Forgive me, oh great Ossian! Did my praise come across as mockery? You seem certain you're right - and so I give you what you want to hear, that's all. You're right, you're never wrong. Why are you not happy?
Well, I disagree with the premise of this thread. Anyone who thinks that men are less verbose than women never had to study the Romantic Poets in school. Every writer is somewhere on a spectrum also. To generalise, men are more spatially oriented so are more likely to write action books, or focus on action. Whereas women are more programmed to work around relationships and emotion, which is why Danielle Steele might get two pages out of an action scene that the OP's dad would prefer to be shorter. Unless its chick lit or schlock sci fi I dont think you can tell whether an author is male or female from reading them.
Uh...just to put it out there? The Fault in Our Stars, a teen romance novel, was written by a man. Goku, in the original Japanese version of Dragonball Z, was voiced a woman. All I'm saying is that it all depends on the author and what he/she wants to write about.
Gotta agree. Sad even that this thread is the most popular one in General writing too (and yeah I'm contributing to that by simply posting this) ... But, the thread, divisive as it is, has also been hijacked by a new member who appears to have very little interest in writing looking at their posts since they joined. I'm not usually one calling for mod intervention, but should this even be in General Writing let alone have any place in this forum at all? Right, rant over, time to look what else is going on
Doesn't a debate involve proofs? Or are we talking a mere free-for-all? Personally, I think it's trolling behavior - getting one's kicks from deliberately saying things to provoke. If the comments were made seriously, there's no point in responding to such nonsense. If made for effect - well, ditto.
I agree. Marcel Proust, (male) very verbose "Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring woolstapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London." Virginia Woolf. Albeit she is not as short as Hemingway, she is pretty concise and not Steele dreary
It sounds to me that you haven't taken a second look at Taoism or the I-Ching. Or rather, that you do not understand the philosophy or the duality aspect behind it. "In none of these conceptions of yin-yang is there a valuational hierarchy, as if yin could be abstracted from yang (or vice versa), regarded as superior or considered metaphysically separated and distinct." http://www.iep.utm.edu/yinyang/ There is the principle of unity, of the ONE composed by the two. Your " is all in the penis" conclusion is a simplistic, narrow-minded and rather ignorant one. May I also add, it seems to me you are full of Yin (according to your above statement) because your discourse lacks creativity, or structure, and is deprived of common-sense rational. Maybe you should Feng-Shui your abode to draw more Yang currents before trolling iniquitous banalities?
There is a different between sex (male/female) and gender (man/woman). The female brain has emotions in the same place as words, the male brain does not. That's why men have a harder time saying how they feel. And how does yin yang account for third gender persons?
Goodness me. What a sad way to disagree with someone or disagree with a topic. Ban him or her because you do not agree with something that a member has posted. I created this thread because I genuinely did feel that my father's insight into writing and how a woman sees things; then, describes her mind in words that may differ from a male's writing style may have some legitimacy to it. To suggest that a thread such as this should be deleted because, in your mind, may be divisive is a close minded view that men and women are same minded and not emotionally different. When my father read the first chapter of my latest attempt at a lengthy writing project, he pointed out that my emotional mind was over riding my movement of the story line. As I read his critique I had to agree. I was writing as my mind interpreted what I could see in my mind. It was then being transferred to paper (monitor). Like it or not, a woman needs to follow the same mechanics of writing that a man does. Wow, maybe I should ban or delete myself because I am a new member who shouldn't be allowed to create a thread??
