gender difference
Saturday, 30 January 2010 10:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eI've been trying to distract myself while waiting for the phone to ring with news of Mali.
I got to thinking about claims of difference between the minds of women and men. In the past I've witnessed hot arguments on the subject, with both sides generally insisting more or less the same thing -- that men and women think and feel differently. I'd always been uncomfortable with such arguments as nobody ever gives any evidence; they argue entirely from their own experience, with one saying to the other that "You can never know what it feels to be [insert male or female here] because you are not." It was always a confounding statement to make, because they're right, nobody can know what maleness or femaleness feels like if they are not of that gender. However I always found it unsettling because I never felt a part of my gender, so I'd always felt a little mystified at what they meant.
It suddenly hit me today that the entire argument springs from a delusion. When people assume that what they feel is shared by others of their gender, they are making an unfounded assumption. They say people of their own gender feel a particular way, and that those of the other gender don't, but how can they possibly know if either of those statements is true? Clearly they can't. Neither sex has access to telepathy. Nobody knows what another human being feels like, let alone an entire gender of humans. And the simple fact that I stand alone, feeling not particularly female or male would tend to disprove it anyway. If I feel like this, how many others do?
I've met plenty of strong, aggressive, gadget-oriented women, and gentle, touchy-feely males. It looks to me that there is far more overlap between the sexes than there are distinguishing features, meaning that many, many people (most?) are not able to be easily fitted into any simplified box of shared experience or mental traits.
Despite it being one of those commonly accepted "self-evident truths", it seems it is really just another example of sexism.
I got to thinking about claims of difference between the minds of women and men. In the past I've witnessed hot arguments on the subject, with both sides generally insisting more or less the same thing -- that men and women think and feel differently. I'd always been uncomfortable with such arguments as nobody ever gives any evidence; they argue entirely from their own experience, with one saying to the other that "You can never know what it feels to be [insert male or female here] because you are not." It was always a confounding statement to make, because they're right, nobody can know what maleness or femaleness feels like if they are not of that gender. However I always found it unsettling because I never felt a part of my gender, so I'd always felt a little mystified at what they meant.
It suddenly hit me today that the entire argument springs from a delusion. When people assume that what they feel is shared by others of their gender, they are making an unfounded assumption. They say people of their own gender feel a particular way, and that those of the other gender don't, but how can they possibly know if either of those statements is true? Clearly they can't. Neither sex has access to telepathy. Nobody knows what another human being feels like, let alone an entire gender of humans. And the simple fact that I stand alone, feeling not particularly female or male would tend to disprove it anyway. If I feel like this, how many others do?
I've met plenty of strong, aggressive, gadget-oriented women, and gentle, touchy-feely males. It looks to me that there is far more overlap between the sexes than there are distinguishing features, meaning that many, many people (most?) are not able to be easily fitted into any simplified box of shared experience or mental traits.
Despite it being one of those commonly accepted "self-evident truths", it seems it is really just another example of sexism.
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 06:09 am (UTC)I was just pondering styles of shopping this morning.
There's certainly more masculine (quick, surgical strike shopping) and feminine (meandering, shopping-as-event) ways of doing things, and I'm not 100% sure they aren't instinctive rather than learned behaviours.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 09:25 pm (UTC)There may well be some generalised tendencies in things like spacial perception or verbal skills, but I think such vague things only really show up when doing statistical surveys of large numbers of people and are worse than useless for predicting the capabilities of any individual. I say "worse than useless" because not only is it ineffective in one-to-one dealings, but it misleads us into incorrectly typecasting people, leading to sexism.