What are immutable differences between men and women?

[StillStunned]

After decades working at a computer, I'm more of a hunched man.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Whoa!! Dare I ask, how you know?

I had an ethology prof mad about cichlids and elephant seals.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I had an ethology prof mad about cichlids and elephant seals.

That's your story and you're sticking to it, huh?

 

[TarnishedPenny]

That's your story and you're sticking to it, huh?

The other explanation involves reincarnation and, while more informative, is subject to interpretation.

 

[AG31]

Indeed, and that's because men and women are the same species. There is of course a degree a sexual dimorphism, but in humans it is relatively mild. For most qualities and traits that you can point to a continuous distribution (height, weight, aptitude in certain kinds of physical or mental tasks), you will generally find two Gaussian peaks corresponding to each one of the two sexes.

Is there a stastitical term for the situation where one or some of a collection of traits might be required for something else to happen, but which of those traits are in play can vary.

For instance, maybe it's required that some of these traits be present for a woman to respond to a man sexually, but which of them are present doesn't matter.

relatively resonant voice, facial hair, defined muscles, an authoritative demeanor, a more prominent brow bone or flatter cheekbones than women.

What is the collection of such traits (some are required) called? If anything?

 

[SimonDoom]

The other explanation involves reincarnation and, while more informative, is subject to interpretation.

Plus, if you come back as a non-human people won't, of course, have any idea what you're saying.

 

[StillStunned]

An elephant seal sounds like a jumbo-sized gasket.

 

[ElectricBlue]

What is the collection of such traits (some are required) called? If anything?

The set of arousal, perhaps? Or a multiplicity, from which you can select any several, in different combinations, that together reach critical mass, and pow!! the width of the room longer matters. That tends to be how my mind works, as you know from my stories - there is never one thing that makes someone attractive (not that you can put your finger on, anyway).

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Plus, if you come back as a non-human people won't, of course, have any idea what you're saying.

That such people haven’t bothered to stay fluent is on them, not me.

 

[SamBomb]

I'm enby and find this whole thread weird.

 

[Lucy_Lastic]

My opinion is that it's genetics, which causes the male and female brains to be wired differently.

Or maybe it's thousands of years of being conditioned to behave in certain ways by an oppressive partiarchy?

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Or maybe it's thousands of years of being conditioned to behave in certain ways by an oppressive partiarchy?

It would be strange indeed if 'nurture' did not play some part, yet we know for a certainty that male and female physiologies have significant differences (beyond the obvious). Heart attack symptoms are different. Female livers are less efficient at breaking down alcohol. Female immune systems are generally stronger. Why is it so strange that brains might work differently as well, providing men and women with different (but overlapping) abilities?

One can view the two sexes as competitors or one can view them as complementary. I'll go with Door #2 - 'different' does not equate to 'better' or 'worse'.

 

[Lucy_Lastic]

Physiologies are different, but that's really a given.

Attitudes and beliefs and societal expectations are what I'm talking about.

Like - and let's take fairly recent things from America because they show a nasty extreme - girls being presented chastity rings by daddy; imagine promising your virginity to your fucking dad, no matter how symbolic it is. The on the other hand a young rapist being shown leniency because it might affect his future prospects. Boo fucking hoo.

Women having their bodies controlled by men. Fuck that shit.

 

[yowser]

A good recent book examines mammalian female physiology and behavior, tackling a number of these discussion points in detail. I like TP's take on it all: Door No. 2.

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon

 

[OffNSFW]

If we changed two categories to, say, six, all data would then be sorted into six categories instead of two, and we would be talking about the ways in which people of each of the six viable karyotypes are immutably different from one another.

Obviously, it is sometimes useful or necessary to group things into categories. But it becomes pernicious when we ascribe them to nature and start to force things to fit into them. As Hawking once wrote about the four kinds of force-carrying particles: "This division into four classes is man-made; it is convenient for the construction of partial theories, but it may not correspond to anything deeper."

 

[Lucy_Lastic]

I checked out a review - the first paragraph had this:

Aortic aneurysms occur six times more often in men than women. But if a woman does have one, it’s more likely to burst, she’s less likely to get effective treatment and more likely to die. These outcomes are a tangle of sex (influenced by chromosomes, physiology and hormones) and gender (how we identify, behave in our environment and interact with one another). Why is our society calibrated for men so that women receive substandard medical care?
and
A modern woman’s brain is not constructed from genetic instructions alone, untouched by the world in which she lives: “It takes a whole girlhood in a sexist environment to build a brain like that.”

Which kind of backs up my patriarchy thing.

 

[SamBomb]

This thread feels so wrong. Sex is bimodal. Gender is wide and varied. Pretending we have simple boxes is just wrong.

 

[StillStunned]

Pretending we have simple boxes is just wrong.

