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Comment by rebuilder | Hacker News Reader

I feel this article demonstrates why gender equality is damn hard for us right now.

I'm male. I believe that has had a significant effect on my upbringing.

I'm an individual. I believe a whole lot of things have had a significant effect on my upbringing.

Why would I want to try to resolve my issues within this gendered framework? Am I really primarily male? That seems like a forced choice to me.

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You can't discard the different pressures specific to each gender, and how each gender deals in their own way with those issues. This reminds me of schools that deal with boys like they are "broken girls", they are ignoring their natural gender attributes when assessing what's acceptable behavior.

Are you saying that there should be different standards of acceptable behavior for boys versus girls. Or are you saying if the schools paid more attention to how boys normally behave, they would accept a more broad definition of “acceptable behavior” for all children?

Yes, people are different, you need extremely flexible standards to accommodate this. Right now the standards are far too rigid, and we have enough data now to know that on average they harm boys far more than girls.

So, yes to the second interpretation I mentioned?

There shouldn't be different standards for boys vs girls, but the standards should be permissive enough to allow for both, which currently just plainly isn't the case in many situations. Sitting still and talking is okay, Roughhousing and climbing trees is not.

That is not to say that one gender will always pick one set of behaviours over the other, people are still individuals obviously, but as a generalisation there is a difference.

Group belonging is a fundamental part of the human condition. We are social, tribal animals. You may, of course, choose not to belong in groups that are defined by being male, but people are members of lots of groups with boundaries drawn for lots of reasons. Given that many men have similar experience by virtue of being men, it seems a reasonable attribute to base a group on.

>Why would I want to try to resolve my issues within this gendered framework? Am I really primarily male? That seems like a forced choice to me.

It is a forced choice. The model of gender as a binary state rather than a spectrum is an obsolete and harmful social construct.

If it’s not a binary, it’s still a very much bimodal distribution. Ironically, the notion that gender is either a binary or a spectrum is a false dichotomy. It’s obviously a bimodal distribution with most, but not all, people clustered around one of the two peaks.

Well yeah... that's exactly what it is. By "spectrum" I didn't mean to imply an even distribution.

Agree in many ways, from the other mode of this bimodal distribution.

> gender equality

The way it's going about right now is "equality for me but not for you" by using over exaggerated claims.

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. It's hard to get out once we go there.

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