BoysToys

[SlowFJH]

We have two boys and a girl (all now teenagers). My daughter was never into dolls and never really liked pink. She was into arts and crafts and loves knitting and sowing. The boys were completely stereotypical (plastic and wooden swords, guns, cars, diggers and tractors, soldiers etc).

We have good feminist friends (with three boys) who banned violent toys for boys. They always gave us the cat's bum face when they visited ours because their boys used to absolutely love playing with my sons' swords and shields. When we went out it for a walk, every stick they found was a gun - despite their parents vocal disapproval.

My friend's boys (now all strapping teenage lads) joke about how their parents banned them from having the toys they always wanted.

We definitely saw differences in toy preferences very early on. My daughter had zero interest in wheeled toys (despite my efforts) but both boys were fascinated by them virtually from day one.

I know my experience is not scientific. But there were some studies several years ago using baby apes (who obviously had not been conditioned by human systems or been exposed to advertising etc). Baby male apes showed a clear preference for mechanical toys over plush toys.

www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys-toys/

I'd love to hear others views on this topic... social conditioning versus biological predispositions.

Evo-bollocks was quite well explained I thought - retroactively telling people that women evolved to use frying pans because female monkeys did

Could you direct me to a source for any qualified evolutionary biologist that has ever made such a claim?

Slow as you have seem to have all the answers already, I'm confused as to why you started this thread.

I've answered that earlier. It was prompted by the now almost adult sons of my friends saying that they themselves would not "ban" their children from playing with certain toys.

The conversation has taken on several other turns since then.

In particular, there seems to be rather a vehement reaction against the impact of testosterone on behaviour. I am really interested as to what lies behind this.

I've asked for clarification as to what exactly is subsumed within the blanket term "Evo-bollocks".

Most recently, I have challenged the allegation that women were banned from chess tournaments.

All well within MN guidelines.

I never said you were breaching mn guidelines.

Would you like to make a contribution to the debate?

www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(02)00107-1/abstract

Yep - there.

Study on monkeys - 'boys toys' were a car and a ball 'girls toys' a doll and a pot (red pan)

published in a journal of Evolution and Human behaviour.

I didn't randomly make the study up you know - I do have some integrity

And again. You don't need to ban something, to make it almost impossible for someone to do. Just because a rule isn't written down, doesn't make it any less of a rule - why do you think they made women's championships in 1927? Sure, it could have been to encourage women to play, but I rather suspect it was more likely to keep the women out of the mens.

I couldn't see your specific claim in that abstact .. telling people that women evolved to use frying pans because female monkeys did

Why do you think they made women's championships in 1927? Sure it could have been to encourage women to play, but I rather suspect it was more likely to keep the women's out of the men's

Why do you think they'd do that? The fist FIDA tournament in 1868 was open to both sexes (as has every single one since). For every 100 players about 98 are men. Why would they even want to keep women out?

I think you're twisting the facts of history to serve a not particularly convincing agenda that chess players are desperate to keep women out.

Most male chess players I know would think they'd died and gone to heaven if they had an influx of female players.

The last bit of the abstract says exactly that! You don't even have to read the actual study:

The results suggest that sexually differentiated object preferences arose early in human evolution, prior to the emergence of a distinct hominid lineage. This implies that sexually dimorphic preferences for features (e.g., color, shape, movement) may have evolved from differential selection pressures based on the different behavioral roles of males and females, and that evolved object feature preferences may contribute to present day sexually dimorphic toy preferences in children.

Most male chess players I know would think they'd died and gone to heaven if they had an influx of female players.

Yeah, that's another inviting prospect for women.... I know that I always love going into a room and being treated as some special snowflake rather than just allowed to get on with what I'm doing.

www.spookmagazine.com/chickmate-the-trouble-with-women-in-chess/

Personally I think you're ignoring history in order to pretend that it's all equal and women just don't want to play chess, it's not that they're discouraged at every step instead.

