Are Gender Behaviors Learned?

[GreyClock]

im going to go a lil off topic here but can anybody explain to me why those things arent considered natural

at what point does nature stop being nature and become this supposedly unnatural product of it instead

just look in the rainforest for one of rhose lil crunk birds that dance and rattle and do all kinds of stupid shit for a mating ritual, you think "what a beautiuful and natural little fella"

now look in a public bathroom and find a minty applying makeup, you think "what a fucking unnatural whore"

human beings are funny

Natural just means something existing in or formed by nature. Yes humans could be considered part of nature, but we developed these big brains and one day dreamed up our own category to distinguish ourselves from the beasts. Words like man-made, artificial and unnatural are just a labels for the things humans do. On a more basic level painting your face could be compared to the huge range of extremely different and elaborate mating rituals found in the animal kingdom. The difference being that with animals it's species specific, while mating rituals vary from human to human. Where all the lil crunk birds do that dance and rattle, largely driven by instinct, only a portion of humans coat their faces in thick layers of makeup. People have their own individual preferences: some people might enjoy their women resembling clowns, while others enjoy their women more "natural" or haggard looking, and we form our opinions based on that.

[Thor]

The world natural literally means "not made by man". Obviously a bird dancing is natural and makeup is artificial.

[AlbinoClock]

Check out these articles.

Let's look at what the wage gap really is. It's not a difference in pay between a man and a woman who work the same job, it's a median difference. The wage gap is what happens when you average the incomes of men and women and look at the difference. As of 2011, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median income of women is 82.2% of the median income of men. That leaves us a 17.8% gap. What this really means is not that women earn 82 cents for every dollar men make, but that one in five women stays home with her kids. Or perhaps more accurately, three in five women take time off to stay home with their kids at some point, one of them doesn't go back until they're nearly adults, one of them goes back to work a year later, another goes back six years later. Meanwhile, the women who never took time off for pregnancy, as well as the men, continue to advance their careers. When they come back, some of them take more flexible hours or shorter hours for a few years, just in case of emergencies. They tend to take jobs that are closer to home if they've got young children, especially if their husband (or wife) works an inflexible job, because somebody has to be able to deal with the kids if there's an emergency. Sometimes it's the other way around, she's got a better job and so she gets back to it hardcore and salvages her career while the husband stays closer to the house and more available in case things go bad. Clearly, given the gap, it's more likely that women take the flexible hours, though. I don't know about you, but to me, that sounds like people are making legitimate choices about what they want to do with their lives.

But it's less often that men have to choose whether or not to make this sacrifice.

Men are physically incapable of pregnancy, they are also more able to wait to have children, as women's biological clocks tend to be screaming at them during the same years that are vital to get their careers going. If you look at women in the job market, there isn't really cultural pressure for them to stay home instead of working for most women. There may be pressure to reproduce, whether from husbands who want children, parents who want grandchildren, or a biological clock that won't shut up, but it's not the same kind of pressure that you'd run into a few decades ago. Older women with no children aren't pariahs like they once were, on the contrary they're likely very successful.

Still, those women have to work much harder than men to get to that point because A) They have to first escape the cultural standard that women should have children and take care of them,

This just isn't the big deal that it used to be. The working woman isn't taboo anymore, she's socially powerful. It's 2012, nobody's shocked that a lady has a job. Women are beating the hell out of men in college in general, but really badly in graduate degrees. Yet still the wage gap persists, not because women can't get jobs but because some of them prioritize differently.  What you have to realize is that pretty much every other reason for a lack of productivity that women are capable of, men are also capable of, so it cancels out. Pregnancy, though, which is not only bound to happen due to the immense pleasure of sex, but also the only thing that keeps the species going, is a physically debilitating process. Not only does it keep a woman more or less off her feet toward the end, it's flooding her brain with all kinds of hormones that may very well change her priorities in favor of her child. If it weren't for the nurturing instinct of motherhood, we'd probably all be dead. It's a powerful force of nature that I wouldn't be so ready to dismiss as completely socially imposed. I mean, this huge thing comes out of their vagina, which is apparently terribly painful, and it screams and shits but they somehow immediately love it. I mean, sure, fathers love their children too, but they don't have much reason not to. They didn't have to carry the fucker around in their body and then push the thing out. Those are some powerful hormones.

B) They have to compete with men under predominantly male bosses.

Because, again, most women choose shorter, more flexible hours if they happen to have children. Women who don't do these things tend to do very well in the job market.

I don't agree with that equation. Maybe I'm talking about more than just the wage gap.

So what specifically, if not the wage gap, do you mean? There are certainly all sorts of aspects of our culture that are still fucking with women. The wage gap just isn't really one of them.

Sure, but this mass "tendency" is hardly an identity or character attribute. It's a series of decisions heavily pressured by cultural expectations and discrimination

If it were 20 years ago, I'd be inclined to agree with you. Today? Not so much.

That's an interesting statistic. Also supposedly 4 times more men commit suicide than women, and on the other end, more women attempt suicide. I'm not sure what it means. This factoid and other data such as women being more chemically prone to emotions points to arguments that women are inferior/are discriminated against because they aren't more like men.

