♫anna♫
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Aug 18 2017 - Always In Our Hearts
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Post by ♫anna♫ on Nov 24, 2009 11:52:07 GMT
There seems to be a big interest in male and female psychology here however that may be defined. Male roles and female roles typical or stereotypical are also a topic of debate.
How we react to other people based on gender is also an interesting topic.
If a man, especially someone i don't know taps me on the shoulder i am immediately offended. If a woman does this i may be amused after being startled or offended. As a rule we don't tap a stranger on the shoulder to get their attention and i never do that! I thinks it's impolite, but i think women as a rule would find it much more impolite, if a man they don't know touches then i some form. I have gender based reservations about hand shakes too!
Comments anyone?
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Post by Liberator on Nov 24, 2009 13:00:30 GMT
Well here's an interesting little article about boys. Personally, I do not believe in a 'male' or 'female' psychology of any significance. There is far too much overlap but society traditionally indoctrinates children of each sex to be as unlike the other as possible and to despise the qualities associated with them instead of to accept their similarities.
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♫anna♫
Global Moderator
Aug 18 2017 - Always In Our Hearts
The Federal Reserve Act is the Betrayal of the American Revolution!
e x a l t | s m i t e
karma:
Posts: 11,769
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Post by ♫anna♫ on Nov 24, 2009 13:17:43 GMT
Well here's an interesting little article about boys. Personally, I do not believe in a 'male' or 'female' psychology of any significance. There is far too much overlap but society traditionally indoctrinates children of each sex to be as unlike the other as possible and to despise the qualities associated with them instead of to accept their similarities. Well FfF, I simply believe that the core identity of males and females is quite different! In other words i don't believe in "Unisexualism" as being the norm! To put it very bluntly FfF males and females as a rule are very aware of their gender identity when they experience a "sexual climax"! Transgendered people of course are the exception and maybe you're an exception too and perhaps some people are truly "unisexual".
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Post by beth on Nov 24, 2009 19:32:58 GMT
I don't understand the shoulder tapping thing. I don't expect most people would approach someone from behind unless there was an actual reason. I do not think I'd think about gender in such a situation but would be more interested in what was going on to trigger the contact. There are people who seem very gender bound to the point they interpret any attention from the other gender as sexual. Here's an example - my husband is quite near-sighted and is not a good candidate for contact lenses. This means he apt to occasionally leave off the glasses and - basically - squint. He's a nice looking guy so I'm used to ladies giving him attention. It doesn't bother me. He has the personality of an absent minded professor and is not a womanizer. Now and then, we'll be shopping and when we check out, the girl at the cash register will start talking to him. He'll lean toward her, focus and stare and . . . sometimes she takes it personally, gets all flustered and giggly. lol I have to chalk that up to the female being overly gender conscious. Personally, I've had platonic male friends all my life - as many as female. I notice my daughters have the same situation - male boyfriends, of course, but platonic male friends, too. It's hard to imagine relating to all males as potential romantic partners, but some do - and vice versa - some males seem to have trouble accepting a platonic relationship with women.
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Post by iamjumbo on Nov 25, 2009 11:55:38 GMT
Well here's an interesting little article about boys. Personally, I do not believe in a 'male' or 'female' psychology of any significance. There is far too much overlap but society traditionally indoctrinates children of each sex to be as unlike the other as possible and to despise the qualities associated with them instead of to accept their similarities. Well FfF, I simply believe that the core identity of males and females is quite different! In other words i don't believe in "Unisexualism" as being the norm! To put it very bluntly FfF males and females as a rule are very aware of their gender identity when they experience a "sexual climax"! Transgendered people of course are the exception and maybe you're an exception too and perhaps some people are truly "unisexual". "unisexual" and homosexual are synonyms, by definition. REALITY is that males and females ARE totally equal, but not in the respect that fff would like them to be. obviously, there are many differences, as there should be, but the differences in no way concern equality. it is manifest that women are not as physically powerful as men, and no woman should strive to be. in NO way would that come remotely close to trying to be equal. it is quite obvious that there are many psychological differences in the makeup of men and women, and these are NOT taught. they are an integral part of what makes a man, or makes a woman.
