"gender can be really important to people in a positive way"

I think there is actually more evidence if you look at history to support the theory that homo sapiens are pretty intolerant lot :)

It might have been interesting to hear the reply if OP had asked her friend what she meant.

To stick with our animal model for a moment, most dogs can be trained to be 'civilized', whether neutered or not. There is a balance between nature and nurture

I personally think most humans start off pretty violent. I've got a toddler at the moment and he can be a violent sod when he wants.

His cousins are interesting, the eldest is very soft natured, exceptional gentle, the youngest has some thug like tendencies. They have great parents so I'm sure they will grow into lovely none violent men.
If they were provoked as young men though my money's on the younger one throwing a punch first.

So yes I think nuture and nature together shape how people turn out.

Men, as a class, pose a potential threat to women, as a class. It is overwhelmingly men who commit sex crime and most women have been victims to some extent.

However the majority of men do not commit sex, or any other, crime. It is therefore far from inevitable that men are in some way inevitably violent. As a feminist one of my goals was to marry a man who could never see me as less than equal and, when we had 2 DS.to raise them with feminist values. Can't say it's been a total success, but we're getting there.

People can control their behaviour obviously and societies can change norms.

Example might be how drink driving went from being not the end of the world to not socially acceptable.

Other examples are found whenever you look around the world and are shocked at a certain type of behaviour because it's not socially acceptable where you are - different levels of street harassment being "the norm" are a good example of this. Different societies have different places that they draw the line, and the line can be moved. This is why feminists bother with "awareness raising" in order to try and shift the line, and of course other groups do the same with a huge range of things they want changed to make society better.

You will always have some people who will be criminal / antisocial that's the way it is. But, you absolutely can reduce poor behaviour by the majority with a bit of work.

Sad thing is it seems that work like this can be very quick to unravel - see Trump/racism for example. So it seems that maybe there is always a stubborn undercurrent who hold antisocial views and are slower to change them. On the whole though, the world is getting better. I saw a very cheery infographic about it the other day

Don't be silly. Of course we need laws, and the means of enforcing them because we don't live in a Utopia where all people will naturally behave well.

To stick with our animal model for a moment, most dogs can be trained to be 'civilized', whether neutered or not. There is a balance between nature and nurture.

People are even more educable and (should) have the ability to be responsible for their actions. Having hormones normal for your sex is no excuse for bad behaviour.

"and entire male dogs who do neither. "

My old dog was like this, even encountering a female dog in season had no effect on him. Interestingly, when we got a younger male dog he behaved in the same way. Our vet explained it as him copying his older role model, the same as young humans do.

I think it depends on when you castrate them dragon...I.e. before the hormones have affected brain development ? Not sure though.

Don't let the weight of history get in the way of the "everyone should just get along" argument. :)

What ideas have you got for creating this utopia ?

I do love a bit of evopsych. It's all so factual

Well in that case we could also dispense with the police service and the military. Getting people to behave in a 'civilised' fashion has been somewhat problematic throughout history...

Even with sex display type behaviours its not always clearcut - there are bitches who cock and hump, and entire male dogs who do neither. And I gather that castration is not considered to be an effective treatment for aggressive dogs.

I think it's reasonable to expect that sex hormones affect sex displays, like strutting and wattles in roosters. Or territory marking in cats.
I'm less sure that sex hormones affect non-sex behaviours in any measurable way. Such as being good at spatial reasoning or maths.

Of course, the serious answer to that is that the way for men to be non threatening is for them to be civilized human beings, which the majority manage pretty well.

Dont tempt us...

oh and of course chasing the females and fighting. I think it is a complex question for sure, in the past the way to make men non threatening other than killing them was to castrate them.

But the notion of race could be important, especially to the disadvanatged group(s). It would be a shared identity and experiences amongst people in that group, and as a sort of reclaiming-the-identity thing, I suppose. Saying "Yes, I am a black person but I am not XYZ stereotype". I guess that's where it differs from gender though. Because if you say "Yes I am female gendered" you are literally saying "I am society's stereotype of XX people".

I see what you're saying here. I think it helps to clarify by distinguishing between sex and gender. So, using your example, biological sex can be compared to race, while gender equates to racial stereotypes. Being able to talk about sex and race is important for those who care about equality, but saying 'but stereotypes can be important to people' isn't a valid argument to make, even if there are individuals who do identify with gender or racial stereotypes.

I realise it's more complex than that as notions of 'race' are socially constructed, so the parallel isn't exact, but in context I think it works. (The reactions to Rachel Dolezal show that many people believe race is objective and unchanging, while maintaining that a man can become a woman or vice versa, which is bafflingly inconsistent.)

Agree that stereotypes are mostly unhelpful. However was fascinated by a program on R4 about testosterone, the guy who discovered it originally did an experiment where they removed the testes of different animals and observed massive differences in their behaviour compared to those who still had it. It was done on roosters so the behaviour was strutting about, having a deep call and a bright red wattle bit. None the less important behaviours in that species that totally refused to develop in the absence of testosterone.

It's the overlapping humps isn't it. For most things (she waves hands.. like.. ear size) if you graph them you get a bell curve. If you graph men and women separately, you get two, overlapping bell curves.

The vast majority of people fall in the overlap, then there's a sliver poking out along each side end where the extremes are

You couldn't tell from an ear measurement if a person were a man or a woman with any certainty until you get to the extreme ends.

It also means of course that people who don't behave according to type must have something wrong with them and be violently suppressed / medicalised / locked up / shunned etc etc etc

YY

Maybe there is a difference on average.
But it won't apply to everyone.
And the problem is that even the slightest evidence of any kind of difference is immediately used to explain why women are stupid and ought to stay indoors with their mouths shut and make sandwiches or whatever.
Why is all this research done? There used to be research to try and prove that people of different "races" were fundamentally different and therefore it was OK to treat person X in this way and actually they probably liked it.
There is very little research into the relative intelligence of people with different ear shapes, for example. Hmmm now why could it be that sex organs and skin colour are the ones that people have got excited about investigating in the past and now? - You know, just to look, to see, to understand some of these important questions about how different sorts of people are inferior, or in modern parlance, different but equal uh-huh rightho.

Is an admission that some "gendered" behaviour is heavily influenced by hormones non-feminist ?

Observing a hormonal correlation with certain behaviours and extrapolating that to form a gender stereotype is what is problematic, I think.

girlwiththeflaxenhair yes that was interesting.

I didn't find the story about being indecisive very resonant - I am extremely decisive and my husband is the biggest ditherer. Is it one of these things that there is more difference within the sexes that between them?

But then there is no question about testosterone and violence. Or is there? How much is socialised. The thing I found weird in another article was that a woman said that testosterone completely damped her empathy, that she could watch really terrible things and have no emotional reaction at all. Then, placebo.

Don't know. The idea that men are "naturally" violent is one that makes me very uncomfortable, feels very defeatist and unfair on men, and does not tie in with my experience of men at all. Loads of them are super gentle. I also know many women who have tempers... Is it that when men are violent they do more damage so we hear about it more? No idea just thinking out loud here.

I don't think it's non feminist - there may well be differences on average - but they are just that - on average. The idea that "men are like this" and "women are like that" and never the twain shall meet is what has kept so many people in misery for so many years.