Masculinity

[Wise Fool]

Well, there it is. Someone said it. Penis!

Look, penis is pretty cool. It urinates like a hose. In fact if you've got some particularly high pressure urine you can alter the form of mud and grass and dirt and sand with it. And then sexually, it's pretty sweet; it generates sexy heat. It's the locus of a man's manliness, if you ask me. Right there in the genitals, yessir.

[Altherion]

8 hours ago, sologdin said:

is there any alleged trait that is more diverse between each alleged 'sex' (whatever the fuck that is) than among each alleged 'sex' (however many there might be)?  

That question requires quantification before it can be answered. If we leave out the defining physiological characteristics of each gender (including those would be silly), most traits will be normally distributed, both overall and within each gender. If you look at the two separate normal distributions, they will overlap, but for traits like strength or longevity, the means will not be in exactly the same place and the variances will also probably be a bit different. However, since there are nearly 4 billion entries in each distribution, the tails are going to be pretty filled out. In other words, there will be women who are stronger than the overwhelming majority of men and men who live longer than the overwhelming majority of women.

Thus, the question needs to be quantified. If you would like a trait where the normal distributions do not overlap at all, then I very much doubt such a thing exists. However, if you would like a trait for which the mean of the male distribution is more than one standard deviation away from the mean of the female one or vice versa, I think it should be possible to find some.

[Lyanna Stark]

 

On 2016-01-30 at 4:38 AM, peterbound said:

penis and lack of penis?

Google intersex.

Or read Fausto-Sterling. This, too, can be googled, (as in, enter "Fausto-Sterling" into google and a helpful PDF will be among the first links).

In short tho, for TL;DR, there are people who are both, or neither, or inbetween and probably more people than we think. If you define "sex" on a chromosome level, then physiology is not always a good indicator. Sometimes it is also forcibly "corrected" by doctors. A lot of it can be found in Fausto-Sterling. Useful reading, that.

 

On 2016-01-30 at 1:11 PM, Altherion said:

That question requires quantification before it can be answered. If we leave out the defining physiological characteristics of each gender (including those would be silly), most traits will be normally distributed, both overall and within each gender. If you look at the two separate normal distributions, they will overlap, but for traits like strength or longevity, the means will not be in exactly the same place and the variances will also probably be a bit different. However, since there are nearly 4 billion entries in each distribution, the tails are going to be pretty filled out. In other words, there will be women who are stronger than the overwhelming majority of men and men who live longer than the overwhelming majority of women.

Thus, the question needs to be quantified. If you would like a trait where the normal distributions do not overlap at all, then I very much doubt such a thing exists. However, if you would like a trait for which the mean of the male distribution is more than one standard deviation away from the mean of the female one or vice versa, I think it should be possible to find some.

Conflating sex with gender, yo. Incorrect usage.

Second bolded section: and this would give us what? The definition traits of masculinity? Something else?

[Lyanna Stark]

On 2016-01-30 at 9:55 AM, Wise Fool said:

Well, there it is. Someone said it. Penis!

Look, penis is pretty cool. It urinates like a hose. In fact if you've got some particularly high pressure urine you can alter the form of mud and grass and dirt and sand with it. And then sexually, it's pretty sweet; it generates sexy heat. It's the locus of a man's manliness, if you ask me. Right there in the genitals, yessir.

I assume you mean by this heterosexual sexuality? What about gay men? Or asexual men? Or bisexual men? Furries? Plankies?

In short: sexual orientation or even inclination to have an active sex life, is that an indicator of one's masculinity?

 

[Altherion]

6 minutes ago, Lyanna Stark said:

Second bolded section: and this would give us what? The definition traits of masculinity? Something else?

Traits that answer sologdin's question (for a certain quantified definition of "more diverse").

[karaddin]

I would argue that the popular conception of masculinity does include heterosexuality, and that this is one of the harmful elements of toxic masculinity.

[Happy Ent]

On 30 January 2016 at 4:17 AM, sologdin said:

is there any alleged trait that is more diverse between each alleged 'sex' (whatever the fuck that is) than among each alleged 'sex' (however many there might be)?  

Altherion gives a good answer to this. But it contains a great question at heart. After some googling, I found this: http://evp.sagepub.com/content/7/2/147470490900700209.full.pdf , which also contains a readable introduction to what “standard deviation distance” should mean in the multivariate case.