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Post by iamjumbo on Nov 25, 2009 11:59:38 GMT
I don't understand the shoulder tapping thing. I don't expect most people would approach someone from behind unless there was an actual reason. I do not think I'd think about gender in such a situation but would be more interested in what was going on to trigger the contact. There are people who seem very gender bound to the point they interpret any attention from the other gender as sexual. Here's an example - my husband is quite near-sighted and is not a good candidate for contact lenses. This means he apt to occasionally leave off the glasses and - basically - squint. He's a nice looking guy so I'm used to ladies giving him attention. It doesn't bother me. He has the personality of an absent minded professor and is not a womanizer. Now and then, we'll be shopping and when we check out, the girl at the cash register will start talking to him. He'll lean toward her, focus and stare and . . . sometimes she takes it personally, gets all flustered and giggly. lol I have to chalk that up to the female being overly gender conscious. Personally, I've had platonic male friends all my life - as many as female. I notice my daughters have the same situation - male boyfriends, of course, but platonic male friends, too. It's hard to imagine relating to all males as potential romantic partners, but some do - and vice versa - some males seem to have trouble accepting a platonic relationship with women. REAL men don't look at every female as a piece of azz. even when you'd like one to be, the first priority is still that she be able to talk about something other than her nail color
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Post by Liberator on Nov 25, 2009 12:11:11 GMT
Now and then, we'll be shopping and when we check out, the girl at the cash register will start talking to him. He'll lean toward her, focus and stare and . . . sometimes she takes it personally, gets all flustered and giggly. lol I have to chalk that up to the female being overly gender conscious. You never know what is in peoples' experience and it can feel unpleasant and even intimidating to feel scrutinised. You wonder what has drawn the sudden attention. It's just as hard for some people to comprehend that every relationship, indeed every contact, has the potential to develop into ' The Great Romance' without feeling that it is somehow expected and obliged to. You never know what will happen tomorrow unless you decide to prevent it from happening, consciously or unconsciously. My emotions tend to extremes: I reserve the word 'friend' for people who really mean something very intense to me. Some people throw it around until it becomes as meaningless as on Facebook. If somebody's death is not going to make me wish I could join them, that's only acquaintance not friend.
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Post by beth on Nov 25, 2009 16:38:39 GMT
Good points, FfF. I can see how it might be a little disconcerting to feel scrutinized - but that's not the response I was talking about. I'll have to keep that in mind before making a judgment call, though. Acquaintance is a very good word - not used often enough. I'm not quite as restrictive as you. There's a pretty broad area between acquaintance and close friend. That's where my friends live . A "friend" is someone I wouldn't hesitate to call up and say, "hey - lets go to a movie", but might not connect with to the point of feeling a cerebral/emotional tie. Of course, online all bets are off and each of us has to set/open boundaries as we choose. I think online friendship has to involve trust - maybe more than anything else.
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Post by Liberator on Nov 25, 2009 18:52:35 GMT
A "friend" is someone I wouldn't hesitate to call up and say, "hey - lets go to a movie", but might not connect with to the point of feeling a cerebral/emotional tie. Ooh no! I wouldn't want to share any kind of experience with just one person unless I felt that degree of intimacy or hoped the sharing would bring us close to it. I feel very uncomfortable with just one person in an intimate setting like that when they are an in-between I only know a bit. The 'cerebral' tie of shared interests and interest in sharing comes first. I don't believe there is such a thing as online friendship - there are online acquaintanceships that lead to to friendship offline. But they can too can be unravelled by separation and miscomprehension.
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Post by Big Lin on Nov 25, 2009 20:57:26 GMT
I think the biggest mystery about the differences between the sexes is how small they actually are.
Other than the obvious - babies, menstruation and lactation - there aren't any significant ones.
Most of the 'gender stereotyping' is just hype.
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Post by Liberator on Nov 25, 2009 22:07:08 GMT
I agree with that! The differences are writ large precisely because they are so small. Until recently it was a case of about 90% overlap and the 5% either side bonkers. But they were somehow presented as the ideal to be as unlike each other possible by exaggerating the differences. Then you get a perception, mainly from the USA that masculine is superior. I think a lot of that had to do with men's work coming to be rather more skilled and interesting while appliance salesmen were telling women to look down on theirs as mere 'chores' so they could flog more electricals.
You hear land girl and Rosie the riveter propaganda but you hear far less about the women who felt absolutely degraded to have to do any such hard and dirty work that should have been left for the men to spare their delicate femininity. My grandmother was too old and my mother too young.
I don't think it's any more of a surprise that the period is followed by a rebound to one of the flimsiest ideals of fragile femininity (femininnies?) ever than that one of the first things to sell like hot cakes after the USSR was make-up. It's often struck me that 'Lolita' is far less about paedophilia than a commentary on American ideals of womanhood at the time (though I reckon Nabokov did have a soft spot for little girls). I've had nightmares about Marilyn Monroe - she's like a great mindless marshmallow!
