Sorry if this comes off somewhat provocative, but I need to know this for my latest plot-bunny. Are females better at doing boring stuff? I'm allways amazed how good my sister is at enduring hellishly boring/repetitive tasks. It's not only been in my family, but also elsewhere. Women actually seem to love to clean, manage to survive the most boring jobs. It actually seems like a hire praxis. If you want to have some repetitive low skilled work done then employ a woman. They're cheaper than robots...
Honestly, I wonder where this is coming from. Did you observe this happen to yourself when you went on hormones? That you could suddenly endure jobs where you'd run screaming when you still were on testosterone? Or is this something else entirely?
Extra Question: Did anyone of you recognize a change in learning habits after taking hormones?
I think...
This is a nurture thing.
Many girls are subjected to long sessions of repetitive hair brushing, etc since young, and it probably inoculates them against impatience.
I've known plenty of girls with less patience than me, and I'm hardly known for my own patience!
And no. Hormones have not made a lick of difference.
I AM more patient than I used to be, but that came more from having less inner turmoil than anything else.
Abigail Drew.
Hm... that's good to know.
Hm... that's good to know. It's just something that struck me as strange. Girls used to be so much better at sitting silently in a class and learning than me. Or actually doing homework. I'd always avoid stuff like that. Working on an assembly line is as close to hell you can come without war to me. But it's nice to know it's probably not hormones.
some things
Men's sense of smell is different from ours. We clean and cook because men are really bad at it.
Knitting is a repeative task or needlepoint. It's soothing to do it can't explain it better.
A large part of what we do instinctively is called a mothering instinct. We just do certain things no matter how much we hate them.
Thats not to say we don't get lazy either. A good way to tell who lives in a house is by the carpet. If its matted and the edges are dirty its a man. If its clean its generally a womans.
Give me an example of what your idea is for story Ie the task itself and I can give you a good idea how a person will react with it.
Some jobs such as customer service is handled by women. I think we are soothing or something. I know I put Dorothy to sleep on the phone a few times. She snores.
Hm... that's good to know.
Hm... that's good to know. You mean the mothering instinct might make women more patient with relatively easy but also mindnumbing tasks.
Well, the story idea has been kinda inspired by this NSFW TG caption: http://rterzanelle.blogspot.de/2013/04/for-lulz.html . I wondered what would happen if this actually happened to like 80 or 90% of the guys. How would society change thanks to such a curse. How would the nu-girls differ from the original girls and the small rest of guys? How would a society like that organize. I guess it would be kinda nice for the guys with Harems for everyone, but it would really suck for the original girls.
Actually Men
Tends to be better cooks than females.
Also the stereotype that men "Are less good at cleaning " is misandric and has no biological explanation.
Simply put we do stuff differently because we were nurtured into it, not because we have some innate biological difference ( it's amazing how similar male and female brains are)
So sorry to burst your bubble but the difference between men and women are mostly due to nurture not nature .
Lily
Well... I'm going more with
Well... I'm going more with the biological explanations where there's at least some evidence for it. Testosterone and Estrogen are nasty drugs and I'd never underestimate their effects and side effects on human minds.
I think it's less a "less good at cleaning" and more a "less willing to clean".
The problem is to tell what is actually biological and what is culture or nurture. Considering that transsexuals exist *cough* I think it's pretty much proven it can't be all nurture.
From a biological viewpoint
Both male and female brain function pretty much the same way. Hormones effect some reactions (all of them some even more than Estrogen and Testosterone) but in general the basic things (concentration, the ability to multitask etc.) are pretty much the same in all human beings ( we have a decent attention span and our multitasking abilities are close to none existent ).
We tend to forget just how strong nurture is: if we are placed in a position that makes us do a specific kind of task often at an early enough age, our brains adapt . So one might be better at analytical thinking because he was raised in an environment that put him in a position where he had to use that skillset more often than others.
As for the transsexual bit : how does it prove anything against it being nurture? we aren't even sure what causes transsexualism and it might well be nurture and not nature which cause it .
There are a number of
There are a number of differences in the male and female brains that have been found in recent years, not even counting the difference in size which can be accounted for by the difference in general body size.
1. The shape of the suprachiasmatic nucleus is elongated in females and relatively spherical in males, while overall volume, cell density, and total cell numbers seem to be the same.
