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LadyEllen -> RE: Women Who Dislike Dominant Women (10/11/2006 4:13:25 AM)
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Look, I did say I wasnt sure I got it right on the difference between acting like a man and doing things traditionally thought of as male role model activities!
What I mean by acting like a man, is trying to work according to the male model, with the male rules in a male system. Women are not men, and they dont need to do this - but very many do, and will fail, because the males with whom they are competing have been playing that game for a lot longer. If women remain true to themselves, and perform the male role model activity as women, then they have a far better chance of success as I see it. In the former, the failure of women to compete is seen by the men as weakness, whilst in the latter the women get the respect they deserve, again as I see it.
Acting like a man, to me denotes weakness and lack of confidence in onesself as a woman - it is attempting to conform and definitely submission to the male model and male rules in a male system. Remaining true to onesself, refusing to conform and submit to the male way of things, to me denotes strength and confidence. As I see it, the former is a handicap on women achieving, the latter is an enormous advantage to women achieving as women.
Of course there is wide variation in character and personality types within the sexes. Of course there is nowadays at least a wide variation in possible gender expression. Of course, anyone is free to be and to act anyway they like or need within the law. However, there remain marked differences between men and women in the way they go about things, their interpersonal behaviours and what each sees as priority .Of course, some will violate this generality - but there have been sufficient psychological studies of the subject to be able to identify that in general, there are male and female parameters in which the majority of males and females will be found.
As for "real men" - well according to the psychological tests that I have seen (Bems et al), the vast majority of men will be clustered on the male side of the gender line - not too far from the centre ground. The vast majority of women will be similarly clustered on the female side of the gender line - again not too far from the centre ground. The overly macho "real men" meanwhile, find themselves at the very upper extremes of maleness, and are in fact according to the study, as unusual as the ultra feminine "real women" who find themselves at the very upper extremes of femaleness. This tells us that the "real man" thing could be more of an irregularity than anything found in the real world amongst men in general. The particular test I refer to (Bems) was also correlated with a mental health study which seemed to indicate that "real men" and "real women" tend to be comparatively less well, than those on each side of the central line where mental health was better.
I will ignore the gay bit as I dont see it as relevant to this - gay men can be overly macho just as much as the stereotype image of them as being over effeminate, and lesbian women are represented at both ends of the scale too - though for both gay men and lesbian women, they also tend to fall on each side of the central line in the same proportions as their heterosexual peers, in the same clusters. Just for information, I repeated the Bems study for my psychology coursework a year or so ago, and specifically included gay men and lesbian women to find this stuff out. Very few gay men, and very few lesbian women, found themselves on the "wrong" side of the line, and even then they were still in the central cluster - ie the effeminate gay men were in the cluster for heterosexual women.
Transgendered people. I could only find a few for my repetition of the Bems study, one of whom was me! Thus my findings are not necessarily accurate to apply generally, due to the small sample. However, the one FtM involved, fell into the same central cluster on the male side. Of the three MtF, one was dead on the central line - indicating gender neutrality for the purposes of the test, and the other two again fell into the female central cluster. This was taken to mean that the transgendered people involved were not anything out of the ordinary for their adopted gender, but were out of the ordinary for their birth gender.
What all this means, is that there are male and female parameters in which the vast majority find themselves. It is not wrong to be outside these parameters, but the parameters are there. When a woman acts like a man, what I mean by that is that she deliberately and against her own nature, adopts the parameters on the male side of the gender line - this cannot be healthy. If a woman naturally acts like a man, then that is OK, just as it is OK for a man to act like a woman if that is his nature. But for the majority, it is natural to be male or female in gender and for this gender to be in agreement with their birth sex.
I hope this clears up what I intended.
E
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