With those caveats, both table 1 and 2 summarise known psychological studies (“Big Five”, aggression) and come to the conclusion that the “deviation” (properly defined) is pretty close to 1 in both cases. I don’t know if this answers your question. Like Altherion says, it’s probably trivial to find hundreds of small traits (some protein mumbojumbo doing whatsitsname to phenotype Blah) that exhibit such behaviour, but I’m not sure how interesting they are.

Speaking of overlapping bell curves, as far as I know men exhibit higher variance in pretty much every operationally significant trait where this makes sense. Roughly, men are diverse while women are the same. But I don’t have a reference for that. (This, of course, expected given the asymmetric investment into reproduction. So, as somebody who trusts in human evolution, I’m biased in favour of this description and may misrepresent the evidence.) This phenomenon alone would explain the observed overrepresentation of men at both the top and the bottom of society without ever needing to appeal to differences in means or cultural factors. Again, I’m biased in favour of this model mainly because of its elegance.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

 

penis and lack of penis?

Google intersex.

Or read Fausto-Sterling. This, too, can be googled, (as in, enter "Fausto-Sterling" into google and a helpful PDF will be among the first links).

In short tho, for TL;DR, there are people who are both, or neither, or inbetween and probably more people than we think. If you define "sex" on a chromosome level, then physiology is not always a good indicator. Sometimes it is also forcibly "corrected" by doctors. A lot of it can be found in Fausto-Sterling. Useful reading, that.

Regardless, since around 99% of men have a penis, and around 99% of women don't, Peterbound almost trivially fulfills Solo's request for a trait in which difference between genders is larger than the difference within.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

is there any alleged trait that is more diverse between each alleged 'sex' (whatever the fuck that is) than among each alleged 'sex' (however many there might be)?  

Altherion gives a good answer to this. But it contains a great question at heart. After some googling, I found this: http://evp.sagepub.com/content/7/2/147470490900700209.full.pdf , which also contains a readable introduction to what “standard deviation distance” should mean in the multivariate case.

With those caveats, both table 1 and 2 summarise known psychological studies (“Big Five”, aggression) and come to the conclusion that the “deviation” (properly defined) is pretty close to 1 in both cases. I don’t know if this answers your question. Like Altherion says, it’s probably trivial to find hundreds of small traits (some protein mumbojumbo doing whatsitsname to phenotype Blah) that exhibit such behaviour, but I’m not sure how interesting they are.

Speaking of overlapping bell curves, as far as I know men exhibit higher variance in pretty much every operationally significant trait where this makes sense. Roughly, men are diverse while women are the same. But I don’t have a reference for that. (This, of course, expected given the asymmetric investment into reproduction. So, as somebody who trusts in human evolution, I’m biased in favour of this description and may misrepresent the evidence.) This phenomenon alone would explain the observed overrepresentation of men at both the top and the bottom of society without ever needing to appeal to differences in means or cultural factors. Again, I’m biased in favour of this model mainly because of its elegance.

The model is elegant, but as a I recall, evidence for it is rather scarce. Shouldn't other animals, especially mammals, also exhibit this phenomenon?

Sorry about double post. This quote function sucks on mobile.

[Happy Ent]

24 minutes ago, White Walker Texas Ranger said:

The model is elegant, but as a I recall, evidence for it is rather scarce. Shouldn't other animals, especially mammals, also exhibit this phenomenon?

Yes, that would be the prediction. I perfectly assume that they do. As I said, I can’t bolster that claim with data, and I admit to having a low threshold of acceptance for it because it seems so obvious to me. 

 

If I were Nature, I would have constructed sexual dimorphism like that. Put all the variance on one of the sexes. Let that one be the aggressive one, let the other be highly selective in courtship. Make the “selected” sex invest several orders of magnitudes less calories in reproduction. Nature could implement this, say, by giving one of the sexes a “redundant” copy of one of the chromosomes, while letting a good part of the genome be active in only the males (the Y chromosome)). I thought this was how it worked, but am more than happy to be corrected—I’d be spectacularly wrong about a very fundamental thing that that would something I’d need to remedy with all haste. It’s probably very naïve—I know very little about biology outside of pop-sci books—but good first approximations is all I’m looking for.

[the Greenleif Stark]

Its 2016, being a man = bad. Just look at tthis thread, the word masculinity is definitely not a good thing, no matter how you try to define it

[peterbound]

 

penis and lack of penis?

Google intersex.

Or read Fausto-Sterling. This, too, can be googled, (as in, enter "Fausto-Sterling" into google and a helpful PDF will be among the first links).

