Of course I behave in ways that might be described as typical for a women. I show affection in action and words. I try to look after the emotional well-being of people I'm around. I work toward consensus. I'm empathetic. I can be passive when it's appropriate. — T Clark

For myself I don't think gender is our behavior as much -- that's pretty close to a trait, though a step removed.

Rather it's part of our identity, and a usually important part, which modifies how we behave. It's not the acts or the traits of a person, but how they act or how they express various traits.

So persons who are -/- can behave in ways typical of the other three genders, but they'd do so in their own way.

I have never had any problem treating all sorts of people with respect. — T Clark

I agree. :)

I wouldn't bother talking if I thought you desired to treat people with disrespect.

I agree. :)

I wouldn't bother talking if I thought you desired to treat people with disrespect. — Moliere

Speaking of which, I feel like I am treading dangerously close to treating you with disrespect. Perhaps we should leave it here.

You started withering on about being labelled by our proper names as well. If you can’t understand the irrelevance of that to what I was arguing, then so be it. — apokrisis

What I do understand and you obviously don't, is that all human labels are significant and powerful. You have labelled my argument here, 'irrelevant' and I have labelling your analysis of my argument, misguided and wrong. So be it, but the labels stand, and are in earnest, and that does matter, because such influences the actions of both of us, which can in turn, affect the actions of others. You seem rather ignorant to the fact that small butterfly affects can change political and social landscapes in the long term. Your first words in your reply where quite accurate, 'what can you say?'

Add chaos theory to the list of things you are not expert in. :rofl:

I try to analyse how I now analyse and interpret another personality/identity, when I socially meet a person for the first time or I exchange ideas or opinions with a person on-line or I listen or watch people talk on TV, or in on-line debates or on call in shows etc.

I have become much slower towards deciding to hate, the vast majority of personas that I would have been quick to hate in the past. Hate is thee most powerful human negative reaction we are capable of, so I now reserve it for a few, but I recognise that hate does still very much exist within me.
Non-heterosexual folks are now removed from my list of identities, I even disapprove of, never mind hate.

I think we all create a list of personas/attitudes/opinions/images, that we apply a response to, within the range between love and hate. But I think it's vital to be always analysing why you include a particular group or individual where you currently place them on your love/hate range.
I think that personal scrutiny of my own 'self,' is what has changed most in it's complexity, refinement and flexibility since I was young. I can only hope that I am doing a better job regarding that responsibility than I have done in the past and I hope to keep recognising the importance of acknowledging, that I have such a responsibility and that I need to always be trying to improve my approach.

That's a great response, as it demonstrates how flawed your analysis can be. :rofl: :kiss: :lol:
From Turing to Mandelbrot, I know it quite well. Even did part of my honours degree thesis on fractals.

Keep whistling. But I can see how tiny irrelevancies do set you off on ever wilder gyrations. You can’t follow the line of the argument.

Nah, I didn't think you were. I think you're voicing your actual thoughts. That's a good thing, especially for men I think, because men rarely talk about their own masculinity. You're just supposed to know somehow.

I wouldn't put this up in such a public place if I weren't willing to engage with people who might have questions or reflections or want to voice what they actually feel.

Yeah, and you seem to be scrambling around in the dark trying to just find where the line is, whilst images of me gyrating occupy your thoughts. I can keep this fun style of exchange up as long as you like princess, it's really easy.

That's a good thing, especially for men I think — Moliere

If you've paid any attention to my posts, you can see that voicing my actual thoughts is no problem, although sometimes I have trouble not voicing my actual thoughts.

It has been a useful discussion for me.

I find it quite worrying that people attribute such things to masculinity without batting an eye. In my view, this is nothing other than misandry - man-hating — Tzeentch

Or you could look it more neutrally. Aggression is often on lists of masculine traits and violence is a heightened form of aggression. None of this suggests any essential link between biological sex and violence because masculinity is a way of characterizing traits and behaviours that can apply to either sex, though they are ideologically associated with men. Or the way I've put it, marketed to men.

There's a sense then in which men are controlled and formed in ways detrimental to their personhood by the social roles that are expected of them. Viewing things that way, there's no misandry in negative characterizations or criticisms of masculinity. On the contrary, being able to separate our egos from our masculinity frees us to view ourselves as being persons before men or anything else.

