When men are presented with a personal problem, it is easier for them to detach themselves from the situation in order to analyze what went wrong and and the next step that should be taken. It is harder for women to be so detached and pragmatic in personal matters because they bestow great value on subjective aspect of the experience (which is closely tied to sense of self). It’s not that they cant (they can if they make that choice) but doing would be seen as a great sacrifice/loss - an act of depreciation or reducing of self.
It makes me think that women are more in touch with their sense of self than men since men are more at ease at abandoning subjective experience and objectifying their selves in order to solve a problem.
I agree insofar as your observations go. Where you switch to interpretation, however, your post remains too vague for my liking. I think you (we?) should inquire further into what “subjective aspect of the experience” and “sense of self” mean. My intuition tells me it has to do with the body: think for instance of the—usually male—scientist who is so immersed in his work that he neglects his own physical needs (food, sleep, etc.). What do you think?
I usually go back to the hunter-gatherer model for this. Men hunted. They needed to solve problems of geometry and speed/distance ratios. And they fought - in the end, that’s usually one-on-one in small arms combat. Men had to be able to go it alone and solve pattern-problems quickly. And when they worked together, it was in a top-to-bottom arrangement. Generals and hunting party leaders. Men found their problems at work, and solved them there, on the spot.
Women gathered, and later farmed. And raised a lot of kids. They needed to be able to find consensus and work together in a non-hierarchical way. Women had to be able to discern much larger patterns - seasonal, familial, migrational. The problems they had to solve, they had to solve collectively.
I think men are more “subjective” in that they go it alone to solve a problem - and they tend to see things in terms of “problem-solution” more than women. Women will talk to their friends more about problems, seeking a collective solution. The see problems as longer-term, and so more difficult to solve. But perhaps they perform the surgery and do the rehab where men slap on the bandage.
here I am, talking like I know the first fucking thing about women.
When a little girl falls off her bike, mom and dad run over to help and get her off the ground.
When a little boy falls off his bike, mom and dad yell, “get up off the ground”.
Girls aren’t forced to learn to cope. What’s considered good etiquette as far as helping females to be shielded from harshness, in effect makes them less able to cope with it.
i think he made a good point jonquil. ur point kinda defeats itself. if it’s okay to be illogical and irrational, and it’s illogical and irrational to be logical and rational, then it’s okay to be logical and rational.
I think it has more to do with the internal sense of self, rather than a physical body. Women can neglect or even be mean to their bodies, too. Maybe it’s higher emotional sensitivity.
I am trying to fit your model into my question. So men are problem solvers. But how does their sense of “I” fit into the problem? It seems that women’s sense of “I” is closer to the problem than men’s. When dealing with a problem women often find themselves in the problem, while men are not.
Some problems require one to be detached and logical to be solved. Think for example about the advancements we made in medical science. Medicine has had to adopt a different stance toward human body in order to improve on its methods. It had to become more objective.
So you think it’s primarily a socialized behavior. What happens to one’s sense of self (how one sees the self and how the self relates to the world) as a result of constantly being forced to cope? Is the self reduced? (it just appears men have a different sense of self then women)
What Faust said. Except more emphatically. It’s not nurture, there are real physical differences between male and female brains. The Mathews effect of like to like reinforces this as children of differing sexes age.
For example, men are more abstract thinkers because neurophysiological development ensures their right/left hemispheres become less well connected than in women, allowing them to strip a problem of emotional weight, and consider it in a more detached way.
this thread reminds me of an incident when i was a child.
i think i was about 8 or 9. i was hanging out with a couple of my guy friends. this girl runs up out of nowhere and says, “GUESS WHAT GIRLS ARE MORE MATURE THAN BOYS ARE!” the first thought that came to my mind was, “how fucking mature is it to go around saying shit like that?”
oh girls.
i don’t think the inability to detach yourself from a problem makes you more in touch with yourself. i haven’t seen an explanation of why you think this is the case.
i saw a study recently that compared romantic feelings of men and women. the survey asked both married couples and unmarried couples / singles various questions about how they view their relationships. surprisingly, more often than not men would describe them in terms of “love at first sight” or other sort of romantic cliches, and women would describe them in terms of how useful the relationship was to them, the career the guy had, stuff like that. wonder if that information can play in here. the ability to detach yourself from your lover and just view him as a means to an end (a house, children) is pretty fucking cold.
I can’t see that men are more logical, just are brain-adapted toward abstraction. If ten people are involved in problem solving, men tend to see it as a project, while women seem more concerned with the relationships among the participants. I see nothing that makes men or women more or less capable of logical thought. It is more about selective focus which is in part hard-wired, and then supported by nurture.
I have no idea how this is connected to “self-ness” which seems to me to be a whole different topic.
Okay, yeah, I see the emotional as the intermediate level between the physical and the mental (the physiological and the cognitive). In Nietzschean terms, then, in women the “heart” generally prevails over the “mind”, whereas the opposite is the case in men. This is in accordance with the fact that most women are “Feeling” types whereas most men are “Thinking” types according to Jungian typology. But I think the reason why these things are so should be looked for in (evolutionary) biology.
