This is a comment by Graham Phoenix on the post “8 Myths About Sex Differences“.
I want to know why there is this relentless pressure for us to believe that we are the same? I find that life is infinitely more interesting if I look for the differences between people. My wife and I love life together because of sameness and difference. We have similar interests and find enjoyment and satisfaction in them, that’s what brought us together.
What we celebrate, though, are the differences, the polarity between us. We are man and woman, male and female, masculine and feminine. We are not opposites but there is a polarity, a tension, a spark between us that comes from the differences between us. They are biological, emotional, hormonal and logical. Our life together grows because we explore and celebrate these differences. Don’t spoil our fun by telling us we are the same!
Photo credit: Flickr / Shayne Kaye
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That is such unjustified stereotyping, it’s completely unnecessary!
“…most people…”
Where did that come from? I assume you’ve had some bad experiences, but that doesn’t justify such a ridiculous comment!
It’s a sad thing, but most people that say there /is/ a difference between men and women, use it as excuse for poor behaviour, use it as excuse to tell people how to live their lives, an excuse to tell women they should shut up and stay in the kitchen, or men to shut up and go to war like ‘a real man’ so when many people say there is, there is a backlash; people don’t want to give /those/ people any sort of excuse, real or otherwise, for their asshat behaviour.
I think we’re mashing theories of evolution – evolution is statistical and relational – frequency of alleles and their relationships – a hard 1-1 mapping of replicators to phenotype characteristics is not to be had, but that does not mean there is a lack of strong statistical significance. We expect variation. That is indeed the engine of evolution. We also expect clusters. @ Graham: “Accepting the differences between people does not need to lead to prejudice.” Yes and how difficult that can sometimes seem! The ultimate difference we all navigate continuously is the realization that there are others who are… Read more »
Think it comes from a relentless desire not to be prejudged according to stereotypes ascribed to an entire group circumscribed by a seeming arbitrary qualifier like race, gender or nationality.
We should absolutely celebrate the diversity in our differences, but it would be great if those differences were ascribed to our choices and actions alone.
Noble thoughts, Random_Stranger. In my experience, though, it just doesn’t work like that. Much of our differences come from choices made for us by our circumstances. Your race, sex and nationality are pre-determined by others, mostly your parents. That doesn’t mean you need to live by those but it does make it more likely that people pre-judge you based on them. Humans have a deep need to understand other people they come into contact with. If they don’t know them they pre-judge them based on what they see or experience. If they then have the opportunity to get to know… Read more »
A great read on this subject is “Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference” by Cordelia Fine.
While sameness and difference may exist irrespective of sex and gender, sex and gender do name a set of differences. Not all differences are merely individual: we also participate in differences that transcend ourselves. The differences named by sex and gender may be handled in a clumsy fashion by most, but that need not make them any less genuine. They are perhaps more akin to family resemblances: while no one in the family has every particular family resemblance, and some don’t seem to have any at all, family resemblances still exist. Gender has a first person presence in us and… Read more »
I think a further question would be asking where the difference or sameness comes from. It would be a mistake to downplay the power of cultural norms in influencing gendered behavior, but at the same time such is rather different than a purely biological cause. I think that recognizing the overlap (and disparity) between the two can create a more nuanced understanding of sex and gender.
Agemaki, I agree with you. We beat our heads against a brick wall if we try to assign the sameness/difference to purely biological or cultural sources. For me it starts with biology and goes on the be influenced by family, friends, media etc. That’s why there is such an interesting mix. If the issue was purely cultural then I don’t see why gay men and women should have such difficulty. The difficulty they have is that they are, on the whole, born with a biological sex that doesn’t align to their gender orientation. If you accept this then you have… Read more »
“If the issue was purely cultural then I don’t see why gay men and women should have such difficulty. The difficulty they have is that they are, on the whole, born with a biological sex that doesn’t align to their gender orientation.”
No. This is a misunderstanding and a conflating of gender identity and sexual orientation. The two are COMPLETELY separate.
Ok, I accept that. I’ll withdraw the argument and think about a bit more.
Well, I do not accept that at all – they are not “completely separate”. To say they are completely separate is to deny the relationship between sexual orientation and gender identity.
