Should Men Be More Like Women?
Posted by Max Dunn Thu, 18 May 2006 05:08:00 GMT
In today’s age, the trait of being very senstive to our emotions is highly extolled. Books about boy’s problems usually boil down to the solution that boys would be better off if they were more like girls in this regard. So I recently poised the question to some friends “Are there any traditional “hunter” characteristics of men that are still useful in today’s world?” No-one could come up with an answer. But watching my son pitch at his baseball game today, I thought of one.
At first, my son wasn’t pitching very well. His first pitch was way outside, the second was was inside, right at the batter. His pitches after that improved, but still were too high or too wide and he started walking the batters.
Can you imagine how stressful and frustrating this must have been? Everyone’s eyes were on him, and his team was counting on him but he just couldn’t control the ball very well.
If he were an emotional person, he might have lost it right then and let his frustration and dissapointment overtake him and cause him to pitch even worse, or even throw a fit or start crying (he is only 10 years old after all). But instead, he stayed as cool as a cucumber and his pitches kept steadily improving so during the second inning he pitched, no runs were scored.
This made me realize that there are times when being able to suppress our emotions is actually helpful. Sporting events are one, but it is also helpful when faced with a crisis at work or a medical emergency. In these situations, being able to put aside emotions for the time being and deal with the situations calmly and rationally is very important.
There is a price to be paid for this however. Most people that can turn off their emotions have a hard time turning them back on again, or even acknowledging that they exist. In these cases emotions will usually come out sideways, sometimes as anger, depression or violent behavior. So it is important to learn how to experience and deal with emotions, not just completely deny them.
This is also not to say that men are always stoic and women are always emotional. The point I am making here is that there is a time and place for both types of responses, and that it is not valid to think that the world would be a better place if men were just more like women in all things.
Somehow during the last couple of decades we’ve gotten confused about the male/female stuff. In an effort to make the business world “fairer” for women, we’ve confused gender equity with gender sameness. Not so! Men and women often think differently, feel differently and process outcomes differently. And then there are temperment difference within each gender. No wonder we don’t know what “normal” is suppose to be.
I’d frankly like to read a brief but scholarly research paper outlining and celebrating our differences. Perhaps there is a way to learn to let the genders compliment each other instead of competing or trying to be the “same”.
I like this division of “gender equity” as contrasted to “gender sameness”. I think this emphasizes that the sexes can be equitable and have the same opportunities while still remaining different.
One book I enjoyed that contains references to many studies about the inherent differences between girls and boys is “The Mind of Boys” by Michael Gurian. One study he mentions on page 287 is by Simon Baron-Cohen who has conducted PET and MRI brain scans on males and females for over a decade. This study, reported in March 2004, showed that the “maleness” and “femaleness” of an individual’s brain is identifiable at one day old!
This gives comfort to those of us brought up in the “plasticity” era where we were led to believe that our sons and daughters are different only because we treat them differently.