If each gender saw itself through the others eyes...

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some women have just as much hair as men, and some men have as little hair as women. still not an absolute rule.

sex still isn't a need, unless you have an explanation for how people go without it?

Since when can a difference in experience not be assumed?

because the life experiences and biology are not necessarily different. they can be similar if not identical in many ways.

why would you assume the experiences to be different?

There are a lot of similarities, as has been established. However, there are many things men don't experience that women do, and vise verse. True, there are exceptions. Exceptions don't disprove the rule, though.

there isn't a rule to begin with. since you can't get into my head, you don't know whether i can understand and empathise with the experiences of a man.

Isn't that exactly what I'm arguing, though? None of us can get into someone else's head, and thus none of us can fully understand what the others are going through.

If you truly understand, that makes you an exception.

that's exactly what i'm getting at, and therefore there is no reason to assume that there is any internal difference between a male and a female as opposed to a male and a male. and there is no reason to assume that a man would have more trouble understanding a woman than a fellow man.

It's not an absolute truth, but it holds true for the majority of gender-typical individuals. All generalized statements about human characteristics are only true for the central part of the bell curve, even the statement that humans have two arms and legs.



Masturbation Or warfare, or drug abuse.

Ok, that was only half serious. The sex urge of a single, high testosterone male is a need that comes and goes. The moment he spots an attractive woman, his limbic system tells him "you MUST have her. This is not up for debate". This need can be ignored, like one might ignore a full bladder. It will subside for a minute or ten, or even for an hour, but upon the next visual stimulus or sexual thought it will return with a revenge. Over time, unfulfilled sexual desire can cause depression, irritability and aggression. Masturbation only helps to some degree, since it does nothing to change one's self-perceived pariah status.

i have a sex drive that is at least as strong as an "average" male (if you compare certain statistical numbers), so i do understand the urge. i don't need to have it explained because i believe i have experienced it as much as any average male. i have nearly passed out or vomited from desire. i used to leave the classroom in high school multiple times a day to take care of business. i get it.

about the body hair - even if something holds true for most people of a gender, it does not negate the experiences of the outliers. those outliers could understand what it is like to be a hairy male (or a relatively hairless female).

oh, also - about the idea that women are somehow scarce in western society... if you look at the census for Canada:

http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/auth/english/m ... ritalsex06

so it appears there is no shortage of women at the moment. there is in fact a surplus of single women in Canada. the sex ratio here is also fairly close to even.

I still doubt that women experience a high sex drive in the same way that men do. You can't deny that there are fundamental neuroendocrine differences between the genders. Since the endocrine system controls the sex drive, it is highly unlikely that you would experience arousal in the same way as a man, and vice versa.



I never said that it negates individual experiences. In my previous posts, I always added caveats like "there are many exceptions to the rule" and "we can't apply the rule to any individual". But exceptions are just that, people on the fringes of the bell curve. Just like the common traits of the majority don't invalidate their individual differences, minority traits don't invalidate the characteristics of the majority. Statements like "men have more facial and body hair than women" are still accurate on a general level.

you cannot know whether my subjective experiences are the same or different, just like you cannot know whether another man's are the same or different. we can keep going around in circles, but basically the point is moot - we cannot know what is in anybody else's head, so we cannot know who is similar and who is different to us. you're seeking to render my experience "different" from a man's, but you have no basis for that. it is, after all, subjective.


nobody exists as an average though - we are made up of individual collections of traits and not one of us is a perfectly average representation of a male or female. therefore, we all have areas in which we differ from the norm. many of those traits may cross over to the area that is average for the other gender. so there would be no reason to assume that we could not understand the experiences of the opposite sex.

i'm going to leave the discussion so that other people can continue (this debate cannot be resolved anyways by its very nature), but i'll lastly offer some thought from an article about a researcher who promotes the approach of supporting gender similarities as opposed to differences:


http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/bra ... snt-matter

That's good news for Canadian men Although this study doesn't mention how many men and women are single. Married people can maintain multiple relationships.

