Sorry, that was me above, the "gay man in a woman's body." Most of the time, anyway.
I think many of the behavioral traits are pretty mutabile. The business of tears, for instance. My husband ranks far over on the "masculine" scale but he tears up whenever the situation calls for it. He's far more emotionally sensitive than I.
However, just as Whedon concedes that there are biological differences, IMO most of those biological differences are the product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, against which our current very recent emphasis on equality is so small as to be almost unmeasurable.
I read a book recently by a Swedish neurologist (or was it endocrinologist?) named Moberg, about oxytocin. Apparently there are sex-specific hormone pathways that mediate bonding and emotional closeness in men vs. women, with vasopressin being the primary (but not sole) hormone in men, and oxytocin (but not 100%) in women. She calls oxytocin the 'bonding hormone' because of its role not only in lactation and bonding to the infant, but in sexual bonding as well.
Men tend to be more territorial and aggressive in expressing their "bonds," whereas women tend to just want to be close, to be held, to cuddle.
I'm not sure how many guys really do "motherhood." I've seen a lot of men caring for their children, sometimes even very intensively (like the father who cares for a young child when Mom goes back to work), but it's my observation that they do it very differently than the mother would. Not worse - in some cases the kids have more fun, because Dad isn't riding herd over them like Mom would. In some ways the kids probably have more freedom to explore, get dirty, make mistakes, track in sand, eat the bubbles in the bath, whatever. It's just different.
Of course men do fashion, haute cuisine, the whole culture of "beauty" very well - they invented it. (Camille Paglia has a lot to say about this in Sexual Personae.) Don Anslett writes books on how to keep house; women still do the scrubbing, mostly.
Both genius and mental deficiency are far more common in men than women, too, especially musical/mathematical genius. (I'm thinking of John Nash - his wife was employed for 20-30 years, who solidly and competently managed a house, a child, a fulltime career as a computer programmer, as well as John Nash himself and his bouts of madness - but he was the one who did the work that led to the Nobel, and I don't think it was just "sexism" or "discrimination."
no subject
I think many of the behavioral traits are pretty mutabile. The business of tears, for instance. My husband ranks far over on the "masculine" scale but he tears up whenever the situation calls for it. He's far more emotionally sensitive than I.
However, just as Whedon concedes that there are biological differences, IMO most of those biological differences are the product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, against which our current very recent emphasis on equality is so small as to be almost unmeasurable.
I read a book recently by a Swedish neurologist (or was it endocrinologist?) named Moberg, about oxytocin. Apparently there are sex-specific hormone pathways that mediate bonding and emotional closeness in men vs. women, with vasopressin being the primary (but not sole) hormone in men, and oxytocin (but not 100%) in women. She calls oxytocin the 'bonding hormone' because of its role not only in lactation and bonding to the infant, but in sexual bonding as well.
Men tend to be more territorial and aggressive in expressing their "bonds," whereas women tend to just want to be close, to be held, to cuddle.
I'm not sure how many guys really do "motherhood." I've seen a lot of men caring for their children, sometimes even very intensively (like the father who cares for a young child when Mom goes back to work), but it's my observation that they do it very differently than the mother would. Not worse - in some cases the kids have more fun, because Dad isn't riding herd over them like Mom would. In some ways the kids probably have more freedom to explore, get dirty, make mistakes, track in sand, eat the bubbles in the bath, whatever. It's just different.
Of course men do fashion, haute cuisine, the whole culture of "beauty" very well - they invented it. (Camille Paglia has a lot to say about this in Sexual Personae.) Don Anslett writes books on how to keep house; women still do the scrubbing, mostly.
Both genius and mental deficiency are far more common in men than women, too, especially musical/mathematical genius. (I'm thinking of John Nash - his wife was employed for 20-30 years, who solidly and competently managed a house, a child, a fulltime career as a computer programmer, as well as John Nash himself and his bouts of madness - but he was the one who did the work that led to the Nobel, and I don't think it was just "sexism" or "discrimination."