But those words *from the extract) are a far cry your misrepresention "women evolved to use frying pans because monkeys did"

In 1868, when the first FIDA chess tournament was held, do you think a group of chess players got together and said "I know we've only got two women interested out of every 100 entrants... but for God's sake that's two too many!! What can we do?"

"I know - let's staet a separate tournament just for them"

"What's that you say? A bit like a 'Women's Network for Chess' - where they can support each other and not be affected by being so underrepresented in the wider game. I don't know about this.."

Correction FIDE not FIDA

I said earlier that I was a member of a chess club at my all-girls school. The group was made up only of girls in my math's class in year 9. I believe the teacher put a stop to it in Year 10 when we sat our GCSE. Not many of us knew how to play before, it wasn't something we'd ever been taught at home or school. We were the only people in our school to be involved with chess club. I imagine not many other girls at my school played chess outside of our class and year group.

I know at the corresponding boy's school there was a chess team open to all. I don't doubt that girl's enjoy chess when the chance to play is given to them. I saw that for myself. It would be surprising if us girls outperformed the boy's school in question seeing as they could have been playing chess at school from year 7 onwards.

I don't think I'd seen a game of chess before that time in school, except for maybe in cartoons. If I was good enough to play at a top level, this would put me off:

Most male chess players I know would think they'd died and gone to heaven if they had an influx of female players.

I'd want to play the game. Not be stared at or hit on.

The "died and gone to heaven" was intended to mean they would be happy / delighted. Not necessarily they would "stare and hit" on you. I think most chess players would be delighted to welcome new players regardless of sex.

Does anyone remember that study that concluded that women naturally prefer pink, because they would be ones collecting berries (conveniently forgetting the fact that most wild berries in this country are blackberries).

My dad is a chess player and his younger female pupils are as interested as boys in the game. They tend to lose interest as pre-teens, when peer pressure kicks in. I think it is far more socially acceptable for boys to continue with special interests into adulthood

Chess teacher although he obviously plays as well.

From the paper:
"The six toys were a ball, a police car, a soft doll, a cooking pot, a picture book and a stuffed dog. These toys were categorized as “masculine” toys, “feminine” toys, or “neutral” toys on the basis of evidence that boys are more interested than girls in balls and cars (the “masculine” toy set), girls are more interested than boys in dolls and pots (the “feminine” toy set), and boys and girls are approximately equally interested in books and stuffed animals (the “neutral” toy set) "

So this seems okay in that the cooking pot is tagged as 'feminine' because kids say it is (As a result, we would assume, of their socialisation?), but I'm still confused as to why the female vervets prefered it? After all, they don't know it is a cooking implement! Perhaps, since female vervets apparently have a greater liking for reddish-pink, then perhaps the issue is that the pan was red? But what about the police car? Did the male vervets prefer it because it could be used in active play, or because they may prefer blue/green to reddish pink? Would a reddish-pink police car have been as attractive to female vervets as the red pan?

I could totally understand the 'females prefer cooking cos evolution' line that I often heard as a result of this paper. But there seem to be too many variables here, they didn't know if males preferred cars cos movement, or males preferred cars cos blue, or females preferred the cooking pan because it was a better choice for whalloping an annoying male over the head with it..............

SomeDyke
It is a scientific study. If you feel the researchers have falsified their results - then you should take it up with the journal. I am assuming it is peer reviewed in order to be a reputable one. But I am not sure.

But this is very different from misrepresenting, misquoting and misunderstanding the data to argue with a point that had not been made by the researchers.

As regards chess, apparently checkers/draughts still has a separate womens world championship. If this is just for encouragement, or because evolutionary biology means females are less able when it comes to manipulating objects meaningfully on a black/white board, I don't know (maybe a red/pink board would produce better results.........)