At the same time you're getting an upsurge (again mostly in the USA) of male militarisation with cropped hair and a lot of TV and comics on military themes.
We haven't lost the belief in superiority of activities considered masculine. We've just taught it to women too. I've heard feminists criticised for trying to make women out of boys but that never took off and predates the 1960s. I see feminists working relentlessly since the late 70s to make men out of girls so that they can fit into the same slot of economically useful tools without personal commitments to interfere. At the same time there are aspects of men that they wanted to demonise.
The rot became obvious when they excluded men from Greenham Common: it did not suit them to have heterosexual men showing they were not 'traditional' violent warriors. Their ideal would be to maintain the differential but with women in the men's place, men as absolute savages if heterosexual and traditionally 'feminine' domestic distractions from being more person than economic unit lost forever, a thoroughly masculinised society parallelling the way 'New Labour' really means 'Old Conservative', 'Conservative' has meant 'American Republican' and Socialist ideals gone down the drain (and 'American Republican' means 'Cromwellian'). Thatcherism and its feminist dupes (or at the top intentional stooges?) have gone a long way towards achieving that dehumanisation of society.
It's mostly women who've prevented it by demanding freedom from work to look after their children and catching up a generation later with original feminist ideals after feminists have betrayed them. It's just like most Russians by 1940 did believe in Trotsky's ideals long after Stalin had denounced him and them.
That's where the idea that merely bringing women into workplaces will somehow have some 'feminising' effect (apart from trivia like the sexes are more polite to each other than to their own) is such nonsense: either both sexes can do the same job as well as each other, so women will do the same job as men under the same conditions not a parallel feminine version, or else they have different qualities so cannot do the same job.
We have seen the former to be true and in a lot of cases women more 'masculine' than men because it is their belief that they must out-macho the men to be accepted and also the excuse of any devious aggressive bitch that she is only criticised because she is female while the same behaviour in a man would be praised. Of course there is truth in this but only partial truth: Hitler was praised! One needs to know who is doing the praising! The same people who denounce ruthless back-stabbing bitches say the same of ruthless back-stabbing bastards.
Hopefully the 'green humanitarian undercurrent' that is the true successor to Women's Liberation is coming through and, especially with this financial crisis, people and young women are just plain sick of competition and aggression and self-aggrandisement that has no time to stop and stare and values people only by what they have and do, like men instead of what they are and how they relate, like women.
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Post by beth on Nov 26, 2009 1:33:00 GMT
(three in one post)
I think it's absolutely possible to have great friendships online. One just has to be satisfied with the limited environment that cyber life affords. I value my online friends just as much as those here in my part of the world. However, I had better say that I've known a number of people who have tried to morph a hoped for online romantic relationship into real time and it has never - let me say that again - N E V E R - worked out. Somewhere, somehow I guess there are exceptions, but I've never seen it happen. --- Lin, I don't know whether I agree with you or not about very little difference between males and females. In some ways, yes, but in others, no. There seems to me to be differences in very young children - not always, but often - that probably would not be learned behavior. Maybe they just identify with their peers, but I have a healthy respect for Jung's archetypes and universal unconscious. ---
Fighters, that's a great post - though it covers familiar ground, it's well stated and explained. In reality, I don't think people - men or women - take time to ponder, much less agonize over those kinds of choices. Most of us, I think, fill several different roles in a lifetime - not either, or - but what, when. Fictional characters in literature might fit that kind of stereotype, but real, live humans are more flexible. jmo
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Post by Liberator on Nov 26, 2009 2:05:07 GMT
We all fill lots of characters in life. I'm not sure what 'choices' you are meaning, but I agree that most people do not think about controlling teir life and are 'corporate zombies'.
You might have some kind of great relationship online, but it's not how I would use the word 'friendship'. To me, friend is somebody I want to be part of and shack up with and hope to spend the rest of my life no longer feeling 'me' but part of an 'us'[/i] (poem I wrote when I was still young enough to write poems. A friend takes you out of yourself, liberates you from individuality to true loss of identity.
I can't know how it is for women but sex can do that, blank the mind and any sense of personal identity and feel just lossof all sense of identity. I think that for women it goes more to either etrreme of letting him get on with it where she doesn't feel anything, or more often traditionally her own sensation is all she cares about and men are her slaves.
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Post by beth on Nov 26, 2009 2:30:00 GMT
But, fighters, you are adding another facet to a friendly relationship - romance.
I'm talking platonic and you're going for love affair. Whole different thing. I mean a romance might evolve from a friendship - and that's sometimes a very nice thing. But, that does not have to happen.