Look at the other factors that are more prevalent in men. We're enormously over-represented in the most dangerous jobs, like logging, fishing, and mining, in all the armed services, in prisons, in the lowest income jobs, in homelessness, in the black market, and in suicide, while being hugely under-represented in doctor's offices and successful child custody outcomes, while having a shorter life expectancy. Men are expendable. Think about that for a second. We've been programmed to suppress our emotions and ignore pain so that we can do what needs to be done. Much of the time what needed to be done, for thousands of years, was killing something or fighting it and dying so that your wife and children have a chance to escape. Maybe that's a pack of wolves or a tiger, maybe it's the Luftwaffe, but if we couldn't get men to line up to die we'd all be extinct a long time ago.
 
When women die, on the other hand, that's a problem. And that, weirdly enough, is why we have traditionally treated them rather badly but also sheltered them. It's not that women aren't valued, they are, their value is what causes their objectification. Reproduction, in any animal, is important. In some species it marks the sole drive in life and its completion marks the end of life. Humans make out quite a lot better than that, producing, after a few years of development, tiny allies who can aide them with tasks of increasing complexity as they grow and learn. The value in this is obvious, especially in earlier times when resources weren't so accessible and the world was a bit rougher.

In foraging societies there's a correlation between the amount of food a woman can bring back to the table, generally through gathering and trapping, and how egalitarian the culture is. When women can gather a significant portion of the diet, especially if that includes meat that they can get from traps, they're well respected. When the hunted meat significantly outweighs the gathered fare, they start to be seen as less competent. That doesn't mean they're seen as less valuable, though, because they need them. They just don't trust them, and that, I think, is where the trouble starts for both sexes. Women are reduced to breeding stock and men are reduced to expendable workhorses.

It's not a good situation for either gender. We've significantly worn away at those old gender norms, though, especially in regard to women.  There's still work to do, but I'd argue that we're at a point where we need to examine gender dynamics in a more comprehensive way. It's not as simple as society unilaterally favoring men, it's a lot more nuanced than that. There are factors that are detrimental and helpful to either gender, but you're not going to really level the playing field until you deal with the imbalances on both sides. What we really need to do, in my opinion, is wear away at the binary and just let people be who they want to be. Women shouldn't be pressured not to have children and stay home to raise them any more than they should be pressured into doing it. By the same token, men shouldn't be pressured into working long hours and proving their worth financially if that's not where their priorities are. I'd love to get rid of all this shit, and part of that is addressing both sides, not demonizing one and valorizing the other in an attempt to compensate for a one-sided assessment of gender dynamics.

[AlbinoClock]

Men have more testosterone than women, this is indisputable. This has such effects as making men more aggressive and stronger. Males and females also have subtly different brain structure. It's not radically different, obviously, but it does effect preferences and actions in subtle ways.

Such as female tennis players being unable to compete with male tennis players.

In conclusion, gender roles are simply societies reflection of the nature of mankind. People who defy gender roles are just acting out against their instincts. It's not good or bad, but transgender people still give me the creeps.

I disagree. There are behaviors, tastes, and mannerisms, that are associated with physical gender, but a great many of them aren't inherent to it. Obviously some things, like hormone levels, are more or less dictated by gender (though even here there are outliers), but there are most certainly men who have more effeminate traits and women who are more masculine, to the point that they may even have facial hair. It's certainly true that men are more likely to exhibit traditionally masculine traits and women more likely to exhibit traditionally feminine traits, but it's never been 100%, and considering that most cultures do have some sort of fairly strictly defined gender roles, that's going to pressure people into giving the appearance of normaliity.  That, I would argue, is contrary to their instincts.

Do you feel that same sense of disgust toward effeminate gay men that you do toward transgendered people?

[miracle fruit]

The world natural literally means "not made by man". Obviously a bird dancing is natural and makeup is artificial.

no, the word natural literally means 'of nature' and nature is defined as the phenomena of the physical world. im pretty sure makeup exists in the physical world, so  i guess by the most general definition there is no confusion

"not made by man"

we dont really make anything at all, we just move around what nature has already created, or is, which is why my question was

at what point does nature stop being nature and become this supposedly unnatural product of it instead

if nature produced, or is, the ingredients for makeup, and also produced, or is, man to assemble them, then why is the resulting product not considered (of) nature? and if it isnt, at what point during it's assembly do we make that distinction? why do we feel the need to make one?

or how about this,

theres a big rock, and a man. man grabs teh rock. what you have now is either:

a) man holding natural rock
b) man holding artificial tool

i domt know. what i do know is that everyone should be happy im making a relevant post in this shit hole forum

[FLOUNDERMAN_CLOCK]

Makeup is a man made product but it's natural for creatures to try and spruce themselves up for a mate.

[F U Clock]

Makeup is a man made product but it's natural for creatures to try and spruce themselves up for a mate.

Sure, but does makeup ONLY make women more attractive because it enhances feminine beauty, or would it be equally appealing on a man and we just don't use it because the society we've invented doesn't require it of us.



Sure she looks good with makeup (and without, obviously). She wears it because it enhances her beauty and that is a natural desire.