Unless a person can't find any beauty at all in masculinity. Then we have a pathological bias.

It would be a very odd imbalanced view to completely reject all masculine traits, yes.

You seem rather ignorant to the fact that small butterfly affects can change political and social landscapes in the long term. — universeness

You are ignorant if you think that political and social landscapes aren't instead ruled by structural attractors. They have memories and thus place constraints on their variety. They evolve as information systems and don't simply unwind as an accumulation of accidents.

So to the degree that semiotic systems have sensitivity to initial conditions, this is a designed-in level of accident. Evolvability itself evolves. The criticality that grounds a living and mindful system is precisely tuned.

You might have familiarity with the maths of non-linear dynamics, but citing the butterfly effect in this context is yet another irrelevancy you have tossed into this thread.

You are ignorant if you think that political and social landscapes aren't instead ruled by structural attractors. They have memories and thus place constraints on their variety. They evolve as information systems and don't simply unwind as an accumulation of accidents.

So to the degree that semiotic systems have sensitivity to initial conditions, this is a designed-in level of accident. Evolvability itself evolves. The criticality that grounds a living and mindful system is precisely tuned. — apokrisis

Here is what the science fiction author Stanislaw Lem had to say with reference to fiction:

“Even though a circular causal structure may signalize a frivolous type of content, this does not mean that it is necessarily reduced to the construction of comic antinomies for the sake of pure entertainment. The causal circle may be employed not as the goal of the story, but as a means of visualizing certain theses, e.g. from the philosophy of
history. Slonimaki's story of the Time Torpedo3 belongs here. It is a [belletristic] assertion of the "ergoness" or ergodicity of history: monkeying with events which have had sad consequences does not bring about any improvement of history; instead of one group of disasters and wars there simply comes about another, in no waybetter set.

A diametrically opposed hypothesis, on the other hand, is incorporated into Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder"(1952). In an excellently written short episode, a participant in a "safari for tyrannosaurs" tramples a butterfly and a couple of flowers, and by that microscopic act causes such perturbances of causal chains involving millions of years, that upon his return the English language has a different orthography and a different candidate not-- liberal but rather a kind of dictator-- has won in the presidential election.

I quoted this in a paper I wrote a few years back. The ergodic theory of history may prevail in social landscapes. Here is a comment I made:

The dynamical systems of mathematics (sets of points and functions to be iterated),
particularly in the complex plane, show both sorts of narratives. There are instances of very
stable regions in which all points under iteration of a particular complex function converge
to a central point, an “attractor”; and there are at times very sensitive regions where
starting the iteration process at two different but neighboring points leads to severe
divergence of outcomes

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You have mentioned what could be seen as a kind of iterative process going from ground up, influenced, perhaps guided or corrected , by "communications" or signals from above. Elaborate on this a bit if you would. I have looked at a paper you suggested, but it's a bit too technical. I'd like to design a simple analogue in the complex plane in which the iterative process includes alterations of the generating function at each time step, these suggested by "observations" at the end of the process. I think of a plant growing upward while at the roots things are happening that more or less guide the outcome above.

Or perhaps this is just babble like that nonsense on the Andromeda Paradox. :roll:

You have mentioned what could be seen as a kind of iterative process going from ground up, influenced, perhaps guided or corrected , by "communications" or signals from above. Elaborate on this a bit if you would. — jgill

It you want to do a pure math model as your project, you probably don’t want to get bogged down in the added intricacies of biosemiotics.

Life and mind are systems of information that can impose their own arbitrary or non-holonomic constraints on the physics of dissipation. Physics just has its boundary conditions. The modelling just needs to capture the holonomic constraints that result in “order out of chaos”.

In simple terms, physics applies some version of the principle of least action on the system so as to close its dynamics. That is all you need. An action functional. A way to integrate in holistic fashion that is the inverse of your reductive differential equations. A global optimisation rule to bring the system’s degrees of freedom “alive”.