Romances are always more difficult that friendships - some work out easily but most are a growing process. When romantic love is involved - and most especially, when intimacy is involved - things are often unequal under the surface. There's almost always a lover and a beloved and a mental/emotional dance of sorts. If a couple can weather that turmoil and move on to the next, more level headed step, they have a chance at something long-term. been there, done that jmo and p.s. I still say good platonic friendships between males and females are great and do not need to move into anything closer.
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Post by Liberator on Nov 26, 2009 3:10:59 GMT
Sorry, I don't get that. I don't believe in this 'Platonic friendship' (and I doubt Plato did either!). You're either in love or you're not. If you're in love, you are friends, if not, nothing. Of course you would not want to see somebody you like tortured to death but that's true for anybody, 'a friend' means loving somebody enough to miss them and maybe to control how you behave for fear of hurting their feelings.
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Post by beth on Nov 26, 2009 3:51:42 GMT
Sorry, I don't get that. I don't believe in this 'Platonic friendship' (and I doubt Plato did either!). You're either in love or you're not. If you're in love, you are friends, if not, nothing. Of course you would not want to see somebody you like tortured to death but that's true for anybody, 'a friend' means loving somebody enough to miss them and maybe to control how you behave for fear of hurting their feelings. I think your pov is lovely and romantic, while mine is pragmatic. But, the difference may be situations and circumstances. I reserve that kind of loving relationship for my husband. Friendships may be caring but I think platonic (for lack of a better word) love is not physical. So I hope you're true to your values and have many wonderful relationships, but when you find the one that's so important you're willing to set a different level for the rest, you'll most likely realize where I'm coming from . . . and not going to. ;D
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Post by jean on Nov 26, 2009 10:38:04 GMT
I still say good platonic friendships between males and females are great and do not need to move into anything closer. Sorry, I don't get that. I don't believe in this 'Platonic friendship' (and I doubt Plato did either!). You're either in love or you're not. If you're in love, you are friends, if not, nothing. 'Platonic' isn't a good label - but don't let's get sidetracked by that into denying what is a reality for many, many people. No-one is denying your all-or-nothing experience of human relationships, FfF, but to use it as the basis for claiming that homosexual people are emotional cripples who hate or reject the other sex is to deny or degrade the real non-romantic, non-sexual frienships that they, like most other people, may have with people of either sex. This has nothing to do with whether homosexual relationshiprs are considered wrong or not - that's quite a different issue.
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Post by gabriel on Nov 26, 2009 11:18:24 GMT
I still say good platonic friendships between males and females are great and do not need to move into anything closer. Sorry, I don't get that. I don't believe in this 'Platonic friendship' (and I doubt Plato did either!). You're either in love or you're not. If you're in love, you are friends, if not, nothing. 'Platonic' isn't a good label - but don't let's get sidetracked by that into denying what is a reality for many, many people. No-one is denying your all-or-nothing experience of human relationships, FfF, but to use it as the basis for claiming that homosexual people are emotional cripples who hate or reject the other sex is to deny or degrade the real non-romantic, non-sexual frienships that they, like most other people, may have with people of either sex. This has nothing to do with whether homosexual relationshiprs are considered wrong or not - that's quite a different issue. All right. Quote where FF has said that homosexual people are emotional cripples. On this thread. Your words. Because you can't. Because he hasn't. Jean, you really need to get another agenda. Because this one isn't working for you.
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Post by iamjumbo on Nov 26, 2009 13:29:46 GMT
'Platonic' isn't a good label - but don't let's get sidetracked by that into denying what is a reality for many, many people. No-one is denying your all-or-nothing experience of human relationships, FfF, but to use it as the basis for claiming that homosexual people are emotional cripples who hate or reject the other sex is to deny or degrade the real non-romantic, non-sexual frienships that they, like most other people, may have with people of either sex. This has nothing to do with whether homosexual relationshiprs are considered wrong or not - that's quite a different issue. All right. Quote where FF has said that homosexual people are emotional cripples. On this thread. Your words. Because you can't. Because he hasn't. Jean, you really need to get another agenda. Because this one isn't working for you. i don't recall that the expression has been used on this thread. max nix though. that IS his belief. he would never deny it.
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Post by jean on Nov 26, 2009 14:09:26 GMT
All right. Quote where FF has said that homosexual people are emotional cripples. On this thread. Your words. Because you can't. Because he hasn't. No - as you know, these words were used on another thread. When I challenged what he said there, anna told me - quite rightly - that it was off-topic for that thread. But what he says here is directly relevant to what he said there. If what I have said here (or anywhere else, for that matter) is abusive, then I wish you would point out to me exactly how.
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