Biology Drives Gender

“Estrogen: Runs most of the male brain circuits.”

Runs most of the male brain circuits? Who would’ve thought?

I’m glad you found the recommendation useful! I guess I just fail to see why people would be so afraid that women and men might be different. It’s as if these particular feminists doubt the validity of their own claim that women are important and deserve respect too unless they can prove that women are just like men. It’s as if it is not enough to say women deserve equal respect simply for also be members of the human race and valuable contributors to society in their own right. But it’s not “maleness” that deserves respect; it is the unique and critical contributions each gender and each individual can offer. There are some things that men can do well; there are some things women can do well. They don’t need to be the same things. If anything, cases like China (with its One Child Policy producing a preponderance of male children, who ultimately became bachelors) and its rising crime rates due to gangs of men without women to keep them in check should provide a cautionary tale about the effects of having too many men and too few women.
Our differences should not divide us. Rather they should make us ever more aware just how much we need each other in order to survive and to have a well-functioning society (paraphrasing Rev. Desmond Tutu here).
Jade @ Tasting Grace´s last [type] ..Tell It To Me Tuesday – Free

A few decades ago some physicians thought that males and females were the same aside from the sex organs, so when a boy had his penis accidentally burned off during a circumcision his family was told to have him undergo reconstructive surgery, raise him as a girl and all would be normal.

As the boy aged he acted more like his brother than as a girl. Eventually, his parents admitted what happened. The boy was relieved and started to live as he was biologically determined.

I know of one case of the above happening and I imagine it happened more than once.

The idea that people are blank slates and they can be encultured to be either gender is absurd.

im not going to say i support all feminists and all feminist theory because i dont. feminism is an evolving movement just as most political/ relegious movements are. No two republicans agree on every issue im sure- same for us

if you say some emminent feminists deny biological gender difference I will take you at you word but most feminists I speak to accepted all this years ago. Any mother frankly, must surely accept the differences!!

please dont see me as a feminist apologist of any hue!

go easy on the medics of yesteryear too? At the time there was good circumstantial evidence to suggest nurture was stronger than nature. for example whilst in prison many men/women ‘turn’ gay. its widely accepted that single mothers are statistiaclly more likely to have a gay son due to the lack of a male figure. sexual prefernce can be massviely altered depending on where a human was born and brought up. so the idea isnt mad or offensive- it just turned out to be wrong. (at least according to todays orthodoxy)

sorry i had meant to add:

some gender differences ARE down to a patriachal society

in some cultures women are not allowed to speak let along hold opinions… are you saying thats an innate gender characteristic?

any girl not conforming can expect a thrashing… if shes lucky

most women of my generation were told to be ‘good girls’. a horrible double standard that still exists in western society today. most of these concepts stem from religion which I hope you would concede, is a tad patriachal.

(remind me which gender gets stoned for adultry again… I forget)

1. sometimes ‘turning’ is compulsory but no the majority of it is voluntary. Read any contempory lifer autio biog. (either gender)

2. sexual preference. still not well understood. some genes have been isolated as possible markers but any psychologcal journal on the matter will show correlation of powerful mother figure and absent/weak father figure often being in the gay childs history. its only a correlation- might be bogus- or other factors at play- maybe its what cereal you have!

3. geography can have a huge impact on sexual predilection. take a caucaisan baby from london and have him spend 30 years in, say Nigeria, and then ask him to describe his perfect girl. do you htink it will be the same as his identical twin raised in london? if you were born in china do you think you would have a differetnt opinion on your favoutie food or music? Im not saying it would make you gay/straight but its likely gonna effect other sexual preferneces.

At this point I think the following:

Biological differences in gendered behavior do indeed exist, but due to differing hormonal and environmental influences both the male and female sexes contain all the personality types within them from submissive males to submissive females, from promiscuous women to promiscuous men – and this isn’t accounting for the transgendered and others of the not quite xx or xy chromosome body type.

Thus shutting men , women, or trans people out of jobs or things simply because of their sex is wrong. As an example, If it’s true 99.9 percent of women in the US (at least 95 percent in my opinion) are wholly unsuited for use as front line combat troops. That being said, obviously some are, just as some females might love astronomy and some males love the more caring/nurturing profession of nursing rather than that of Dr.

In my opinion society should be set up so that those who want to do something and can hack the qualifications should be able to do it. Nonetheless, we shouldn’t cry sexism when finding that men and women tend to prefer certain occupations, nor should our sense of justice make it ok to basically forcefully or via intense social pressures people into one hole or the other.

Great overview, and I love the graphic. Now I understand why men can drive stick shifts and women can’t. Who would have thought it was hard wired? What about navigation/map reading skills? That one has to be hard wired as well.
.
The only thing I would change is the listening particle. I think men tend to actually listen better than women. My wife thinks the same thing for what it is worth. The difference is men either give you their whole attention or almost none at all. Women tend to try to multitask but often don’t do it as well as they tell themselves they do. So if you are talking to a man about something he finds uninteresting (for example repeating the same thing over and over), he tends to focus on something else (the circle and the square probably give a good hint). But when men are listening, they really are paying close attention.
Dalrock´s last [type] ..Old School Cinderella

There’s no study on whether boys raised by single moms are more likly to be gay, but one study found that boys raised by gay couples (male and female) are no more likely to be gay.

