[scotty79]

Why are people so fixated on gender? We all mostly want the same things, feel the same things and do the same things, both good and bad. Individual variety overwhelms slight difference in averages between the groups.

When it comes to anything except children, "I'm a man" is no more meaningful than "I'm a Libra". Objectively meaningless, subjectively can screw you up but only if you believe in zodiac.

[d-z-m]

> "I'm a man" is no more meaningful than "I'm a Libra".

I think you're overstating things here, by a lot. I understand not wanting to get mired in gender politics, as I find it tedious as well. But "man" and "woman" goes deeper than star signs.

[scotty79]

I think you underestimate how strongly people who are into zodiac signs feel about it. Roughly just as strong as people who are into gender are feeling about theirs. The mechanism is the same, you blow up differences, neglect similarities. All in service of constructing your identity in opposition to others.

[d-z-m]

I'm not talking about how people feel about anything. I'm saying that in the aggregate, differences between men and women exist that are predictable and durable. People may feel this way about star signs, but that doesn't make it true(and there isn't a mountain of scientific literature to back up the latter claim, for the former there is).

I'm also not saying that we aren't more the same than different, I think that's true as well.

[scotty79]

There are measurable differences, sure. There's ongoing discussion how many of them should be attributed to being a male and how many to being a man. The ones attributed to being a man are no different in nature than the ones attributed to being a Leo. They are cultural. They are stornger, but only because the human culture is (and was) much more obsessed about gender than the zodiac. Also because zodiac is completely empty but men/women piggybacks on the real male/female differences.

Male/female differences are real and objective but they manifest mostly on the long tails of normal distribution. When you exclude the outliers that male sex has way more of then differences between sexes shrink to almost nothing across nearly all qualities.

[d-z-m]

> there's ongoing discussion how many of them should be attributed to being a male and how many to being a man. The ones attributed to being a man are no different in nature than the ones attributed to being a Leo. They are cultural.

I don't think you can uncouple "being male" and "being a man" so easily. For thousands of years these two have been interlinked. I would argue, one informing and influencing the other in a sort of cultural epigenetic dance.

This goes back to my original objection with your comment, I don't think that "I'm a man" is objectively meaningless, but at this point I'm arguing semantics :^).

[hn92726819]

> Objectively meaningless

I think that's your issue. In isolation, maybe you think it's objectively meaningless. But if that were true in life and society, you would not see such drastic statistical significance between men and women. For example, wouldn't you expect murders, suicides, pay, life expectancy, etc etc to be a 50/50 split if gender is objectively the same?

I don't know for sure, but I imagine your star sign or whatever is not a significant predictor of anything. But being a man or woman is a significant predictor in many things.

[scotty79]

It's known that men have more long tailed distribution across many traits. It's not super surprising because they have just one X chromosome which means any deviation from the mean on it gets expressed and there's a lot of important stuff there.

Things like murders, suicides, excessive pay and such are mostly result of that. It's not because men are different on average. It's because they are more spread around the average. Which pretty much means that men from the end of the spectrum are less similar to other men from the opposite end than they are to all women.

Of course sex and even gender are better predictors than zodiac signs. Nearly everything is a better predictor because zodiac signs are crap. But affluence might be better predictor than gender for many things. Neuroticism might be a better predictor than gender for many things. IQ can be a good predictor for many things. In the myriad of very good predictors why fixate on the simplest and dumbest one that just divides population exactly in halves?

PS: Zodiac signs are a great predictor of what horoscope the person is going to read or what zodiac pendant or t-shirt or whatever they are going to wear or buy. All other predictiors including gender are absolutely terrible at predicting that. ;-)

[hk__2]

> We all mostly want the same things, feel the same things and do the same things, both good and bad

The irony is that it’s clear from this affirmation that you are a man, because any woman knows how false this is. This is the same for pretty much any situation where some group dominates another: the dominants think everything is fine because they don’t experience any discrimination and don’t understand why the dominated complain and are "so fixated on gender" (or race, etc).

[negidius]

I'm not a man, and I agree with scotty79. We are all different as individuals, and gender is pretty mush meaningless. Knowing that someone is a man, woman, non-binary, etc. might allow me to guess some things about them (if I also know their culture), but it doesn't determine anything and people are way more likely to make incorrect harmful assumptions than correct useful assumptions. It might be slightly more predictive than zodiac signs, but only slightly.

