This makes me think that this stuff is cultural mimicry resulting in conforming to local gender roles rather than a true gender divide.
Happy to alter beliefs based on evidence that target this specific notion: that it is not subcultural.
not only this is true across different cultures, but also throughout history.
1800 years old Roman penis carving near the Hadrian's wall
https://www.militarytimes.com/resizer/1V8zCb1tPjuWr0elUXTJhd...
1700 years old penis graffiti in ancient Rome
https://i0.wp.com/hyperallergic-newspack.s3.amazonaws.com/up...
Priapus weighting his dick in Pompei
https://images-cdn.bridgemanimages.com/api/1.0/image/600wm.X...
Penis Parinirvana, Edo Japanese scroll
https://media.britishmuseum.org/media/Repository/Documents/2...
Phallic Fertility in the Ancient Near East and Egypt
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRoS-c0...
winged penis in ancient India
https://www.michaellaird.com/pictures/3217_4.jpg?v=160027396...
and so on
For instance, if I said "guys do MDMA" and showed evidence of MDMA use in different cultures, you wouldn't be convinced right?
The point is boys have a penis and they draw penises.
The penis has always been a symbol of fertility because it represents the seed. Semen in English translates to the Italian word seme (which means both sperm and seed) and, no wonders, it comes from Latin semen (pronounced /'se|me|n/), but the Latin word meant "from the same roots". In Greek it's σπέρμα (pronounced /'spέrma/), in Italian the same word is sperma, in English it's sperm.
From σπέρμα (seed) comes the Italian word speme, that means "hope"
In Japanese, Chinese, Sino-Tibetan, Vietnamese, the word is always related to "sprout" and "grow".
The Japanese kanji for sperm has two roots from Chinese alphabet, one means energy, perfect, the second means child.
MDMA is just a synthetic drug of this time and place (mostly the west), it doesn't mean anything for anyone.
So, while girls today are (mostly) free to express their artistic abilities, unlike the ancient past, they prefer to draw vulvas (in various forms from the most realistic to the metaphorical ones) and not dicks, because they do not have one.
A cult alternative to nowadays: :banana or :aubergine
Edit: HN trims emojis
Ah the origin of priapism, it all makes sense now. Not sure if that's an honor or not for the guy.
It became an auspicious of fertility during Alexander the Great and an important figure in Roman mythology.
So he was born cursed, but then honored.
At least for the things I've showed.
If you know of female roman soldiers walking the Hadrian's wall, female painters in Pompei or female sculptors in ancient Egypt, I'm eager to read about'em.
We know of women artists in Japanese Edo period, but they did not paint penises (AFAIK)
But that's besides the point, the point wasn't if women sometimes draw penises, the point was that 'boys like to draw dicks on things' and historical records show that they kinda always did.
most penises drawings don't and the overwhelming majority of them is the work of a man.
BUT, that particular Japanese painting is kept at the British Museum [1] and it depict a parody of the death of Buddha...
So yeah, "ahahaha, penis (and vulva) so funny"
This is an hilarious and inventive – not to say scurrilous – parody of the sacred Buddhist subject of the Buddha's death and passing into a state of nirvana (‘nothingness’). Conventional painted versions of the subject have survived in quite large numbers in Japan, dating from the late 11th century onwards. They were displayed in temples each year for rituals held on the anniversary of the Buddha’s passing, traditionally the fifteenth day of the second month. Here the ‘Penis Buddha’, with golden skin, reclines on a dais resting his ‘head’ on one arm, the same pose taken by the Buddha Shakyamuni in conventional versions. Women with vulva faces gather round to lament, in company with paired couplings of various animals and vegetables. Two penis mourners stand in place of Buddhist guardian kings. At the back, pine trees and a river painted on a screen represent the sal trees and Badaiga River of tradition. Between the trees at the back are two esoteric deities with multiple vulva-heads and multiple arms that hold sex toys in place of their normal attributes.
There is a tradition in Japan since at least the late eighteenth century of comic parodies of the Death of the Buddha
[1] https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_2011-3012-...
So I think in some respects there are true differences between estrogen and testosterone. The rest of my life has stayed rather constant during this time, and I am 37 years old.
It would be wildly unethical to get people to take these out of hormonal manipulative drugs for purely a psychological study so the only way to get this sort of understanding is through people like yourself sharing your experience, so thank you for sharing your story!
If you don't "vote" you get fined $20, but voting has occured once you turn up and claim your ballot paper and get ticked off on the electroral roll, after that you can do what you want.
There was some talk (rumour) that these particular type of informal votes were being counted up as a means of tallying up general voter disaffection. Not sure if true.
I was particularly driven by two factors
a) Party voting policy whereby your local member is forced to vote along "party lines" more than 99.9% of the time, even if it is blatantly and severely against their constituants best interests.
b) The nature of the electoral system whereby if your vote is with a losing candidate, it might end up being redistributed on "preferences" that you have no say in, to decide the ultimate winner. This means it is possible that it is very hard to predict where your vote might actually end up at the time you cast it.
I won't address your particular example (“guys like drawing dicks on things”), but a similar one that I'm sure strikes you as cultural as well: the sex difference in toy preferences and play behaviour. The following is an excerpt from the book Perspectives in Male Psychology by Louise Liddon and John Barry, which argues that it's not subcultural:
“Some of the most intriguing evidence supporting the biological basis for sex differences in toy preferences comes, unexpectedly, from animals. There is a large body of evidence in animal research finding strong effects of prenatal and perinatal exposure to sex hormones on a range of sex-related behaviours, including juvenile play (Meyer-Bahlburg et al., 2004). Even more intriguingly, some research has found that male monkeys spend longer than females manipulating toys that move (wheeled toys or a ball), whereas female monkeys make more contact with a doll and cooking pot (Alexander & Hines, 2002; Hassett et al., 2008). Most intriguing of all is research that finds a sex difference in how primates play with objects: young females tend to play with objects as if they are nurturing an infant, and young males play with the same objects with more vigour, often as a weapon.
Compelling evidence for a biological basis for play behaviour comes from a 14-year study of ‘stick-carrying’ in Ugandan chimpanzees (Kahlenberg & Wrangham, 2010). These chimps tend to use sticks to signal aggression, to find food (e.g. taking honey from a hole), during play or as ‘stick-carrying’. This latter behaviour accounted for about 40% of stick-related behaviour, and was initially puzzling for researchers. The behaviour was observed to be most common in juvenile females, compared to weapon use, which was most common in males. The researchers noted that stick-carrying sometimes involved cradling of the stick, and the behaviour always occurred prior to the female’s first birth and ended when the female became a mother. The researchers concluded that stick-carrying is a form of play-mothering. The sex difference in stick-carrying appeared to be spontaneous and without any teaching by adult chimps, making social learning an unlikely explanation.
The overall explanation for the sex differences observed in these various human and non-human animal studies is that, in general, males are naturally predisposed to activities such as hunting and building, and females are naturally predisposed to nurturing the young (Hines, 2005). Extrapolating this evidence to humans, when boys are playing with cars this could be an expression of an innate tendency to track moving objects, as might be done in hunting, and when girls play with dolls this could be an expression of an innate tendency to nurturance and mothering.”
There are obviously some newer adaptations (the ability to digest milk as adults in certain populations, or even sickle cell disease in West Africans), but they seem to be the exceptions to the rule.
(All numbers approximate.)