Gender Phenomena

These ideas are gathered from many sources, and a few insights of my own. No description is perfect, but this seems to be pretty good and works better than any other system I've found. The primary sources for this material are books about psychology and behavioral psychology, and modern self-help books such as those by David Deida. I got interested in these issues when I discovered that there was much misunderstanding among my friends and family regarding my own sexual orientation, and started doing the research necessary to explain things in a clear, concise and accurate way. I am also lucky enough to have found the Sterling Institute of Relationship which allows people to actually experience the power of these concepts in action. There are other groups that do similar work, such as the New Warrior Training and Warrior Soul Resource Center, and spinoff groups such as The Nation of Men I have also gotten much inspiration from The Red Green Show (on certain PBS stations, primarily those near the Canadian border) and The Man Show (on Comedy Central).

The Feminists and the Chauvinists Are Both Right

How can that possibly be true?

Here is a position I associate with feminism, specifically a type of feminism called "equity feminism" (keeping in mind I'm a man, but I think this one is pretty commonly accepted):

Men and women are fundamentally the same — they have the same capabilites and the same potential (aside from an obvious bias in statistical distribution in things like weight and muscle mass). Men and women are called "different", and treated different in society because they are perceived as being more different than they are.

And here is a position that I (being a man) will arbitrarily call a "chauvinist" position because it is frequently cited as a source of bias and/or discrimination of various kinds:

There are clear and distinct differences between men and women. There are many things that women are better at than men, and many other things that men are better at than women. These differences are innate and genetic, and will arise in any group of men or women regardless of how they are raised or what culture they are in.

These seem like contradictory statements — at most one is true. Fundamental to the following discussion is the proposition that:

Both statements can be equated if they are restated in terms of an intermediate concept of distributable attributes.

A distributable attribute is simply an attribute that can be posessed to a small or large degree. Each individual is said to have a certain amount of each attribute.

It is important to distinguish attributes from behavior. Behavior is a time-variable phenomenon, and the person's attributes are not all reflected in their behavior at any particular moment. However, attributes typically describe the extent to which the individual is likely to exhibit a corresponding behavior.

There are thousands of gender-correlated attributes

That is, there are thousands of distinct attributes, for which a correlation can be found with the gender as determined by chromosome. (For simplicity, most studies ignore minority populations like X-X-Y.)

Most of the correlations have a near-zero covariance with gender.

That is, the correlations are all very weak. A typical attribute will apply to 30 of X-Y individuals and 32 of X-X individuals, or vice versa. 2% is a very low difference and results in a low covariance.

When the covariance for each attribute is computed for a group of individuals, and the covariances are all added together, the resulting covariance is very high.

This statement says, besically, that when you look at all of the attributes together, you have an extremely reliable indicator of gender.

The resulting strong correlation is what most people are noticing when they perceive "masculinity" and "femininity" in other people.

Most people who have not disciplined themselves to examine particular attributes one by one notice the combined correlation instead and see a strong difference between men and women. When each individual attribute is looked at, it is difficult to see where the differences come from.

Distinctions of Gender

There are several different pairs of concepts that will be discussed here:

male and female
masculine and feminine
man and woman

These are often confused with each other. For example, man is often confused with masculine by those who assert that all men have masculine behavioral or psychological attributes.

As Deida mentions in most of his books, the masculine/feminine phenomenon is not always correlated with male/female. In particular, many men are more feminine than masculine, or at least, feminine enough that they end up being noticably different from the majority of men.

I use the word masculine to describe any physical, psychological or behavior attribute that can be shown to occur much more often among men than among women, and feminine to describe any physical, psychological or behavior attribute that can be shown to occur much more often among women than among men. I don't label physical characteristics, but obviously some of them (such as reproductive organs) are commonly used to define man and woman, and many others have a correlation with sex.

It is often thought that masculine and feminine attributes are subject to a type of tradeoff effect, such that if a person's feminine attributes are stronger they have to have weaker masculine attributes at the same time, otherwise it wouldn't "add up". In fact this is not the case. Each type of attribute is subject to its own distribution frequency, separate from the other. This means that we find people with a lot of both, and people with very little of either. This explains why gay men do not fit very well into the "butch / femme scale" idea which asserts that each gay man is placed somewhere on a spectrum from masculine to feminine. In fact, most gay men have an average (for men) level of each of the masculine attributes combined with feminine attributes of a level usually only found in women. This allows the gay man to express himself as masculine or feminine, as the situation warrants.

masculine attributes	feminine attributes
simple emotions [21]	complex, unpredictable emotion [21]
accountable for decisions [22]	decide based on feelings at the moment [22]
attracted to women	attracted to men
enjoys masculine company	enjoys feminine company
prioritize purpose, direction [29]	priortize flow of love in intimacy [29]
prefer polygamy	prefer monogamy

A Relationship Paradox

Here is part of the attributes chart again:

masculine attributes	feminine attributes
attracted to women	attracted to men
enjoys masculine company	enjoys feminine company

There is a sort of paradox here that affects most heterosexual couples to some degree or another. The attraction depends on polarity [22]. However, everyone has a certain amount of affiliativeness and because your partner enjoys their own type of personality for company your affiliativeness will tend to drive your personality closer to theirs, reducing the polarity.

There is no real solution to this other than to make sure you spend plenty of time away from your partner and in the company of others of your own gender personality type.

A Two-Dimensional Distribution

To illustrate the idea of a two-dimensional distribution, let's consider women's dress sizes. The women's department is divided into categories that are confusing for anyone who has never had to shop for a dress. To figure out what part of the store has what you want, you first have to know the height and waist size of the person you're shopping for:

An example of a two-dimensional attribute distribution

This system is completely different from the categories that society or individual women use to describe their size and shape:

Another example

The difference is that this time we're looking at the ratio between height and waist, recognizing that it is this relationship between the two attributes that is most important.

The Two Dimensions of Gender

Applying this to gender, the two dimensions are obviously the masculine and the feminine. The stereotype is that men have a lot of masculine and a little feminine, and that women are the other way around. Among men, the exceptions fall into the categories Gay (lots of both attributes), Transsexual (more feminine than masculine) and Androgynous (little of either).

---MEN--- M . . . . . . . . . . . | . . . | . . . | . . . | . . . | S . B . G . | . . . | . . . | . . . |...................... | A : T . + - - - - - - - - - - F Traditional Perception S=straight, B=bisexual, G=gay, A=androgynous, T=transsexual

A gender distribution for men

However this isn't very accurate. It's a lot better to look at the ratio of masculine to feminine. No matter how much you have, what makes the most difference is which one is stronger, and how much stronger. The result looks more like this:

---MEN--- ---MEN--- M . . . . . . . . . . . | 0 . . | 1 . . | S 2. . | . 3 .. | . B 4. . | . . 5 . | . . G . |``.. . 6 . | X `.. .....'. | A :....''''' T . + - - - - - - - - - - F More Accurate S=straight, B=bisexual, G=gay, A=androgynous, T=transsexual 0-6, X = Kinsey scale numbers

A more accurate gender distribution for men

The popular "Kinsey scale" used to classify people's sexual orientation, fits well on this chart.

Footnotes

[21]: Deida, The Way of the Superior Man, chapter 21

[22]: Deida, The Way of the Superior Man, chapter 22

This page was written in the "embarrassingly readable" markup language RHTF, and was last updated on 2018 Aug 27.

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