When I say completely separate, I am referring to the fact that whether your male, female or intersex (biological sex) does not influence whether you identify as a man, woman, queergender, etc (gender) which does not influence whether you identify as gay, straight, bi, poly, etc. (sexual orientation).
So what do you mean when you say I am “denying the relationship between sexual orientation and gender identity)?
One issue is that people normally work forward from sexual identity to sexual orientation. If you identify as a woman, and you are only sexually interested in women, then you would identify as homosexual. Is there a model that works backwards from sexual orientation to get sexual identity? For example, I have never heard of someone starting out by identifying as heterosexual, then stating they must be a woman because they are only interested in men. (Note: this is different from someone stating they are really a man though they were born a woman, because that goes to sexual identity… Read more »
Right by “sexual identity” I think you mean “gender identity,” first off. I’m not trying to be nitpicky, here, but I think it’s important to get the terms right. 🙂 On to the rest…I think what you’re referring to is that a person’s sexual orientation (gay, straight, etc) is contingent on their gender. Someone who identifies as a man, for example, can’t be a lesbian. And even a term as broad as “heterosexual” is at least partly defined by your own gender. I am homosexual because I am attracted to the same gender as myself, which means I must have… Read more »
!!! I don’t mean to be rude, HeatherN, but I am amazed at the contortions of your language! No wonder people give up and go away when faced with someone trying to discuss this subject in a way that implies we are all really the same and we really have to be careful not to offend anyone.
I don’t follow your logic and please don’t try and explain it to me. I would rather experience the wonder of life than get tied up in contortions of language.
Thank you for the discussion, should we leave it now?
It’s not “her” language. It’s language used by LGBT community advocates and activists as well as those who study sexuality and gender.
I mean, if you were going to talk about cooking and you basically said chopping vegetables was the same as baking pastries, you’d be informed of the difference.
You don’t have to accept that language means things, or continue in the conversation, but those terms mean real things.
So basically, you’re “normal” so you don’t have to think about these issues…so you’d rather just ignore them? Yeah, privilege is lovely.
So when I say biological sex, gender and sexual orientation are completely separate, I mean that one is not contingent upon the other. A person’s gender does not determine their sexual orientation, and a person’s biological sex does not determine their gender. Our culture has just conflated them all, and to such a great degree that even groups that exist outside the normative (straight, cis-gendered) are limited in their definitions by the system that they have to work with. And you can see this play out in homphobia. Often times the logic behind homophobia is that said person’s romantic/sexual attractions… Read more »
Yes, HeatherN, I am ‘normal’. It’s not that I don’t have to think about these issues, I choose to work with and help other ‘normal’ people. That does not give me privilege, it’s just who I am. I have as much right to be and use language as you. I am not in your world and don’t really understand it, again that doesn’t make me privileged. It just makes me ‘normal’ to use your description. Julie, I accept that it’s the language of a community, and I accept that it means something to that community. This is the problem that… Read more »
“The difficulty with the sex and gender issue is the confusion between biology, preference, identity, sex, gender, orientation…”
Is that it also can be described. I mean, I understand it. If one wants to learn something, one will.
Alright I’ll try to be brief and use very little jargon. Your assertion that all of the language that I’m using just doesn’t affect you or pertain to your world, is actually kind of wrong. For one thing, statistically you’re bound to know someone who’s LGBT. But for another thing, this language applies to straight people too. “Straight” is as much a creation of culture as “gay.” When I made my (admittedly snarky) comment about privilege, I was referring to this: you fit into the norm and so are buffered from having to think about your gender or sexual orientation.… Read more »
Thank you, Alistair, the subtlety of it is very well put.
I think that the push to recognize sameness is more about recognizing that difference/sameness exists irrespective of sex and gender. You are different from your wife because you are different people, less probably because of your biology than because you are different individuals. The flip side is recognizing that men are not all the same and that women are not all the same–because they are more than just a member of a particular sex and gender.
Exactly. And that last bit took feminism awhile to wrap it’s head around…but it did eventually.
The differences I identify are due to our biology, and its consequences. In terms of simple personalities there is sameness between us, that’s what brought us together. It’s the differences between us due to biology that make our relationship what it is. Yes, of course there are personal differences at work here but the spark is due to our polarity which comes from us living in our respective masculine/feminine cores.