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

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I think a lot of where we do get around this problem is when we are clear that, lets say when it comes to a partner/fiance/spouse, we know that we don't understand what we don't understand and therefore - as adults - we opt not to rush to judgment because we realize its areas of them that we don't have an intuitive understanding of.

No one's a perfect dead-nail but I'm sure you'd find a lot of people where their distance from dead-nail is negligible, in a sample of millions of people (if we even decided to keep within the same society for ease of comparison) for the closest people to the mean you'd likely need an electron microscope - figuratively - to even notice where they aren't dead center. In understanding what a 'normal curve' is you have at least have 60% percent camped out within one standard deviation of the mean and by all intents and purposes we could at least take 20% and say that they exist within a close enough margin of error that you could call them 'average'. Note that human language isn't perfect, never will be, just like if you ask someone to draw a perfect circle it'll never happen - just like a circle is a concept so are average, normal, the use of tools such as normal curves, etc..

I think you may have answered your own question here. Chemicals are physical things, endocrine glands are as well as their internal gearing. In that sense even most of our emotional differences come down to being 'physical'. Of course they are things that we can socially compensate and work around more readily than...say...not being able to walk or having three arms... and that goes for anything that's internal state and pre-behavioral (ie. we can catch/filter it). I think what I'm getting at here - if there was no fixed nature to things like sex drive, no fixed nature to things like mood and endocrine chemistry, there would be no such thing as coping mechanisms; we'd find something about ourselves that was out of line or inconvenient to us or society, *snap* we'd fix it, and it wouldn't come back. The grind of dealing with feelings or drives that run counter to what's practical at the moment wouldn't exist. Same can be said for Asperger's as well, the first time we got chided by someone or enough someone's to believe it was inappropriate we would have become NT and that would have been that.

This thread makes my head hurt. Im not even going to try to make sense in here

But that is precisely contrary to what I stated. Sure chemical/hormonal differences are physical but I don't believe that they are as big a divider as most people think.

The only reason that genders are different is because the people in them are making them different.

Right but you still raised your objection in the form of a question to the extent that you said it wasn't physical. I was just indicating that the argument over 'physical' is more a problem of verbal construct than anything else.

Much like apples and squash are different because the atoms in them are making them different.

Thankfully male and female are more like heads and tails side of a coin than completely separate species, however I still maintain that we're at our best when we understand what we understand, accept that we don't understand what we don't understand, and try to stay as compassionate as possible both ways.

I guess something else I should clarify when I say that last part, I'm not at all saying people should *not* try to understand each other because of it, just that - when someone's different than you its just best to remember that if their preferences in certain areas are challenging, not similar to your own, etc. its best not to assume that they're just a version of you that's being impractical. When talk about the "We're all the same" logic going wrong that's one of the key areas where it really falls apart - it in a sense forces people to conform, it rules out their best selves if their best self is outside of what's considered the center, I also think in a way it makes gender relations crappier if we try to pin our own motivations on the opposite sex. Its things like that where the minute differences like hereditary and gender chemistry, even culture, matter if you want to use your empathy to its fullest capacity; otherwise there's a certain amount of self-righteousness trapped in because of that 'we're all the same' outlook.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 01 Mar 2012, 9:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

Thats the problem, we dont have actual differences. Ive lived in many places and noticed the differences between men and women change a lot by region. If it were something which we actually are different then all those regions would have similar things. My conclusion is that they are different because its what people tell them to be.

What you're saying is social conditioning *can* hide nature. I agree. That does nothing to disqualify the existence of nature and, probably your best places to look for these differences are the most liberal societies rather than the more conservative or even fundamentalist ones. The argument I'm making here isn't to put up dividers, I just don't like the self-righteousness that happens when people assume that people different from them are just rogue versions of them.

Firstly, the only question I asked was how much sex drive influences a person's life view. I don't see how anything spoken about after that answers that question. It was more rhetorical than anything, anyway.

Second, I never said emotional/mental things aren't physical. I gave examples of the types of physical differences that ARE different experiences between the two genders and said that I believe the rest is subjective.

I completely disagree with all of this. Let me break it down.


I don't think anyone (or at least not myself) was trying to imply that all people different than them are an impractical version of themselves. My perspective has more to do with that gender is completely irrelevant as to what makes someone else different from you. People differ in various ways from each other person regardless of gender.