Also note that just because something is “hardwired”, doesn’t mean it’s unchangeable. I’ve had some success using NLP-esque techniques to remove my sexual desire for certain women when it was inconvenient, so I wouldn’t rule out that one can change their sexual orientation through extensive effort. (A mandatory disclaimer that I do not have any moral objections to homosexuality, whether or not it is choice).

dear all (and especailly April)
i did not propose my own theory on the causes of homosexuality- i dont have one.
what i said was that it is not fully understood within the scientific community.
if you go to about.com they have further info.
there is still hot debate in the gay, lesbian & transgender community and with the psychological and biological disciplines.
interestingly identical twins often share the same sexuality (straight or gay) but as often do not.
this suggests both genes and environment (or even choice) might play a role but there is not a supreme or accepted explanation at present.
as for the ‘father figure’ argument, go to gay rights.change.org and you will see an article on the latest research on this this theory. the site is actually highly critical of the data but the data is there nonetheless. I’m not saying how valid the theory is, I dont have the expertise or trianing required but its certainly an idea that has been in circulation for sometime.

thanks PJL- I appreciate those comments. J

for others:

another useful link talking about absent fathers and older brothers having a possible correlation:

http://utahcog.blogspot.com/2006/11/big-brother-makes-you-gay.html

Ms. Walsh,

this is off-topic but it doesn’t surprise me the least that many feminists avoid condemning the cultural parctices of Muslims and people of the Third World. They know that they could only do this by condemning backward cultures, which would obviously imply that they consider Western civ. to be superior to others since it treats women much better (among other things). This, in turn, would contradict the foundations of feminist ideology i.e. that Western civ., built by the horrible monsters known as white males, is patriarchal, oppressive, genocidal, colonialist, racist, sexist and responsible for all the evil in the world.

This is the reason I believe that MRAs should encourage Muslim scholars to attack feminist ideology. Feminists have gotten used to right-wing white men – Christian fundamentalists, conservatives etc. – attacking and criticizing them. They expect it, they have canned responses to it. But they aren’t as confident if Muslims do the same. It’s unexpected and they don’t know how to fire back effectively. Non-white right-wing women are also useful attack dogs against feminism.

@April
“It’s not comparable to the probable skin color of the people you’re likely to be attracted to based on geographical location, either. While it’s true that I’ll probably mostly be attracted to white men because I am around white men more often than non-white men, if I were a lesbian, my “racial preference” would probably stay exactly the same, only I would tend to be attracted to white women, rather than men.”

What a raging example of what is wrong with modern feminism. Doublethink, hypocrisy minus introspection!

So it’s “familiarity” that makes you attracted to whites, versus say blacks and Asians?
But the” oppressed” get to define what oppression is? Make up your mind please.

Since I don’t think your “excuse” goes over very well with non-minorities, what do really mean by the oppressed get to define what oppression is? Oh I know what it means. In practice, it means that a feminist can use “excuses” when she’s the “oppressor”, but when she feels “oppressed” she gets to act like a bitch.

Um. Oppression when defined at an individual level will ALWAYS become whim and accordingly rather than talk about prostate cancer vs breast cancer balance in federal research, feminists want to write columns about the “oppression” of a bride changing her last name. Power grab movements play loose and fast with the definition, because in doing so they can work the system to their advantage. However, oppression is really simple to define… disparity in the citizenship rights of a sub group of citizens within a governmental entity. Convention is not oppression, it’s peer pressure at worst.

There’s a very good reason that N.O.W is often referred to as the National Organization for Whining vs it’s official name.

Hollenhund, yet if you go to those developing (previously known as 3rd world) countries, it is FEMINISTS who are doing work there to change conditions for the betterment of women, children and in fact men.

There is no denying that religion as we know it now is largely patriarchal, including, if not particularly, the Abrahamic religions, of which Islam is one.

There are also Muslim women and men within the faith who are working to reform that. http://www.muslimwakeup.com was one such cluster of reformers. The women who are forming their own mosques are another. The rise of female imams and Islamic scholars is another. It is happening, just as it is happening in the other 2 Abrahamic faiths, but at a slower pace.

And while the West remains to be far ahead of the East in terms of overall progress of women, I’m reading here that there is a cohert of Western men that want to turn back the hands of time and look Eastward for change!

Why is it that the most advanced countries ALSO have strong Feminist movements?

Does nobody else see a correlation between keeping women down and the progress of a country?

Given the poor survival rate of infants, in most of human experience, merely sustaining the tribe required 3-4 live births per female and growing it took a lot more. How does a career outside the home and “independence” (a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle…) fit with that reality when there is no electric powered anything and life expectancies are short? Notions of gender relations that modern feminists take for granted would have in the past quickly led to the biological extinction of the people trying it. But go ahead, call it oppression.

April:
Ahem, might I remind you that a lot of the earliest european feminists and feminist supporters were men? It wasn’t just Mary Shelly writing about women’s liberation, you know. It’s true that when the initial and VERY powerless women’s organizations were formed in the US in the 1830′s 99 percent plus of members and open supporters were women, but even then there was quite a bit of male funding.

I’m sorry, but there’s always been a noticeable undercurrent of male thinkers who have thought that women have gotten a raw deal. And of course , at least in America and Sparta when it came to giving women rights, the majority of men supported doing so.

On the other hand it’s very hard *though not impossible* to find female thinkers who cared much about the plight of poor working men.

““On the other hand it’s very hard *though not impossible* to find female thinkers who cared much about the plight of poor working men.”

In our own country the lady who’s previous statement got pulled up by the Tea Party for being racist – regarding a White male farmer, who she ended up helping immensely (a factor her detractors failed to mention but the man’s family attested to). Despite originally wanting to get off the farm and go North, she returned to the South to aid the plight of poor, working farming men.