Is this specifically NOT a good look for masculine beauty? Or is it just because we're not used to it. Maybe if women dominated society they would have men dress this way.

Another example is fashion. Typically fashion is used to enhance beauty by tricking the eye into seeing a more attractive shape - usually by making people look thinner and taller. But it is more acceptable for men to wear loose fitting (comfortable) clothing, and men are often ridiculed for wearing anything too fashionable or tight.

[AlbinoClock]

Male actors use makeup to make them look more attractive all the time, it's just a different strategy than women. Women tend to want to soften their features, whereas men want to make them look more sculpted. Eyeliner will make your eyes pop a bit whether you're male or female, though, and nailpolish can work too. I don't think guys would look great with blush or lipstick, but those accentuate features that are more associated with feminine beauty.

[AstronautClock]

are you saying only sugar causes cavities? are you crazy nigga?

[DurianClock]

Is this specifically NOT a good look for masculine beauty? Or is it just because we're not used to it. Maybe if women dominated society they would have men dress this way.

If I dominated society, men would dress like this:



I have my reasons..

[GreyClock]

are you saying only sugar causes cavities? are you crazy nigga?

The combination of sugar and certain bacteria, yeah. One of my cats used to eat a little bit of pudding each day and his teeth were getting pretty bad. My other cat doesn't care much for pudding and gets wet food instead and his teeth are fine.

[Thor]

no, the word natural literally means 'of nature' and nature is defined as the phenomena of the physical world. im pretty sure makeup exists in the physical world, so  i guess by the most general definition there is no confusion

I don't know where you're getting that definition. My guess is your ass.

Code Select Expand

naÃ,·ture
ââ,¬â€š ââ,¬â€š[ney-cher]
noun
1.
the material world, especially as surrounding humankind and[B] existing independently of human activities.[/B]
2.
the natural  world [B]as it exists without human beings or civilization.[/B]

natural
natÃ,·uÃ,·ral
ââ,¬â€š ââ,¬â€š[nach-er-uhl, nach-ruhl]
adjective
1.
existing in or formed by nature ( [B]opposed to artificial[/B]): a natural bridge.
These are the most common definitions of the words. When somebody says a whore painting herself up like a clown is unnatural that is literally true. It is not a matter of opinion or up for interpretation; by the standard meaning of the word makeup is not natural, as the substance and application would not exist without humanity. The individual molecules might have existed without mankind, but you aren't going to find a bottle of nail polish growing off a tree.

[Marlin Clock]

Since we're on the subject of  male genitalia someone explain to me why this is an ancient and cherished part of japanese culture

The tanuki is a real animal with actual giant testes. Plus, since Shinto is a pantheistic religion, there's a temple or statue for everything, and I mean evvvverything.

[miracle fruit]

I don't know where you're getting that definition. My guess is your ass.

my butt wields the knowledge of a thousand men

Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the cosmic.

...

Within the various uses of the word today, "nature" often refers to geology and wildlife. Nature may refer to the general realm of various types of living plants and animals, and in some cases to the processes associated with inanimate objects ââ,¬â€œ the way that particular types of things exist and change of their own accord, such as the weather and geology of the Earth, and the matter and energy of which all these things are composed. It is often taken to mean the "natural environment" or wildernessââ,¬â€œwild animals, rocks, forest, beaches, and in general those things that have not been substantially altered by human intervention, or which persist despite human intervention. For example, manufactured objects and human interaction generally are not considered part of nature, unless qualified as, for example, "human nature" or "the whole of nature". This more traditional concept of natural things which can still be found today implies a distinction between the natural and the artificial, with the artificial being understood as that which has been brought into being by a human consciousness or a human mind. Depending on the particular context, the term "natural" might also be distinguished from the unnatural, the supernatural, or synthetic.

you completely and probably deliberately skipped over the part of my post that mattered, so i highlighted the sections which basically explain what i was inquiring about

It is not a matter of opinion or up for interpretation;

what a stupid thing to say

[FLOUNDERMAN_CLOCK]

I personally prefer sugary foods and brushing my teeth after over being a caveman, what with your teeth getting ground down to the point where you actually need your wisdom teeth.

[AlbinoClock]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

[PirateClock]

i stopped reading this thread after someone said women are beautiful without make-up.

They are not. Even the most natural beauty will look better with some make-up.

[F U Clock]

i stopped reading this thread after someone said women are beautiful without make-up.

They are not. Even the most natural beauty will look better with some make-up.

I agree makeup makes women look more attractive, but as you said, makeup makes everyone look better, so shouldn't men wear it too? Do we not because it's "feminine", or is that bullshit, and we just don't want to do it because we're lazy or something. Is makeup an enhancement to feminine beauty, or is there even such a thing as feminine beauty vs. masculine beauty?

[F U Clock]

Let's look at some of the HOTTEST MALE STARS OF THE DAY!







Oh wait I'm sorry I got confused with that last one.

[GreyClock]

i stopped reading this thread after someone said women are beautiful without make-up.

They are not. Even the most natural beauty will look better with some make-up.

Then you missed one very informative post about ancient dick art.