I also believe that the gender roles as currently understood/defined are what cause people to conform, not the inverse as you indicated. People think they should do or feel certain things because of their chromosomes and people outside of the norm aren't a "real woman" or "real man". Eliminating those boxes doesn't mean that people should all be regarded as the same. Rather it means that they should all be regarded as individuals rather than a member of their gender.


Nor did I see anyone imply that we should all pin our motivations on other people (again regardless of gender.)


The differences DO matter. They just aren't as clear-cut as male/female and I don't see why we should behave as if either gender is supposed to behave in any particular sort of manner. The other sorts of differences you listed (culture, racial background, even chemistry is not as clear cut as male/female) are exactly WHY no one can really say men do blank and women do blank because there are other factors to consider.


Also, I feel that more self-righteousness comes in when people say "On you just don't understand how hard it is to be a woman!" than when everyone just evaluates people as individuals.

I fail to see how you equate lack of gender prejudice/stereotypes to meaning "we are all the same." My statement "there is not as much difference between the genders as society would like us to believe" wasn't intended to mean that we are all the same. But rather that there is no reason to draw the line straight down depending on what genitals you have. It just isn't relevant to who you are, imo. People should just be people, not stereotypes. There isn't a set list of personality characteristics that come with a particular set of chromosomes.

Last edited by myth on 01 Mar 2012, 10:04 am, edited 3 times in total.

K, got it. Thanks for clarifying.

Well considering im right now living in one of the most liberal places in the world I think im entitled to say that. Until you and everyone else can accept that we are different simply for the sake of being different and meet societies standards then we will never be trully equal

I'm not saying you or anyone else in this thread were saying that - just that when I look around at life as it is today and where our culture is it seems like that's at least as destructive a force as people judging over differences. I know a lot of people like to take the one problem at a time approach but I *think* we're far enough forward as a culture that we can handle both simultaneously. If some bumpkin decides that everyone not being the same means we need to go back to the 1950's they simply aren't worth listening to.


I don't disagree with anything you just said about what we should be striving for, just that I think we're simultaneously creating another secondary problem if we try to push that concept into absolutism. If a girl wants to take a guy on a first date to go see something romantic - it likely won't work. If a girl wants a guy to multitask, it likely won't work. If a guy wants to take a girl to go see Nascar on a first date - it likely won't work. Similarly if he wants her to do something geeky and incredibly focused, he'd be in luck if he was dating an aspie but otherwise it probably wouldn't work. On one side we are all individuals and should always keep that in mind, but at the same time the gender component is the gender component - its not really a problem unless we make it one, and it can be made a problem both by people trying to make a call on which is better or, for guys to think that girls who aren't geeks are flawed or girls who think guys who aren't more like them are flawed. If people can't bridge the gaps nothing really happens.


Well, first of all - on an aspie forum - I'm talking to some pretty self-aware people, so among us you won't have that.


I'm not endorsing that one or the other is 'supposed' to at all. I mean there are some niche obligations on biology that are more reflexive but other than that I'd completely agree - people should be whoever they want to be and express themselves anywhere on the gender spectrum that they feel they're on.


I think that's garbage as well. The more classy way for people to handle it is let an ignorant comment pass and then make a suggestion from a more logical/innocuous direction. People unfortunately are animals of ego and, when they say things as brash and forward as "You don't understand!", even if they weren't stating it to pick a fight, we're constantly bucking for social positioning either consciously or unconsciously and hence anything that sounds accusatory essentially sounds like a liberty or turf-grab and it closes people's ears.


I'm saying that when people falsely try to oversimplify all of this you have fallout and misunderstandings both ways. I was highlighting the problem I see in people's behavior, often, when their invited to act on impulse from the pre-conscious seed that the person they're dealing with is acting from the same pool of experiences that they are. Essentially it can be a pass to jump to conclusions. I'm not at all saying that we should be saying "Nevermind, gender differences reign supreme", just that we're making an almost equally big mistake to say they're nonexistant either. I also realize that you're not saying they're nonexistant, just that the idea that they are is being thrown around a bit in this thread and I'm partly addressing that in addition to answering your questions so to clarify I wasn't reading anything like that into your posts.

We'll have the capacity to be 100% the same, as I think your suggesting, when we blow away human DNA and essentially have our 'I' experiences uploaded to silicon chips where such things as X and Y chromosomes, hormones, etc. don't exist. We're essentially hyper-sentient mammals though and mammals are still stuck with some polarity at the base.