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Nurture can trump nature, though: There are matrilineal societies where competitiveness is considered a feminine trait. As is often the case, it's not simply e

• jplayer01 7y ago
  Okay, what does this have to do with what she said? > We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man. She's not saying that biology is the sole factor that determines how we behave. She's saying that we need to understand it and integrate it into our understanding of cultural, psychological, sociological artifacts. Or more importantly, we can't understand them without taking into account biology. I don't see anything wrong here.
  • cygx 7y ago
    Nothing wrong with it as long as you avoid the traps of naive essentialism or fallacious appeals to nature.
    • jplayer01 7y ago
      None of which she does.
• macspoofing 7y ago
  >There are matrilineal societies where competitiveness is considered a feminine trait. Are we talking about outliers or are we talking about the vast global and historical populations. These kinds of examples usually point to some small tribe in Africa, or some matrilineal or matriarchal property in some civilization (e.g. Spartan inheritance laws) as a counter-example, but miss that you still need to explain why the vast majority of civilizations and societies independently ascribed the same properties to men and women.
• depressedpanda 7y ago
  > There are matrilineal societies where competitiveness is considered a feminine trait. Never heard this before. Could you list some examples?
  • cygx 7y ago
    The Khasi people of north-eastern India often get cited as an example: https://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/gender-differences-competition.pdf https://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/gend... See the comment by obviuosly for some caveats.
• obviuosly 7y ago
  This result failed replication in 27 ethnic groups along the matrilineal belt in Central Africa: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/slowes/files/lowes_competition.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/slowes/files/lowes_competi...
• emsy 7y ago
  "Considered a feminine trait" is nurtured. Whether it is a feminine trait or not is nature and should be derived from observation.
  • cygx 7y ago
    That wasn't the best phrasing on my part. Quoting the abstract[1]: We use a controlled experiment to explore whether there are gender differences in selecting into competitive environments across two distinct societies: the Maasaiin Tanzania and the Khasi in India. One unique aspect of these societies is that the Maasai represent a textbook example of a patriarchal society, whereas the Khasi are matrilineal. Similar to the extant evidence drawn from experiments executed in Western cultures, Maasai men opt to compete at roughly twice the rate as Maasai women. Interestingly, this result is reversed among the Khasi, where women choose the competitive environment more often than Khasi men, and even choose to compete weakly more often than Maasai men. [1] https://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/gender-differences-competition.pdf https://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/gend...