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

[reddaisy]

I have heard so many variations on that comment that I really need to properly articulate my objections.

My belief is that gender differences are often as a result of learnt behaviour and most of us are all complicit even if it just means buying a 'little monster' t-shirt for a boy.

Following on from the boat race thread where it was argued that for true equality, men and women should compete against each other, it is clear that there are biological differences between the sexes which impact on their performances.

I keep reading conflicting scientific reports on the differences between men and women's brain and what, if anything, that actually means about different skills/intelligence etc.

So, can we talk about this and explore the perceived innate differences between men and women?

Anything can be looked at from a feminist perspective

Massively off topic, but someone at the beginning of the thread mentioned the difference between black and white athletes.

Michael Johnson (400m world record holder and BBC pundit) made a documentary on Jamaican athletes just before the Olympics which explored a very interesting theory. Sprinting is dominated by black people from - specifically - North America and the Caribbean, whose ancestors would have been brought there on the slave ships from Africa.

Conditions on these ships and, and on the plantations that they worked on, would have been so extremely harsh that only the strongest would have survived. The offspring of these men and women therefore inherited excellent physical genes. This obviously hasn't done them a great deal of good socially or economically, but in a competition of brute strength and speed, they are world beaters.

It's not really a point that can be extrapolated to the discussion of differences between men and women, but I think it does illustrate that even distinctions that can be traced back to genes, can still be - ultimately - a result of socialisation, behaviour and the oppression of one group by another.

This thread is giving me flashbacks to obsessively reading The Saddle Club but refusing to go anywhere near horses because their teeth scared me.

I think there is a lot of truth to the "feminine" skills being the basis of decent human behaviour. It reminds me of that Gloria Steinem quote "we've begun to raise daughters more like sons but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters"

I remember about 30 years ago asking a very high up Naval officer why women couldn't be fighter pilots (or why there weren't any)

Periods were mentioned before he beat a hasty retreat, I'm assuming he was thinking hormonal rather than bloody

But maybe you should consider that rather than there being a right/wrong dichotomy in all discussion, there are perspectives, similarities and differences in experience etc? Might make this more fun for everyone.

You can skip over my posts if you want. What irritates me is that perspectives tend to be considered relevant and welcomed if they accord with the prevailing general concensus. Sometimes I do agree , other times I don't.

Sorry meant "only welcomed"

Do you think there is a right/wrong dichotomy in this kind of discussion, Still?

Actually, no need to reply to that. I will take your advice.

I think some people see, (ok, some men mostly) some activities as 'womens' stuff' even when they are happily doing it and not feeling demeaned(?sp)
Today I felt I should have challenged the chap, looking at his (filthy) grandson who said that he'd washed him three times already and 'a womans work was never done'.
My mother would have said something, I just felt disgruntled without having the ability to articulate why, without upsetting the bloke.
Ingrained manpleasing, I now feel like a poor excuse for a feminist.

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.

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

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."

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"?

"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!

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

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

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.

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 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?