Yes, masculinity exists.

[unbibium]

I saw a link on Fark with this headline: «"We need to get rid of the whole idea of masculinity. It's time to abandon the claim that there are certain psychological or social traits that inherently come with being biologically male." So says this clueless pansy boy».  The article itself backtracks all over its own assertion so much that I don't really know what point he's trying to make.  I suppose it's no accident that an article by a man on eliminating masculinity would be so wishy-washy.

So I wanted to see how many farkers would defend the article.  Not many, of course.  But I read this comment:

There was actually this big fiasco that more or less confirmed some ideas of "masculinity" are biologically based.

This psycho psychologist with an agenda named Money took an infant whose penis had been damaged at birth and decided to experiment with it. He convinced the parents to give the boy gender reassignment surgery andraise it as a girl. This Money lunatic farked with this boy's life in order to prove that gender was completely a societal construction andhad no basis in biology.

Well it failed miserably. The boy's entire life he never felt right as a girl and was basically a tomboy. Money [faked] the results claiming the boy, known as "John/Joan," was perfectly feminine despite being a biological male. Eventually, as he got older, "John/Joan" found out he was a born a male and eventually had gender reassignment surgery again to get his penis back. He eventually comitted suicide.

Sure, there are definitely someaspects of gender roles that are societal constructions, but at the core there are aspects of men and women that are completely biological.

  I actually remember seeing this story on a news magazine show a few years ago.  The subject was still alive at the time.  John Money's Wikipedia page cites the experiment.  And in the section titles "On pedophilia," the page cements Money's quack status:

His view was that affectional pedophilia is caused by a surplus ofparental love that became erotic, and is not a behavioral disorder.Rather, he felt that heterosexuality is another example of a societal and therefore, a superficial, ideological concept.

The greatest damage to society is done when we try to divorce the mind from the body.  It's the thing that the hyper-religious right wing has in common with the androgyny-agenda left wing.  The only difference is which behavior they blame on society, rather than biology.  For the right, it's sexual expressiveness, promiscuity, and homosexuality.  The the left, it's the differentiation of the sexes, and for a few extremists, heterosexuality itself.  Healthy people generally accept these ideas as a part of the world around them, but there are people who are threatened by them, and some of them desperately want to make laws.

A lot of sociological debates boil down to "how should humans behave?"  Well, human nature is certainly malleable, but each of us has a nature within us that limits just how much we can change.  And if the wrong people win this debate, it eventually becomes "how can we make humans behave in the manner we've decided upon?"  And we get answers like the war on drugs, and abstinence-only education.  How might gender-neutrality advocates screw up our society through legislation?  I'd rather not find out. Because that screws not only masculine men and feminine women, but also effeminate men, and butch women.

Comments

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

That's true, as is "Fewer women than men want to be firemen. Of the subset of people who wish to be firemen, fewer women than men are in adequate physical shape for it."

The women who want to be firemen, are in adequate physical shape, and pass all the tests and training, are firemen. But they make up a very small minority. I believe that the cause for this is not external discouragement.

There are other vocations that don't have this problem. There are a lot of women programming in my department at work, for example. Women who are good at math and logic are much more common than women who can carry a 200-pound adult out of a burning building. Men who are good at math and logic are much more common than men who can carry a 200-pound adult out of a burning building. But the statistics are not quite the same.

[jwgh]

It seems like there are two parts to what you are saying: fewer women than men want to be firemen, and fewer women than men can physically be firemen. I accept that both of these things are true, and that the latter is not a result of societal pressures. It sounds like you think that the first fact is primarily (or maybe even solely) the result of the second, and that societal pressures don't account for much of it (or, maybe, any of it). This seems possible but unlikely to me.

Regarding other vocations that don't have this problem: a lot of them used to. How do you think this changed, and when that was the case how do you think people explained the fact that there were hardly any female engineers (for instance)?

[jwgh]

I guess that, inasmuch as I have a point at all, it is that people seem to have a strong predisposition to underestimate the influence of society on these sorts of things, and that while I don't discount the idea that biology has some influence on these things I suspect that it it is much smaller than people are predisposed to think. I think that there is value, therefore, in trying to find where that limit is through programs like the one you describe.

I think that Title IX shows how powerful these kinds of things can be.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Society can function as a multiplier effect on biology. This becomes dangerous when you have "Most X are Y, therefore X should never be not-Y" memes in your society.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

Actually, very few women, perhaps none, want to be firemen. Some, however, want to be firefighters.

On the issue of societal vs. biological influences, there are a lot fewer biological influences than people imagine. For example, people in America (and Europe?) regard women as being more emotional than men. I think there have even been "studies" that "prove" this is biological. However, anthropologist Edward T. Hall (in The Silent Language or The Hidden Dimension, I forget which,) points out that the Japanese don't regard either gender as being more emotional, while Iranians regard men as being more emotional, which is why women are encouraged to do all the marketplace haggling (because men would get into fistfights.)

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

That sounds to me like it could result from differing definitions of "emotional". It's also a reasonable hypothesis that the different cultures provide different cues, and men get emotional at the cues Iranian society provides, and women get emotional at the cues American society provides.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The thing is, what's claimed to be biologically limited changes over time and it's not clear that we know what really is. Physical strength, probably so, on average (I'm weaker than many women and I know women who are far stronger than most men, but the general trends are there). But you can still find people today who insist that the vast majority of women are biologically ill-suited for math and logic (Lubos Motl will swear up and down that physics departments with lots of women in them go bad as a result, and if you disagree you're a damn commie), and 100 years ago it was common knowledge that studying man-stuff would mess up a woman's uterus.

Part of the problem is that biological and social forces can't really be separated 100 percent. Say, for instance, that women have a biological bias toward being less aggressive, and that the academic community in physics is structured to reward aggressive self-promoting behavior. Then you could say that women really do have a biological strike against them in physics, but it's because of a socially contingent fact that may not be of any fundamental importance.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

I really hope that within my lifetime, we have enough established sociobiological science to tell our ass from a hole in the ground. It might not shut everyone up, but it'll give skeptics like me something to cling to.