Do you believe in blank-slatism?

[BalletBunting]

To what extent do you think masculinity/femininity and biological?
For example it seems that testosterone is strongly linked to competitiveness and aggression (and perhaps violence) which could account for male/female crime differences

I think that every person has a personality that is then influenced by different factors, so society, hormones, circumstances, conditioning.

I believe the sexes both have factors that people within that sex share, so how society treats them and different hormones, but within that sex there will be a huge range.

I don't think that humans are blank slates that just become moulded by what's around them, but I also don't believe we are born fully formed.

More like we have latent potential inside us to become lots of different things and it's the seeds that are watered that grow.

I think as all men have testosterone and not all are violent then I think it's social, circumstantial and personality.

As DH has traits and mannerism he inherited from his father, my son's facial expressions are exactly like mine, so much of growing up is based on our family and biological history, before we even get into politics and critical thought.

I'd be interested in any study of testosterone that made a connection with violent behaviour though as trans men are taking it and if they became violent as a result there's another reason not to medicalise trans men.

Testosterone may or may not be a driving factor in behaviours that lead to criminality; but the fact remains that early socialisation and learning is critical to behaviour in adults.

If we don't teach children empathy, or to inhibit their violence, then they will act out.

I think we have different personalities at birth, but are nurtured into gender roles. For example women I know who are into football and motorbikes, etc, tend to have older brothers they look up to. Blokes I know who are more into bubblebaths and gentle pursuits tend to have older sisters they look up to. Total stereotyping there I know.

Competitivity is definitely not just for men - good god no. I know so many really competitive women. I wonder how much girls are socialised out of it because it isn't very 'ladylike' to want to 'destroy your enemies'.

I also observe that puberty brings a lot of behaviours that are to do with the different male and female drives. So hormones do play a part in behaviour. It's like nesting instincts when pregnant can make women OCD about dirt after having been an utter slob.

I think blank slatism has been discredited scientifically in a fairly effective way.
I think that in terms of behaviours, you have very overlapping groups of male and female, but altogether you see some significant differences. Just as you would see if you looked at height. Some things will have smaller differences and some larger. An inclination to spend time with infants is an example, there is a clear biological basis in terms of the physical element (nursing) where the species would have had been unlikely to survive if that kind of instinct did not exist. It's also found in all other mammals. Male aggression is another - it seems culturally universal and also among other great apes, and it's most common among mammals in general. So in both cases I would see those behaviours, and the personality traits associated with them, as biologically founded.
I don't think you can separate the body, brain, and hormones when talking about a person. It's wrong to say there is no male or female brain because those brains are attached to male or female bodies and male and female hormone profiles.

Socialisation is very important in any case - I think it's important because we are not blank slates. It's important to try and understand the tendencies in populations, because social norms, social structures, customs, and such, are how we direct these kinds of tendencies in positive rather than negative ways, ones which allow for a fair society that also responds to environment people are living in. But we need to understand what kinds of differences there will be in populations in order to have effective socialisation, and to see if it is working the way we would like.

Goosefoot what then would be the implications of how we socialise children?

What do you think, OP? You sound a bit non committal, almost like you're setting up a debating society motion?

Masculinity and femininity are metaphysical. They don’t exist in the real world and are instead perceptions of what male and female people are like. For instance. A thousand years ago being literate was a masculine trait. Today literacy and literature and all things associated with the above are deemed feminine.

I don't believe in blank slatism, no.
But I do believe people attribute characteristics to innateness that are environmental.
I think the impact of Testosterone on character is vastly overstated.

But mostly, I believe in the capacity of humans to overcome our basest instincts. We don't leave our elderly to starve in the wilderness, we don't abandon the sick and weak, we eschew survival of the fittest in favour of fair, democratic, compassionate society.

So even if I did believe that aggressive propensity was innately higher in men, I also believe in the ability of humans to overcome such violent potential with the effort of will.

"Goosefoot what then would be the implications of how we socialise children?"

It would depend on what sort of behaviour you wanted to control or modify, and what result you wanted.

So - say the issue is you want to socialise around women as caregivers of infants and women as worker in the workforce. If you think women feel the need to be caregivers more often than men only because of training and social pressure, your approach might be to make the social pressures more equal for men and women, by having equal parental leave and state childcare. You might expect that this would lead to equal numbers of men and women staying with infants and more sending children to childcare.
On the other hand, if you think women are likely to want to stay home more often than men even if the pressures are the same, you might still want parents to be able to choose who works or not, but there would be other issues as well. You would have to ask, is it best to accept that more women will stay home and somehow compensate for the effect of more interrupted careers, or would it be better to create conditions where the women are pushed toward working so they have more economic independence? You also would have to assess things like disparities in types of work or wage gaps differently than if it was a totally nurtured difference, and it might affect how you think about elevating (or not) the social value of unpaid work.

I've done a lot of family history and got in touch with a 4th cousin. Our common ancestor was born in 1824 and died in 1889. The two families seem to have stayed in touch until about 1950 shortly before my great grandmothers death.

What is really striking is the similar patterns the two families, which knew nothing about each other, have seemed to have taken. There are common interests and occupations. And even some personality traits.

My father's cousin also lost touch when his mother moved to South Africa when she was 2 and died shortly after - and again a similar thing - despite him not being raised by his biological mother.

There are also traits that seem to follow through for generations in my husbands family.

I think it likely that it is a social and biological related thing and not one rather than the other. I think there is a certain amount of predetermined fate about the life you end up living.

However its also very clear that particularly significant events or twist of fortune can have very profound effects for generations. One person becoming an alcoholic or having a husband die can change everything, not just for an adult, but their child and their grandchildren and great grandchildren before there might be an opportunity to recover from that incident.

So blank slatism? No. I think it's far harder to escape the reality of your birth than many of us would like. Some people can and do manage it, but I think it rarer and harder than we care to think.