"Men and women are just different and have different skills and talents"

I'm not denying there's a positive element to empathy almond. But women, IME tend to have an overdeveloped sense of empathy - where they put other people's feelings before their own. To me, that seems like a defence mechanism.

Cailin, much as I recognise the process of predicting other people's behaviour as a defence mechanism, I don't think it is the same thing at all as empathy.

I don't think empathy is about having a better or worse understanding of the exact nature of somebody else's thoughts and actions. Empathy is more about seeing someone else who is obviously experiencing distress, and whether or not that distresses you too.

I don't think it matters what names we give to those two processes, but I think they are very different things.

People responding to an injured puppy or a baby and wishing to comfort them generally don't so to protect themselves. It is pretty much universal among young children of both sexes to feel caring and protective towards things that exhibit the traits and physical proportions of human young.

Even the 'feel' of the two experiences is so different. The first one is terrifying and it makes me feel sick when I have to do it for any length of time. In fact it makes me start to think about suicide.

The second one makes me feel happy after the event. Even if it sad, helping the other person and feeling compassion for them leads to contentment. It is a twist of emotions like recovering from bereavement.

Women have more experience of being hurt, but are prevented from reacting to that hurt as they are not allowed to be angry or violent. So instead, humans being ingenious creatures, we react by using what is open to us - cues, signals, understanding of other people. We people please, we prevaricate, we avoid being in situations where we can be hurt, we avoid risk, because what else can we do? And we have posters from the police telling us that's what we need to do - danger is out there so we have to skirt and around and be afraid, we have to stay at home and not drink, we have to look out for our friends. We are socialised constantly to be "empathetic" - it's what fighters do when their hands are tied behind their backs.

Women are constantly reminded they are not safe, that time is running out, that they won't be beautiful any more soon, that things aren't stable. It keeps them on the back foot beautifully. We need to reduce the threat level for women as a fundamental starting point for changing the world IMO.

I studied psychology because of that need to understand people, as a protective mechanism. It had the added benefit of fitting with my role as a woman -women like understanding people, don't they? Well you know what, I actually like business, and wheeling and dealing (which is part of what I do now) and now that I've reduced my perceived threat level (by dealing with the abuse) my actual (non-feminine) traits are coming out.

It makes sense that a person who is under threat (which women are, or are taught to feel they are anyway) would align with lower-status beings (children) and protect themselves by understanding the social order around them. It's only people who run that social order who can act like it doesn't exist or flout it - they won't be punished, will they?

I will have to find the link to the empathy and neuroconjecture thing again.

The researcher was giving a whole list of habits you could develop which protect your empathy against society's attempts to switch it off.

If any of that is true, then it could be that we get girls to practise those habits all the time, but not boys. So men end up with weak resistance to societal messages.

Funnily enough I always believed I was an empathetic person, but actually I'm not. What I am is someone who's been sexually abused by multiple people and treated badly by my family. If I were a boy, I'd probably have been socialised to be angry about that, or to act out using violence or drugs. Instead, as a girl I was socialised to keep quiet and take responsibility such that I painstakingly watched out for everyone else's cues to understand how they were feeling in order to avoid getting hurt. Rather than feeling angry and blaming others for treating me badly, I was made to believe (by my dysfunctional family and society in general) that it was up to me to keep myself safe from the inevitable elements out to get me (generally, men). I am not empathetic at all really, in fact I find people quite hard to understand, but I am very good at picking up tiny signals of danger/displeasure/shitheadedness and I am very defensive and get myself out of things quick smart. I am good at conflict and confrontation as I have had to learn these things for survival. One might look at me and say I'm a "typical woman" in terms of temperament - good with children, a good listener, not angry or confrontational, good at defusing charged situations. But that is all entirely learned. What I am is a very good survivor and I have learned what it takes to survive in this society. It is only now that I am unearthing the me underneath those survival tactics. That me is not a "typical woman" at all. I have realised how much energy I was expending fulfilling my role. I feel angry a lot more these days. It feels so good.

I think they were saying in the brain, that when people say they are experiencing empathy, the parts of the brain that are active are the same parts that would be active if someone was hurting them.

The neuro people put people in brain scanning machines after saying othering things about entirely fictional groups of people. The bits of the brain that flash when you are supposedly feeling empathy didn't respond as much in most people if a member of the fictional group was being hurt.

If it is that easy to reduce empathy in most people, how can we possibly know how much empathy a man or woman should feel? How can we separate it from socialisation?

I nearly fell off my chair when I read about that famous empathy/analytic "experiment". It was self-reporting!! How can that even pass as an experiment!? "Do you feel empathetic?" Like fuck I do. Frankly I feel murderous most of the time when these things are mentioned.

The inactivation of the X chromosome, which only happens in women, and the phenomenon of imprinting, by which genes are expressed differently whether they come from the mother or father, are thought to explain some differences between men and women, such as space awareness or empathy for example.

Having said that, I believe many perceived differences are pre conceived ideas. A good example of this is the idea that men are better at sciences / maths. This doesn't exist in the country where I come from and if anything there's a bias towards women being better. And indeed these degrees in university have as many men as women and they do equally well. Only exception is maths degrees for which there's a strong bias in favour of women.

Yes. Lots of men (and women and NAMALT etc etc) are not very logical, which is weird given what people claim.

As Buffy alluded to, it is particularly striking that so many people are happy to say "men are better at spatial awareness," but if you say "men rape women" which is a truism, given the law in this country (as in, it can't be false) all sorts of cries of "manhating" go up.

Why is that I wonder

"Unicorns shit blue poo."

Quite, Cailin.

In fact I'm going to have this as my next username.

In my little black book in my head I have pencilled in "WTF" next to so many people because of these sort of statements they make. Seemingly quite sensible people. No one is safe!

And now we're in a situation, thanks to vocal transactivists, where we can't even say "women have uteruses" or "men have penises." They would entirely take away the meaning of the word "woman" which then begs the question - if nothing at all defines woman then how can there be any stable, predictable differences between a "woman" and a "man"?

The statement in the title "Men and women are just different and have different skills and talents" is entirely meaningless on a purely statistical and factual level. It is impossible to divide nearly 7 billion people into two groups and say this group does this and this group does that. It doesn't mean anything. The only reason such a statement is ever made is to justify some sort of unfair situation, usually a situation where men are privileged. As soon as someone says something like this to me I just think "idiot." They might as well say "Unicorns shit blue poo."

Not a poor excuse for a feminist violetwellies. You pick your battles.

One of dp's teammates from a sport he does calls jobs around the house "pink jobs" (cooking, cleaning, tidying, washing) and "blue jobs" (DIY, putting bins out). He's 28yo. It's framed as a "joke", but let's face it it's not very funny and it reflects the balance of jobs when he lived with his (now ex) girlfriend.