Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[LordBucket]

No worries. Big topic, lots of people with extremely different experiences from which to draw conclusions, lots of emotion, a fair amount of historical baggage from previous, similar threads...and some peculiar quoting rules in this specific thread which we're not all even sure how closely to follow.

Thread is a recipe for miscommunication. We're doing well.

[Helgoland]

You know what, fuck you guys. And gals. And whoever does not feel included by the previous two sentences.

Some people (you know who you are) apparently got what the rules in the OP were meant to achieve. Some people (you know who you are) apparently lack either the necessary intellect or the nessary attention span for remembering the very simple rule of:

No quoting other forumites. Period.

I stopped reading on page seven, because I'm kinda drunk right now and there's actually a fair bit of interesting discussion in there, so apologies to anyone who tried to, y'know, smother the flames. I don't get home for a couple of hours, and this thing explodes so badly? I'd've thought it would go better. Bay12, I am disappoint.


Locking this again for about 24 hours or so, I guess. Let's see how it goes next time.

[Helgoland]

Huh, it seems things got better right at the point where I stopped reading... I guess you should take the first sentence of that last post to be a reaction to what happened up to page seven.

Spoiler: A metaphor involving buttocks, pertaining to the OP (click to show/hide)

You know how a sofa fresh from the store can be uncomfortable until it's been 'sat in'? It only becomes comfortable once you've left enough of an ass print in its cushions. Try looking at rule two, 'no outright discussions', that way: We'll leave our collective ass print on it eventually, and until then it'll just be a wee bit uncomfortable. People appear to have made some good progress with that over the last ~five pages!

The 'no quoting' rule isn't a sofa though. It's a bench. And it takes a helluva long time to leave ass prints in wood, so get used to it being uncomfortable. If it wasn't uncomfortable, it wouldn't achieve its purpose: Slowing discussion and avoiding inflaming tempers.

So with more optimism than before: Round three - ding!

[TD1]

I'm curious - how far do ya'll think gender comes into personality? How far is what we observe societal, and how much nature? That's been niggling me for a while.

Edit: wait... Is this post against the rules? I only now read Helgo's infamous butt print analogy.

[Bauglir]

I think it does a lot. I emphasize it that way because reality includes all the social feedback and expectations and role models and so on. It's not as simple as saying "This slice of a personality is due to sex, this one's due to social influence, etc..." If you want my opinion of how much is purely biological, I'd say quite a lot, because biology is a complicated beast and most humans seem to have strong biological urges toward social interaction, which means the "social" stuff isn't as separable from it as people like to think. If you want my opinion of how much is purely genetic, I'm not sure, but I suppose very little of it based on my (limited) understanding of development in general, and similar problems do arise as in the general biology case.

If you want my opinion of how much of it ought to be based on gender, I'd say much less, at least on a social level, but that's personal preference and nothing more. But people are extraordinarily complicated, personalities are extremely fuzzy notions, and I think the nature vs nurture paradigm is played up for more than it's worth. For example, how much is nature and how much is nurture can vary from person to person! Certainly, whether a given behavior falls under one classification or the other, it shouldn't really have any impact on how you treat individual people you meet.

So, I guess I'd say, gender comes into personality a lot, and there's a lot of nature and a lot of nurture, and that there are surprisingly few situations when it actually matters what answers anybody has to those questions. I'm not one to discourage learning for the sake of learning, of course, I'm just aiming to bring some perspective.

EDIT: I choose to waggle my ass ever deeper into this couch. We'll have it broken in by the end of the week! And I'll be appearing in the OoC thread by the end of the hour!

Apparently that didn't happen.

[Antsan]

PTW

Maybe I'll come up with something worthy later.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

In response to the question "how far do ya'll think gender comes in to personality?" (If that counts as quoting another forumite I frankly don't give a damn my dear Helgoland) I say that it is a significant contributing fact, but not the end-all-be-all. I've read a myriad of reports, and they all appear to indicate that, from a psychological standpoint, women are generally more gentle, emotional, and neurotic then men. However, in my personal experience I have found men to be the more loyal and the better friends. Of course, this is all skewed by the fact that i'm 18 and male.

