Men vs Women

[jimtaylor]

The dynamics between men and women are very interesting. Sometimes I can't help but think it's amazing how different men and women can be from each other. Like how the hell are we even the same species? I'm sure everybody alive has heard the old stereotype that men are logical and women are emotional which from my personal opinion is crap.

Of course, all of this is my own personal opinion since I don't have a gaggle of graduate students to do research for me and still then it would be a social study which means whatever discovered is not always true. Either way, nothing I am saying is fact just my observation and it doesn't apply to every single person perfectly. There is no 100% when dealing with people, 75% is good enough. So take it for what it is worth.

So with that little disclaimer out of the way, the reason behind me saying that is crap. There are studies upon studies on the differences between men and women. From the very obvious physical differences, to relationship preferences, attraction, communication, the list goes on and honestly it is very fascinating stuff to study. The simple thing I can gather from all those studies and my own observations is that men are not terminators lacking any form of emotion and women are not one cute kitten picture away from losing it.

How I like to think it is that women are very logical and men are very emotional but how these things manifest themselves are completely different. Let me start with men for obvious reasons. We have emotions and we can feel them as intensely and as deeply as women feel them. How we convey them though is, for lack of a better term, suppressed.

Let's say a man has had a bad day at work. Most are not going to want to come home and open up about it, let it out and work through the emotion. More than likely they are going to want to do something that distracts them from the emotion. This could be whatever hobby they have. Working on cars, video games, movies, drawing, musical instruments. Our emotion is expressed through that action in many ways.

That desire to completely envelope the mind in a process that takes us away from the negative emotion is a way of coping with that emotion which is also why we can sometimes become emotionally attached to things that women don't understand. An example for myself is football and basketball. I played both sports with my brothers for as long as I can remember and then played competitively. When one of us had a bad day, nothing more needed to be said then, "Do you want to shoot some hoops?" So now when I watch that sport, many of those same emotions are inexplicably tied to that action.

For young men like myself, I think it is especially difficult to verbally communicate what we are feeling. It is like a foreign language for us and when you are learning a new language, you might know what you want to say but don't have the understanding to say it. It's frustrating and adds more stress than what it relieves.

However I think it is good for men to learn how to communicate emotions better like women do but here is the catch 22. You have to practice to get better and the societal expectation on men is to be tough and not sensitive. This is where I think mothers really can help out their sons but unfortunately, not every guy has that luxury for one reason or another. So that puts the pressure on young men and women in their first relationships to grow through the pains of this immaturity.

And trust me, it can be painful and too much pain can push a guy even further away from maturing. I wanted to discuss why I think women are logical in this post but it is already getting too long and it is harder for me to write about it which is causing me to go slower in how I structure. I will work on it later.

 

[CogentPursuit]

Everyone thinks they are logical. Some may be more than others but we all fall under the delusion that we make sense most of our lives. The emotions are less in men more often in that they are more often Ti/Te and women are more often Fi/Fe. The only thing is that a lot of men have grown up to suppress their feelings but this has lessened. Men could express their emotions just as well as a woman if they only talked as much about them. It is about learning.

I am curious about the women and logical. What do you think and see.


People often use the term logical when referring to actions that fit with there own judgment. Most people see things differently and so they view logic differently. Is it possible that women more often say things that make sense to you and so that is the way you see it but then do other people see it the same way? Do women think most men are logical?

I try to base the judgment of logical on concrete facts and consistency in a system of thought. Such a thing should not include abstract or subjective values that conflict. In other words logical is not necessarily ethical. Logic would not solve anything without at first being given a thing to solve and that thing is a subjective value held by the person using logic. If we had no subjective values with which to give us direction or goals we would not need to think or use logic. So I often wonder if we should consider a person with less personal values to be more logical, or someone who is consistent with their values to be logical, or should logical continue to be "Makes sense to me." as if Me is the standard for all logic.

The last question I have is if it is fair to compare emotion with logic. Just because you are emotional does not mean your not logical.