To answer that you first need to define what you mean by a 'third gender'. Also, it's important to differentiate between anatomical gender, gender identity and sexuality. For example, a male to female transsexual who is in a long term relationship with a female. She is not a 'he' and she'd tell you she never truly was, even though her genetics still say she is XY. She was born with fully functioning male genitals, hence male gender at birth, and before the op, she felt that she was born into the wrong body, wrong genitals. Her gender identity was female, even though anatomically she was born a male. After she transitioned, her sexuallity remained lesbian. She isn't a heterosexual male who happened to have a sex change but is still attracted to women. She is a lesbian transsexual, her gender as she experiences it is female. These things can get quite complex, but it is the reality of the situation. Anatomical gender is something we are born with and have no input on. As long as the person has at least one Y chromosome, they are genetically a male (in the absence of Y they are female). There's no third type of chromosome just like there's no genuine third type of genitalia, only something in between male and female and extremely rarely, both (true hermaphroditism). Genders can't be truly switched, a man can't have a surgery and start having periods and ovulating. A woman can't have the op to get fully functioning testicles. Also, our Xs and Ys can't be tampered with. Not yet anyway. But they can be approximated to most closely resemble the individal perception of self. Gender identity on the other hand, may or may not correspond with anatomy, and people may consider themselves to be one of the two genders, or something in between, or no gender if they don't identify with a concept of gender identity. Same goes for sexual identity which is again, a different thing. But on a biological level, a male and a female remain as two sexual varieties in nature, so in that biological sense, yin and yang in different ratios explain the entire continuum of human gender.
Biologist and gender theorist Anne Fausto-Sterling, in a 1993 article, argued that if people ought to be classified in sexes, at least five sexes, rather than two, would be needed. http://capone.mtsu.edu/phollowa/5sexes.html
It follows exactly what I said. It's a paper written over 20 years ago so the terminology and understanding and the law have all improved since then, as did the understanding, but essentially it all boils down to making an argument for inadequacy of insisting that people group themselves into one of the two proscribed genders. But the baseline duality I spoke of is clearly acknowledged in the article which focuses on gender identity aka 'sexes' whilst recognising the male-female continuum and varieties on the spectrum. @Poet of Gore : Males and females absolutely do not have 'very different' brains at all. There are some subtle differences, more often physiological than anatomical, but those vary from person to person and you might not be able to tell, if a brain is male or female just by looking at it. For a recent easy to understand review of the topic have a look here http://www.popsci.com/article/science/stop-looking-“hardwired”-differences-male-and-female-brains
I think that the fact that men are strongly socialized not to talk about feelings is more likely to be the primary cause of this difference.
You realize that the comment wasn't about you, right? I'm not saying that you can't defend someone else or be upset on someone else's behalf, of course, but I got the impression that you might think that it was about you.
pfffft, as if it's possible for people to have a huge variety of influences that determine individual personalities on a case-by-case basis, or that societal conditioning has anything to do with the formation of a person raised in that society! SCIENCE IS BAD AND SCARY, personal anecdotal evidence derived from Your Dad and Some Really Old Stuff I Read Somewhere Once are the only sources that matter! the only measure of reality that anybody needs is gutfeel! you know truthiness when you feel it in your guts! (that's a man thing, by the way. men know truthiness by feeling it in their guts. women "know things" by "thinking" it with their "brains," which is clearly an inferior process.)
There's no problem with the original post, though if you've been around forums long enough you can see what happened next coming with all the certainty of a North Korean General election. These kind of posts always go off-topic and lead to heated arguments. Chicken Freak is correct. We are here to discuss writing (the clue is in the title of the forum). The thread was hijacked by someone who has yet to discuss writing at all which again is okay, they can take their time, but to hijack what was an initially writing-based post and turn it into political thread on their own views of gender is not a good thing for the forum IMHO. Thankfully, other members are bringing the thread back on-topic since my first comment.
Prove which? The socialization, or whether it outweighs the brain geography thing? I don't even know if the brain geography thing is entirely accurate, so I certainly can't prove anything related to that. The socialization seems pretty obvious by observation. Yeah, that's anecdotal data but it's pretty overwhelming anecdotal data.
The whole thing. Maybe men are more socialized to bottle up their feelings, or maybe they (as in a higher percentage) are simply less emotive creatures. How can we know for sure?
We could know for sure. As was noted days ago in the debate room, Earth is over populated. I vote we take a couple of thousand children (50% male, 50% female), raise them isolated in the desert, and settle a lot of these nature vs nurture debates once and for all.
