The NationStates Feminist Thread II

[GabrieIa]

Hmm, science is on my side with this. For one they have more compassion, they care more about the people. Now dont tell me the exceptions because there are some

What is your source for that?

Hmm, science is on my side with this. For one they have more compassion, they care more about the people. Now dont tell me the exceptions because there are some

Can you provide any proof for this? What are some examples of women caring more about the people?

I am sorry you two, but i need to start to wind down to sleep. It is that late at night here. I need to not debate right now, but will continue with this when you two want. Here is one thing i found, http://www.sexscience.org/PDFs/Gender%2 ... 0Final.pdf Just use this for right now. I am to tired to check it

[Hittanryan]

What is your source for that?

Can you provide any proof for this? What are some examples of women caring more about the people?

I am sorry you two, but i need to start to wind down to sleep. It is that late at night here. I need to not debate right now, but will continue with this when you two want. Here is one thing i found, http://www.sexscience.org/PDFs/Gender%2 ... 0Final.pdf Just use this for right now. I am to tired to check it

Is this peer-reviewed?

[Lady Scylla]

I am sorry you two, but i need to start to wind down to sleep. It is that late at night here. I need to not debate right now, but will continue with this when you two want. Here is one thing i found, http://www.sexscience.org/PDFs/Gender%2 ... 0Final.pdf Just use this for right now. I am to tired to check it

Is this peer-reviewed?

You can use Google Scholar to look it up.

[Galloism]

What is your source for that?

Can you provide any proof for this? What are some examples of women caring more about the people?

I am sorry you two, but i need to start to wind down to sleep. It is that late at night here. I need to not debate right now, but will continue with this when you two want. Here is one thing i found, http://www.sexscience.org/PDFs/Gender%2 ... 0Final.pdf Just use this for right now. I am to tired to check it

That is about sexuality.

Unless you're arguing desiring sex is an act of compassion, and I'd say that depends greatly on who your partner is.

[Hittanryan]

Is this peer-reviewed?

You can use Google Scholar to look it up.

It's looking like a no.

[Galloism]

You can use Google Scholar to look it up.

It's looking like a no.

It's not even about the subject - never mind peer review.

It's like asking about time dilation at relativistic speeds, and someone passing you an article on cellular mitosis, and immediately asking if it was peer reviewed.

[Lady Scylla]

You can use Google Scholar to look it up.

It's looking like a no.

https://scholar.google.com

Behold. A resource for cited, and peer-reviewed studies, and what I use to commonly blast people's bullshit.

[Mattopilos]

Ok, Radical Feminism is not Third Wave Feminism. I agree with trans rights but not to the point of preferred pronouns and bathroom issue.

Excluding yourself from other issues based on equality doesn't strengthen the message of feminists, it hurts it.

Radical TERFs are different from more moderate ones. Because i support them but it is not a femist issue.
All in all feminist issue in my opinion do not include non male issues.

TERFs are TERFs. They like to exclude themselves from issues from transgender people one way or another. Don't pretend being 'moderate' on the issue makes it more righteous.

[Hittanryan]

It's looking like a no.

It's not even about the subject - never mind peer review.

It's like asking about time dilation at relativistic speeds, and someone passing you an article on cellular mitosis, and immediately asking if it was peer reviewed.

I didn't get too far into reading it before noticing it looked more like a college term paper than an article from an academic journal. Peer review was just the first red flag I acted on is all.

[Galloism]

Incidentally, its probably not true that women are more compassionate than men, but the expression thereof is probably different.

That's an opinion piece, but it makes some good arguments.

The data is inconclusive, as there is no commonly accepted definition of 'what is compassion'.

[Mattopilos]

Incidentally, its probably not true that women are more compassionate than men, but the expression thereof is probably different.

That's an opinion piece, but it makes some good arguments.

The data is inconclusive, as there is no commonly accepted definition of 'what is compassion'.

I think that has to do with the previous discussion touching on "benevolent sexism" - they appear more compassionate because that is what we expect them to be.

[Galloism]

Incidentally, its probably not true that women are more compassionate than men, but the expression thereof is probably different.

That's an opinion piece, but it makes some good arguments.

The data is inconclusive, as there is no commonly accepted definition of 'what is compassion'.

I think that has to do with the previous discussion touching on "benevolent sexism" - they appear more compassionate because that is what we expect them to be.