Just curious... do you have both parents and brothers or sisters and how many?

 

[jimtaylor]

Everyone thinks they are logical. Some may be more than others but we all fall under the delusion that we make sense most of our lives. The emotions are less in men more often in that they are more often Ti/Te and women are more often Fi/Fe. The only thing is that a lot of men have grown up to suppress their feelings but this has lessened. Men could express their emotions just as well as a woman if they only talked as much about them. It is about learning.

I am curious about the women and logical. What do you think and see.


People often use the term logical when referring to actions that fit with there own judgment. Most people see things differently and so they view logic differently. Is it possible that women more often say things that make sense to you and so that is the way you see it but then do other people see it the same way? Do women think most men are logical?

I try to base the judgment of logical on concrete facts and consistency in a system of thought. Such a thing should not include abstract or subjective values that conflict. In other words logical is not necessarily ethical. Logic would not solve anything without at first being given a thing to solve and that thing is a subjective value held by the person using logic. If we had no subjective values with which to give us direction or goals we would not need to think or use logic. So I often wonder if we should consider a person with less personal values to be more logical, or someone who is consistent with their values to be logical, or should logical continue to be "Makes sense to me." as if Me is the standard for all logic.

The last question I have is if it is fair to compare emotion with logic. Just because you are emotional does not mean your not logical.



Just curious... do you have both parents and brothers or sisters and how many?

I am going to answer your last question first, because it is easy. I have both parents though they are divorced and my mother is a complete narcissist. That is not me being facetious, she has borderline narcissistic personality disorder. I deal with both of them on a regular basis. I have 3 sisters, 3 brothers and I am the middle child. My two older brothers have passed away in the last seven years. I also have 4 step sisters and 2 step brothers. None of which I associate much with.

Also to answer you second to last question, that is the whole point of me posting this. Just because women may more often use Fi/Fe does not make them any less rational or logical than men who use Ti/Te. And men are no less emotional.

Forgive me if my response sounds as though I am defensive, I think you raise great points but I am going play devil's advocate. Some of what I say is not necessarily what I believe but I am going to argue it anyway because it is a possible argument. As you explained, everyone thinks they are logical and does the use of Te/Ti make one more logical? Just because their thoughts are more structured, does it make them more logical? Does it make them more rational in their judgments, more sound in their choices?

From an insurance underwriting perspective, hell no. Men are the most stupid, most irrational, most illogical, riskiest beings on earth. Their straight line, organized, suppression of emotions, less empathetic and more apathetic approach to thought only makes it easier for them to justify their decisions which more often than not are absolutely stupid. Watch YouTube for 30 seconds and you will see all you need to see. Or in my case join a fraternity and have the opportunity to see it played out before your eyes on a nightly basis. Bad decisions justified by sound logic, or at least society deems bad decisions. If we were on animal planet and we were anything but human, there would be nothing wrong with it.

You try to base your judgment on concrete facts and consistency in a system of thought. Human action is neither consistent or based in fact and as far as things around us go, we are constantly redefining what is fact. But who is to say what is fact and what is consistent? If you get a fact wrong, to maintain consistent, are you going to stick to that thought until proven wrong, even to the determent of yourself and those around you? How logical and rational then is that decision if it does nothing to better yourself or society?

This straight line type of thinking works amazing in the hard sciences and in the classroom. Were you are either right or wrong, or you have A,B,C,D to choose from. This ability to think objectively without the burden of ethics is sometimes necessary. We would not have a lot of the technological advances we have without it. Many aspects of society would not function without it. So I am not saying it is wrong but I don't think it is completely logical. The thought process may be logical but the result is not always.

My point is that life is not a classroom, it is not a theory. You cannot separate ethics from logic when judging logic from a societal perspective. In regard to humans, ethics and logic are intertwined because the only reason we have been able to advance this far is because of the advantage of being social creatures. So is it not logical to consider ethics as part of our logic?

