What do men want?

orthodoc;886291 wrote:

Why do men say they want a woman who is warm and sympathetic, caring, etc., and then bail the moment she shows these qualities? Why do men decry the concept of the icy narcissistic queen, and then spend their lives chasing her? Do men really need to endlessly hunt but never make that perfect shot?

For me ... I'm interested only in terms of making sense of past failures. I've moved beyond the phase of trying to reinvent myself. I'm just honestly wondering.

Clodfobble;886364 wrote:

I'm not hip with the kids' lingo these days; what is GGG?

Dan Savage and his readers often use the abbreviation "GGG." It stands for Good, Giving, and Game, and it means one should strive to be good in bed, giving "equal time and equal pleasure" to one's partner, and game "for anything—within reason."

footfootfoot;886395 wrote:

(I didn't say footing, for obvious reasons)

...a lady in the street, and a freak in the bed...

[T]he demands of erotic ecstasy are often at odds with the dictates of social propriety.

orthodoc;886291 wrote:

Yeah, okay, get the shorts and knickers out of the way ... and then, not ignoring sex, but taking a broader view, that concludes it...

"I didn't learn how to shave from my father either. Which turns out, I think, not to be so strange. One of the the things about manhood I learned from my father is that it's a solitary experience, a land of silences and understatements, a place where a lot of important things have to be learned alone. Whereas womanhood, a lot of the time, is a thing you get to share."

DanaC;888842 wrote:

But...is that difference innate or culturally created?

xoxoxoBruce;888906 wrote:

It's the grandparents, it's all their fault, they screw up the kids and send them home for the parents to deal with. ;)

MYTH 2 Sex-related brain differences explain behavioural differences between the sexes

According to John Gray, author of Why Mars and Venus Collide, men are prone to forgetting to buy the milk because of their more localised brain activity (as quoted by Cordelia Fine).

It’s tempting to see the brain differences between the sexes, mythical or otherwise, and think that they explain behavioural differences; such as men’s milk amnesia, their superiority on mental rotation tasks or women’s advantage with emotional processing. In fact, in many cases we simply don’t know the implications of the sex-related brain differences. It’s even possible that brain differences are responsible for behavioural similarities between the sexes. This is known as the “compensation theory” and it could explain why men and women’s performance on various tasks is similar even whilst they show different patterns of brain activity. Bearing this in mind, readers should treat with extreme scepticism those evangelists who draw on supposed sex-related brain differences to support their claims about the need for gendered educational practices.

It’s also important to remember that behavioural differences between the sexes are rarely as fixed as is often made out in the media. Cultural expectations and pressures play a big part. For instance, telling women that their sex is inferior at mental rotation tends to provoke poor performance; giving them empowering information, by contrast, tends to nullify any sex differences. Related to this, in countries that subscribe less strongly to gender-stereotyped beliefs about ability, women tend to perform better at science. These kind of findings remind us that over-simplifying and over-generalising findings about gender differences risks setting up vicious self-fulfilling prophesies, so that men and women come to resemble unfounded stereotypes.

Dr Cordelia Fine will present her argument today at the Australian Council for Educational Research Conference in Melbourne on the brain and learning.

"This dialogue about 'boy brains' and 'girl brains' makes us overlook the important point that, although there are average differences, boys and girls are far more similar than they are different," says Fine, from the University of Melbourne.

Fine says many pop science presentations claim that neuroscience has shown important differences between boys' and girls' brains, and sometimes suggest the two should be taught differently, and possibly separately.

"These commentators appear to be getting a lot of attention," she says.

Fine says there are three problems with this trend, which can have damaging consequences - not only in classrooms, but at home and work.

First, she says, claims are often made on the basis of isolated brain imaging studies that have not been replicated, and in some cases have found to be wrong.

For example, says Fine, males are often described as having a "spotlight brain" that processes information such as language in one hemisphere, while girls are supposed to have a "floodlight brain", using both sides of the brain.

As part of this idea of a more interconnected female brain, females are supposed to have a larger corpus callosum, the thick band of neurones that connect the two hemispheres.

She says while older smaller studies support these differences, the bulk of more recent data has found otherwise.

"The data overall just don't support these ideas," says Fine.

However, she says, this has not stopped commentators from drawing conclusions based on the earlier studies.

Behavioural studies
Fine says while brain imaging studies can make exciting news, they overshadow decades of behavioural research that go against the idea that differences matter.

"In the majority of cases, the differences between the sexes are either non-existent or they are so small so as to be of no practical importance in, for example, an educational setting," she says.