[d-z-m]

> because any woman knows how false this is.

In what way is the statement you quoted false?

[hk__2]

> In what way is the statement you quoted false?

"We all mostly want the same things, feel the same things and do the same things" is contradicted by any studies on consumer behavior that takes gender into account. Of course deep inside we’re all mostly the same, but as a society we constructed a gender polarization that has very real effects on what we want, how we feel and what we do. If I tell you that my friend likes to wear high heels and a red skirt you can hardly pretend the probability they are a woman is only 50%.

[d-z-m]

I think all your objections are subsumed by the "mostly" qualifier in the OPs comment. I don't think OP would disagree that the percentage of people who buy high heels is highly skewed towards women. I also don't think OP was referring to consumer behavior in their comment, so your pushback on those grounds seems needlessly contrarian to me.

[hk__2]

I cited consumer behavior as an example, but open any book about sociology and gender studies and you get plenty of examples on how there is a large gap in things we want/do/feel between men and women. That’s obviously a construction, biologically there’s nothing that causes much difference in what we want/do/feel. That’s probably where the disagreement is: my point is that even if theorically (= biologically) there shouldn’t be much difference, in practice (= in our societies) there is one.

[scotty79]

Good marketing strategy is to associate your product with identity assumed by significant number of customers. Studies of consumer behavior show mostly this. That gender based marketing works successfully. However regardless of gender customers want some food, clothing, shelter, mobility, entertainment.

> If I tell you that my friend likes to wear high heels and a red skirt you can hardly pretend the probability they are a woman is only 50%.

If you tell me that your friend wears a pendant with Libra zodiac sign I'd estimate probability of her being a Libra higher than 50% too. It doesn't mean identifying as a Libra is something natural, innate or objectively meaningful or indicative of the qualities you value.

[hk__2]

> If you tell me that your friend wears a pendant with Libra zodiac sign I'd estimate probability of her being a Libra higher than 50% too. It doesn't mean identifying as a Libra is something natural, innate or objectively meaningful or indicative of the qualities you value.

That’s not what I’m saying but maybe I misunderstood your point.

[randomdata]

Dominance exists, but does not run down gender lines.

[scotty79]

Dividing oppressed and oppressors neatly along some superficial trait is great for making politics. Especially when historical correlations were strong. But you often have to bend backwards to explain the complexities of reality where sometimes women oppress women and men who oppress women at the same time oppress men even more.

[hk__2]

> But you often have to bend backwards to explain the complexities of reality where sometimes women oppress women and men who oppress women at the same time oppress men even more.

Not really, in all systems of dominance you have oppressed who embrace the cause of the oppressors, often not consciously. There are a lot of women who defend patriarchy, even if as a whole this is detrimental to them (and pretty much everyone). See also Black people who endorse racist theories about White dominance, etc.

[scotty79]

And that lets you dismiss them somehow so they don't cloud your clean theory of oppression based on single superficial trait?

So you once again can clearly proclaim that gingers are always oppressors and non-gingers are always oppressed?

There are women doing better than vast majority of men. Sweeping them under the rug as some loonies that love being oppressed is not really smart.

This kind of thinking leads to Asians to be no longer classified as a minority for some purposes despite being a minority just because they are doing better than whites.

I don't deny correlations, especially historical correlations. But nowadays fixating on gender or skin color is about as helpful as considering spherical cow in a vacuum.

Let's take African Americans for example. Nobody denies that their current woes have historical root causes in their skin color in times of legal racism in USA. But nowadays the bulk of their problems stems from the fact that they are poor in the society that's ruthless against poor. Why not address that instead? Why not take better care of the poor? Why not work on how to provide the poor with safety, healthcare and education and a path to wealth? How does fixating on skin pigmentation helps with any of that?

Sure, the history of African Americans is a great example that you can forcibly make a group of people poor for stupid reasons and they stay poor. But this should just be used as example that being poor is not always the fault of the poor person. This should breed compassion towards all poor. Instead it's used to revitalize racism and conflicts along racial lines when you focus on for what stupid reasons the group was made and kept poor.

Seeing the world as divided into oppressors, oppressed and allies is terribly counterproductive. Humans are just humans, when they are in positions of power, in the absence of proper controls they will exploit and oppress others for their own benefit regardless of their gender or skin color. Trying to forcibly find method to madness based of superficial traits brings you away from this reality.