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Forgive me for being difficult - but you offer many arguments with no support whatsoever.
I'd like to see this scientific proof.

Firstly:

Your example of raising a male infant as a female is a poor one.
Firstly, it relies heavily upon the assumption that males and females are different.
The logic goes in circles and proves nothing.
Secondly, I would be interested in seeing your sources.
I have heard of this before, but I have not confirmed it.

I know many men that have grown up in families composed predominantly of women, and they have qualities which we would label as feminine.
Same with girls - I have noticed that many girls who are raised in a family of mostly males will end up with qualities that we would associate with males.

Secondly:

There are men and women both with very similar builds.
Men and women have very similar bodies - all of the proportion are the same.
The only differences, aside from the chest and groin, are very subtle.
As an artist, I have observed this.
(It is very hard to differentiate men and women when drawing because of these sometimes ridiculously subtle differences.)

Thirdly:

I have heard too many gender-stereotyping statements which contradict each other.

Example:
Women are supposedly the more sensual of the two genders, according to one stereotype.
According to another (yours) men are more sensitive to touch.
These two stereotypes seem to come awfully close to cancelling each other out.


-Alezunde

P.S. Someone please examine my arguments and attack specific points!
I've been arguing for days, and some of my arguments are disgustingly weak - I've just been too lazy to reinforce them.
Attack my arguments so that I know what my weak points are. 3nodding

ok then the only fundamental difference left is they are physicaly different. everything I have told you is from what I have either seen heard or learnt through reading. unfortunatly I'm not a god teacher(well at least over the enternet. if I was talking to you face to face it may be different.) all in all I think that if there were any differences between men and women fundamentaly they were more evadent about 60 years or more in the past were men and women didnt have equality. today through the equality of all genders we have lost most if not all our fundamentals for we had been given the ability to act like our counterparts and there for we did and through that have changed over the years so now(as I said earlier) whatever fundamental differenes we did have are now gone or at least not as obvious as before

(chuckles) I don't think anybody will argue the physical differences. It's behavioral differences that are much harder to proove. Heh.



Well, doesn't this lend support to the argument that gender differences are purely social constructs? These constructs have been eroded substantially over the past 60 years but they're still there. I think there's some confusion here by what you mean as "fundamental differences". Maybe you should explain what you mean by this in more detail, because I'm interpreting this to mean differences that are FUNDAMENTS, or the basic structure and not very changeable. So... they are not, to me, fundamental differences... they are variable and changing differences.

I have to respectively disagree. Obvious physical differences aside, I see males react and respond differently from females, just from personal experience. The two genders certainly are similar, however, I do believe there are behavioral differences.

You should feel free to discuss your ideas and theories here.
This is a Philosophy guild, where all opinions are weighed equally. :p
If you would prefer to dicuss this via PM, feel free. ^_^

Aeonian.life:
We have been discussing the behavorial differences between men and women - you should sift through the replies and see what points have been argued thus far.
I would like to hear your arguments on how you have seen men and women act differently. smile

-Alezunde

That was my thought at the beginning of the argument; that males and females have the tendency to react differently to the same situations. But one could argue that these are just stereotypes; while many males might react one way to a situation, most may not. In other words, it seems to come down to this:
Do the tendencies of many members of a gender to react a certain way delieanate (sp?) the tendencies of the gender in its entirety?
I suppose it depends on whether you look at individual tendencies as exceptions to the rule.

There are differences, but perhaps the question that needs to be asked here is "Are these differences significant?" And, where do we, and all of these studies, set that line for a significant difference? I presume they do it using the standards of statistics, but who knows? I haven't read any studies on this issue in quite some time, just news articles reporting on the studies themselves.

Sure, you can make may sayings that "men usually X" and "women usually Y" but generalizations, while usefull, can be a dangerous thing. It's generalizations that sometimes create prejudice, bigotry, stereotypes, and judgemental labeling of others. Instead of looking at a person, and see their sex, and assume certain things about them because these things are generally true... is it not better to just look at a person as a PERSON? Throw out all those presumptions when we first meet a man or woman? Treat them, simply, as human?

Studying these assumptions I speak of is probably difficult, since it would be very hard to isolate assumptions based on gender from all the other cues that we get when we first meet a person.

There's a phenomenon known as the halo effect, in which when a person sees someone who is physically attractive, the positive effect of their attractiveness gets translated to positive things in other qualities. In other words, because they are good looking, they must also be smart, nice, great people. People make this error all the time, but once we become aware of it, it becomes easy to prevent with enough discipline.

A sort of halo effect occurs with gender too. You see someone is female, and you assume, say, that they're emotional, less intelligent, etc. You see someone ismale, and you might assume they're more intelligent, and less emotional. A lot of these reactions are so subconscious its hard to catch ourselves when we do it. We all develop these kinds of reactions to label and put people into boxes. It helps us make sense of the world around us.