I think you can judge logic from an evolutionary perspective. This may sound a little harsh and cold. Despite all I said above men as a gender are logical, as individuals they can be very illogical. The same goes for women. Now the reason women are logical. While men are off fighting each other, doing our part to prove our value, who is left home to take care of the young and the old?

The answer is simple, women. So I think it is very logical and rational for women to be more empathetic. More expressive in their emotion because they have the burden of trying to keep everything together while we are away. Of course society is evolving now to not need this as much but as we have seen with slavery and some of the less prideful moments of humanities history, society sometimes advances faster than we are able to.

For the majority of human history it was extremely important for women to hold together the fabric of society while men either hunted or fought with each other. We would have fallen apart and society collapsed if women were just like men because they would have started fighting wars of their own while men were off fighting wars.

Let me put it this way. You would not judge a female black widow as being irrational for eating the male black widow after mating. Simply because it is to the advantage of the species to act that way. It is to the advantage of the female to eat the male and the male to escape as fast as possible so he does not get eaten.

Now the interesting part is that we are in a time that all of this seems to matters less. Our entire history is almost irrelevant. It will be interesting to watch how it all plays out.

 

[CogentPursuit]

Also to answer you second to last question, that is the whole point of me posting this. Just because women may more often use Fi/Fe does not make them any less rational or logical than men who use Ti/Te. And men are no less emotional.

Forgive me if my response sounds as though I am defensive, I think you raise great points but I am going play devil's advocate. Some of what I say is not necessarily what I believe but I am going to argue it anyway because it is a possible argument. As you explained, everyone thinks they are logical and does the use of Te/Ti make one more logical? Just because their thoughts are more structured, does it make them more logical? Does it make them more rational in their judgments, more sound in their choices?

Not at all. I agree will all this. I do want to point out Ti/Fi though, Ti is about organizing your own thoughts. This issue with the MBTI tests are that they test for preferences. Do you prefer to “find an emotional solution or a logical solution”. I find these questions only seperate the people that prefer what they deem logic over emotions. Most of them turn out to be more objective thinkers but lack the ability to identify value in subjective thought making them unsociable, in a sense they become easily illogical when forced into social situations, or are stressed. As you said above, Te tends to logic externally instead of internally leaving the world to see the structure in sentence and thought at the moment. Fi is the opposite of the Ti in that they organize their feelings and this allows for them to be logical in another way, socially and in understanding human beings.
Of course I am not a great MBTI disciple so I am not certain about the above but I do know that emotion is just an expression of how your values have been affected. If you value something and someone destroys it, you feel angry. If you value something and it is lost you feel sad and empty. If you value something and someone else has it, that you have a low value of, you feel jealous. Emotion is just a tool that communicates and acts on subjective values. Your own values like life are also a good example of this. If someone is killed then you get angry if someone threatens the life of someone you value you could be afraid. This is all logical to me, it is just a different route to get there than logical thought of examining your values. Ti/Te. I like this person so I should help them as apposed to (Fi/Fe) if I do not help this person I will feel guilty. Guilt is failing to be true to your values. You value the person/or people and so if you are not true to helping them you feel guilty.

From an insurance underwriting perspective, hell no. Men are the most stupid, most irrational, most illogical, riskiest beings on earth. Their straight line, organized, suppression of emotions, less empathetic and more apathetic approach to thought only makes it easier for them to justify their decisions which more often than not are absolutely stupid. Watch YouTube for 30 seconds and you will see all you need to see. Or in my case join a fraternity and have the opportunity to see it played out before your eyes on a nightly basis. Bad decisions justified by sound logic, or at least society deems bad decisions. If we were on animal planet and we were anything but human, there would be nothing wrong with it.

