Pink brains and blue brains

[minniebear]

So everything in me believes there is no such thing as a girl brain or a boy brain, and it bugs me a bit when family stereotype based on gender (I have two girls: girls are better behaved and easier to raise, boys are more interested in playing with toy cars and better at throwing, as examples).

Can anyone hit me with some facts to back up what I intuitively believe to be true (that gender differences such as those listed above are down to socialisation rather than biology)? Or am I wrong? I just want to feel I have it right in my own head. Im confident in the way I'm raising my girls and am aware of (and trying to avoid) gender stereotyping, and I'm not planning to rant and rave at the next person to bring all this up. I just want to better educate myself.

No, I don't tidy or shop at different points in my cycle. I get a little ratty in the classic PMT sense, but that doesn't change my behaviours beyond having to bite my tongue a little more than usual.

I had no nesting urges with either pregnancy.

Wow, I had only skimmed that article when I posted it but the history is really interesting. PMS seems to have its roots in hysteria. Worth looking into properly.

That's interesting Assasin that you did not notice any differences like that.

In many ways women's cycles can trigger massive surges of creativity at certain points too. Probably a lot of misdiagnoses of bi-polar come from not understanding it.

I'll read that article Miffer.

women who were misled to believe they were premenstrual experienced more symptoms of PMS than those who were actually premenstrual but who were misled to believe they were not.

I stopped at that part if the article Miffer because it seemed a bit odd that you could mislead a woman to that extent. I don't doubt however that cultural attitudes do influence the experience of PMS.

What I was talking about before though was not PMS in the negative sense.

However enormous the effects of gender stereotyping are, nothing is going to make me think that because men and women are equal, they are identical in all ways. I do think that biology makes a difference. How much is the very interesting question.

KindDogsTail

I don't disagree, I would go further than you in fact. However the menstrual cycle stuff rings totally false especially when you attach behaviours like tidying and shopping to it.

Miffer

Strangely enough, my PMT was always better when I was at work than if I was at home. DH could trigger it like there's no tomorrow, whereas my best friend, not so much.

Having said that, there is no doubt I had PMT. It would turn me into a demented harridan. I could feel the seething irritation seeping through me.

Perhaps it's something that is always at a certain level and a particular set of circumstances triggers it further.

Being post menopause, I can safely say, hand on heart, I never, ever get it.

I'm a model of diplomacy and effervescent sainthood.

Datun

It reminds me of an article I read that discussed how Italian women use vaginal douches as standard and are horrified when they discover British women don't. Apparently Italian women insist that their vaginas are unpleasant smelling and dirty without douching. (Excuse all the massive generalisations but that was the gist).

I think the point the author makes in the article is an interesting one that "not biological" doesn't equal "fake". I can also think of some other reasons why PMS/T would appear more prevalent in Western culture other than it simply not existing biologically.

The idea that women are irrational because of their hormones and all that yucky blood is an old one and the lack of research into it (if the article is to be believed) is terrible. Isn't there evidence to suggest that hormonal levels change the way we smell and thus changes the way people react to us (I have never looked into this so apologies if this is another evo pysch myth I am spouting)? If so maybe it's that men react differently to us and thats why you wanted to slap your partner and was otherwise okay with your mate.

This is all off the top of my head, I just find it bizarre that we all accept something that doesn't seem to have a great deal of evidence backing it up. Then again I only read one thing so maybe it does.

Then again why would there be research when it only effects women and privdes a convieniant excuse to dismiss us?

Miffer

I read your first post, and was just about to type exactly what you said in your second post!

Although, if you could draw a correlation between the number of men stabbed with a fork, and PMT, then they might take it seriously.

I've never felt any inclination toward either frenzied house tidying (or unfrenzied house tidying for that matter!) or shopping sprees, nor did I feel any need to 'nest'. I expect that dh cleaned when I was in hospital though. Can I attribute that to his hormones or is it only women that are at their mercy?

I've seen other reports that PMS is really not a thing, or at least not for the vast majority of women. Oh and an interesting piece about how menopause symptoms vary by culture (can't remember where or when unfortunately), with far fewer symptoms in cultures that value age than those that reify youth.

nooka

Yes, I've heard that too. I still don't really understand it. How can a physical symptom be culture driven?

On the other hand, you do get psychosomatic illnesses and symptoms.

For me, i never tracked but when AF turned up i realised why i'd been so bloody pissed off over the previous day or so.

Isn't there evidence to suggest that hormonal levels change the way we smell and thus changes the way people react to us

That's interesting. They should do a study of couples where the man has no sense of smell as a control group.

The brain is a powerful thing Datun! Hormones too though, and lots of chemicals going on in there too. Bearing in mind that just because something doesn't appear to have a physical cause doesn't make it any less real to the person experiencing the symptoms.

I think the menopause symptoms were linked to how positive people felt about no longer menstruating, which was linked to whether there were positive roles for elders. If you are anticipating being venerated for your wisdom that's very different to being told you are on the shelf and effectively worthless. One of the things I really like about working at a university in Canada is that we often have local elders come in to speak and play important ceremonial roles at events. I watched one recently and wondered how often I'd seen an old lady play an important public role.

nooka

That's really interesting. So many cultures used to venerate older people.

