Do you think it is sexist or feminist to point out biological differences?

[Nikia]

Between males and females. This thread made me think of this.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=1828663&mesg_id=1828663
I wanted to say that biologically sex is more of a risk for boys and girls and that our sex drives haven't fully developed within a couple of years after puberty. I realized though that some posters on that thread would probably find that sexist. I guess that sex and attitudes towards sex would be the most frequent subject where this might be brought up.

[cally]

1. No, but I think we all have difficulty discussing these issues

It's hard to get our points across. It's too easy to take our own personal experience and generalize about all others.

I find it fascinating learning that boys and girls learn differently. Studies have shown that boys and girls learn math differently. I have a personal problem with these studies because I and both my girls seem to learn math best in the way that males do. I remember their elementary school adding new techniques that were more girl friendly and how difficult it was for my girls. Just one example that all girls or all boys are not the same and we shouldn't generalize from one to all.

[ismnotwasm]

2. I think biological differences are only part of the story

The way we teach, the way we learn, our attitudes toward ourselves and our bodies. How much does brain chemistry respond to environment, anyway? How does thousands of years of role conditioning affect behavior? Hormones and childbearing affect how men and women react to the world, of course, but there is the chicken and egg factor.
The problem is institutionalized sexism. Any study is going to start with a premise, and it would be very, very difficult to weed out covert sexist factors when examining differences, OR the differences in behaviors between men and women.
I like what the poster above said, not to generalize, let each rise to their ability, let's see those abilities nurtured and encouraged, no matter what the sex someone is.

[Hello_Kitty]

4. Agreed

I'll buy a gender difference study when they can convince me that the researchers were able to fully and reliably control for their own cultural biases. Until then, fuck that shit.

[Hello_Kitty]

3. No problem with what your addressing

But what I can't stand is when sexists attempt to reinforce bogus gender stereotypes and prescribe behavior to people based on dubious "scientific" theories and essentialist assumptions. That doesn't help anyone, especially not vulnerable adolescents. Kids need an environment where they are taught healthy sexuality along with respect for their bodies and minds. I hate how you have these 2 extremes of shame-based prudery (mostly for girls) and market-based sexual exploitation (mostly for boys but also for girls to think that's what they need to be to please boys) foisted upon our young people.

The reality is that BOTH males and females want sex and loving relationships. What's so different about that?

And I don't think what you pointed out is sexist at all. Teenagers are generally not capable of handling the ramifications of a sexual relationship. That's why we adults are supposed to set limits and protect them. And if that means giving them the means to protect themselves from pregnancy and disease should they choose to try it, then so be it.

[geniph]

5. Certainly there are biological differences,

but what doesn't make sense is trying to extrapolate backwards from generalizations about large populations (all men & all women) to individuals. Individuals will always confound expectations made by generalizing, always.

[OldLeftieLawyer]

6. Raise kids

If you have boys and girls, as you raise them, you realize - no matter how your intellectual, enlightened self wants to deny it - that there are profound differences that are attributable only to their gender. In in pregnancy, there are differences in how boys and girls are in utero. I wouldn't have believed it, but it's true.

And wonderfully so, I might add. That's what keeps the world turning.

Then, as you adjust to these shocking developments - yes, boys are inherently more aggressive, even as infants, and yes, girls are much nicer and more docile, which rapidly changes, but they never match the hard-nosed aggression that seems to be part of boys' wiring - you do everything you can to help them turn out to be good people, regardless of gender.

So far, so good, in our family.

[smirkymonkey]

7. With my sister's children, it's the other way around.

Her daughter is headstrong, aggressive and competitive (She's 4) and her son is gentle, docile, easygoing (he's 2).

[ismnotwasm]

8. yes but....

Not always. I've raised 4 kids. I have an assertive/aggressive Combat veteran army soldier daughter (very much the warrior archetype) And a good natured, easy going son. Oh, he can get angry, but definitely not the warrior, aggressive type. So how much nurture and how much nature OLL? As a young, forming, feminist, did I unconsciously reinforce my daughters natural aggression, while repressing my son's when I was raising them? (I sure as hell didn't do it on purpose--dumb as a box of rocks when I was young) I was a young mother, not a particularly good one either. Nurture?
My other 2 are step-daughters. I raised them from when they were 4 and 6. Both very assertive, one can get aggressive, but they fall more into the "norm" as far as male/female roles. Nature?

See, that's why I think biological differences are only part of the story. We know testosterone is an aggressive making hormone. (One of the reasons old time violent-prone thugs tend to loose their edge as they age,-- testosterone levels dropping) Women have their androgens also. In fact men have "female" hormones. Hell, when you look at it, except for a few baby making hormones, men and women share quite a few simularities as well as--what you put so well-- world turning differences.

The differences in women and men Should be celebrated, but women seem to get the short end. I know feminists can get defensive at words like "nurturer" or "caregiver" But I embrace them. I'm a nurse and its a tough job. If those qualities are part of who I am, great.

It's better than when I was a violent street rat, with enough
aggression for a couple of grown men.

If we can get a balance, of a yin/yang sort-- why, then we'll have half a chance at helping our young ones reach their potential, and become those good people.

[OldLeftieLawyer]

9. Of course it's a combination

My girls grew up to be mothers first, which surprised the hell out of me, after the interesting adolescent times they marched us through (the girls were capable of walking through walls, by the way, while they sweetly smiled). One married a rock star - no, really - and has two kids, lives in Malibu, and gets more done in one day than I ever got done in a week. She's finely-tuned her aggression into community activism.