Gauge invariance now seems the most generic approach. I cited a Bayesian Brain paper where even biosemiotics is now trying to align itself with that. :smile:

The link again - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsfs.2022.0029

I also mentioned before why the complex plane might be better for modelling for real world physics. It offers the dimensionality to capture both the translations and rotations of Newtonian mechanics - wave mechanics especially.

It is hard to turn vectors into interestingly structured landscapes with macro features arise out of micro actions. But spinors offer the kind of dichotomy - of moving in a line vs spinning on a spot - that builds realistic texture into the “world” being described.

You can get the chaos of a turbulent flow as your landscape fills with wandering vortices of all sizes.

The dichotomy becomes one of divergence and convergence over all scales - which is what you seem to want to model.

In news just in, man the hunter has been debunked. Haven’t had time to assess the credibility of this. But it could be a problem for those defining masculinity in terms of risky trades.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101

None of this suggests any essential link between biological sex and violence because masculinity is a way of characterizing traits and behaviours that can apply to either sex, though they are ideologically associated with men. — Baden

The one-sided focus on men in these kinds of debates gives a very different impression.

Masculinity and femininity nowadays are seen as traits present in both men and women, but when discussing the so-called 'darker side' of masculinity the discussion is always about men. Not about masculinity, and (obviously(?)) not about women.

Even still, it's unhealthy to associate these essential traits with inherently negative things. The message it sends to boys and young men is that there's something wrong with them. Sadly, I think that's a message many of them have already taken to heart.

What this reminds me of is how certain religious groups like to label the woman as inherently flawed and sinful. Forgive me for being skeptical when such a group claims to be taking an open-minded, balanced approach to things.

There's a sense then in which men are controlled and formed in ways detrimental to their personhood by the social roles that are expected of them. — Baden

I'm well aware. That discussion must be had, but the tone matters, and it's the tone I saw in this thread and others that reeked.

Shaming men for being men, whether explicitly or implicitly, is certainly not the way forward.

Western society in general seems to lack positive male role models and has a conflicted view of masculinity at best, so really it needs to be taking a long look in the mirror instead of complaining about the faults of its offspring.

'Masculinity' - difficult to define and understand.

I find it quite worrying that people attribute such things to masculinity without batting an eye. In my view, this is nothing other than misandry - man-hating
— Tzeentch

Or you could look it more neutrally. Aggression is often on lists of masculine traits and violence is a heightened form of aggression. None of this suggests any essential link between biological sex and violence because masculinity is a way of characterizing traits and behaviours that can apply to either sex, though they are ideologically associated with men — Baden

@Tzeentch has a point in that some unreflective people can take extreme views of what 'masculinity' (or even 'femininity') means. Some are ignorant, including me to a certain degree, and don't take kindly to the term 'feminism' because they don't appreciate that it is not women against men. Also, that men can be feminists too. I think @Moliere described some discomfort in this area earlier. [see Edit]

Thanks, @Baden It's worth repeating. To take a more detached, neutral stance is quite difficult until people understand that basic point i.e. both males and females show 'masculinities and femininities'.

My interest is in the power relationships particularly the systemic inequalities in politics and how we are, or are not, governed fairly. For everyone.

So, I appreciated @180 Proof's definition of patriarchy:
'a disproportionate control of national governments and multi-state/national corporations (re: resource investments, allocations, accumulations, subsidies, etc) by "wealthy" members of the male gender primarily for the benefit (i.e. maintaining "traditions" of hierarchical dominance) of "wealthy & professional" members of the male gender'
— 180 Proof

***

We tend to assume what 'masculinity' might look like in a woman but I wanted more information.
Still to find out but in my exploration this caught my attention:

Masculine identities are constructed through difference and association: being a man involves both not being something other than a man, and being like certain other men. Masculinity involves displaying attitudes and behaviours that signify and validate maleness, and involves being recognised in particular ways by other men and women.

R.W Connell, in her book Masculinities (1995), argues that what is important to a meaningful analysis of gender and masculinity is the “…processes and relationships through which men and women conduct gendered lives. ‘Masculinity’, to the extent the term can be briefly defined at all, is simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture.