"The problem is, when you start talking about girl brains and boy brains, you are actually encouraging educators to do something that all educators understand that they shouldn't do, which is to put people in categories rather than to look at each child as an individual."

Fine says the performance of girls in mathematics is a case that demonstrates the need to look beyond neuroscience to explain what is going on.

"Twenty years ago girls were doing badly at maths, now they're not," she says.

"That must have some kind of correlate in the brain because the brain is the basis of all behaviour. But it's certainly not some enduring quality of the brain."

Undertoad;889123 wrote:

And a male human and female human are genetically more different than a male human and a male chimpanzee.

As you know, men have an X and a Y chromosome and women have two X chromosomes. So besides the usual 0.1% (or 3.2 million base pair) difference between people, men and women differ by the presence of the Y chromosome.

The Y chromosome is a tiny thing; it is about 59 million base pairs long and has only 78 genes. If we look at base pairs, the difference between men and women would be 59 million divided by 3.2 billion or about 1.8%. This translates to men and women being 98.2% the same.

Men and women are actually a bit more similar as the Y chromosome has about 5% of its DNA sequences in common with the X chromosome. This would change the number to 98.4% the same.

If the 98.7% number for chimp-human similarity is right, then by this measure, men and women are less alike than are female chimps and women. (More recent data suggests that chimps may be 95% instead of 98.7% the same, but this is still up in the air.)

Now if we look at the gene level instead of at the base pair level, men and women become much more similar. If we assume 30,000 total genes, then men and women are about 99.7% the same instead of 98.4%. (I haven't been able to find a good number for how many genes chimpanzees and humans share.)

So is the bottom line that men and male chimps have more in common than men and women? Of course not. If we take a closer look, we see some of the dangers of looking at raw percentages instead of individual changes.

Another way to think about this is the 55 million or so differences between men and women are all concentrated on one chromosome and 78 genes. For chimps, the 42-150 million differences are spread out all over the chromosomes over many, many more genes.

In other words, while the quantity of changes may be the same, the quality is different. Even though we share most of our genes with a chimpanzee, lots of the chimp's genes have changed in ways not seen in people. These changes make a chimp a chimp and a human a human.

Some of the products of these changed genes in a chimp now do different things, or do things differently, do them in different places, do them more strongly or weakly, or even do nothing at all. It only takes a single DNA change to make a gene stop working and there are millions and millions of differences between you and a chimp. What all of this means is that in essence, chimps have many more "different" genes than the 78 different ones between men and women even though the % difference at the DNA level may be comparable.

regular.joe;889030 wrote:

I hope you are not pushing some sort of genderless utopian society where there are no men or women just humans who happen to be born with a penis and a vagina only to used for making little humans with an equal chance to have a penis or a vagina.

footfootfoot;889135 wrote:

Where do tomboys and homosexuals fit in your paradigm? Nature or nurture?

Undertoad;889137 wrote:

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

Aliantha;889161 wrote:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But this isn't just about the impact on girls. Think about what we tell our boys.

DanaC;889209 wrote:

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


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

Sundae wrote:

Anyway I'm not saying that planning for children is specifically girl-thinking. Not at all. The majority of straight people work on the assumption that they will procreate. I'm just saying that the choice of career involves gender in many ways which do not involve brain development at all.

footfootfoot;889260 wrote:

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;889343 wrote:

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

Sent from an undisclosed location.

DanaC;889350 wrote:

Non-comms, though. They're a different story. So far I am getting the distinct impression that NCOs were disproportionately victims of violence.

regular.joe;890210 wrote:

That is very interesting. I suppose I should stop baiting her in this forum and let her have a little peace to write her thesis.

regular.jose wrote:

It's a hard feat for us low context Mericans to pull off.

One need only look at a woman’s shape to discover that she is not intended for either too much mental or too much physical work. She pays the debt of life not by what she does but by what she suffers—by the pains of child-bearing, care for the child, and by subjection to man, to whom she should be a patient and cheerful companion. The greatest sorrows and joys or great exhibition of strength are not assigned to her; her life should flow more quietly, more gently, and less obtrusively than man’s, without her being essentially happier or unhappier.

Women are directly adapted to act as the nurses and educators of our early childhood, for the simple reason that they themselves are childish, foolish, and short-sighted—in a word, are big children all their lives, something intermediate between the child and the man, who is a man in the strict sense of the word. Consider how a young girl will toy day after day with a child, dance with it and sing to it; and then consider what a man, with the very best intentions in the world, could do in her place.