@Clarence:

blockquote>Ahem, might I remind you that a lot of the earliest european feminists and feminist supporters were men? It wasn’t just Mary Shelly writing about women’s liberation, you know. It’s true that when the initial and VERY powerless women’s organizations were formed in the US in the 1830′s 99 percent plus of members and open supporters were women, but even then there was quite a bit of male funding.

I wasn’t aware of that, actually. But I still stand by my statement that oppressed groups are largely the founders of their own revolutions. Are you saying that men started feminism as we understand it to have been at its most effective and relevant?

Also, although it’s quite a derail, I agree with you about capital-F-feminism largely ignoring working poor men. They are generally shrugged off as “still privileged” because of their sex, but the fact that they remain powerless and are themselves oppressed isn’t acknowledged.
April´s last [type] ..This just in- biology

Yep, and all the “grass hut and dirt” communities have organized feminist movements.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigggghhht.
It’s no mistake that the most developed countries on our planet are the ones that have embraced feminism.
Clarence, why don’t you take a flight into one of the more famously patriarchal regions of our world and see how long you can thrive or even survive there.

@Dalrock

My computer skills still suck however. Anonymous at 2:21 am is me.

Chili,
I’m not going to bother responding to much of your ridiculously dismissive screed.
After all, I’m sure you know your PHMT.

I’ll just say I’ll give a crap about female sexual trafficking when you decide to give a crap about things like forced impression of young male children into armies, and I’ll give a crap about the rapes that occur in places like -as an example- Bosnia, when you give a crap about the men and boys who are often slaughtered en-masse before those rapes take place.

If you want to play this sick little game I can match you. I’d rather not.

“”A lot of the grass hut places have matrilocal family structures and tend to have single moms and children with the dads treated more like uncles and not very incentivized to be in their childrens lives.”

Name at least ten.

I’ve done a lot of travelling in my time. I wanna see if you know your stuff.

Being a world traveller has not made me an “expert”, rather what it has done was made me regurgiate the kool aid. Most keyboard jockeys have no experience of the world outside of copying and pasting on the internet.
I have lived amongst matrilineal families. They were patriarchal with very present fathers and divorce as well as single motherhood were unheard of.
I have lived in villages with no electricity where the covering of my head was a requirement for going out of the house.
Again, fathers were very present, in charge, and again, divorce and single motherhood was unheard of.
Naming one is not enough because you yourself said “A lot of the grass hut places have matrilocal family structures”. If you were have said “a few” then one of the few might be enough. But I want to know where all these “lots” of matrilocal grass hut places are where fathers are marginalized.
Experience is the best teacher. Not the internet.

All developed and advanced countries have feminism as a common theme. End of story.

Concerned Mom,

“All developed and advanced countries have feminism as a common theme. End of story.”

Female economic empowerment and sexual liberation is brought about when a civilization reaches its peak; they subsequently result in moral decline, economic stagnation due to low paternal investment and demographic decline, the combined effect of which is that society becomes vulnerable to inner and outer shocks and eventually collapses. J.D. Unwin has explained this well in ‘Sex and Culture’. It happened to Babylon, Rome, Sparta and it is currently happening in the West.

“I’m not aware that women working hard all day in harsh jungles or under the hot sun in fields while the menfolk lay on their asses drinking the local moonshine is “matriarchy”.”

I’m not aware that men slaving away in factories, on the fields and dying en masse in wars as expendable beasts of burden while the womenfolk stay at home with their children is an “oppressive patriarchy”. Oh well…

Have you considered the possibility that men are “lazy” and violent in matriarchies because women select them based on their dominance and sexual attractiveness instead of their labour and provider potential – since women have the economic potential and thus do most of the manual work? That they don’t work hard because they aren’t encouraged to invest in their children since nobody knows the father of any child?

I haven’t travelled to Africa although it’d be interesting to know which countries you’ve visited and what is the reason in your opinion why men generally slack in said societies if it’s not due to the disincentive to paternal investment.

What Mom apparently cannot see is that the fact that many marriages are “arranged” in various hell-hole parts of the world is one of the things that sustains what little development they do have.

@Snowdrop111
“sex is bad for female bedbugs. A 2003 study for the Royal Society of London found that the more sex a female bedbug has, the shorter her life will be.”
.
There was a similar study on humans (male and female). They found that if you never have sex, you’d live forever. Then they reran the test and found out it only feels that way.
Dalrock´s last [type] ..Mrs Dalrock’s favorite wedding scenes

@J
You’ll be pleased to know that my navigation and map reading skills have gotten my family safely across the country and back over the last two weeks.
Now, if I could just get my husband to let me drive.
.
Nice work J! But I can see why he won’t let you drive. He’s got a good thing going there with you navigating and all…
.
BTW, I posted my take on your “sizzle vs steak” concept while you were navigating across the country. It is titled “If women prefer alpha, why are most men beta?”. Check it out when you have some spare time and let me know what you think.
Dalrock´s last [type] ..Mrs Dalrock’s favorite wedding scenes

Rum, you’re assuming I’m anti-arranged marriage. I’m not.
I simply pointed to the fact that in tribal socieites, there is very little, sometimes no, individual agency, so the kool aid myth that women in traditional tribal socieites are “choosing” mates based on sexual attractiveness is wrong. Many of them are married off at puberty before they know what hit ‘em.

