The study in question, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used a technology called diffusion tensor imaging to model the structural connectivity of the brains of nearly 1,000 young people, ranging in age from 8 to 22.

One important possibility the authors don’t consider is that their results have more to do with brain size than brain sex. Male brains are, on average, larger than females and a large brain is not simply a smaller brain scaled up.

Larger brains create different sorts of engineering problems and so—to minimize energy demands, wiring costs, and communication times—there may be physical reasons for different arrangements in differently sized brains. The results may reflect the different wiring solutions of larger versus smaller brains, rather than sex differences per se.

But also, popular references to women’s brains being designed for social skills and remembering conversations, or male brains for map reading, are utterly misleading.

In a larger earlier study (from which the participants of the PNAS study were a subset), the same research team compellingly demonstrated that the sex differences in the psychological skills they measured—executive control, memory, reasoning, spatial processing, sensorimotor skills, and social cognition—are almost all trivially small.

To give a sense of the huge overlap in behavior between males and females, of the 26 possible comparisons, 11 sex differences were either nonexistent or so small that if you were to select a boy and girl at random and compare their scores on a task, the “right” sex would be superior less than 53 percent of the time.

Even the much-vaunted female advantage in social cognition and male advantage in spatial processing were so modest that a randomly chosen boy would outscore a randomly chosen girl on social cognition—and the girl would outscore the boy on spatial processing—more than 40 percent of the time.

Yet the authors describe these differences as “pronounced” and as reflecting “behavioral complementarity”—scientific jargon-speak for “men are from Mars, women are from Venus.” Rather than drawing on their impressively rich data-set to empirically test questions about how brain connectivity characteristics relate to behavior, the authors offer untested stereotype-based speculation. Even though, with such considerable overlap in male/female distributions, biological sex is a dismal guide to psychological ability.

Also missing from the study is any mention of experience-dependent brain plasticity. Why?
As prominent feminist neuroscientists have noted, the social phenomenon of gender means that a person’s biological sex has a significant impact on the experiences (including social, material, physical, and mental) she or he encounters which will, in turn, leave neurological traces.

Yet the researchers do not pay any attention to the gendered experiences (such as hobbies, subjects studied at school or higher education, or participation in sporting activities) of the young males and females in their sample.

This absence has two consequences. First, the researchers miss an opportunity to investigate whether gendered experiences might influence brain development and enhance the acquisition of important skills valuable to all. The second consequence is that, by failing to look at gendered social influences, the authors guarantee that no data will be produced that challenge the notion of “hardwired” male/female neural signatures.

These characteristics of the PNAS study are very common in neuroscientific investigations of male/female sex differences and represent two important ways in which scientific research can be subtly “neurosexist,” reinforcing and legitimating gender stereotypes in ways that are not scientifically justified. And when researchers are “blinded” by sex, they can overlook potentially informative research strategies.

If you read the whole article, you'll find lots of links for those assertions and criticisms.

This has some interesting stuff to say about it as well:

http://www.jpehs.co.uk/2013/12/03/br...female-brains/

There are also some really good academic responses, but I can't access them from home (the library license is only from on campus).