Well, strictly speaking, only about half of us have boxes...

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I think that the whole of human science and art has to be deconstructed and modified in order to incorporate modern gender politics. Nothing else will suffice, it seems.

 

[SamBomb]

I think that the whole of human science and art has to be deconstructed and modified in order to incorporate modern gender politics. Nothing else will suffice, it seems.

It's not modern though. Many societies throughout history have different views on gender and sex.

Non-binary and trans people have always existed. Sex has never been binary. Gender has never perfectly correlated to sex.

 

[AG31]

Or maybe it's thousands of years of being conditioned to behave in certain ways by an oppressive partiarchy?

Why did the oppressive patriarchy make it so likely that a man will think with his dick instead of his brain? Poor planning, I'd say.

 

[AG31]

Well, strictly speaking, only about half of us have boxes...

Inappropriately laughing out loud again...

 

[SimonDoom]

It's not modern though. Many societies throughout history have different views on gender and sex.

Non-binary and trans people have always existed. Sex has never been binary. Gender has never perfectly correlated to sex.

Based on what I've read, I don't believe this. I know it's popular to claim this, but the sources I've seen don't support this claim. It's an example of reverse-engineered history to support a popular contemporary narrative that's driven more by contemporary ideology than by science.

Yes, it's true that throughout history there have existed people who deviate from the norms concerning anatomical sex, gender identity, and sexual preference. That doesn't disprove the fact that for the vast majority of people, sex and gender are the same thing, gender identity is relatively fixed, sex has a biological basis, and to the vast majority of people gender seems binary. It certainly does to me. It appears to be that way for almost everybody I know. This is just as much a "reality" as is the "reality" to a differently-gendered person that gender appears fluid or variable, and the former reality is far, far more common. It has dominated all cultures throughout history. That many cultures have had many different ways of recognizing deviances from this norm doesn't change the fact that it's the overwhelming norm. Just read books. All books from all cultures throughout history mostly treat sex and gender as the same thing and as binary.

You can't have it both ways. If you claim that your personal, subjective experience of your gender identity should be validated by others, then you must also grant that everybody else's personal, subjective experience of their gender identity must count, too. The binary folks vastly outnumber the non-binary folks. My reality is as valid as yours, and most people see things the way I do.

The problem with these debates is that they tend to devolve into "either/or" thinking, which we don't have to accept. We can recognize that not everybody falls into the "simple boxes" presented by the traditional sex/gender classification system, and that allowances should be made in our language and our law for such people, while also recognizing that the vast majority of people DO fit into the simple boxes and that there are good reasons to preserve classifications because a) they're based on biological reality and b) that's the way the vast majority of people experience life.

A classification system that divides things into two sets is not rendered invalid by the fact that there are individuals who don't fit neatly into either set. If that were true, we would have a hard time ever classifying anything. It's OK for a classification system to proceed along the principle of "do the best you can."

 

[SimonDoom]

Why did the oppressive patriarchy make it so likely that a man will think with his dick instead of his brain? Poor planning, I'd say.

Depends on who's doing the planning.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

...male and female physiologies have significant differences (beyond the obvious). Heart attack symptoms are different. Female livers are less efficient at breaking down alcohol. Female immune systems are generally stronger. Why is it so strange that brains might work differently as well, providing men and women with different (but overlapping) abilities?

'significant differences' can be tiny. Statistical significance is often meaningless in practice. If you look at the range of any physiological function, yes, there's likely a difference on average, but that still leaves 95% or more of men and women all within the same range. Why do people focus on looking for spurious differences rather than being reassured by similarities? It leads to the common two gender roles being forced to be more different than those people might act, if not pressured to do differently.

Many women break down alcohol slower than the male average, sure. But there's also ethnic groups with greater or lesser alcohol tolerance - many people of Chinese origin can't drink alcohol. Men can exhibit 'female' symptoms of heart attacks (and I believe get equally ignored). If we're going to do science properly we need to look at the similarities and differences in varied groups, not just male and female, if we're going to improve outcomes.

We're at the very early stages of figuring out how much sex actually varies - most people have no idea if their chromosomes match their outward sex, for example. Unless you're an Olympic athlete or struggling with infertility, no-one ever checks your chromosomes! (OK, yes, I have looked at mine because I was in the lab and bored...) And gender is only really a big deal if where you live doesn't let you express it however feels comfortable to you. Unfortunately an increasing number of places seem to be enforcing more gender separation, which is as close to politics as I'm getting here.

At least it's improving in some areas. I had to spend half an hour explaining to a nephew recently why Eddie Izzard said in the 80s he had to steal make-up as there was no way a teenage boy could buy it in Bexhill-on-Sea. The concept of not being allowed to experiment with make-up was totally alien to a teenage boy in 2023.