Carl D Cravens writes:
> Are you really unfamiliar with the general studies in this area.
It's a
> known and well-accepted theory that women and men are different from
each
> other. And the way they differ are *generally* as has been stated
on this
> forum. Your experiences may differ, but your experiences are not a
> scientific study.
It is a known theory that men and women are essentially different. It
is far from a well-accepted one - indeed, most people actively
theorizing about this sort of thing seem to have reached a conclusion
that notions such as "masculine" and "feminine" are entirely socially
constructed. There are researchers who look for essential
characteristics, but they seem to be doing a lot of handwaving in
order to justify their prejudices and biases biologically.
> Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Not a case-study,
specifically,
> but certainly a work derived from such knowledge. Nobody writes
such a
> popular book about how different men and women generally are without
it
> having some substantial truth to it. If it were all a lie, it
wouldn't be
> so well received.
It's well received because it plays into the popular myth that men and
women really can't understand each other and because it offers a
compelling and resonant metaphor for the constructions of masculinity
and femininity that we have to live with. When you've got a pair of
people, one who's been raised to see the world as competitive and
objective, the other who's been raised to see the world as cooperative
and subjective, of *course* you're going to have problems
communicating, and if we say the first person is from Mars and the
second person is from Venus, we then have a convenient and reassuring
metaphor: we don't misunderstand each other because we aren't making
ourselves clear or because we're expected to adhere to certain norms,
we misunderstand each other because we're speaking different languages
and because we're from different planets. It's not a lie, it's
something more damning than that - it's a comforting half-truth that
in the long run does more damage than good.
As near as I can figure, the male/female split in gaming (which I'm
not denying the existence of, to some degree) is because the culture
of roleplaying game shops is strongly dominated by preteen and teenage
boys. Any teenage girl who sets foot in that store is most likely
going to be seen as a potential sex object rather than as a fellow
gamer. Any teenage boy who sets foot in that store is likely going to
be invited to join a game by another teenage boy who is likely not
focusing his eyes at chest-level. Simply based on that, it's hardly
surprising that the hobby of roleplaying propagates well among teenage
boys but not so well among teenage girls -- who, when they got older,
devised a similar hobby without knowing what the boys were doing. Do
we really need to defend archaic notions of essential personality
traits in men and women in order to explain this phenomenon?
Charlton
--
Charlton Wilbur
cwilbur@bowdoin.edu
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