In short tho, for TL;DR, there are people who are both, or neither, or inbetween and probably more people than we think. If you define "sex" on a chromosome level, then physiology is not always a good indicator. Sometimes it is also forcibly "corrected" by doctors. A lot of it can be found in Fausto-Sterling. Useful reading, that.

 

That question requires quantification before it can be answered. If we leave out the defining physiological characteristics of each gender (including those would be silly), most traits will be normally distributed, both overall and within each gender. If you look at the two separate normal distributions, they will overlap, but for traits like strength or longevity, the means will not be in exactly the same place and the variances will also probably be a bit different. However, since there are nearly 4 billion entries in each distribution, the tails are going to be pretty filled out. In other words, there will be women who are stronger than the overwhelming majority of men and men who live longer than the overwhelming majority of women.

Thus, the question needs to be quantified. If you would like a trait where the normal distributions do not overlap at all, then I very much doubt such a thing exists. However, if you would like a trait for which the mean of the male distribution is more than one standard deviation away from the mean of the female one or vice versa, I think it should be possible to find some

You're stretching for that one St. Lyanna

[sologdin]

HE, althy--

thanks for all that.  will review & cogitate.

my impression, however, is that the definitions are cocked up ab initio, as WWTR notes when reviewing fausto-sterling.  if there are five (allegedly) binary indicia of 'sex,' say, and a specific configuration of those five items has been designated 'male,' i.e., by mere definitional fiat (as supported by invasive mutilations) and the opposite configuration has been designated 'female,' what to designate the other intersexual combinations, however many there are (it's quite a bit more than two)? 

it's kinda dogmatic to define away all of those other items; that's the import of PB's contribution about the phantasm of external genitalia--an effort substantially identical to saying a bachelor is an unmarried man or 2 = 1+1.  it's an a priori analytic statement, mere tautology, begging the question, when we have already assumed the meaning of 'male' as 'penis possessor.' it strikes me as kinda gross to assume penis as 'male' and then search not even for indicia that are constantly conjoined thereto (probably because there are no such things) but rather for certain tendencies in the other four indicia and then arbitrarily say 'these tendencies also are male sexual markers.' it is insignificant, arbitrary, without any rationale other than a political convenience, the assumption of a definition on the basis of a solitary signifier and then its unwarranted application back upon other not obviously related items. it amounts to the creation of an ideological abstraction: why erect 'male' over a certain combination of physical traits?  were it limited to simply five sets of binary physical traits, then no one cares; the issue is the political suggestions tendered by retrograde evopsych arguments that pile into that abstraction their philistine political preferences that are as yet unwarranted in the genetic evidence. 

[TerraPrime]

4 hours ago, Happy Ent said:

If I were Nature, I would have constructed sexual dimorphism like that. Put all the variance on one of the sexes. Let that one be the aggressive one, let the other be highly selective in courtship. Make the “selected” sex invest several orders of magnitudes less calories in reproduction. Nature could implement this, say, by giving one of the sexes a “redundant” copy of one of the chromosomes, while letting a good part of the genome be active in only the males (the Y chromosome)). I thought this was how it worked, but am more than happy to be corrected—I’d be spectacularly wrong about a very fundamental thing that that would something I’d need to remedy with all haste. It’s probably very naïve—I know very little about biology outside of pop-sci books—but good first approximations is all I’m looking for.

Sex determination is not universal. Here's a short TedEd video that delves into some of the variants in sex determination:

 

 

What the video didn't get into is the variations in dosage compensation. In mammals, to correct for gene dosage issues arising from XX vs XY, the females choose one of the X copies to inactivate. This process is random, so you can get some females with patches of skin that are different than others (this is why calico cats are 99.99% females). In insects and worms, they do it differently. In some worms, both copies of the X chromosome are reduced by half in activity. In fruitflies, the X in the XY is doubled up in usage.

In other words, if Nature did have a consciousness, She invested in at least a half a dozen ways of determining sexes. In fact, the majority of her investment are in non-sexually reproducing organisms, which outnumber sexually reproducing organisms in both sheer numbers and in species diversity.

TL;DR: Just-so stories based on nature are almost always wrong.

 

[Dr. Pepper]

4 hours ago, the Greenleif Stark said:

Its 2016, being a man = bad. Just look at tthis thread, the word masculinity is definitely not a good thing, no matter how you try to define it

No one has said that.  The discussion has centered around whether or not a single definition of masculinity can be pinned down along with critiques of various elements of the social construct of masculinity.  This is no way equates with man=bad.  The same discussion with femininity would also struggle to pin down a single definition and have valid criticisms applied.  It wouldn't mean that the conclusion is woman=bad.  