I can’t claim to have read all the responses, but I think I’ve got a good feel for the direction of several conversations. I’ll just comment generally.
*In thinking about gender/racial sexual preference, we have to realize that it’s not a switch. That is, having one preference doesn’t mean not having secondary preferences. I think you’d find that most white men living among white women will tend to prefer white women. Plop the same white men in Korea, and I bet most of them will start to prefer Korean women. Send the men to prison, and some of them will start to prefer white men. Some will prefer celibacy. Since “outside life” provides both men and women, we can say that most of these men objectively prefer men to women. In order to discover any objective preference between Asians and Whites, we’d have to concoct a test environment where there were exactly equal social standing for all races, which is a bit of a pipe dream. So the most we can say is that preference is a strong indication of the number of options.

* One of the most damning pieces of evidence that sex differences are primarily biological is that the physical differences in female brains occur across cultures. If The Patriarchy caused them, we’d expect extremely patriarchal societies to produce female brains which were stunningly different from female brains in Denmark or Sweden, for example. But that’s not the case. Similarly, many differences in brain development begin in utero. Kind of hard to ascribe to culture.

* In thinking about pre-industrial society and feminism, it’s important to remember that birth rates go down sharply as industrialization increases. That is to say women have more time to do things besides be pregnant in post-industrialization. It takes time to be a feminist. In other words, the feelings of inequality might well have been there, and it’s impossible to simply point to the lack of a movement as evidence that there wasn’t a feeling of oppression.

* Arranged marriages have only been a prominent feature of human society since marriage, which is to say since property ownership. Humanity goes back much, much farther than that, and it’s actually pretty likely that women did have some role in mate selection for the vast majority of human pre-history. In fact, what we call “The Patriarchy” is best attributed to the addition of property ownership to hundreds of thousands of years of females selecting males who displayed strong “alpha” qualities. In an ironic twist, our growing brains allowed us to figure out how to form male dominated socioeconomic entities, and then later, how to stop being so damn patriarchal.
Hambydammit´s last [type] ..When the Truth Hurts

@Susan and others,

A gem today from one of the investment blogs I read (I’m an investment/finance type) which is directly relevant to our discussions here on sex, biology, gender, male-female dynamics, sexuality and attraction:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/08/seeking-the-truth-or-obscuring-it/

When the entire edifice rests on falsehoods, mistruths, faulty assumptions, false premises, future outcomes, as we have seen over the past few years, can be horrific. History teaches us that eventually, the Truth will reveal itself. When that happens, there can be terrible consequences: Economies collapse, wars occur, empires crumble, millions die.

Are you a truth seeker, or a truth obscurer?

I’ve wondered why I find this blog so compelling, and I think it is because Susan I believe you are a truth seeker. I believe this subject matter, male-female relationships and sexuality, biology and gender has many, many, many truth obscurers. We saw them in full force come attacking during the Jaclyn Friedman discussions. I am convinced they do not seek the truth but start with an ideology and then ignore all facts and reality. The Amanda Marcotte-Duke Lacrosse thing highlights that. For many people, truth is not important, especially if it intereferes with their political agendas and motivation for power as Barry highlights.

Ultimately, like the housing/finance/credit bubbles, this area of biology and culture and sex, and male-female sexuality will see the truth win out. Just a question of when.

“For whatever reason, in the U.S. at least, black men are perceived as highly sexual and masculine”

maybe its my imagination but is someone assuming the role of agent provocoteur around here?

Stellar post Susan !

And I concur with your comment, “We are always better off with more information, whether we like it or not.”

The more scientific data we have highlighting the similarities (and differences) between the sexes, is advantageous to all aspects of our interpersonal relationships. Additionally, comprehension and application of this data will help diffuse the propensity for emotional volatility between the sexes.
Nicole Johnson´s last [type] ..The Testosterone Tango

@April

“A person who feels oppressed defines what oppression is. And, pretty often, a lot of people agree that they also feel similarly oppressed, and they try to fight that oppression.”

What a load of manure. I can’t believe that this is what passes for serious commentary in any moderately educated population. It begs the question of exactly “who” is oppressed, hell, even why we should care about oppression. I would agree that European Gypsies are oppressed. I would also say that I don’t give a rat’s ass, given that they have shown zero ability to acclimate to the societies that provide the structure of modern civilization on which they rely.

“Oppressed groups define oppression” is just mindless question begging.

Damn. Now my day is ruined. I absolutely loath intellectual dishonesty.

A Concerned Mom says:

All developed and advanced countries have feminism as a common theme. End of story.

Only the Anglosphere has it in anything approaching the virulent male oppressing form we have it in America. And the rest of the Anglosphere tended to get it from America (though it’s true that first wave feminism developed in both Britain and the US contemporaneously in the second half of the 19th century primarily). Britain for example didn’t adopted the outrageous 2nd wave feminist argument that all marriage is automatically an equal economic partnership as soon as the man is foolish enough to say “I do”, whether he wants that equal economic partnership or not. This is absurdly the case up to any level of wealth, unless the man was smart enough to require she sign a prenup that will hold up.

It isn’t just divorce 2.0 through which feminist oppress men in America, though that’s damn bad when the marriage as lasted for a while and the man has built up some assets and has a couple of kids with her. Even when she’s the one who’s cheated and won’t stop, and /or stops having virtually any sex with him, she’ll almost always get custody of his two children while totally unenforced visition rights for him that are all at her whim and convenience, the house, more than half his earned assets, her lawyers fees paid by court order by him, so what incentive does she have to be reasonable and get the divorce over with, child support=also stealth alimony which is more than half his after tax take home pay in high tax coast states and which is totally unaffected by what she does or could earn, and sometimes if she’s older and has been lazily living off him when she could have gone back to work after the kids were all in school, even alimony on top of this child support=stealth alimony or after it runs out when the kids come of age.