Connell argues that it is important to consider the power relationships between different masculinities as well as their relationships with femininities in order to analyse how these relationships act to reproduce, support or challenge the distribution of power in society. She identifies five categories of masculinities, which have been criticised, and should be regarded as fluid rather than rigid: — Gender matters - Masculinities

There follows a brief explanation of the 5 kinds:
1. Hegemonic
2. Complicit
3. Subordinate
4. Marginalised
5. Protest

***
Edit to add:

I call myself a feminist because I've read the feminist works and agree with them. (I don't call myself a feminist because most people have ideas about what a man calling themself a feminist is, and it doesn't correspond to why I like feminism) — Moliere

I can relate to this and wonder why. Is it still the feeling that a woman calling herself a feminist is setting herself up to be seen as either a butch lesbian or a man-hater? Perhaps it would help to start a thread on 'Feminism' ?!

You are ignorant if you think that political and social landscapes aren't instead ruled by structural attractors. They have memories and thus place constraints on their variety. They evolve as information systems and don't simply unwind as an accumulation of accidents. — apokrisis

You are rather naive. Political and social landscapes can be altered by a myriad of factors. Especially in a world where global communication can be achieved from almost anywhere on the planet. An individual really can start a revolution from their bed. 'Went viral,' is a common phrase in use today.
The butterfly affect is very much in play in the social and political world today, much more, in comparison with the past. Who knows what small event (perhaps even one based on patriarchy,) a person might see, by accident, on-line, which causes them to perform an action, that results in a long term cascade/recursive effect that ultimately causes or prevents a second civil war in America.

You might have familiarity with the maths of non-linear dynamics, but citing the butterfly effect in this context is yet another irrelevancy you have tossed into this thread. — apokrisis

Yeah, you keep repeating your interpretations of irrelevancies and you keep tossing them into this thread. Are you hoping to cause your own little butterfly affect?

Are you hoping to cause your own little butterfly affect? — universeness

Just one wee point. Could you at least call it the butterfly effect. It would be less cringe.

Researchers typically presume that stone projectiles buried alongside males are hunting tools but are less persuaded when projectiles are associated with females.

Your link.
The erasure of females in art, and science is very familiar, but in prehistory — I should have expected it, but didn't.
Men have bullets, women have beads, because you can't shoot berries. And that's why they don't call projectile weapons "equalisers".

{The butterfly affect is of course the feeling that accompanies the fluttering of strictly feminine false eyelashes at a manly man, a small act that can result in a whole new dynasty.}

No, I think you should enjoy your cringe, you are welcome to it.
Effect is the result of the change, affect is the influence that causes the change.
Stop wearing your arrogance so prominently, it makes you look desperate and petulant.

@universeness @apokrisis - 'mon, be civil.

Gender differences are trivial compared to the commonalities between men and women — Judaka

A good question then would be: What is left out when we dismiss both feminine and masculine traits of a human?

I think far too many human characters are defined as either masculine or feminine. Things like compassion, logical reasoning, basic feelings aren’t masculine or feminine.

What is left out when we dismiss both feminine and masculine traits of a human? — ssu

If a social constructionist view is an impetus for this change, then we risk making potentially harmful changes to mitigate problems under a false assumption. Masculine traits aren't just embers of a patriarchial system, they're sometimes just the result of biological proclivities or, useful or benign cultural norms. I don't agree with organising society & education in a way that denies differences between men and women, but assuming our "dismissal" of the feminine and masculine characterisation of traits didn't do this, then what is the purpose then? Is the concept so fundamentally sexist and immoral that it must go?

The majority of criticism against these ideas has originated from the postmodernist & social constructionist view, and it's tainted the well for me. If you have a more nuanced case where the argument is explicitly not from either of these perspectives, then I could consider it more fairly.

universeness apokrisis - 'mon, be civil. — fdrake

It's Mod Rule!! :scream:

'Went viral,' is a common phrase in use today. — universeness

Like the video of a herring gull swallowing a squirrel whole "went viral". Neither squirrels nor sea gulls changed their behavior, despite their addiction to social media.

Who knew squirrels were so gullible?

Who knew squirrels were so gullible? — BC

I agree, a worse pun ever thread, would be quite entertaining.
My 'Jeopardy' pun in the shoutbox, was much better!