Are men and women really all that different?

Are men and women really all that different?

Well golly gosh, the short answer is of course yes. Just take a little peek under the outerwear and you can see there are some major anatomical differences but really apart from a few adorable sex related attributes, what is really so different?

Actually not as much as we first think. There are in reality more similarities between females and males than we ever realise. The differences we tend to see are more a result of society insisting on enphasising the differences than anything biology has created. In fact so similar are we that the default human form in the embryo is female. It takes the action of surges of testosterone to alter the strong course of development towards a female baby in order to activate the male pattern towards becoming a male baby.

In the process of becoming a male some female bits are absorbed, and others reorient and reposition and become the bits and pieces typical of the male body. But to do this the human fetus has to be actually sensitive to the action of testosterone. In rare cases this doesn't happen and the female form persists and the baby is born with the primary appearance of a female, while genetically they are male. Their body just doesn't respond to the signlas that their hormones try to activate.

So not only do we have what we can call males, genetically marked by a special pair of sex chromosones referred to as X and Y, we have females marked by two X chromosomes. Then there are varuious other folks who may have X and Y chromosomes but are insensitive to testosterone and are usually raised as girls but are geneticallly male, and then the even wider range of other chromosomal variations such as a single X, or multiple X and one or more Y chromosomes. These variations in chromosomes means that genetically we cannot be totally certain that there are simple differences between males and females. It is hard to classify and hard to draw clear distinctions.

Then apart from that, since most of the chromosomes are similar between males and females (there are 23 pairs of chromosomes in all), with the sex attributes being mainly determined by the single pair of sex chromosomes, we ought to expect that much of the way humans behave and think and feel ought to be similar. That is just what we find. This includes map reading, mathematics, logical thinking, verbal ability, assertiveness and nurturing behaviour.

Statistically, there is greater commonality in the intellectual and emotional aspects of male and female human behaviours than there are differences. This means that in the theoretical case where a baby were to be raised with the family having no idea of its genetic sex (an interesting mental experiement), it is likely that we would find the kiddie grows to display behaviours that we would identify with both typical males and females. 

What we tend to find in real life upbringing is that the ways of being we strongly identify with masculinity and femininity are actually products of the context of the culture and society of the time. Hence we also see changes in these gendered behaviours over time historically. Not so many generations ago for example, pink used to be just as much a male colour as a female one, but today, we are deluded into thinking little girls are born with an "I love pink" gene, which is of course nonsense.

Your thoughts?