It’s also VAWA, where men are guilty until proven innocent and get orders of protection forcing them to move out of their homes that they’re entirely paying for for three months or so, even if she rescinds her drunken statement “she felt scared” the next morning or week because “domestic violence always gets worse” lie the feminists. It’s also ridiculously hair trigger sexual harassment laws and civil lawsuits entertained by the courts, which give women a real advantage in office politics and can make them hard to fire.

It’s also favoring girls over boys in school and cheering at every advance for girls over boys rather than wanting genuine equality in school performance between the sexes as much as possible. It’s all this affirmative action for girls in the workplace and moaning about glass ceilings, while everyone knows that the really long hours tend to be put in by men and that women often find ways to get men to do part of their work for them — and are much harder to fire.

It’s also feminist lying about date rape and forever trying to push the definition of rape more and more so that anytime a girl has buyers remorse the next morning especially if she got a bit tipsy, then it’s automatically “rape” “because girls never lie about things like that”.

@ Dalrock

Nice work J! But I can see why he won’t let you drive. He’s got a good thing going there with you navigating and all…

Oh sure, take his side! I can count the number of times I’ve driven my husband over the last 20 or so years on one hand (unless driving someone crazy counts).

Actually, he refuses to let anyone drive. My oldest was informed that he will be allowed to drive the family down the open roads when hell freezes over.

BTW, I posted my take on your “sizzle vs steak” concept while you were navigating across the country. It is titled “If women prefer alpha, why are most men beta?”. Check it out when you have some spare time and let me know what you think.

I saw it, but I haven’t had time to post a well thought out response to it. I will though.

@Rum

How does a career outside the home and “independence” (a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle…) fit with that reality when there is no electric powered anything and life expectancies are short?

Hasn’t career outside the home for most people, male or female, been dependent on electric powered something or another? Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most men were farmers and most women were farm wives, whose help was indispensibe to running the farm. Even guild craftsman and shopkeepers essentially worked at home with the help of a wife. The only pre-industrial, non-home-based careers I can think of were doctor, lawyer and priest or nun. The Industrial Revolution moved work out of the home or farm and separated the genders in the workforce. That’s the start of careers and women working for employers, as opposed to working in the home, farm or family business.

“Feminism identifies how women are oppressed. Do you think that there is something wrong with that? “

Uh. Yeah, I have a problem with that. That’s why we are having this discussion. You see, unlike you, I am fully aware that most people, if they discount consensus, will be unable to discern pet peeve… from unfair..from oppressive. And this is especially true of folks like feminists who think their shit don’t stink.

… Is there some reason why humans are supposed to say that they are attracted to each and every person of their preferred sex or gender in order to avoid being oppressive?

Still my biggest problem is with your blatant racism. Blacks and Asians aren’t attracted to every member of their preferred sex, so why do you think Blacks and Asians would expect you/Caucasians to be? You seem very at ease when feminists define oppression, but when it’s a minority group all of a sudden what “they” mean by oppression is ridiculous and over the top. Understand the proximity excuse (“I only hang around white people, therefore I am more likely to date white people).” is oppression to minorities. And minorities, not April or John Mayer, are those who identify how minorities are oppressed. Right??

When the botched circumcisions in the early 1970s, they would chop off the penis of boys and reassign their gender, thinking they could live as girls.

The results were complete disaster. They found you could not, in fact, reassign gender to regular boys (maybe you can do adult gay men who want to be women, but that’s a different matter).

You seem on the right track with this well-researched post. Bravo. But I urge you to research the case of David Reimer, who was a victim of sexual reassignment when he circumcision went wrong — which is not uncommon. Rather than drone on, I’ll leave you with a link to his Wikipedia entry. His book is well worth checking out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

David would probably have liked to chime into this discussion but his harrowing life led to his suicide in 2004.

PS: Involuntary circumcision of male babies should be illegal. My body my choice should extend to men. If men want this procedure done, they can get it at 18.

… I’m attracted to all colors, and when I look at nudes I rarely have a preference.

As is most every other guy not in a supremacist group…
With that said, the elephant in the room is the abundant racism in female sexuality that is so often missing in men’s. I mean it’s 2010 and we still have porn starlets that refuse to do interracial. Feminists are loathe to apply “personal is political” to their vagina’s though. Ultimately they want women to maintain their power edge in sex and will do anything to avoid being put on the serious defensive… as April is attempting right now.

@Average Joe:

You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re either the most disingenuous troll I’ve ever encountered in the blogosphere, or your reading comprehension skills are nonexistent.

I’m done engaging with you in this idiotic conversation.
April´s last [type] ..A Serious Problem

@ April

You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re either the most disingenuous troll I’ve ever encountered in the blogosphere, or your reading comprehension skills are nonexistent.

Says the newcomer who opens with racists comments!
Feminists always need to find a “troll”… it could never be April who is at fault. April is perfect as all feminists are…

@ Clarence

Thanks for a good point. Yes, in some cases women face penalties from other women and men if they do not perform this procedure. However such penalties are rarely life-threatening, and more to the point, women are often at least part of those who promalgate the social sanctions.