The only issue with this is that I don’t see risk taking as the only illogical endeavor made by humans. I also would argue that everything is a risk and the question is if the outcome is worth the risk and what is the plausibility of success. The younger men and women are more likely to feel invincible. I find that due to the chemical makeup of man and the up brining to not fear. To suppress fear, men do ignore the logical communicator inside them that says, do this and a bad thing will happen. If a man is naturally capable to feel and examine the world through feeling does that man lose a part of himself that is a natural thought process and handicap himself? I would think so. I would not get caught up in this though and stop noticing all the things women do. They know exactly where to strike emotionally when they are angry and can be very damaging to each-other and men even though they don’t want to admit it. Women can sometimes perceive threat that does not exist. A man says that the dress does not fit and the woman gets upset and accuses him of calling her fat, but the man never said this. There are numerous examples that exist that cannot be seen from a bar graph. I tend to believe that everyone is illogical and that some are less than others. I don’t split it by any group.
I think it best if everyone could find an even balance between emotional and logical thought; logic using ethical values to guide you to a goal. Emotion is a great communicator to tell you what is going on but decisions must be made, not reactionary, but in a thought out manner thinking of future possibilities. This being said emotion should not be suppressed but emotional reaction should.

You try to base your judgment on concrete facts and consistency in a system of thought. Human action is neither consistent or based in fact and as far as things around us go, we are constantly redefining what is fact. But who is to say what is fact and what is consistent? If you get a fact wrong, to maintain consistent, are you going to stick to that thought until proven wrong, even to the determent of yourself and those around you? How logical and rational then is that decision if it does nothing to better yourself or society?

This is why I have deemed that all human beings are illogical, but some can sustain more logic than others. An example is the word smart. Where is the level of smart defined? Do we select an arbitrary number on an IQ test? Judging smart is an intuitive process that we use and it works by examining your level of intelligence in comparison to everyone else the person has seen . When I say your are smart all I really mean is “You are more intelligent than more than half the people I have met.” This really doesn’t mean anything if all I met were dumb people and it means a great deal if I spend most of my time around college professors and college students. Logical is the same. It is not a statement of your are logical or not but a comparison of your ability to achieve logic in comparison to others.

This straight line type of thinking works amazing in the hard sciences and in the classroom. Were you are either right or wrong, or you have A,B,C,D to choose from. This ability to think objectively without the burden of ethics is sometimes necessary. We would not have a lot of the technological advances we have without it. Many aspects of society would not function without it. So I am not saying it is wrong but I don't think it is completely logical. The thought process may be logical but the result is not always.

The straight line thinking is not logic IMO. The world functions with simultaneous actions and reactions occurring and affecting multiple things at once. We try to linearize it because we understand it better. Logic is not about taking a straight path and putting the blinders on, it is about judgeing all the possibilities and plausibility of all the connections that may affect the end result you are trying to achieve. I do not believe ignorance = logic. In fact ignorance can lead you on a path of making illogical decisions over an objective scope of view.

My point is that life is not a classroom, it is not a theory. You cannot separate ethics from logic when judging logic from a societal perspective. In regard to humans, ethics and logic are intertwined because the only reason we have been able to advance this far is because of the advantage of being social creatures. So is it not logical to consider ethics as part of our logic?

A computer has not ethics and yet it is the most logical machine you can find. The thing is that a computer only does what we tell it to do, and it does it on predefined system we created. Logic is but a tool of consistency and arithmetic. A human’s ethics and values can give logic a goal and tell it what to do. The arithmetic is judging which values are more important in different situations and how to best achieve them. I suppose a man can be proud of his tool called logic but in the end it is the personal values that make us different and unique. A person can be proud of their emotions but the truth is that it is but a tool, it is the personal values that make us different and unique.
A balanced individual is someone who uses emotion and logic in ways that focus on the benefits of both while limiting the side effects, to achieve an ethical or subjective goal.

I think you can judge logic from an evolutionary perspective. This may sound a little harsh and cold. Despite all I said above men as a gender are logical, as individuals they can be very illogical. The same goes for women. Now the reason women are logical. While men are off fighting each other, doing our part to prove our value, who is left home to take care of the young and the old?

