hadespussercats wrote:laklak wrote:Wumbologist wrote:Kristie wrote:
Damn it! You should've told me! We could've hit the mall in St Louis!!
They have malls in DC, right? Does clothes shopping make me a gender traitor?
Depends. Shopping for ammunition, weapons, hardware or electronic devices is OK. Food shopping is questionable, but still within civilized parameters. Shopping for clothes or shoes is just gay.
CES, this is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about, half-a-million pages ago:
See - what we do here is talk past each other. I didn't say that men don't ever shop. What I am acknowledging is the evidence differences - the distinctions and we're talking about what might be the cause of them.
What I've posited was that the evident difference/distinction in behaviors MAY be a function of differing brain functioning.
I'm not trying to be sexist and say "women be shoppin'" type stuff. I know men buy things. But, you have to admit that something is afoot in the way men and women behave. And, there wouldn't be the jokes and things about women's shopping behaviors vs. men's shopping behaviors if there wasn't a distinction that most people find fairly obvious.
One of the theories going on out there is evolutionary psychology - which is that male and female psychologies - human psychology - is an evolved trait.
hadespussercats wrote:
hadespussercats wrote:* As for shopping, even stereotypically speaking men love to shop. They just shop for different things-- music, stereo equipment, instruments, computer stuff, cars, motorcycles, bikes, and related fun stuff for souping those vehicles up, boats, fishing tackle, hunting and camping supplies, beer and liquor, porn--
etc. etc.
etc., etc.
There are threads within threads here-- anyone want to have some splits made?
Yes, but the issue wasn't shopping and who likes to shop more, or whether it's "the same but for different things". The issue was that there are distinctions in behavior between men and women.
Let's assume they both love to shop -- but, men shop for guns and cars type stuff, and women shop for clothes and jewelry type stuff (using shorthand terms for brevity). What's the cause of the distinction? Pure culture? Pure evolutionary psychology? Genetics?
It certainly makes sense to me that the brain is a lot like other organs in the sense that it can differ between men and women, it can be larger, smaller, and its aspects or structures can be different, from person to person, but that its development falls in different normal distributions. Like hat size or dick size -- most men are size X in hat and Y in dick, statistically -- there is a normal distribution from "the norm" in a bell curve of some sort. So, some men have huge cocks and some have small hat sizes.
The brain is another organ. Most folks have brains that function around the average IQ --- but that too is a normal distribution, with some very very smart and some very very dumb. And, some with aptitudes higher in art and some in math or whatever - all sorts of differences, all of which -- given the entire population - do adopt a statistical distribution, with a "norm" within a certain range from the middle. Right?
Men and women's other organs differ. You ladies have ovaries and clits. Men have penises. Men tend to have more pronounced ridges at the eyebrows, heavier chins, and larger heads -- men tend to have more muscle content relative to fat, and men have longer torsos relative to legs.
So - why would the brain be different? We've found that men and women's brains function differently and we've measured some different aptitudes - verbal vs. math and stuff like that. Why wouldn't things possibly differ between men and women in terms of behavior too? Our behavior is controlled by the brain.
So, we would expect to see men with a "normal" distribution of like, math aptitude, and that curve would be shifted just SLIGHTLY to the right of the woman's curve, because men TEND to be a little better at math. There would still be LOTS of women that are better than LOTS of men at math. The same goes for verbal - women's bell curve would be shifted just a tad to the right of the male curve. Why couldn't that also be the case with things like "competitiveness" -- and whatnot?
And, clearly, if we have a brain-generated distinction in competitiveness, that is going to inform much of human behavior in other areas that might not seem so obviously related -- I mean - if we find that men's brains function to make them more traditionally "competitive" than women, then we might expect them to, oh, say, fight more, play war games more, etc.
I don't know the answer -- I'm just kicking it around. Do you think that male and female brains are the same, and that the difference between a man and a woman is that of the rest of the body, and then how we are brought up? That doesn't make sense to me. Why would the brain be a perfectly interchangeable organ male to female? We have different body fat contents but not different brain structure? I can't imagine evolution working with such a perfect dividing line -- like "ok, we're going to evolve into two sexes, and most of the organs are going to be slightly different from sex to sex, whether in size or shape and such, but not the brain?
This is precisely what I think. You do not become a survivor until you move on. A club for rape victims, alcoholics or drug users is OK, but a lifetime membership in it is a fool thing to do. Your "club" would be, for you, the only safe place to be, therefore it would limit your interaction with real life, and you would be unable to function. That's why I left AA, it contained victims and those who were unable to move on. Granted, some were better off in there, they would have been unable to survive without constant encouragement and supervision, but I felt that I had to join the real world to grow and heal. Scary, but true.
smiley to convey fellowship and good cheer.
anymore.