Your welcome. My point though was not so much that the mother who refused to mutilate her daughter would be penalized, but that there is no place for the intact girl in some of these societies. In many tribes, no one will marry an intact woman, and there is no other social option but marriage. In those cases, what can the mother do but mutilate her daughter?

@ Days of Broken Arrows (cool name, BTW)

Involuntary circumcision of male babies should be illegal. My body my choice should extend to men. If men want this procedure done, they can get it at 18.

Interesting that you feel this. My sons were circumcised because my husband (no, not Jewish or Muslim) felt that they should “look like him.” It was a case of the same sex parent wanting the procedure as discussed above, but without any of the dire social pressure to influence him.

hi joe
it was to both of you i guess
J

Hi Clarence,
I think you make good points.
Personally I would be against conscription, genital mutilation of either sex and false accusation.

Of course there will be exceptions to some of the points I listed.
Condaleeza Rice, was very much a hawk back in 2003 wasnt she? – I get that shes female

But if you look at the answers to most of my questions and an overwhelming picture emerges, even if we restrict ourselves to just Western countries and the last 10 years.

Im quite optimistic however. I look forward to the 1st female president and the 2nd female UK PM.

I look forward to better gender balanced and minority political representation in my own country.

There has been massive improvements in gender equality in my lifetime- I really count my blessings there. But I’m mindful that inequality still remains.

If the religious leaders of the Jewish and Muslim faiths (all men by the way) wish to renounce circumcision then I would support and applaud them.

I dislike any form of oppression but the simple fact is that on planet earth males have more rights and opportunites on the whole.

I do understand that exceptions exist (eg parenting rights lean towards females) but i mean on the whole. in most countries. for large populations. not just london jet set and manhatten cool girls.

@jess

Women run most of the world. There may be an exception for parts of the Middle East but that is even debatable.

Your percentage crap is a joke. Women don’t get executed for adultery. They get the kids and all of their husband’s assets. Women can’t get a man fired just by making up a sexual harassment story. Women can get men jailed or murdered by making up a rape story. Women support every war out there. The list goes on and on.

Women run the world and that’s why the world is in such a sorry state.
white and nerdy´s last [type] ..A Working Hypothesis

Jess,

feminists omit some important facts when discussing ‘female oppression’. Patriarchal societies that oppress women also oppress men but in different ways – to be precise, they all consign everyone in rigid social roles. Men in such regimes are turned men into expendable beasts of burden and cannon fodder toiling and bleeding for the ruling class – in other words, they are also forced into roles that the other sex is shielded from (military service, hard physical labour etc). For women there is a ‘glass ceiling’ but also a ‘glass floor’. Draconian tribal and religious law extends to both women and men – don’t forget that.

Feminists – and sadly, women in general – also tend to generalize men. The reason is obvious. Only two groups of men capture women’s attention:

A: the men with political/economic power
B: dominant, confident alphas, thugs and other assholes who make them wet.

(There is obviously an overlap.)

Women, encouraged by feminist propaganda, got angry at group A because they oppress them and group B because they never commit and they sometimes abuse women physically. What feminists glossed over and average women failed to realize is that 85% of men are dutiful white-knighting provider betas who belong to neither group – therefore they are invisible to women – and avoid harming women altogether.

(The mirror image of this is men saying all women are cheating, lying sluts – they are describing the behavior of young, beautiful, slutty, unscrupulous women because other women don’t capture their attention.)

Thus it is fair to conclude that the misogynist patriarchy – where men as a group systematically oppressed women in order to benefit themselves – doesn’ exist and never actually existed, at least not in the way feminists want us to believe. What actually happened was that a tiny minority of men oppressed women AND men – the notion that there was an evil patriarchal brotherhood of men – with landlords and capitalists were high-fiving peasants and factory workers yelling “Yeah dude, we surely oppress those bitches well, aren’t we?” – systematically oppressing women in order to benefit all men is ludicrous. The male leaders of the church, the state and the economy didn’t give a damn about other men and had no intention of benefiting them – they benefited themselves by turning them into working drones and cannon fodder, and the most effective way to do that was to impose monogamy on the populace.

Therefore the statement that “women were oppressed in the patriarchy” is technically correct but it is also disingenuous since it doesn’t address the fact that a) men were also oppressed b) the majority of men never hurt women in any way and had no intention to do so. It is similar to a historian who condemns the Nazis for persecuting Jehova’s Witnesses and nothing else – it is true but omits the other groups they persecuted.

Of course, feminists say „patriarchy is bad for men too”. This is technically true but it is clearly meant to be nothing else than feminist propaganda for men. It is the equivalent of telling young men „follow us and liberated young women will take up some of your burden in the workplace and provide you with lots of hot pre-marital sex”. This, of course, is a crock of sh*t because a) due to female hypergamy sexual freedom doesn’t benefit most men b) feminists and women never actually intended to liberate men from their patriarchal role of expendable beasts of burden.

Are average men interested in sexual liberation and complete gender equality? Sure, as long as it means that

a) young women are willing to have pre-marital sex with both alphas and betas
b) women are free to enter the workplace but there is no AA and ridiculous sexual harassment laws
c) both women and men lose their sexual privileges (i.e. no pussy pass, institutionalized chivalry, oppressive divorce laws)
d) men cannot be forced to support children they didn’t consent to (after all, women can abort children they don’t want and have a monopoly on reproduction)
e) etc., you get my point.

Of course, women and feminists want NONE of that.

