To think men and women are actually programmed differently?

@ChessorBuckaroo so interesting! I’d love to watch that. It also doesn’t surprise me.

I think there are 2 different debates here though. There is the obvious biological differences that have influenced things such as splitting men and women in sports because men are just that little bit faster or that little bit stronger naturally - it’s not to say that women cannot be - but the science is all there. We have very little control over these and they hardly influence our personalities.

But what a lot of people are arguing about on this thread are the masculine and feminine roles that we assign ourselves and how many of us end up confirming to gender norms and that being infair because women generally get the short straw.

I know men who are brothers and uncles and have had to step in for the childcare at a young age (someone pointed this out earlier) a I know females with zero maternal instinct. There’s a lot that we learn and things like cleaning and even cooking is all down to preference and “being bothered”.

@Globusmedia that's a very confident statement to make!

Ok well you do you.

I shall continue to call it out for what it is.

Well I certainly wouldn't blow on DC's food either. Its an ineffective way to cool food down and quite grim from a hygiene pov. Why risk passing viruses around for something unnecessary?
As far as washing hands after a nappy change goes, it just makes you wonder if he bothers after cleaning his own bum Let alone the other, and forgetting basic hygiene standards is just being grim in general really, you could apply that to any task - food prep etc. Bad examples maybe, but if you swallow the narrative that poor men can't cope with learning domestic tasks and basic parenting, because they are not built that way, then you just give them a free pass to be lazy. You don't hear about poor women, who are trying to be the breadwinner or provider but can't manage it, as thats a mans job. Nope, turns out women can work and earn just as well as men and vice versa is true. Anyone can pretend to be incompetent so another will take over. If he's inept, it just shows he needs more practice at it.

We are biologically different. I'm reading Cat Bohannons Eve' right now that explains how there are differences even in hearing and sense of smell.

Trying to work out what’s actually true is my end goal. That feels sufficient motivation to me.

I don’t support the idea that we should subordinate what’s true to what’s useful. Nor the idea that what is moral depends straightforwardly on what we take ‘natural’ to be. Historically those ideas have been tools of the powerful, and I think they still are.

I'm a neuroscientist. Our brains are mostly blank slates that can be programmed to be good at whatever we want. It's called neuroplasticity and it is the key to our intelligence. Hence why taxi drivers develop huge areas to process geographical information etc. There are tribes in the world where the main caregivers to children are men, and they're very good at it. When you scan their brains, they have similarity to how you would expect a typical UK female brain to look.

Nurture trounces nature when it comes to the brain. The key to our success as a species is how quickly we adapt our brain to our environment.

So men are competent enough to do many jobs (in terms of employment) but they aren’t so good at childcare because that’s how they’re programmed? Yeah right 🫤

In my view the best way to respond to that is to challenge the implication directly, not to try to reverse-engineer the science.

There is a long history of science being distorted or suppressed in service of social or moral goals, and mostly it turns out badly (including for the moral
claims that got build on shifting scientific sands).

It absolutely becomes a way of excusing men from pulling their weight. That is how it is weaponised. For example in the book “Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus” the messaging was clear “don’t expect X from men as they are not made that way.

Because if something is due to “biology” then suddenly we start to excuse people from doing it or worse, suggest they are applauding for mediocre efforts because “they are trying but just not made that way.”

What do you think the end goal is of trying to assert that men being useless partners is “due to biology and evolution”

Most of the differences are to do with sex

The ability to focus or concentrate, to be accurate, to do boring and repetitive tasks, to work well with others - these are skills as much needed for hunting as anything else

No. I think those that believe there’s a biological element often think the biological element is larger than the social element and think it’s an acceptable excuse.

You see examples on here all of the time.

Do you think that if there’s a biological element, it excuses men from pulling their weight? (I don’t).

@JHound Sorry, I realise I may have misread your reply as being your summary of what I said (if it was that, it’s totally wrong).

If you meant only that talking about biology can be a way to excuse men from child work then I agree it can. I think those are extremely weak arguments.

Where I think you and I may differ is that I think the thing to attack is the weak reasoning from a to b.

I don’t think it’s helpful (in fact I think it’s massively unhelpful) to implicitly agree that the logic works, and just instead deny that humans are a product of evolution, at least as far as some element of some differences between men and women goes.

Exactly.

I feel that’s pretty much the opposite of what I wrote.

Is there anything in what I wrote that you disagree with? If so, what?

So is male aggression entirely a result of socialisation then? No correlation with testosterone?

In a nutshell - reinforcing the biological aspect is a way to get women to settle for mediocre partners.

Two separate questions: whether there’s a biological component, and what the social implications of that are for us now.

I don’t think that reinforcing the idea that there’s a valid link from a to b is particularly helpful. (Which you do if you deny a on the grounds you disagree with b).

It sets up the question of whether men can and should be fully and equally competent in child-raising as a scientific question, for a start, on which the evidence may come in either way.

Far better, surely, to treat that as what it is: a social and political issue, not undermined at all by any possible answer to the nature vs nurture debate.

Agree. That doesn’t imply there’s no biological element though.

@SouthLondonMum22

They want us to believe that somehow the possession of a penis makes men incapable of child rearing, using a vacuum and buying sensible gifts so that we accept mediocrity as biologically driven.

I will never believe that having a penis means that you can hold down a complicated, senior job yet somehow can’t manage to turn on a washing machine or change a nappy.

I think in general men and women do have different brains. Our original basic biology accounts for it - men stronger, better at hunting and protecting, women better at nurturing. Doesn't mean we can't learn to be different or that all men / women are the same, but I think it's pointless not to concede that evolution has made differences.

"Competence" is in the eye of the beholder isn't it, and it does seem to me like many mothers are micro-managers.

But we're the opposite way round in our house. I clean the bathroom in 10-15 minutes.

DH takes an hour when he does it.

Yes he does it better. But I do it well enough.

Far more mothers need to stop martyring themselves and master the 80-20 rule - ie 20% effort for 80% result. Much more efficient than going for 100% all the time.