2. The interstitial nuclei of the Anterior Hypothalamic/Preoptic Area has been found to be bigger in men then in women.
...and that's all the ones I can remember from the book I read but I'm pretty sure there are more. (the book being 'Brain Gender' by Melissa Nines from the Oxford university press.) It's a technical book reviewing a large number of different studies on differences in genders. It's not just about the biological differences in the brain but also effects of prenatal hormonal shifts and how the can effect the child. There are a couple of studies of intersexed girls (ones that have genitalia and all other appearances that looks female but they are genetically male) as well as some case studies on babies born male but do to some kind of genital trama were reassigned as females, that find that there are marked differences in their behavior from the norm of other girls, showing that there are possibly nature reasons for gender differences as well as nurture ones. There is a lot more in that book but I'm not good at describing it. If you can bare a bit of technical language it's a great book to read, I'm sure lots of people here would find it interesting.
if you take a look...
If you look around, the majority of "great chefs" are male (not all by any stretch)... Take a look at Iron Chef America as an example... Men can cook as well as women. It's a matter of training and innate abilities.
Cleaning? Think back to the old "Odd Couple" TV show... Tony Randall played the Neat Nick... Another example comes from my Navy experience... None of the ships I served on had women (as far as they knew)... And, they were extremely clean. Men can clean quite well... They just get away with not doing it... in civilian life, as "cleaning is woman's work"...
There are men with that nurturing "instinct" (for lack of a better term).
IMO - Avoid stereotypes. There MAY be some jobs that women are inherently better suited to and others men, in general... But, you can probably find more than one example where someone of the "wrong" gender is able to do them as well or better than the expected on.
Annette
Quite the opposite, I believe
The ability to perform dull, repetitive tasks forms a bell curve in distribution. Like many of these curves that appear in nature, the means between men and women appear pretty similar. However, the standard deviation is wider for men, so when you are looking for people who are particularly good, or bad, at it, you'll find more men than women. You can look more easily at the high correlation between repetitive natures and autism, and of course many more men are autistic than women.
You mention cleaning (and grooming) as counter-examples. Women do, on average, have a lower tolerance for dirt and mess than men do. While there's some culture sensitivity to the amount women will tolerate, they tolerate less than the average men across pretty much all cultures. I'd suggest that this, more than a tolerance for repetition, explains that behavior.
Titania
Titania
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
The cleaning thing was just
The cleaning thing was just an example, but I see it wasn't chosen well... I guess I phrased my question not so well, since it was more about studying habits and working habits. Did anyone see any differences in how they studied since they were on hormones?
You've probably got a point with the wider bell curve.
Thanks,
Beyogi
A Jittery Thing.
From my experience, Testosterone is at fault. I feel so strongly about this that I think that it should be a controlled substance; that young males should have their sperm collected and promptly get castrated full stop.
Then when they are captured by a female, she can just draw on his sperm bank. Perhaps a way can be found so that he can still "inflate" to keep her libido sated. A castrated man may not have one, what a relief. Oh, it will greatly decrease the likelihood of prostrate cancer too.
When I still had my Testosterone tumors, I was edgy, easily angered, aggressive and a risk taker. I've ridden motor cycles at over 120 MPH, climbed and topped trees in excess of 175 feet tall, stood in front of operating electrical equipment and worked in 480 Volt panels, LIVE. In retrospect, it was the Testosterone what did it.
Since corrective surgery where I got rid of those loathsome things, what some call small brains, my life is much more sedate and I am much more patient, loving, kind, mellow and all that. While living as a woman the last 8+ years, I am much happier, I wonder how it would have been had I just got castrated, and continued to live as a man, taking tiny amounts of estrogen to reduce bone material loss.
I was always a nurturer, but just impatient and aggressive. I even question the need for further surgery. Living in a woman's world is much nicer though. Some men can be very helpful if you are clever enough to find nice ones. :)
From my experience,
That sounds... very emotional. Maybe you just were someone very strongly affected by testosterone?
You'd make many females very unhappy with this. You know they disdain unmanly men. I'm pretty sure a general breast amputation also helps against breast cancer.
Sounds like a classic case of testosterone poisoning. Just reducing the amount of the stuff would have probably helped too. You're right about the agression and risk taking though. On the other hand if nobody ever took risks we'd still live in caves. Yet that's a very important point for my story. How would it affect humanity if the risk takers suddenly weren't so willing to take risks anymore. And you couldn't risk the rest... Well, they wouldn't be able to treat men like canon fodder and had to regard every last one as human beings. Would be a nice change for once.
A cynic would call this the happy life of cattle. That's interesting though. So the new hormones/lack of old ones definitly affected you strongly. So it seems to affect some people more than others. Is there a cheap way to actually test your hormone levels? I'm kinda curious since I never felt that extreme as you. Hell, my sister is a bigger risk-taker than I. Hm... that's actually good stuff. So one could expect some ex guys react like you and others wouldn't show a big effect.