With all that in mind let’s look at your list:

„% of wealth held by men globally
% of land held by men globally
% of politiacl power held by men
% of religous power held by men
% of wars started by men”

As I’ve said, a tiny group of men tended to monopolize political-economic power and oppressed everyone else – in fact the monopoly was never complete since they were willing to let women into the realm of power (see Queen Elizabeth I, Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great etc). Yes, most wars were started by men – and the majority of their victims were also men.

“% of women allowed to hold muliple husbands
% of women men allowed to hold mulitple wives”

Polygyny benefits the tiny minority of powerful men and most women on the expense of everyone else. Use your brain. Polygyny allows many women to cluster around the powerful alphas instead of having to pair-bond with boring betas, thereby indulging in hypergamy. It is hardly a tool of female oppression. And what makes you think most women want to have multiple husbands?

“% of women who suffer orgasmic tissue mutilation
% of men who suffer orgasmic tissue mutilation (male cicumscision does not prevent orgasm btw)”

“Orgasmic tissue mutilation”? FFS how the Hell do people come up with such phrases? Desert tribal societies heavily restrict both female and male sexuality and FGM is a tool for the latter. It is a painful and dangerous one but desert tribes don’t usually invent sophisticated tools for anything. Your analogy is wrong since male circumcision is not its male counterpart, it is done for hygienic reasons.

“% of women who are executed for ‘adultry’ (often merely speaking to another man)
% of man who are executed for adultry”

Yes, society used to punish both men and women for adultery. So what? Are you trying to tell us that men are somehow given a free pass for adultery in a patriarchy? LOL!

“whilst the pain of other ‘unfair things’ like childbirth, mentruation, PMT and the menupause cant be blamed on men (we have to blame mother nature there) the things on the list above are avoidable and are perpetrated, now and in the past, by men.”

Many things only affect men and only mother nature can be blamed for that. Men can have erectile dysfunction, women cannot. Men can get cuckolded, women cannot. Men can get falsely accused of rape, women cannot etc. Cards aren’t stacked in favor of men in that regard.

Oh, come on. Scientists have been doing studies for decades to argue that women and non-whites are inferior. But that doesn’t make it true. Do we really believe that this time their science is not biased? 6 MRIs does not a valid study make. And even if it did, there is NO WAY of knowing if the brain was altered because it was born that way, or if the society influenced it to become that way.
We all agree, as you said, that men and women act differently. But can a scientist today say why any better than they could those decades ago?

For further reading, if you’d like: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2010-08-08-brain-scans-sexes_N.htm?csp=34news

4. it doesnt matter how the unfairness came about, be it by design or accident it came about and is grossly unfair.
5. i dont think most women want men to be expendable beast soft burden. I want me and my life partner to grow old together and look after our 2 children. i think a majority of women and men would like this this set up. i had a ‘bad’ relationship and then a few enjoyable flings prior to meeting my perfect guy. not an unusual situation.
6. your list:
a. im afriad you cannot control who people lust after. the breaking of social bonds was bound to benfit attractive men and women and unempower unattractive man and women.
b. sex harrassment laws are there for a reason. i think women who eploit them for obscene cash rewards are scum and anit-women. All women I know blame the panels for over compensation- that does not mean the laws are wrong.
c. divorce laws are designed around 2 principles, child protection and keeping the wife to a resaonble qualty of life. i think thats fair- what would the alternative be? if your father have divorced your mother and left her destitute, with no property, finance, qualifications, or employment history would you be happy about that?

im sure everything you say is perfectly accurate. that is not the point. the point is that historically woman have had an additional set of ‘oppressional’ burdens. We only got the vote in the UK relatively recently!!! Equality laws are also relativley recent. Im not saying your great grandfather had the keys to the city, but he had more rights and freedoms than your great grandmother.

As for the top 1% argument, I’m not saying that the lords cared for the surfs I’m saying that if opportunity and fairness were abundant then all top positions wouldnt all be male.

Because its not the top 1%, its the layer below that, and the one below that, the one below that, and the one below that.

I think the alien argument is a perfect one. If an alien landed they would clearly regard males as ‘superior’ because globally nearly all relgious, military or politcal roles are occupied by males.

In the last UK election all 3 candidates were male. We have had one female PM since parliament began hundreds of years ago. The mechanism that perpetuates this has some roots in oppression and ristricted rights.

Jess:
You say that all the top positions wouldn’t be all male?
Well, we will be nice and ignore Queen Elizabeth, Cleopatra, Bodecia ( I think that’s how you spell it) and the other females in power. They are, admittedly outliers.

But do you know how power in human history has traditionally been passed down prior to the age of democracies?

Birth or warfare.
Just how many women are good at warfare? Ok, now that you’ve answered that, how about women who are not only tactically brilliant but can fight on a battlefield. Quite a few Kings have had their reigns end on this or that battlefield.

I think that pretty much explains it. It’s not like they had “affirmative action” policies for men, though there were alot of sex roles ordained by the church. But the church not only had popular support from both women and men (arguably even more popular support from women) but it had armies backing it up.

So I’m afraid warfare and threat of warfare explains probably 90 percent of all the male rulers in the past.

I’d compare sexual power to soft-power versus the hard-power that men typically wield.

What I’m trying to say is that you’re only looking at one dimension/side of power. Don’t discount it altogether. Otherwise I’m not really interested in getting involved in nitpicking who oppresses who more…I think a better question is why it happened for so long.

Have you raised children? Because I can tell you that the sexes behave very differently from about the age of 6 months, if not earlier, and show marked differences in what interests them.

