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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think all of you debating nature/nurture on boys and girls always miss the larger idea that socialization is ALSO kind of nature.

Not that we can't fight it to an extent, but humans are social creatures who group and label and find meaning and companionship in these groups. LGBT community keeps on adding letters, why? Because its a group that kind of welcomes differences and smaller subsets keep wanting to get included into a larger and welcoming movement. This is a good thing because those people are gaining a lot from joining but its human nature to want to belong.

The reality is that nature and nurture have created gender divisions for a lot of reasons over the centuries. Hunter/gatherer, centuries of division of labor having the man work and the woman caretake. Exacerbated by the physical and biological trend towards those roles via increased strength/testosterone and the ability to bear children and nourish them through early childhood. Those have created a bajillion subtle things that reinforce those roles in our society. But to simply write that off as 'socialization' is to write off like...human nature as simply socialization. Which hey! It kind of is! But also virtually impossible to totally fight against.

I've never understood how someone can truly embrace and support the transgender movement AND believe that gender is a completely social construct. It is a social construct, but one that is woven into our biology and built on the centuries of human evolution, both cultural and bodily evolution. Humans want to belong, so men embrace a common set of traits that define them as a part of that group and so do women. You can disagree or agree with the 'goodness' of that quality of humanity but to deny it is, IMO, to deny human nature. [/quote]

I would also say adding onto this that the recent kveching about robbing men of their masculinity is probably just opposition to a new and necessary evolution in masculinity as the things that inspired the defining traits of masculinity are slowly kind of being eradicated. We don't NEED men to provide in the same way because women are capable of doing the work in a way that was simply not true when these divisions first started to emerge. But despite that, the things that cemented the 'female' identity (primarily childbirth and early childhood care) ARE still necessary and things that even high powered working moms have to take on to an extent.

In other words women have caught up with men in capability due to technology in ways that men will be incapable of catching up to women due to biology. Caught up in the context of, 'things one gender was in charge of because the species survived more effectively that way' not in a better or worse way.

I think men are trying to figure out how to define 'men' in a world that doesn't require and in some ways is harmed by the extreme examples of what has made men invaluable and successful in the past. It is really interesting from a sociological perspective IMO. [/quote]

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