"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?

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.

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 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

'That is very interesting about 'empathy' being the same neural response as being hurt. Again, I'd wonder whether, rather than being a 'female' thing, 'empathy' is actually because women have more experience of being hurt, being afraid and feeling week (so what's called 'empathy' is actually identification with the feeling of being hurt) and developing coping strategies (which are interpreted by researchers as 'what empathy looks like').'

I was wondering if as empathy gets switched off through 'othering' groups, if women's empathy is harder to switch off because they already feel othered anyway, so are more likely to be on the side of the underdog. If that is true, it may be that there are other things that turn empathy off in subordinate groups.

Cailin, I think what I'm saying is that there are multiple different reasons why a person may put another's feelings before their own, and some of them have nothing with empathy.

Empathy is a feeling. Being self sacrificing is an action. Self sacrifice can be caused by a lot of bad feelings and carried out for a lot of poor reasons and circumstances.

Why is it though that in many of these studies men are said not to feel empathy?

I've noticed with my DH that he's far more empathetic since getting into feminism - for example, he cries at films now when in the past he cried at literally nothing. Part of that I think is his sense of lost status - before he felt like his place was assured, everything was alright with the world, now he feels more threatened, less sure, more unstable. His empathy has definitely increased.

I wrote a blog post a while back, can't remember if i ever actually posted it. At the time there were two popular songs in the charts. That's What Makes You Beautiful by One direction (what made her beautiful was the fact she thought she was ugly) and Sexy and I Know it by lmfao. Just contrast those two for half a second.

Not feeling empathy is one of the criteria for being identified as a psychopath, so I don't think it can be that most men don't feel empathy.

I think that the extent to which you do or do not feel empathy is down to a whole load of social experiences and learning.

I think somebody has to be prepared to be vulnerable to feel empathy.

If you are either a. terrified or b. deluding yourself about how bad other people have it in order to protect your own status, I think that makes it hard to feel empathy, but that is just my opinion.

I would agree with that Buffy. Almond, what you say about responding to kittens and babies is not really what I'd mean about empathy. I think that presses a survival and protection button in all of us, and it doesn't take much in cognitive resources to be able to understand that a baby needs looking after or a kitten is cute and endearing. Empathy as I see it is more about engaging with people on a harder level - feeling the sense of hurt when someone's having a conversation and their partner turns away to talk to someone else, leaving them out for example. IMO women see and understand these things because we are so tuned in to how important these social cues are. This relates back to what men were saying on the ask the opposite sex thread - men are tuned into the physical capability of other men because that's their threat. They don't notice the physical capability of women because that's not a threat. Similarly we don't empathise with a cat who's annoying another cat because they're not a threat, we just find it a bit funny.

Buffy, I agree that we are just trying to make sense of a feeling, but I don't agree that women are more empathetic (if indeed they even are) because they are more used to being hurt.

In my experience, people who have been hurt a lot have more problems experiencing empathy. People seem more capable of experiencing empathy if they feel loved, have people around who they trust, people who they can be vulnerable around.

Often people feel empathy for a third party together. A is sad about C, A tells B, A and B experience empathy together and this creates a bond. You have to trust each other to expose the emotion together.

I think people turn off boys' empathy as part of this whole, 'be a man, punch that person, bully that crying weakling, what are you, a girl?' type thing.'

Cailin, I think we're certainly talking about two different processes - caring and understanding.

It seems obvious that there are lots of situations where people understand that someone is being hurt - people in famines, torture in the West, contemporary genocide, and they just don't care. They don't care even if it is happening to a baby.

As events have happened and do happen all the time where people don't care, I would call that ability to deeply care about outgroups empathy. Say for example, the practice of using African American babies to lure alligators. That is closing down empathy. It isn't complicated to understand that is a terrible, hurtful thing to do.

And often, people in positions of power are exceptionally good at understanding how other people think and feel, but are using it for their own purposes.

This is all too deep for me. But if I remember (and understood) correctly, in that empathy-vs-analytical experiment "empathy" means "having an emotional response to the cues of others" as Buffy said. In Delusion of Gender another experiment was mentioned - and there it turned out that men (and women) are plenty empathetic when they are financially rewarded for being empathetic.