.
I have, and while I agree with this, I can also testify to the fact that my daughter is much more interested in mechanical and technical things than my son. She also didn’t display any more interest in dolls than he did.
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Does this mean I have defective children? No. It means that part of their personality and behavior is governed by sex hormones and part of it is governed by their own innate personalities and experiences.

Aldonza:

I’m glad your daughter likes mechanical things.

Her biochemistry is probably a bit different than average , but so what? We can use more mechanics and technical people of either sex

i never got to read nerdys reply, by the sounds of it, it couldnt have been too constructive.

Yeah because calling a man who speaks the truth “clinically insane” is “constructive”.
white and nerdy´s last [type] ..A Working Hypothesis

It’s probably safe to say that your genetic/hormonal profile looks different than that of a nursery school teacher.

.
I could argue that at least my hormonal profile looks different than my own hormonal profile of 10 years ago (or, being a menstruating woman, my hormonal profile of 10 seconds ago…LOL!) I am comfortable working in technology surrounded by men. I’m also quite comfortable sitting with the other hens quilting and gossiping, cooking Thanksgiving dinner for people I love, and nursing a newborn child through a growth spurt.
.

I think we’d be a lot better off if we acknowledged the real differences between genders and among individuals.

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I’m in complete agreement. I acknowledge that men and women are different. Further, I *like* those differences. But just like there is little value in insisting that men and women are basically identical except for plumbing, there is little value in pushing all men and all women into neat little boxes with no room for individual variety and basically ignores the influence of culture.
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For example, I will not argue that women prefer men with resources when choosing a long-term mate. However, cross-cultural studies in evo-psych pretty consistently show that the strength of that preference varies greatly depending on the culture they were raised in.
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I think men and women probably share more things in common than they have differences. But oh those differences certainly keep things interesting!

Aldonza:
You’d be very telegenic.

I’d probably vote for you on the issues alone, though , esp. given that the two main parties keep sending TweedleDee and TweedleDum up there every four years

to hollenund;
right…well i acutally prefer short snappy posts rather than epic essays but i will have a stab at it;
1. conscription- ok i guess i agree
2. tribal laws- no, please look at the link i gave. women are treated terribly in many countries. they are 2nd class citizens.
3. i meant that the UK monarch has no real political power- the PM does however.
4. of course women want political power. the trouble is the boys network, the infrastructure, lack of role models, lack of a support network. even if you take account of the fact that on aggregate women (due to children etc) may not be quite as as ambitious as men it doesnt explain the paucity of female leaders. its not like its 60/40 its 99/1.

9. i mentioned bin laden as he is a famous (infamous) muslim. yes i can see from a muslim link its limited to 4 wives so that must be true of him too I guess. maybe i was thinking of the numbe r of children he had. anyhoo, 4 is 3 more than 1.
10. circumcision- really sorry you cannot compare the 2. for them to be comparable you would have to take the entire penis away. thats what a full female clitorectomy does- it removes the mini penis- the clitoris. Most US men have circumcision, most have no problems orgasming. personally my view is to leave babies alone. in any case male circumciosn does not effect promiscuity, female circumcsion certainly does- hence the control factor.
11. yes muslim law is supposd to apply equally but in reality:
http://www.iran-e-azad.org/stoning/women.html
12. obligations- i disagree on that point. as i say read some pankhurst stuff.

Clarence you have my total agreement

Dear W&N,
I had been meaning to write to you. I actually clicked your link late last night.
I thought about writing to your blog directly but actually decided not to because I thought it might drag me into an argument which I really didnt want and I also didnt want to undermine you on your home turf so to speak.
When you describe women with ‘streched out c*nts’ and children as ‘crtoch spawn’ (and worse) I did think you were in it for sensationalism but you have spent a great deal of time developing the blog and your comments are clearly passionately argued and heartfelt so I have come to the conclusion that life has been harsh to you and you are currently in some form of crisis.
As someone who doesnt know you from Adam I would give a real plea that you find someone to talk through your anger and emotions. From what I can gather you are in your 30s and single and quite bitter.
I hope you can beleive me when I say I found love relativley late on and some of friends didnt get hitched till they were early 40s. If you dont like the idea of marrying a single mother there are plenty of single women who are childless and are warm and loving and attractive. Honestly you are wasting precious years in a cylce of reinforced anger but if you met the right person it would dissipate so easily. I dotn know of anyone who is out for cash or manipulation. they just want to get on with their lives, hopefully meet a nice guy and settle. not hugely different from guys really. and i apologise for my earlier comments in the week. not meant at all.

1. http://www.stop-stoning.org/en/history
perhaps this link is better. or if you dont trust these links try the united nations, the british consulate, Amnestry International, Panorama links etc.
Male stoning was faithfully reported in a consequtive list.
its just that female stoning is much more frequent.
this is because its so easy ot fall foul of the law.
A male can talk to a girl in the street, with his face shown, who is no relation
But if a women does that, who is no relation, she can be convicted.
some women after being raped gets convicted for adultry
you will understand why not meny men get raped by women.
2. divorce laws- do u want to marshall your point differently? i couldnt follow your arguments
3. gradually UK politics is getting better. the old boys club is geting weaker. there are more female candidates. females are gradually showing their worth in high powered jobs. bit by bit we are improving. in the US we recently had an election involing a women and a black man. nobody would have predicted that 30 yrs ago. so yeah, politicians can be greedy and self serving, incompetant and vain. but we voted for them. and at least we can vote them out. the beauty of democracy. provided pressure is maintained i think we will have somehting approaching proportinal representation. heres hoping anyway.