They didn't always need to explicitly ban women to keep us out, and the 'very few' argument doesn't always work either. Although some explicit bans were amazingly long-lived. I just think of dear Philippa Fawcett, from Newnham College, who scored THIRTEEN percent higher than the next best in the lists in the Maths Tripos, yet was still not given the title of Senior Wrangler (males only), or awarded a degree (took until 1948, a month before her death).

"It is a scientific study. If you feel the researchers have falsified their result.."

I NEVER said anything like that! Honestly, try thinking a bit before you post! I was criticising the DESIGN of the experiment and the interpretation, not claiming anyone falsified anything.

And if you knew anything about science, you'd know that implying that someone has FALSIFIED anything, or even stating that someone else was accusing someone else of falsifying their results, is about as serious as it gets. You DO NOT bandy words like 'falsifying the results' about in scientific circles unless you are really, REALLY sure.

So, I think it was a poorly-designed study, I think there were too many variables that were not separated out, but I also think that the experiments are probably a bit constrained by the fact that they have to(?) use actual kids toys. Later experiments, which go for a plush/movable split, but frankly, couldn't you do plush/hard, movable versus non-movable (and make a furry police car, in both pink and blue), and so on, rather than mixing it all up with a hard, blue, police car being compared to a pink, fluffy toy bunny........

Or would the monkey enclosure then be so full of toys that they couldn't find anything :-)

"I am assuming it is peer reviewed in order to be a reputable one. But I am not sure." Rather an ODD comment, given that despite the fact that their website seems rather slow, it only took me a few clicks to find the 'Guide for Authors' (It didn't, my browser hung!) -- Wikipedia says it is peer-reviewed, so it MUST be true!

Actually, I'm rather more perturbed by their statement that they encourage submissions from scholars in the humanities! Sorry, but proper boundaries MUST be maintained between scientists and lesser mortals. Can't have these damn people who don't even know how to performs student's t-test infecting the pages of our august journals.................. :-)

Are we reading the same abstract that I quoted?

It says that their results, that female monkeys preferred the frying pan suggest that preference for these things evolved before humanity did - ie, it's been baked in before humans were humans, and in the same way, the male monkeys preferred the ball.

That's what evolution is - that because the monkeys, who branched off the tree before us exhibit this behaviour, that explains how we, who branched off later also exhibit that behaviour - ie. women like frying pans, and look our precursor female monkeys like frying pans - it's innate!

Honestly, I just don't think you're understanding the point that opportunity is just as important as rules.

Also if you think a woman doesn't know exactly how it'll go if she walks into a club full of men desperate for female company, then you're wilfully blind to how the world works

that because the monkeys, who branched off the tree before us exhibit this behaviour, that explains how we, who branched off later

We branched off from each other. Monkeys are literally just as evolved as we are.
Just saying.
What you mean is branched off the human line of ascent. And anthroponotic view.
Is it relevant? The thread is already bonkers anyway...

Yeah, I know, we've all been on the planet evolving - the common ancestor we both branched off from :)

it's gone a bit weird, but I think that keeping things strictly correct is the expected with this one - I don't think little mistakes can be allowed to slide so good catch!

Agree with GTJ.

Not that I agree with the paper at all.

Especially classifying a pot as feminine. That's just bizarre - every single kid in the world, when put in a bath, wants pots to pour water between, every single person in the world (pretty much) uses pots to eat from and put things in - there is nothing inherently feminine about a plastic pot (frying pan, whatever it actually was)

And there's plenty more holes to shoot in it come to that - that perhaps the male monkeys were bigger so got first pick, that since as Lweji pointed out we didn't descend from these monkeys but both descended together, how can things that a monkey do reliably relate to humans etc.

That is why it's evo-bollocks.

SlowFJH wrote - "In 1868, when the first FIDA chess tournament was held, do you think a group of chess players got together and said "I know we've only got two women interested out of every 100 entrants... but for God's sake that's two too many!! What can we do?""

In the 19th century, many chess groups deliberately chose to hold their group meetings and tournaments at men-only venues that banned women. So, women were deliberately, though indirectly, excluded from chess tournaments.