Lads: Learn to be Men!

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I have to confess then - I'm either profoundly ignorant or coming from a completely different world. I've always heard that young girls, if given trucks to play with, will coddle them, name them, and make-shift dolls from them much like boys given dolls with crash them together and try to make action figures out of them. I've heard from politically neutral sources that women have more empathy gearing than guys, that guys have more justice gearing, that women have more of a reward cascade dedicated to socializing than guys do, that guys single focus with more depth while women have diffuse awareness, women have a sense of time in their 20's and 30's where they're counting down the time that they can procreate while guys have a different set of things altogether. Either I'm interpreting this right or I've been maliciously given a lot of false information throughout my life and been surrounded - in a liberal area of all places - by people who's general behavior has backed up everything I've said so far in the thread.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 05 Feb 2011, 1:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Oh for pete's sake. You're kidding me with this, right?

Absolutely not.

I have you know i've used altoids tins as a wallet. thats right imagine me pulling money out of a metal box. once i even accidently dropped it in a group of people to show it was geniune metal.

dont mess with me

you crack me up richard.

I know a girl who is the single mother of a little boy. She bought him different toys, saying "My son can display any gender he likes." As soon as he could talk, he started saying "Car" "Plane" and he would try and fix his toys when they were broken.

He is now 6, and I saw him a month ago, he was talking on and on about planes crashing and trying to climb inside the baggage compartment at the airport. He is such a boyish boy, and with no outside influence whatsoever.

However, gender is a fluid, spectrum thing, and children are born with a range of genders. My friend was prepared for a gender-neutral child but was surprised by such a boyish son.

I have always been quite gender neutral, and have always felt different to my peers who were more feminine. When I was a child my closest friend was a girl who was feminine, but very tomboyish, loved sports and outdoor stuff.

The opposite scenario can happen, a child can be very gender-neutral or gender-different and be born to strong-gendered parents, ie the little boy who wants to play with dolls but has a dad waiting with baseball glove and ball...

I believe gender is genetic, and biological, and there are many different genders, not just two. And rather than society moulding gender, which it does to a certain extent, society gets in the way of people expressing their true genders, if it is outside the norm.

I completely agree, as a kid I was into purely geeky things; dinosaurs, astronomy, chemistry, wanting to paint like Bill Alexander or Bob Ross. When I got older it was video games, then by the end of primary school music really took off as an interest as well as making it. I wasn't super-masculine, had a lot of macho-type relatives who actually thought they needed to take over for my dad and toughen me up, which needless to say wasn't particularly appreciated although it did teach me exactly what I was up against in the broader world around me. In my earlier years my parents tried to get me into sports of all types and I didn't have the interest, they had to bribe me with video games to keep me in YMCA wrestling in 3rd and 4th grade! Martial arts I couldn't stick with either back then, though understandably finding something that wasn't a belt factory/boot camp that taught you nothing aside form how to dance was the overwhelming norm and I found lots of that.

What it comes down to though is this - people need to be nurtured for what they are as well as staying open minded to other angles of culture. A lot of times as well cultural narratives and dialogs will have a set of language that can be misinterpreted from the outside mainly because human experience is so strongly subjective, or at least from this point - we have language but we're still absolutely terrible at using it well enough to have much more than superficial communication in many cases.

Something else forgotten on this list - integrity, which I would hope is gender neutral. Integrity is one thing that's been unfortunately in rare supply these days and I think its integrity that I'm likely getting at regarding what a lot of authors on this site are hoping to expound (aside from obviously a lot of cute nostalgia and humor like the Altoid can bit or learning how to shovel snow the 'manly' way). It still stands to reason though that guys do need to teach guys integrity, women perhaps can teach guys integrity or be roll models but I don't know if its quite as automatic for boys to register unless their mom happens to have a reputation as the iron lady of the neighborhood.