Engendering differences

Thorsman99 decided to hit me with a second question:

if you could remove all societal influences, do you think there would be a difference between the genders, and if so, what would it be?

You know, this is a fantastic question, though I’m not sure how qualified I am to tackle it. Copious numbers of sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists have tackled this question for years and can’t come up with an answer they all agree on. Since I have no training in any of those fields, nor have I read any of the research produced by the members of these fields, any answer I give will be little more than the speculative musings of a mere fool talking out his ass. But then, it won’t be the first time I played that part, nor do I expect it to be the last time. 😉

First of all, I would like to acknowledge the impossibility of the conditional portion of that statement. There’s no way to remove all societal influences, whether you’re talking about gender differences or the inclination to play the tuba. At best, you can try to remove the explicit indoctrination concern gender roles and the stigmatization of those who don’t conform to the roles of their gender. But the fact remains that young children (and gender roles tend to be learned at a very young age) will be raised by gendered people, and those people have already been influenced by societal ideas about gender roles. And even if they reject society’s gender roles, as role models for their children, they will imprint their own notions of gender and gender roles on their children through their own actions. They only way to avoid this would be to not allow young children any interaction with any people (or limit there access to non-gendered people, but since I doubt that any truly non-gendered people exist….)

So, now that I’ve established the impossibility of the suggested condition, I’ll try to ignore that fact and answer the question anyway. Based on my own experiences and observations (mostly of my nieces and nephews and a few friends’ children), I do think there would still be some differences. I do think there are certain tendencies among boys and girls. For example, both of my nephews are far more active and aggressive in their play than all four of my nieces ever were. In fact, the difference is so pronounced that my sister once joked that she needs to make Liam and Warren run around the house five times before she sits them down to work on their school work.

I also tend to think that girls do tend to be more nurturing and caring on the whole. So in many ways, I think a lot of the generalizations about men and women have some basis in truth, and I don’t think it’s just due to socialization.

However, I also think that if social influences were lessened and people didn’t try to force strict gender roles and norms, I think there’d be be more variation. In statistical terms, I think this would mean that the standard deviation would grow and that the bell curve would widen. You’d see more boys with a nurturing side and more girls expressing a bit of aggression. I also think that without the stigmatization of those who don’t entire fit the norms (or fall completely outside of them), you’d find that everyone would be a lot more healthy, especially in the emotional realms.