Supple Cow

+1

Okay, as an anthropologist, you must know that the impossibly complex system of things that drive human behavior can never be boiled down into one thing. So, it puzzles me how quickly you can write off a quite scientific idea as something that is too simple to be a factor in explaining a certain trend. Obviously there are many reasons for our many behaviors and ours will all differ to some extent, without fail. From what I gather, you were looking for some kind of overarching thing that you CAN apply to more women than not - something more statistically significant than the countless other factors that also factor in, like our geographical location, family structure, socio-economic class, age, place in history, and so on.

But let me expound on the idea a bit. I've said this once before (notably, in a Politics thread), but the word 'competition' actually comes from the Latin competare, meaning 'to strive together'. Typically, men have this idea that it means there has to be a winner and a loser and that it's me vs. you or us vs. them. Women tend to actually strive together - often toward a common goal, but sometimes not - usually leaving out the part about tearing down the competitors. I picked this idea up from a that encouraged women to join the race, as it were, by pointing out that the once male-dominated sport of running did not mean that there was any good reason for women to not also be involved.

So my original point was not that men are more competitive than women. It's that our definitions of 'competition' are night and day. I see the world as this tragic joke on women because it is, historically (and with only very few examples in the distant past to the contrary) a man's world. I could go on at length about how this (on average) makes women able to put themselves in another's shoes while men are exceptionally bad at it (especially when it comes to imagining life as a woman). Instead, I will point you to this thread: http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/tilted-...ere-chick.html

More puzzling to me is that you seem to be asking a question about differences in sexes and wanting the answer to be about something other than sex. (!) This whole discussion and the environment in which we are having it frames it in terms of sex. Sex is a biological difference. It's more concrete (though no more measurable) than culture and its effects on human behavior. Our bodies work in different ways, and it is impossible for this to not have an effect on how we see the world - our bodies are the lenses through which we see the world, our tools for interacting with it.

Whether you fall into the fat part of the bell curve or not, that bell curve exists and there have been many studies that support the idea that women tend to relate to the world in an I-You fashion while men typically relate in terms of I-It. So you can not want to have children or be the cook in the household and despise all the traditionally feminine garb, but you are still in here trying to build some kind of consensus or find some way to get the women to cooperate, and that just isn't the point of the Politics forum.

I hate the Politics Forum because its very nature (the current population in there which I am assuming you do not wish to suddenly exclude) forces a kind of discourse where complex things must be stated simply. Human beings are not simple, but the whole arena of politics involves analyzing and manipulating people as objects (I-It: the male paradigm). My simple answer to this OP is that I hate that. I just hate it. You can decide for yourself that everything I said is just hooey or you can agree with some or all of it, but it won't change that I hate interacting in that way. I even gave it a try by answering your OP as simply as I could, and then you (a woman I happen to know understands human behavior better than you are letting on in this thread) were forced to respond to that simplicity with more simplicity, further mangling the larger meaning I originally wished to impart. And what did it do? It pissed me off!

So, I am asking you, what is your goal? Are you trying to get the women to fit Politics or are you trying to get Politics to fit the women? I honestly don't think you can do both. But that doesn't mean that when, on occasion, it happens to be less trouble than it is worth, I won't still go in there and have my hand at some reasonable discourse. That is, until it gets to the point where I am just banging my head against a wall again.

(FWIW, this thread has actually been useful to me because I am warming up for the cultural geography paper I am about to write. The politics forum has not proven to be useful to me in that way. Hopefully, and I say this as a woman, this turned out to be useful to you for whatever your purposes are as well.)

__________________
"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
(Michael Jordan)