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It's Women's Fault
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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Boys are taught to ignore emotions (“are you crying? Man up!”)
But emotions is what connects humans (and animals for that matter) and can’t really be ignored anyway
Join the two… and you get loneliness, frustration, rage.
We should start a conversation on emotional education (not only for boys but especially for boys)
I think it's in our nature.
Nope. Lego did a large behavioural study on this because this was their assumption, they thought they were doing completely gender-neutral stuff, but even controlling for parents's biases their stuff wasn't gender-neutral when it came to actually be interesting to kids. I'm talking about stuff like the city series, here: A street, bunch of houses, bunch of minifigs. Figures that the girls by and large where looking at the inside of the buildings, finding them empty, and lost interest while boys where seeing the streets, found ample of detail and also a car to drive around, and created stories. There are, of course, as always exceptions to the binary but the overall trend was undeniable.
That (and the insistence of US stores on not having gender-neutral isles and putting Lego in the boy's section) made them create the Friends series: Detailed house interiors, larger, more detailed minifigs. The pink is for the stores and parents, the interiors for the girls, the build-what-you-want flexibility for the humans.
Generally speaking, I think that difference feminism has been discarded prematurely. Sure, none of the normative BS that many of its proponents espoused should ever see the light of day, but denying difference is harmful in its own way, and the reason is the inevitability of essentialising: If you say "there is no difference at all between men and women" you're bound to essentialise everyone towards your own gender. And it's way better to be essentialised as an apple when you're an apple than it is to be essentialised as a pear.
Do you realise that kids before puberty don’t have much difference from biological point of view. Sexual organs are not developed or fully developed and no hormones to speak of.
The story of Lego you said… cool you can control parents behaviour… what about peer pressure? Or the idea was to control the parents of a whole town (including Cartoons and TV shows)?
Boys develop coarse motor skills first, then fine motor skills, for girls it's the other way around. Which also means that girls are quite good at sitting still in primary school, boys, without getting tired out in recess, very much aren't. Cue "behavioural issues".
Lego did control for everything that could be controlled. They're the OG "our toys are for everyone" company. They thought that their stuff was gender neutral, that stores and parents, society, were the problem, but had to admit that, no, kids actually do have, statistically speaking, different play preferences. Their female set designers didn't catch it because they were not kids, any more.
And "no hormones to speak of" MF if there were no hormones involved male karyotypes would develop female.
Depending on who you mean with "we" I definitely agree.
...and fails at doing so, if I may add. Male-pattern aggression is simply more obvious because it's in your face physical while female-pattern is psychological, always ensuring plausible deniability.
Women favour low-risk engagement, passive aggressiveness over overt aggressiveness. Thus you see emotional manipulation used way more often, one approach being self-victim-framing, and for that the narrative of "oh women are so delicate and emotional they have to be protected no matter what they do" fits the bill. Female viciousness is beautiful but I very much prefer it in the "never start a fight, but always finish it" version. Relevant symphonic metal. Also if you're trying it with me you're getting tickled into submission.
Having kids changed my view. Originally I believed nature influenced our gender roles. Since having kids I have seen in my kids and others that there are clear differences in how both boys and girls interact with the world and both are pretty incredible to watch. I think maybe the idea that being more stoic and less emotional is ok.
Saying all that, there are definitely cultural influences that can take these inherent traits to toxic levels.
I'd like to see studies showing when kids are left to their own that they will trend towards non traditional gender based toys. My gut is believing that this may not need proof that girls and boys do not experience emotions with similar intensity.
One thing I think is a clear difference is attention to details between men and women. What I worry is that if we start thinking men and women are more similar than they are we could run into problems when average people wrongly assume the other experiences things they do.