Do social interactions without gender exist?

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They obviously exist on forums where people don't know much personal information about each other. I'm just wondering if they can ever exist in real life. I notice that some interactions I have in real life are more gendered than others. Is it possible for any interactions in real life to not be gendered at all? Some people say gender always plays a role in how they interact with people.

Last edited by DevilKisses on 21 Feb 2016, 10:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Perhaps in segregated prisons?

When men and women meet there are many thousands of years of history and social interaction (mores) that effect the present interaction. To say nothing about pheromones.

Social contact between robots?

What do you mean social interaction with or without gender? I don't know how you define that.

She said "without". She did not say "with or without".

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Never thought much about it. But now that I am asked to think about it I guess that its true that in social gatherings of folks who are not LBGT I guess gender always has some influence on how folks interact (even if its unconscious).

Not really sure that it can be said to exist on the internet, either, since those without an obvious gender are generally 'men' by default assumption.

If I don't know what it is then how I am suppose to know what it is to be without it?

Is the question rhetorical or meant to be answered?

I'll take a stab at it:

I assume that by, "without gender" they mean "without perceivable effects of social gender roles".

Away from the Internet, I have such a relationship with several co-workers. Our department is somewhat unusual in that the founder of the company is a woman as is the head of my department. Because of this, there is very little if any of the usual gender role affects in the interactions within our department. It's simply not part of the corporate culture. However, even in that situation it does on rare occasion crop up in the guise of sexed stereotypes, such as when something slightly heavy needs to be moved.

That's why I never have a problem with this.

Without gender means that women and men don't get treated differently. They see people as people instead of their gender. They might also be focusing more on other traits, so gender gets mostly forgotten about.

I would think that such a situation doesn't occur very often. I think it's human nature to want to assign gender to other humans, creatures, and even objects. A ship is a "she". Why is that? If a person doesn't know the gender of an animal, such as a dog, it's often a "he".

And then Romance languages even assign gender to nouns. And other cultures assign gender to certain things, such as the yīnyáng, the yin and yang. One is female, and the other male. Certain aspects of the natural world are considered to be "yin", and others "yang".

Humans also have a tendency to anthropomorphize creatures, inanimate objects, and forces of nature. We also tend to create stereotypes. I think we like to put things into familiar categories in order to make sense of the world.

Perhaps among young children who haven't yet been taught such a thing as gender exists and the opposite one has cooties.

Those associations depend a lot on the language. Perhaps the notion that a ship is a "she" in English is particularly strong precisely because English nouns generally don't have grammatical gender. Regarding the "assumed" gender of an animal whose sex you don't know, it depends on the species: a cat is usually assumed to be a "she". In Spanish, the same used to happen with a fox (and you still see folk tales calling one a zorra, feminine of zorro, originally meaning a fox of unkown or irrelevant sex), but this probably changed because, nowadays, zorra is often considered a bad word, meaning 'slut' when referring to a woman.

Outside poëtry, it's unclear the gender association affects non-gendered entities, rather than just the nouns themselves. Bear in mind there are often synonyms with different grammatical genders referring to the same thing.