[sologdin]

4 hours ago, White Walker Texas Ranger said:

Google intersex.

Or read Fausto-Sterling. This, too, can be googled, (as in, enter "Fausto-Sterling" into google and a helpful PDF will be among the first links).

In short tho, for TL;DR, there are people who are both, or neither, or inbetween and probably more people than we think. If you define "sex" on a chromosome level, then physiology is not always a good indicator. Sometimes it is also forcibly "corrected" by doctors. A lot of it can be found in Fausto-Sterling. Useful reading, that.

Regardless, since around 99% of men have a penis, and around 99% of women don't, Peterbound almost trivially fulfills Solo's request for a trait in which difference between genders is larger than the difference within.

fuck.  I misread this earlier, as you cocked up the quote of cerys.

PB did not fulfill anything at all, as noted, supra. you acknowledge this by throwing his thesis under the bus immediately by proclaiming that 99% of 'male' persons are identified by external genitalia, as opposed to his categorical 100%.  this is an incoherence.

more fundamentally, though, is that neither of you have addressed my basic thesis that y'all have abstracted an alleged 'sex,' here, 'male,' from the mere presence, at times, of external genitalia. the assumption of 99% does not strike me as anything other than a convenient hyperbole unrelated to the real. is there anything that warrants the imposition of an abstract maleness upon persons with this preferred external genitalia? because, if not, then really y'all just want to talk about phallus possessors.

[TerraPrime]

9 minutes ago, Dr. Pepper said:

No one has said that.  The discussion has centered around whether or not a single definition of masculinity can be pinned down along with critiques of various elements of the social construct of masculinity.  This is no way equates with man=bad.  The same discussion with femininity would also struggle to pin down a single definition and have valid criticisms applied.  It wouldn't mean that the conclusion is woman=bad.  

 

He's not entirely off, though.

There are plenty of aspects of conventional masculinity that *are* bad, in the view of some people. For instance, the heteronormative component of masculinity is bad. The defining of masculinity via the purging of that which is seen as feminine is also bad. At the same time, being rough around the edges, liking team sports, and laughing at fart jokes, are not declared bad.

[Dr. Pepper]

6 minutes ago, TerraPrime said:

 

He's not entirely off, though.

There are plenty of aspects of conventional masculinity that *are* bad, in the view of some people. For instance, the heteronormative component of masculinity is bad. The defining of masculinity via the purging of that which is seen as feminine is also bad. At the same time, being rough around the edges, liking team sports, and laughing at fart jokes, are not declared bad.

Yes, and I noted that.  That would be critiquing elements of masculinity, not concluding that being a man is bad.  

[Red Tiger]

4 hours ago, the Greenleif Stark said:

Its 2016, being a man = bad. Just look at tthis thread, the word masculinity is definitely not a good thing, no matter how you try to define it

Eh, you have to look at what type of forum you're on. Guessing from my experience here I would say this is a mostly leftist forum, whereas you would get different opinions on what constitutes positive masculinity on a more centrist or right-wing forum.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

44 minutes ago, sologdin said:

fuck.  I misread this earlier, as you cocked up the quote of cerys.

PB did not fulfill anything at all, as noted, supra. you acknowledge this by throwing his thesis under the bus immediately by proclaiming that 99% of 'male' persons are identified by external genitalia, as opposed to his categorical 100%.  this is an incoherence.

more fundamentally, though, is that neither of you have addressed my basic thesis that y'all have abstracted an alleged 'sex,' here, 'male,' from the mere presence, at times, of external genitalia. the assumption of 99% does not strike me as anything other than a convenient hyperbole unrelated to the real. is there anything that warrants the imposition of an abstract maleness upon persons with this preferred external genitalia? because, if not, then really y'all just want to talk about phallus possessors.

Blame the new board software (is it just me, or does it seem like the software gets worse every iteration) and tapatalk.

Anyway, Peterbound may have assumed that 100% of men have penises, but he didn't state it explicitly. You asked:

"is there any alleged trait that is more diverse between each alleged 'sex' (whatever the fuck that is) than among each alleged 'sex' (however many there might be)?"

He responded: "penis and lack of penis? "

He gave a trivially correct answer to your query. It doesn't matter if 100% of men have penises or 99% do (actually closer to 99.9%).

Let's be generous and assume that only 95% of men have penises and 95% of women don't. It you have a hundred men and a hundred women. Then the men will have on average 95 penises and the women 5. There's a standard deviation of 2.18 penises in each group, while different between them is 90.