The western world's obsession with image and youth has a lot to answer for.

I wonder if it's because we now live a lot longer and younger people see old people degenerate long before they die. Perhaps 'old age' loses credibility as nowadays a significant proportion of it can spent 'failing'.

Years ago, I was having a conversation with my mother and grandmother (grandmother was born in 1898). I asked my grandmother if she ever suffered from PMT. She didn't really know what it was. So I explained. She said it was never a thing because when she was younger, women were either pregnant or breastfeeding for most of their fertile life. (She was one of ten, ten - gawd).

That hadn't occurred to me before.

Do you not find you behave in different ways at different times of a cycle?

Not really, I may feel different but I don't necessarily behave differently.

Anxiety for instance is linked to hormones and some people may find anxiety soothed by cleaning, others by throwing themselves into external work or exercise. I think the feelings follow from biological reasons but the behaviour from societal ones.

Some behaviours are definitely due to biology - differenr hormone levels (usually higher t in boys and o in girls) lead to different behaviour. Higher testosterone levels are linked with more aggression, competitiveness, dominance etc and oestrogen with emotions, nurture, empathy etc. Now, every woman and man has different levels of each hormone, so that is not to say that all women or all men behave as such, just that as a general rule those are characterises associated with high levels of those hormones respectively, so some of our societal gender roles do have some basis in basic biology, but they aren'the a hard-and-fast rule.

Some behaviours are definitely due to biology - differenr hormone levels (usually higher t in boys and o in girls) lead to different behaviour. Higher testosterone levels are linked with more aggression, competitiveness, dominance etc and oestrogen with emotions, nurture, empathy etc.

I'd change that to say "Some feelings are definitely due to biology". Not everyone acts on the feelings of aggression, empathy etc.

I'd say the actual behaviour/actions are shaped by society.

It's pretty easy to see that the housewife/breadwinner role came from our times as hunter-gatherers. Women were breastfeeding the children (before bottles and formula so women were the only ones who could physically care for a baby naturally anyway), so needed to be kept safe. They provided emotional security and care. The men were the more aggressive and stronger people, as they are built to be stronger than women naturally (again, that doesn't mean that women can't be stronger), so they were the choice to hunt animals and protect the clans from attacks. It was a pretty good system and it worked for a long time. There is a theory that as these roles were essential to early human survival, that humans evolved to be more inclined to those roles.

But, in modern times we have formula snd express pumps and bottles, we have jobs where we don't need to hunt/fight with animals, and we have good childcare, so there is no reason why the restrictions of our past ancestry should have much hold over our choices in roles nowadays!

I must say I think there are differences between male and female brains - for one thing many emotionally-charged disorders such as Bipolar and Borderline Personality Disorder are far more common in women - most likely due to oestrogen naturally making us more sensitive to emotional as a general rule of thumb. Again, this is not true of every woman, nobody is saying it is. Whereas anti-social and narcissistic disorders are more prevalent in men which goes hand-in-hand with male aggression and dominance/confidence.

BUT! Just because we are naturally inclined to a disposition that does not mean that we must follow that path, socialisation plays a huge rule in reinforcing our differences and making them harder to break free of then.

Is it easy to see that? Do we actually know how our early ancestors divided up tasks? Or is it all guess work and supposition influenced by modern notions of male and female roles?

I can see why you made that difference, but usually feelings do entail behaviours - so those who feel more empathetic are more likely to enter into a care-based career, while those feeling more aggressive may strive towards having a lot of power or doing hard manual work.

However, as I say there are nuances and plenty of boys are caring and more sensitive then some women, i'm just talking about general trends.

I don't think we should reinforce these to children though.

I doubt men were breast-feeding the babies though, they had no means to. Women were the only possible ones able to do so back then. The likelihood of the women who had babies/kids risking being killed fighting a wild animal, leaving no milk for their child I think is slim. They were essential to child-rearing so probably wouldn't have been put in the middle of danger back then. If they died it would have been wet-nurses, and I doubt a wetnurse would be out killing animals when they have numerous babies to feed because their mothers died or couldn't produce milk.

Times have changed though, as I said that set-up doesn't hold any advantage for the survival of our species now. It would have done back then.

I think that early societies might have used extended family to wet nurse and look after babies/children enabling more adults to go out and gather/hunt. Cooperative child rearing I suppose. I think that they would have given solid foods earlier as well. Many social animals do similar, why not early human societies?

I suppose women who weren't mothers were able to hunt, but the ones with children would either have to leave their children with the clans while they hunted (and yes this is just my opinion but I doubt they would risk leaving a child unmothered? Although care in the community was better than from what I know), or take the kids with them to fight (which also seems unlikely but then again our notions of childhood have changed sociologically over time).

I guess I don't think it is true to say that all differences between sex are biological, but it also isn'the accurate to say they are all sociological either. Nature & nurture and all that jazz...

Because I'm pretty sure if I grew a dick and balls over night and got flooded by testosterone I would be behaving differently the next morning, due to that.

I guess it's determining exactly how much is nature and how much is nurture/societal.

The Aka people of central Africa apparently do similar to what I described, with men actually "dry" nursing their babies whilst the women are off hunting or similar.