Well, they also self report higher, but that doesn't mean anything.

People often fudge self reporting - in both directions.

[Lady Scylla]

Ok, Radical Feminism is not Third Wave Feminism. I agree with trans rights but not to the point of preferred pronouns and bathroom issue.

Excluding yourself from other issues based on equality doesn't strengthen the message of feminists, it hurts it.

Radical TERFs are different from more moderate ones. Because i support them but it is not a femist issue.
All in all feminist issue in my opinion do not include non male issues.

TERFs are TERFs. They like to exclude themselves from issues from transgender people one way or another. Don't pretend being 'moderate' on the issue makes it more righteous.

That and TERFS and SWERFS are both RadFems. Neither are moderate to any degree.

[Giovenith]

According to the numerous studies cited here, there is very little substantial difference in men and women's capacity for compassion. Rather, the sexes have different tendencies in expressing compassion due to a mix of both evolutionary roles and social conditioning. Copying the text below.

It should also be noted that tests designed to measure the human capacity for harm and cruelty such as the Milgram experiment do not show any major differences between men and women - scientists went in expecting women to be less willing to electrocute their partner than men, but they were just as easily coerced into abandoning their morals. Taking a look at the female Nazis in charge of women's concentration camps also doesn't lend much to the "women are more compassionate than men" assertion. Most data seems to suggest, as the below article explains, that our own stereotype of seeing women as nicer has caused us to build our own concepts of what qualifies as "nice" around female-specific behavior. When the factors that would allow this bias are taken out of the picture, men and women behave almost identically.

Yesterday, journalists at Huffington Post Live asked me to comment on whether women are more compassionate than men. Scientists in general tend to cringe at any strong black-and-white statements of this kind since we know there is no data to support such strong claims. If you ask a neuroscientist to distinguish a male from a female brain, for example, s/he would have a difficult time doing so. Although differences have been detected (for example, women appear to make greater use of both hemispheres of the brain and therefore have a slightly thicker corpus callosum—the part of the brain that bridges the two hemispheres), the differences are subtle and there is no single area of the brain that we can say clearly distinguishes a male brain from a female brain.

Compassion is Innate

Moreover, whether they are researching animals or humans, males or females, scientists find that compassion is innate and instinctual across the board. As I discussed at length in my previous post, research with animals and humans shows that we naturally have an impulse to help others who are suffering. This tendency, that Dacher Keltner has coined the "compassionate instinct," seems to have ensured our survival. Research by Stanford University's Robert Sapolsky suggests that this instinct is linked to thriving and improved reproduction in primates. In other words, compassion is natural and no gender differences have emerged across these studies.

Men's and Women’s Brains On Compassion

One brain imaging study, however, found that men and women appear to differ with regards to their brain activation during compassion. This study by Roberto Mercadillo of the National Autonomous University of Mexico compared men and women's brain activation while they were experiencing compassion. He asked participants to lie in an fMRI scanner and showed them sad images meant to elicit compassion. Both men and women reported experiencing the same levels of compassion in response to the photographs. However, the regions of the brain activated in men were different than those in women. While this study does not suggest that one gender experiences compassion more than the other, it suggests that the genders may differ in how compassion is experienced and expressed.

Are Differences in Compassion Innate or Learned?

In self-report questionnaires, women do, in general, report experiencing more compassion in their lives than men report doing. There may be a number of reasons why they report it more. Differences in compassion expression in men and women are probably in large part due to different socialization processes. We know that our brain is "plastic" and that it changes in response to experience. A large body of research has shown that men and women have very different experiences and that they are socialized extremely differently as of infancy. Think about girls who are handed dolls and baby carriages to play with (suggesting nurturing and caring behaviors) and boys who are handed superheroes and toy soldiers (suggesting fighting, and protecting behaviors). When girls (or women) cry it is seen as normal but if boys (or men) do, they are often taught crying is a sign of weakness and is not “manly.” How much of differences observed in adulthood are due to years of socialization?

Socialization may in turn have impacted how men and women learned to communicate emotions such as kindness and compassion. In a study of human touch by Dacher Keltner, participants were asked to communicate different emotions by touching another participant's hand. They were also asked to guess what emotion was being communicated when their partner touched their hand. The participants could not see each but guessed each other’s emotion simply through a touch of the hand. When both partners were men, the odds of them guessing that the emotion being communicated was sympathy was no greater than chance. When at least one of the participants was a woman, however, participants were more accurate. Since sympathy is seen as a more “feminine” trait more acceptable for women to express, women may have learned to both communicate and recognize it more easily.