[Helgoland]

Mentioning what question you are responding to is in fact highly encouraged, since it allows your post to be read more independently from the thread as a whole.

[Tiruin]

Err, Helgo...you could please edit the rules in the OP. They are, honestly, not that clear, unlike the forum guidelines with the reasoning behind it being present.
That could help a LOT on how to understand what to post, in the least.

[Jelle]

Spoiler: "Discussion stuff" (click to show/hide)

How about a fresh new angle on the gender discussion? It's easy to get stuck in this mindset that gender roles, wether you accept or reject or identify with them or not, are these absolutes in our society. Fair enough in most western culture the gender roles as we know them have been widespread and more or less the same for a long time. While modern society is making strides to no longer enforce these gender roles as rigidly, the gender roles themselves are, in my opinion, still a relic of the past.

To that end I think it's interesting to study more of the history of how gender roles have evolved. Regrettably I don't know that much about old asian african and american culture so I can't really comment on those.
The western notion of gender has been defined by roman culture like none other, which was a very patriarchal society. The spread of christianity arguably further solidified the division of gender by roman culture. It's interesting to look at western cultures that did not necesarily share the same gender divide, or had a similar but less defined one, cultures that were often also far less supressive towards woman as well.

Some prominant examples of mostly different views of the female gender throughout western history are the ancient celts, the more recent viking culture and to some extent the ancient germanic culture, the scythians/sarmatians of eurasia and perhaps also ancient persia

I don't know, is this an interesting topic to discuss regarding gender? It's one of the things that's always fascinated me at least. Study the past to understand the present and all that.

[Tiruin]

Gender roles, in my opinion, are social constructs--and are thus far subject to any stigma the localized society in question, perceives them as. (which...primarily speaks about pretty much every 'wrong' problem in society--localized social stigma, or the prevalence of an ideology, continued in culture and belief).

I don't know, is this an interesting topic to discuss regarding gender?

It is.

...But I can't quote you, or continue speaking on that topic you bring up...for reasons I cannot exactly understand. ._.

[Helgoland]

It says 'no outright discussion' in the OP. I really don't know why people keep forgetting that middle word.

[Jelle]

Very well, I'll spoiler my previous post for those who would still like to read it. I'll also be retiring from the thread.

[Antsan]

Tiruin, of course you can elaborate on the topic. You just cannot use a style of answering that is personally directed at Jelle instead of generally everyone.

I think what Helgoland is trying to get you guys to not do is more about who you are talking to and not where you get your ideas from, that is, you aren't allowed to direct criticism at anyone, thus the "no quoting" rule, as then anything you write is implicitly directed at the one you are quoting.
If that makes any sense.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

It says 'no outright discussion' in the OP. I really don't know why people keep forgetting that middle word.

I'm somewhat confused by this honestly. I really, REALLY don't want to beat a dead horse here (which I think I might be doing anyhow), but it just seems superfluous. Can you at least define outright discussion in a more detailed manner in the OP? I mean, what the rules SEEM to want to do is make the thread a collection of loosely related, but not directly correlating, posts on peoples opinions on gender. Which... is fine? but what would anyone be gaining out of it? Is that your intention?

Of course, I get we're desperately trying to avoid derailment and flame wars, but it seems to me that you are alienating... a fair amount of forum goers from this thread. After all this forum is formatted as a DISCUSSION board. Again, I don't want to seem overly critical here... just... my two cents.



Now, to contribute something to gender discussion, based on what Tiruin said, I would like to state that I too believe Gender Roles to be mostly a social construct, although they evolve in many other species, and change over time. In modern times however, gender roles are a bit of a bit burden on the average western person (not to discount the rest of the world, but given that many places in Africa/Middle East/Asia are even more steeped in annoyingly antiquated and superfluous tradition than the US, which itself is still quite steeped in tradition depending on where you live, i'm not sure how to even go about instituting change or talking about social/gender problems there). Of course, people have a right to live however they want to, but I believe in gender equality and that both genders should possess EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY.