There was a time when telling a man he was a lot like a woman would have ended in a fistfight. But now, considering the sad state of male social status, we can consider this a huge compliment.
And considering that my wife snores and loves baseball and I like to shop and have actually said the word “duvet,” maybe psychology professor Janet S. Hyde of the University of Wisconsin is on target.
The thrust of her just-released report is this: The mass media and the public in general exaggerate gender differences when, in fact, men and women are very much the same animal and certainly not from different planets but actually, say, living in adjoining rooms.
In conducting a meta-analysis of psychological gender differences–essentially a study of studies–Hyde included findings that dismissed such claimed differences as girls being more social than boys, girls having lower self-esteem, girls learning simple tasks more easily while boys flex their mental muscles with higher-level cognitive processing.
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She pointed out that once you peel back the layers of context used in some of these studies, you find that, hey, we’re all just people.
In fact, she asserts that 78 percent of the supposed gender differences covered in the studies she viewed were negligible or non-existent.
Not to say there aren’t a couple marked differences cited in her report. For example, men can throw a ball harder and farther (duh), and we masturbate more. (I’m stunned. Call me blind, I just don’t see it.)
On the more meaningful measures of human psychology, however, not only are men not the clueless louts we are portrayed to be on television, but we differ hardly at all from women, for example, in our moral reasoning and moral orientation. (Well, other than the fact that we have a much more casual attitude about casual sex. That was listed along with the ability to throw farther.)
But back to our similarities. I would venture to say that in many ways, my wife is my buddy. So I can buy into Hyde’s hypothesis quite easily. Despite the obvious physical differences internally, our engines run pretty much the same way.
“Why do we exaggerate the differences? It’s a question with multiple answers,” Hyde said. “One is the media dramatization. But there are also some basic psychological processes involved. One is the human tendency to categorize; we want to categorize people into male or female, black or white, gay or straight. Once we categorize people, we want a reliable set of attributes that we’re sure that person is going to have–stereotypes. And then we exaggerate those. This may not be very sexy to your readers, but it is a strong underlying cause.”
So OK, I’m buying pretty much all that the professor is peddling, and I agree that insisting that basic psychological differences exist can, say, rob men of rich family experiences and women of rich work experiences.
But the one time I have always felt most different from women, beyond the obvious, is in an argument. Stereotype alert! I don’t know if this debate technique is covered in secret women meetings, but it goes like this, the woman speaking:
“I can’t believe you let the dog out without tying her up!” Then, before I can even form a thought, “Do you remember what I told you about the roof?”
Two unrelated points, they both urgently demand answers. My brain, unlike my wife’s, can’t go in two directions at once. I’m dead in the water, and arrows are coming from all sides. As a male, this is my cue to storm off.
Come to think of it, now I believe I understand that masturbation statistic.
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