The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower is it in reaching maturity. Man reaches the maturity of his reasoning and mental faculties scarcely before he is eight-and-twenty; woman when she is eighteen; but hers is reason of very narrow limitations. This is why women remain children all their lives, for they always see only what is near at hand, cling to the present, take the appearance of a thing for reality, and prefer trifling matters to the most important. It is by virtue of man’s reasoning powers that he does not live in the present only, like the brute, but observes and ponders over the past and future; and from this spring discretion, care, and that anxiety which we so frequently notice in people. The advantages, as well as the disadvantages, that this entails, make woman, in consequence of her weaker reasoning powers, less of a partaker in them. Moreover, she is intellectually short-sighted, for although her intuitive understanding quickly perceives what is near to her, on the other hand her circle of vision is limited and does not embrace anything that is remote; hence everything that is absent or past, or in the future, affects women in a less degree than men. This is why they have greater inclination for extravagance, which sometimes borders on madness. Women in their hearts think that men are intended to earn money so that they may spend it, if possible during their husband’s lifetime, but at any rate after his death.

As soon as he has given them his earnings on which to keep house they are strengthened in this belief. Although all this entails many disadvantages, yet it has this advantage—that a woman lives more in the present than a man, and that she enjoys it more keenly if it is at all bearable. This is the origin of that cheerfulness which is peculiar to woman and makes her fit to divert man, and in case of need, to console him when he is weighed down by cares. To consult women in matters of difficulty, as the Germans used to do in old times, is by no means a matter to be overlooked; for their way of grasping a thing is quite different from ours, chiefly because they like the shortest way to the point, and usually keep their attention fixed upon what lies nearest; while we, as a rule, see beyond it, for the simple reason that it lies under our nose; it then becomes necessary for us to be brought back to the thing in order to obtain a near and simple view. This is why women are more sober in their judgment than we, and why they see nothing more in things than is really there; while we, if our passions are roused, slightly exaggerate or add to our imagination.

It is because women’s reasoning powers are weaker that they show more sympathy for the unfortunate than men, and consequently take a kindlier interest in them. On the other hand, women are inferior to men in matters of justice, honesty, and conscientiousness. Again, because their reasoning faculty is weak, things clearly visible and real, and belonging to the present, exercise a power over them which is rarely counteracted by abstract thoughts, fixed maxims, or firm resolutions, in general, by regard for the past and future or by consideration for what is absent and remote. Accordingly they have the first and principal qualities of virtue, but they lack the secondary qualities which are often a necessary instrument in developing it. Women may be compared in this respect to an organism that has a liver but no gall-bladder.9 So that it will be found that the fundamental fault in the character of women is that they have no “sense of justice.”

This arises from their deficiency in the power of reasoning already referred to, and reflection, but is also partly due to the fact that Nature has not destined them, as the weaker sex, to be dependent on strength but on cunning; this is why they are instinctively crafty, and have an ineradicable tendency to lie. For as lions are furnished with claws and teeth, elephants with tusks, boars with fangs, bulls with horns, and the cuttlefish with its dark, inky fluid, so Nature has provided woman for her protection and defence with the faculty of dissimulation, and all the power which Nature has given to man in the form of bodily strength and reason has been conferred on woman in this form. Hence, dissimulation is innate in woman and almost as characteristic of the very stupid as of the clever.

Accordingly, it is as natural for women to dissemble at every opportunity as it is for those animals to turn to their weapons when they are attacked; and they feel in doing so that in a certain measure they are only making use of their rights. Therefore a woman who is perfectly truthful and does not dissemble is perhaps an impossibility. This is why they see through dissimulation in others so easily; therefore it is not advisable to attempt it with them. From the fundamental defect that has been stated, and all that it involves, spring falseness, faithlessness, treachery, ungratefulness, and so on. In a court of justice women are more often found guilty of perjury than men. It is indeed to be generally questioned whether they should be allowed to take an oath at all. From time to time there are repeated cases everywhere of ladies, who want for nothing, secretly pocketing and taking away things from shop counters.

for their way of grasping a thing is quite different from ours, chiefly because they like the shortest way to the point, and usually keep their attention fixed upon what lies nearest; while we, as a rule, see beyond it, for the simple reason that it lies under our nose; it then becomes necessary for us to be brought back to the thing in order to obtain a near and simple view. This is why women are more sober in their judgment than we, and why they see nothing more in things than is really there; while we, if our passions are roused, slightly exaggerate or add to our imagination.

Clodfobble;890355 wrote:

You remember that "political compass" quiz that we've done a few times in the past?

I want a "gendered behavior" compass, and also a "gendered behavior you are most attracted to" compass.