The answer is simple, women. So I think it is very logical and rational for women to be more empathetic. More expressive in their emotion because they have the burden of trying to keep everything together while we are away. Of course society is evolving now to not need this as much but as we have seen with slavery and some of the less prideful moments of humanities history, society sometimes advances faster than we are able to.

For the majority of human history it was extremely important for women to hold together the fabric of society while men either hunted or fought with each other. We would have fallen apart and society collapsed if women were just like men because they would have started fighting wars of their own while men were off fighting wars.

Let me put it this way. You would not judge a female black widow as being irrational for eating the male black widow after mating. Simply because it is to the advantage of the species to act that way. It is to the advantage of the female to eat the male and the male to escape as fast as possible so he does not get eaten.

Now the interesting part is that we are in a time that all of this seems to matters less. Our entire history is almost irrelevant. It will be interesting to watch how it all plays out.

I see some value in this but at the same time woman begot man, so evolutionary genes are passed onto man. I would also argue that man prevented woman from learning or achieving any academic importance in society. If you were right that evolution can draw a line between man and woman then I would think that woman’s intelligence would suffer to this.
************************************************************************
So the truth is that I was drawn to this thread being a man and you claiming more often women are logical. I value my logic. I drew a line to I am a man and I am not logical, and felt it needed correction. This puts me in a situation where I have bias in this discussion. How do I defeat this? Where has the bias affected my logic, what have I ignored? I am left to question all this in order to adequately objectify my argument.
I realized that I am an individual and not necessarily in that category. I realize that my value in logic may not be understood fully and I need to reevaluate that value in determining its true worth. Does it fit with larger goals like life and empathy? The conclusion is that it can be useful tool in that I would not be able to evaluate my feelings and compare their worth without it, but only when I use it toward a greater goal such as self improvement and helping others in life. The moment it becomes a source of pride then it loses its external worth and can be an unforeseen burden on others. In the end I chose a post that defined logic as a structure existing in both men and women to test my understanding. At this point I am not so concerned with who is more logical, men or women, until I understand the value of logic and what it does for us. I prefer to evaluate on an individual basis to judge each individual independently. I stay away from generalizations but at the same time it can be usefull in determining a bigger picture of an underlying problem.

 

[jimtaylor]

I see some value in this but at the same time woman begot man, so evolutionary genes are passed onto man. I would also argue that man prevented woman from learning or achieving any academic importance in society. If you were right that evolution can draw a line between man and woman then I would think that woman’s intelligence would suffer to this.
************************************************************************
So the truth is that I was drawn to this thread being a man and you claiming more often women are logical. I value my logic. I drew a line to I am a man and I am not logical, and felt it needed correction. This puts me in a situation where I have bias in this discussion. How do I defeat this? Where has the bias affected my logic, what have I ignored? I am left to question all this in order to adequately objectify my argument.
I realized that I am an individual and not necessarily in that category. I realize that my value in logic may not be understood fully and I need to reevaluate that value in determining its true worth. Does it fit with larger goals like life and empathy? The conclusion is that it can be useful tool in that I would not be able to evaluate my feelings and compare their worth without it, but only when I use it toward a greater goal such as self improvement and helping others in life. The moment it becomes a source of pride then it loses its external worth and can be an unforeseen burden on others. In the end I chose a post that defined logic as a structure existing in both men and women to test my understanding. At this point I am not so concerned with who is more logical, men or women, until I understand the value of logic and what it does for us. I prefer to evaluate on an individual basis to judge each individual independently. I stay away from generalizations but at the same time it can be usefull in determining a bigger picture of an underlying problem.

Sorry I do not have much time right now to respond but I want to clarify real quickly. I don't think women or men are more logical. The stereotype says men are more logical than women. My argument is that both are logical and illogical, just depending on how you view it. Each has their purpose and value. Just like I don't believe women are more emotional. They express their emotion more often but that does not make them less logical. Men do not express their emotion as often which does not make them more logical. Is my point.