The situation seems to be more bleak for men in other countries. David Glowsky writes in a paper from 2007: "In Germany, single men above the age of about 30 years are confronted with a lack of single women in their age-group (Martin 2001: 310). This “marriage squeeze” rises to the age of 45, decreases slightly after this, but remains intact up to beyond 60 years."
http://www.diw.de/documents/publikation ... sp0061.pdf

In an older study, K. Davis and P. van den Oever examined the ratio of single men to single women in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Hungary, Japan, Norway, and Yugoslavia, and found the following numbers of single males per 100 single females:
20-24 years old: 168.1
25-29 years old: 177.6
30-34 years old: 133.2
35-39 years old: 103.2
40-49 years old: 55.7
50-59 years old: 39.5
60-74 years old: 32.4

This might have changed in recent years, but there does seem to be a worrisome trend.

That is basically what I'm saying. You cannot conclude that your experience resembles mine because just because you also have a high sex drive, because you can't walk a mile in my brain.

The only point where we are disagreeing is my belief that our biological sex difference makes this even more unlikely than it would otherwise be the case. I do have a basis for this belief, because if you are female and I'm male, I know for a fact that our endocrine systems and genitals are vastly different. As a result, sexual arousal works differently for us on a biological level.

Does a "different" sex drive really color your "experience" so much?

Imo the only things that it is impossible for the opposite gender to understand are things related to physical differences. Eg. I will never know what it feels like to have your balls stick to your thigh on a hot day (lol) and you will never know what it feels like to have another human living inside of you (neither will I but that is beside the point since it is within the realm of female possibility). All the mental/emotional things are subjective and I do believe that society creates a larger division than there needs to be with statements like "Women do -blank- and men to -blank-" and while -blank- may indeed be a trend, it isn't the cold hard truth that people take it as.

I don't understand women these days who claim to be so oppressed by men. Where? How? It seems like women have some things handed to them at times and other times they can work hard for it just like anyone else. I haven't felt any oppression in my life from men. The people who claim that it's so hard to be a woman always make me scratch my head. I have always had an aptitude for programming and if I had been able to go into that field I'd be surrounded by predominently male collegues but this would not bother me. Why would it? They're just people.. I've heard plenty of women complain about how their field is dominated by men but I fail to see how this is relevant.. ?

Its really thing about how deep people's internal realities are, which of course most people would never claim to be such or may not come off as overly 'deep' socially but their subconscious is still a pretty significant part of a person's brain. In that sense we're all enhabiting other worlds and talking to facsimiles, so so the difference between me and another guy vs. me and a particular girl wouldn't be megalythic, I'd say it would be at least half as amazing to see how another guy sees me but, I say only half because there is still - no matter how we slice it - a difference of instinct, difference of upbringing, difference of health, best practice, and safety issues that essentially connects the same dots of reality in a different way. Ie. people see the same physical things but the point it all starts from - them - will be its own unique world unto itself.


We can all read each other to an extent when it comes to conveying intentionality and trying to get the most accurate guess at another person's style, character, and preferences but that's really the best we can do. I mean I guess I'm saying this with the given assumption that you possess the same faculties we do - if you are a psychic and just never got around to telling us that would be a bit of a conversational game-changer.

Regardless though if our inner worlds (both within and across gender) weren't so different though you wouldn't have diversity in what people like to eat (net of allergies), what movies people like to watch, books they like to read, music they relate to, sports they're into, etc. etc. You'd also have no such things as either 'guy movies' or 'chick flicks' just like you'd also have no such genre of music as the one where its either a room full of guys listening or guys who dragged their girlfriends along, nor would you have any genre of music where the audience is mostly women or women and boyfriends/husbands they dragged along. We can debate how much of this is genetic and how much of it is cultural, I'd personally argue 60/40 but even at that - even if it was 100% cultural - we can see that people are rigid and they're quite strong in their preferences, in that sense regardless of what's nature and nurture either way we end up with rather etched-in-stone worldviews most of the way.