Hm... so being on female hormones actually allowed you to express that side of your personality better. I'm not sure if I confuse you with someone else, but I think you mentioned your transition wasn't all that voluntary. Or at least heavily influenced by psychopharmaca. Sorry if this is a bit too inquisitive, but it would be useful to know. Where would you put yourself on a gender scale personality wise? -3 for extremely feminine to +3 extremely masculine? I'd be 0-1 btw.
Problem is being nice usually doesn't pay for guys. It's not exactly a strategy that leads to frequent reproduction. Actually another question. I'm not sure about your sexuality but I mean to remember you were heterosexual. What kind of guy do you prefer? The nice ones, or the successful assholes? Sorry if this is super inquisitive, but I really want to know what kind of developments I can expect if I suddenly turn 90% of the human males into females.
Repetitive tasks.
That's a tough one. Based on my own experience I'd have to say it's nurture, and really hasn't got much relation to sex or gender. Yes a woman's sense of smell is better, but that's as much evolution and hormones, I think. In the evolution sense, females have been the caregivers, the ones who paid attention the things that would endanger their children, like a predator lurking just out of the camp, village or whatever it was they were in, to making sure the children were taken care of and that includes messy diapers or whatever was used to contain the excretions of young humans.
But that isn't all of it. I've known females who lived in places I wouldn't have set foot in if I hadn't known them, horrible housekeepers, things thrown all over the place, things like that. I've also known guys who kept their places neat and cleaner than a lot of women believed. I grew up with Asthma, so a lot of time I couldn't just go outside and have the rough housing fun that the other boys did. So I helped out around the house, and just got into the habit of being neat with my living space and keeping it clean. Thanks to that, I think, repetitive tasks haven't ever really been a problem for me. I just do it, kind of zone out and think about other things as I do stuff that way. I've worked on factory assembly lines, in photo processing where I was what the called a retoucher (Yes, that was before computers got widespread use) and actually find vacuuming to be relaxing to this day.
Habit patterns tend to form early in life and those stay with you once you've acquired them unless you really work to change them. Shoot, once stayed with some friends for about a month before a move to another town, and the first thing I did there was spend hours doing the dishes. I can't stand being a totally messy place.
Just my -- dollars worth there -- and I could be full of it, too. With me, you never know.
Maggie
That's a tough one. Based on
So much for the baseline, I guess. And then we get the bellcurve again...
I think you'd run screaming from my bachelors pad *cough* Although it's almost reaching a critical point even for me...
I've Asthma too... I guess they have better medication nowadays.
Hm... I get story ideas and nuts because I can't write them down at the same time...
You make a strong point for nurture. And it definitly makes more sense than that suddenly ex-guys would love housework. Maybe some that were overcompensating, but not the majority. Did you realize anything about learning habits?
Thanks for your comment, it was really helpful. Prevented me from just discarding nurture as an explanation.
Beyogi
I have a rather short atten-
Oooh, Prawns! ^_^
I've got some Mussels and Prawns dumplings
Do you want some ?
***connects extravagant to an EEG to test the reaction of cat-Vboys to sea food**
Mmm...
I would love some, but you need a much bigger sample size to conduct a proper experiment. We're talking tens of thousands of Cat-Vboys from all over the world.
Whats the population size of the Cat-Vboy specie ?
cause it's all in relation to the population size :D
Well,
all I can say is that I have never knowingly met another Cat-Vboy. It's been established that the most wonderful thing about Tigger is the fact that he's the only one, but I would hope that there are other Cat-Vboys besides myself. There probably are, I just don't have any skill in searching for anything.
I'm not saying you can't carry out the experiment on just me though. = )
If by repetative...
If by repetitive, you mean "gathering", then possibly, yes.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5934226/Hunter-gather...
-- Sleethr
OMG, an inquisitive researcher!
My day is truly blessed!
I am a rather emotional woman, and have actually had to tone it down a bit because lots of women are quite reserved.
Yes, I have heard that women select men based upon their ability to help them and their offspring survive. And now being an accepted member of female culture, I have observed the way of women around their mates. Many actually shamelessly treat their men like they are the masters, but we all know that is not true. :) Yes, females are consummate manipulators.
Yes, I think I was waaayyy overdosed on Testosterone, and with the abused personality I had due to years of trauma, it was all the worse.
I think your GP could have the test done rather cheaply if you have the resources. Now, taking Vivlelle dot, my estrogen level is around 35; normal for a 66 year old woman. I have NO testosterone. My endocrinologist was astonished and tested that to show me that I was wrong. As if! I will tell you this with great certainty, most doctors are absolutely ignorant of transgender physiology. You probably know more than your doctor. It is disappointing.
