But can you lie about it?

To be fair, though, you've only written two or more consecutive sentences a couple of times.

What happened was, you reinforced a longstanding stereotype by defending its use by someone else -- he literally said, "Those are stereotypes that reflect of course the average man/woman etc," which Gizmo cited as sexist.

You said, but doesn't everyone understand that women are skilled at emotions while men are not? Which was just a repetition of the stereotype that was called sexist in the first place, which the guy acknowledged as sexist, and along you came to say, no but seriously it's not sexist if it's true.



Yadda yadda yadda, I tell you to specify which women, when, which emotion, given that only a subset of human feelings are commonly defined as emotions and associated with the feminine-- sadness, distress, anxiety...-- while others -- pride, regret, frustration, etc are not, so when we are discussing 'emotions' we are almost by default discussing 'feminine' traits, and this dynamic of associations has kept women in a self-reinforcing box forever. It seems to me that what you meant was that it's your impression women will more readily express a certain narrow category of feelings and do so nonviolently (=appropriately?) or at least in a way you don't expect men to, because you associate these emotions with women in accordance with the stereotype.

My personal suspicion is that awareness and articulation aren't very different between the sexes and it's more a matter of the conditions under which an individual will do it.

A word to the thick soul sistas
I wanna get with ya
I won't cuss or hit ya.

I'm not sure men express "aggression" better or more often than women, just more violently - especially in ways that make the news or crime statistics.

If you think of someone as non-confrontational, do you necessarily picture a woman? I'm not saying women are more aggressive either. If I think about aggression I've witnessed that is not physically violent (maybe even that is) there's not a glaring obvious difference between sexes.

(Probably I've witnessed more from women because my Mom is way more aggressive than my Dad was. - wait, nm, that's not counting the 10000 fights that my older brother started.)

Again, this isn't a team sport. I was talking to you, not him.

I really couldn't care less what masque said, and I certainly wasn't defending him. If he were talking about physics, I would. If he were interested in actually learning instead of just banging out his opinions about how people work, I would.

What I was hoping for was an actual discussion. Not really a problem if that is not the sort of thing you are into. Masque and I usually get along reasonably well despite him being incapable as well.

Situation matters much more than character. That is true of most human behavior.

Whether men are capable of learning (from a young age) the full range given the proper conditions? I would say most likely yes. I am under the assumption that I have.

Yes, we tend to show all of the nuance and scalpal-like precision as a monkey throwing feces.

It is more "acceptable" when a man is aggressive.

We need Giz to step it up a notch. Three street fights a week until they catch up!

Awesome! Not so much if you were getting beaten on a daily basis, but that your brother being aggressive was an afterthought.

That's the standard interpretation, but I dunno. I'm am often in the blue collar world and dudes being aggressive is not really acceptable. It's all about respect. Because there may be a fight if you cross a line, there's often no aggression. I'm also often in the non-blue collar world where a fight would be much less likely and there is far more verbal aggression.

Clients/customers can be aggressive, and that's pretty split among male and female.

He was older and much larger, but I held my own well enough that it toughened me up rather than beat me into submission.

Construction related?

You equate sticking up for yourself with aggressiveness?

I was a pretty ****ty older brother.

I'm an electrical/general contractor and primarily install solar photovoltaic systems.

Not sticking up for yourself. Being an a-hole.

Even the stereotypical contractor who yells at the workers, the only time I've seen that is from paper contractors who came up through sales/marketing, not the guys who put on a tool belt. Not that it doesn't happen, but the closer two people get to being in a position where they could fight, the more I think there's generally a palpable sense of restraint from aggression - even like aggressive postures or gesturing.

Lolchestbumping.

I am glad that you are OK.

Your son made it sound like you were in a dark place, very sad and unhappy and I took it to mean that you were very isolated and possibly worse. My point in that thread was that he was dealing with you poorly. Starting that thread was a deplorable way for any son to treat his mother, not just for starting the thread but also for his actions during the thread. Were these the actions of a grown man?

I wish you continued happiness.

Females typically express aggro in the form of relational aggro, whereas dudes typically are more directly verbal or outright physical. It's all about socialization and how we expect the genders to express themselves.

FWIW, boys are almost exclusively encouraged to express anger when experiencing any of the wide range of unpleasant emotions. Like, emotional awareness is severely lacking; apparently it's not cool for boys to feel sad, jealous, rejected, etc.

Once a woman makes her mind up to do something, she is going to do it. This is not a disparaging remark, it is a fact. The problem isn't me, its the people that are so easily get offended.

FWIW I have said some sexist things on this site, but OP was lazy and just went with the first thing she found.

Are you actually saying that when a man knows when to keep his mouth shut he can't also love? Are you serious about this?

what? lol

I can say that I've plenty of real world experience where this simply was not the case. At work or home I have interacted with women who had made up their mind but were later convinced to change it.

It seems odd to me that you think this is remotely factual or that women are any different then men with their capacity to change their mind.

They did it once you back was turned dude.

Wow do I disagree with this. You ever been around iron workers? Or spent time on a tight commercial site when multiple trades are trying to work in the same area at the same time?

Remember that time you told your male friend that he shouldn't get married and he listened?

Me neither.

Iron worker is a gender. Up until recently it was thought that they were of an entirely different species.

They are definitely prima donnas. idk if that's sexist or not. It probably is.

On the first count, not that I know.

On the second, yes, but rarely, and I try to avoid it. It's not that I've seen a lot of aggression between trades, but it's just crazy having everyone in everyone else's way. As time has gone by, I have consistently reduced the number of people I have working on anything at one time. Again, not because of aggression, just that productivity is much higher with small teams. Also, new construction is like 5% of what I do.

Iron workers getting in each other's faces a lot?

I thought everyone considered Electricians to be the biggest prima donnas.

I don't know if this is just ridiculously obvious, but in contracting/construction the aggression is SOOOOO much higher among salespeople. At least IME.

Ironworkers' primary method of communication is yelling at each other in abusive ways. They don't even acknowledge anybody else on site, which leads to them doing super fun stuff like torching out a beam directly over somebody's head without warning them. Then that guy comes up to the ironworker screaming and yelling, the other ironworkers come to the defense of their coworker, the guy who had molten steel drip on him has his coworkers come over, and everybody gets all shouty and chest thumpy until the super comes out of his trailer and yells at everybody to shut the **** up and get back to work. Most of the time it doesn't actually lead to a fist fight. Most of the time.

I think we can probably agree that plumbers are the absolute worst for cutting big ass holes in things without bothering to ask anybody if that's structurally appropriate.

I just took up welding recently myself. Welded a rack on my truck. Ruined my windshield because I'm dumb. (my protective wet towels fell when I wasn't looking.) Also, my welds sucked, but they got a little better by the end.

It takes a long long time to get good at welding. You probably have years ahead of you of not even knowing what you're doing wrong, but it's fun. Well, at least I think it's fun.

Gizmo's gonna be mad that we hijacked her thread with man talk.