Another reason women may have learned to express compassion more easily emerges from the work of Shelley Taylor, at UCLA, who found that men and women respond differently to stress. These differences may have certainly have trained women to express compassion more explicitly. Taylor found that the "fight or flight" response is characteristic of men whereas women tend toward a different tendency: "tend and befriend." Women faced with a stressful situation are more likely to respond by socializing, bonding with others and seeking protection and nurturance within a community. These tendencies may have been evolutionarily adaptive since we have evolved in communities where women’s primary responsibility was raising and protecting offspring who needed protection while men traditionally engaged in hunting and warfare. A new study, however, suggest that men, too, also can respond to stress through social bonding.

Finally, women may at times have higher levels of "oxytocin" - sometimes called the "cuddle hormone" or "love hormone" because it is linked to bonding, social connection and monogamy. Oxytocin is produced during sex for both men and women but is particularly important during childbirth. It is produced in women during labor and lactation in women and is believed to trigger bonding and nurturing behaviors.

Men and Women – Same Level of Compassion, Different Look?

Rather than suggesting that these tendencies might have made women more compassionate than men, I would argue that they would simply have altered the expression of compassion. While women's expression involved nurturing and bonding, men's compassion was expressed through protecting and ensuring survival. Compassion just took on a different "look and feel" depending on our evolutionary needs for survival.

One reason we might think that women are more compassionate than men is that we think of compassion in only one way: nurturance, kindness, softness, gentleness, and emotional warmth. We think of compassion in mostly feminized terms. It may be that women are conditioned to think of compassion as involving caring and nurturing and that, for men, it takes on a fiercer more protective appearance. From my work with veterans and active-duty personnel, I have seen deep expressions of compassion that do not have nurturing and maternal features. Think of the many heroic acts that happen daily in which people throw themselves into dangerous situations to help others. These are fierce, courageous and even aggressive forms of compassion.

Generalizations are generally never accurate. We often all engage in both nurturing and fierce expressions of compassion. Think of a mother who yells and roughly pulls her child away from oncoming traffic (fierce compassion) or military service-members who hold each other in grief after the loss of a friend (nurturing compassion). Love, compassion, kindness are natural to all of us in their varied forms of expression.

Rather than asking whether men or women are kinder or compassionate, the question should rather be: What are the myriad beautiful forms in which compassion expresses itself?

[Mattopilos]

Excluding yourself from other issues based on equality doesn't strengthen the message of feminists, it hurts it.


TERFs are TERFs. They like to exclude themselves from issues from transgender people one way or another. Don't pretend being 'moderate' on the issue makes it more righteous.

That and TERFS and SWERFS are both RadFems. Neither are moderate to any degree.

Exactly - it is a very strong view to hold, no matter how 'moderate' you are on it.

-snip-

I.e. the view of compassion is centred around women, but that does not mean they are inherently more compassionate, because compassion can occur in more forms than we note? That, and it is because they happen to show it in a form that is more noticeable and more direct?

[Giovenith]

I.e. the view of compassion is centred around women, but that does not mean they are inherently more compassionate, because compassion can occur in more forms than we note? That, and it is because they happen to show it in a form that is more noticeable and more direct?

Pretty much. Also, we tend to notice it more when women act compassionately due to confirmation bias (and vice versa, overlooking when women are cruel and painting cruelty committed by men as more heinous - just look at our prison sentencing habits and how we view female-on-male violence) and often subtly teach men that they should not participate in compassionate behaviors we deem as "womanly" such as crying or touching - there's always that complicated blur between how the sexes are taught to act vs. how they evolved to generally act, but regardless, eliminating the bias these differences create and looking at raw compassion itself yields no difference. And when push comes to shove, women have no shortage in their capacity for callousness. Humans are social but tribalistic animals, period. When the right buttons are pushed, any one of us can be made to act in any way.

[Galloism]

I.e. the view of compassion is centred around women, but that does not mean they are inherently more compassionate, because compassion can occur in more forms than we note? That, and it is because they happen to show it in a form that is more noticeable and more direct?