The other girl is a mother of three, who is much softer-spoken than her older sister, but who is also a therapeutic masseuse, dealing mostly with the terminally ill. She's got a strength inside her that has nothing to do with the "bang-bang, shoot-em-up" noise that defined her brothers.

One of the things that startled me when the boys were little - and we didn't allow them to have guns - was how, without anyone prompting them, the boys started fashioning guns out of things like spoons and washcloths. I've heard that story so many times from other mothers - boys just have this thing about "bang, bang."

Both our sons are in competitive businesses, although not of a traditional sort. They're partners in a winery in France, which is as cutthroat as you can get, but with good manners. They both married strong, intense women, just as my daughters married easy-going, complicated men.

Did we influence them? Of course we did. How my girls became full-time mothers, when they weren't raised by one, is testimony to my belief that every kid will properly rebel. I'm just glad they don't vote Republican. But, they arrived with certain wiring, and our kids fell into the patterns that you find in the child psychology books. They are verified by the deviations from the norm, like your kids, like the niece and nephew quoted above. Of course there are exceptions - how could there not be?

But, the differences are real. As for the careers women choose today, I think their choices have been greatly expanded from the male-defined jobs - if they were even allowed to have jobs - that were so sparsely available a generation or two ago. I didn't become a lawyer because I wanted to be aggressive - I did it after a year as a social worker in Chicago, where I saw how much power there was within the legal system to effect change to help people (senior citizens were my clients).

So, there's nurturing and caregiving within all professions, for men and for women. You're a nurse, I'm a lawyer - we both take care of people. So do the men in our professions. Perhaps we need to watch more carefully, and embrace what we see with arms opened wider, because, save for the loony exceptions that live at both ends of the spectrum, I think we - men and women - have a lot more in common than we might think, at first glance.

[ismnotwasm]

10. "Didn't vote Rebublican" LOL

Mine either. Thank God. Interestingly, I want to get involved in legal policy affecting medicaid/medicare funding once I get tired of floor nursing (I need quite a bit more education but my legs are aching, it's time!) I started out in Long-term care, so I've seen first hand what government cutbacks combined with cooparate greed do to our most helpless population. Long term care is my first love professionally, and I've always intended to go back once I get the education and position that will give me a little "clout"

And I don't think denying differences between men and women does us any good, but I do think we need to watch carefully for that covert sexism when studies are thrown up at us about what the differences are and what they mean.

My favorite professor--that one you never forget-- was this
older woman. She wore wool skirts and a cardigan, and had this little old lady voice. I'm assuming she was in her early sixties, but you never know. She was a physical chemist with a couple of PHD's and God only knows what other degrees. I can only imagine what she went through as a female ground breaker in the field of chemistry. She said she choose that area of chemistry because she couldn't stand the smells of biological chemistry. Cracked me up.

[spooky3]

11. A statistical perspective

This is a topic on which there is a lot of research conducted by people in a variety of fields. I'm not knowledgeable enough about it but it always bothers me when people like Lawrence Summers ignore the fact that it is there and draw conclusions without reading it. That's like talking about whether a certain food causes cancer without reading any of the literature testing the hypothesis in a controlled way, maybe based on what happened in his or her family. It's possible the speaker's right but certainly it is far better to read the controlled research than to draw conclusions on the basis of anecdotal experience.

I do know this dangerously small amount:

1. from a statistical perspective, on many of the characteristics on which men and women have been compared, the means are not different to a statistically reliable ("significant") standard. And given that journals strongly prefer articles where significant differences are found (because there are infinite numbers of reasons for why one didn't get significant results) that means you're not seeing a lot more studies showing no gender differences even if they were well done.

2. Many studies showing differences have been discredited because of poor research design, so better research needs to be done.

3. On those good studies where differences are found, despite mean differences, there is considerable overlap in the 2 distributions. Picture one bell curve a little to the right of another. What this shows is that while it's correct to say men are/have more of something than women (or vice versa) there is a lot of variance in the distributions unexplained by gender, such that there are many women who score higher than many men. Under these circumstances it would be wrong to say men and women as groups don't differ but it would be just as wrong to treat individuals as though their own score is primarily determined by gender. Obviously other characteristics (for example, intelligence) may be much more important in determining an individual's score. And, even where gender means are different, it's entirely possible that something correlated with gender (such as nurture) could account for the difference.

[antigone382]

13. Very good post.

You said what I said below, but you said it much better.

[antigone382]

12. It all depends on the context.

Biological differences in anatomy and development are not only fine, they are important; it is biological fact that girls generally mature more quickly than boys. As a result, there are statistical differences in self-esteem and confidence in this age group; that's significant, because studies done on middle and high school students have been used in the past to extrapolate personality differences between men and women that may not be accurate. Thus, a biological difference between the sexes is important in evaluating a perceived psychological difference between them.

But there are other times when biological "differences" are more related to flawed, biased studies than they are to actual scientific fact. For example, there have been no shortage of studies that attempt to confirm biological differences in the brains of men and women--for instance, showing that men's thinking is more logical and mathematical, while women's is more intuitive and verbal. But there are numerous problems with such findings. They often rely on information which we still aren't quite sure how to analyze, such as brain patterns and the comparative sizes of different sections of the brain (and often they aren't even using human brains to conduct these studies, but rat or other animal brains). They often use samples which are too small to yield a reliable scientific result, and/or the actual percentage of difference is too small to be statistically significant. Not to mention that experiments which contradict these, finding minimal differences in male and female brains, are reported by the media with much less fanfare and importance, if they are in fact reported at all.

Biological differences can be powerful tools either to help or to hinder the feminist movement, because they are so hard to negate or argue with. Thus, any finding of biological difference needs to be carefully vetted before it is treated as established fact.