I've met a few of the people here in real life. I don't think any of them would describe me as a docile cow. :)
Yes, when all the mail is in, my transition was very much forced. I considered it to be an affront to God. I had fought off my girl feelings all my life but when they put me on psych meds, it made those feelings burn through my veins like fire. Suddenly "Gwen" insisted upon being heard! A few years later, after the surgery, I read that the DSM considered surgery to be the cure for depression that surrounds GID, so insisted that I get help getting off the drugs. It takes time for these drugs to titrate out of your body and in about a year or so, I knew that I would never have transitioned had it not been for the drugs.
I do have to admit that I am very happy as a female, and the heartbreak of a family that insists on being asses is finally dissipating. I have never seen some of my grand children and likely never will.
Thankfully, the Mormon church picked me up right before I did it. Cathy had asked the police to check on me and I just lied to them and they bought it. A little while later, on my way home to finish it, I had my life changing encounter. I won't mention it further so I do not offend others, but we can PM about it if you like.
What kind of men do I like? Why the tall bearded ones I suppose. :) They need to be reasonably dominant but gentle and intellectual. I really like men that are my intellectual superiors. I have a playful nature and like um certain um things. :)
May I have Beta rights to a first read?
Bogosity
All statements of the form this sex is better at x than that sex are bogus to a degree; unless x is pregnancy or writing a name in the snow, the capabilities of the sexes overlap to such a degree as to make such comparisons nearly meaningless.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
right, there are a couple of
right, there are a couple of areas where one sex has a slight lead over the other but those don't really have meaningful impact because it's only statistically lower or higher. I everyday life you are likely to meet almost as meany of one gender that are good in a task they are statistically supposed to be poorer in, as you do of the other gender. It's only if you meet up with a hundred or so and take notes on how they all perform that you will see any pattern.
Of course that doesn't get into the psychology of how they think though the problem, which can be sometimes different between men and women(though there are a abundance of times that it is pretty much the same). But no one is really sure if that is more to do with nature or with nurture. Best not to get psychologist on the subject unless you have a lot of time.
I actually just did my
I actually just did my graduate research project on the difference between male and female reaction times. Evidence supports that women have faster reaction times when doing repetitive tasks. Women have slower reaction times when doing non-repetitive tasks. Research suggests that both genetics and hormone play a role in how woman process cognitive data and response to it. Very little evidence suggests that nature plays a role.
Don't you mean nurture?
Don't you mean nurture?
I don't think...
I don't think that's necessarily a male or female thing... Just some folks seem to take pleasure from repetitive. Others feel "stifled" by repetition.
IF there's a correlation between repetitive work and something in humans - it's probably a reverse correlation with intelligence (to some extent) the more intelligent, the less likely a person will be satisfied with repetition.
Of course, there are other things that can override this... One is the complexity of the task... Another is whether the person can do something else at the same time or not. Doing a very complex task over and over again is harder and thus less likely to be boring. Someone with ADD (attention deficit disorder) would likely have more trouble with repetitive tasks than some others. It goes on and on.
As to whether how I learned stuff changed after starting HRT... Not that I've seen. The only difference came - not after starting HRT, but after transition. I'm more willing to try things I've not done before (in my area of professional expertise)...
Annette
Sorry
(Don't know how to do the quote thing without quoting everything said)
If you make a story about 90% of the male population turned female, I'd actually be interested in how you present this. I can imagine a great deal of chaos will come of this.
The world would kinda suck though without guys. I'd help as many of them get as much back as they could though. I know how it feels to be biologically the wrong sex, so quite a few of those "girls" would probably seek transition. And I would hope we'd be open arms to help them through their rough times however it happens.
I know who I am, I am me, and I like me ^^
Transgender, Gamer, Little, Princess, Therian and proud :D
Only one thing I would like to add that has bearing
is that testosterone does increase the assholishness of a person of either sex when taken (ie: control freakishness, unexplainable rage fits, desire to show that person is in charge) and increases the chance of those around that person to be abused or beaten. For example, being choked to death, punched in the face, etc.
There is also the propensity of obtaining secondary testosterone poisoning from someone using the gel form of it too (ie, masculization effects from being exposed to it such as growth, hair follicle growth enhancement).
I speak from firsthand experience.
Sephrena
It all depends upon
attitude.aptitude and talents. A person with superb balance can be a great athlete, yet have a lousy voice. And another with a personality/aptitude for minute detail will make for a scientist, or most any occupation needing above average. Currently, there is a series called Suits about a young man in a law firm who has pased the bar exam without attending college and Psych is about a guy who is excellent at piecing together clues, using the ruse of being a psychic.
May Your Light Forever Shine