Pretty much. Also, we tend to notice it more when women act compassionately due to confirmation bias (and vice versa, overlooking when women are cruel and painting cruelty committed by men as more heinous - just look at our prison sentencing habits and how we view female-on-male violence) and often subtly teach men that they should not participate in compassionate behaviors we deem as "womanly" such as crying or touching - there's always that complicated blur between how the sexes are taught to act vs. how they evolved to generally act, but regardless, eliminating the bias these differences create and looking at raw compassion itself yields no difference. And when push comes to shove, women have no shortage in their capacity for callousness. Humans are social but tribalistic animals, period. When the right buttons are pushed, any one of us can be made to act in any way.

I mean, maybe, but you'd be hard pressed to engineer a situation where I would be naked juggling assorted fruit standing atop a giant pyramid surrounded by thousands of naked women throwing tiny pickles at me again.

[Costa Fierro]

Excluding yourself from other issues based on equality doesn't strengthen the message of feminists, it hurts it.


TERFs are TERFs. They like to exclude themselves from issues from transgender people one way or another. Don't pretend being 'moderate' on the issue makes it more righteous.

That and TERFS and SWERFS are both RadFems. Neither are moderate to any degree.

I wonder what SMURF would stand for.

[Lady Scylla]

That and TERFS and SWERFS are both RadFems. Neither are moderate to any degree.

I wonder what SMURF would stand for.

Sweaty Male Under Rancid Fauna

[Soldati Senza Confini]

I wonder what SMURF would stand for.

Sweaty Male Under Rancid Fauna

Oh my

[Costa Fierro]

I wonder what SMURF would stand for.

Sweaty Male Under Rancid Fauna

Stupid Moderates Undermining Radical Real Feminism.

[Mattopilos]

I.e. the view of compassion is centred around women, but that does not mean they are inherently more compassionate, because compassion can occur in more forms than we note? That, and it is because they happen to show it in a form that is more noticeable and more direct?

Pretty much. Also, we tend to notice it more when women act compassionately due to confirmation bias (and vice versa, overlooking when women are cruel and painting cruelty committed by men as more heinous - just look at our prison sentencing habits and how we view female-on-male violence) and often subtly teach men that they should not participate in compassionate behaviors we deem as "womanly" such as crying or touching - there's always that complicated blur between how the sexes are taught to act vs. how they evolved to generally act, but regardless, eliminating the bias these differences create and looking at raw compassion itself yields no difference. And when push comes to shove, women have no shortage in their capacity for callousness. Humans are social but tribalistic animals, period. When the right buttons are pushed, any one of us can be made to act in any way.

Seems like more gender role issues, then.

[Giovenith]

Pretty much. Also, we tend to notice it more when women act compassionately due to confirmation bias (and vice versa, overlooking when women are cruel and painting cruelty committed by men as more heinous - just look at our prison sentencing habits and how we view female-on-male violence) and often subtly teach men that they should not participate in compassionate behaviors we deem as "womanly" such as crying or touching - there's always that complicated blur between how the sexes are taught to act vs. how they evolved to generally act, but regardless, eliminating the bias these differences create and looking at raw compassion itself yields no difference. And when push comes to shove, women have no shortage in their capacity for callousness. Humans are social but tribalistic animals, period. When the right buttons are pushed, any one of us can be made to act in any way.

Seems like more gender role issues, then.

Indeed. This whole, "Women should be in charge because they're naturally more compassionate!" is no different from times of old that said, "Men should be in charge because they're naturally more intelligent/level-headed/brave/moral!"

Like, no, everybody step the fuck down, genitals aren't a leadership skill. Invoking an incidental trait of yours for power and respect you haven't actually done shit to earn is one of the most pathetic activities humanity has constructed.

[Mattopilos]

Seems like more gender role issues, then.

Indeed. This whole, "Women should be in charge because they're naturally more compassionate!" is no different from times of old that said, "Men should be in charge because they're naturally more intelligent/level-headed/brave/moral!"

Like, no, everybody step the fuck down, genitals aren't a leadership skill. Invoking an incidental trait of yours for power and respect you haven't actually done shit to earn is one of the most pathetic activities humanity has constructed.

Agreed 100%.

[Forsher]

That and TERFS and SWERFS are both RadFems. Neither are moderate to any degree.

I wonder what SMURF would stand for.

Sexual Mores Undermining Radical Feminists If I say so myself, that's clever.