Genderal Trivia

A part of me believes that in fifty or one-hundred years, the human being will have developed enough intellectually to avoid the pitfalls and stupidities of all generalizations about races, ethnicities, classes, nations, genders, etc. Fortunately, I am too historically immature to participate in such an intellectual jump, and so can enjoy the fruits of blogging on generalizable categories, in this case gender.

I usually tune out when elders try to impart some wisdom to me about the mamas and the papas, but I was struck by a conversation I had with my aunt last week. I'm not sure how it came up, but she mentioned a theory that she had heard (whether in a book, in a lecture, or in a separate conversation I am not sure) which goes basically like this:

1)Men function socially through a discourse of information/trivia/knowledge. They talk about what they know; what they know more about than somebody else; what they need/should know; what they can gain from sharing knowledge, etc. (2)Women on the other hand tend to focus much less on comparing or sharing of knowledge, or games of one-upsmanship of information, and much more on what they lack. They tend to comfort each other on their insecurities surrounding not knowing something.

My initial reaction to my aunt's claims was to dismiss (2) entirely. Despite being told (2) by a woman, who herself works for a think tank (a factory of information processing), I found the claim that women are more interested in mutually comforting each other's insecurities to be rather baseless on a general level of theorizing. I'm not sure exactly what women do instead, but unless they do it completely behind the backs of me and and all men, I find it hardly to believe that women spend most of their time talking to each other about how bad they feel about themselves in this or that regard, and how the other person can make them feel better. If any women readers would like to agree with my aunt, however, I will be all ears.

As difficult as (2) was to swallow, I was nonetheless struck by how muuch I was persuaded by (1). In my personal experience, I do find males to by and large engage in these information-exchanging games with far greater frequency than do women. This is not to say men know more than women -- far from it -- but only that they display and test each other's knowledge more in social settings. Here I must pause to consider the subjectivity of a position that so ardently agrees with (1): that I am an individual in a university, in a particular environment and social circle that it would be fair to say absorbs and discusses more information on a day to day basis than the average human, let alone the average male. But the question is, how subjective is my experience. Has anyone ever heard two women discussing such absurdities as sporting statistics, or espresso machine engineering, or automobile horsepower, or landlocked countries? I know women that are knowledgable about all of these topics. Rarely, however, do they use this knowledge in the service of posturing, as I find men often do: quizzing each other, or testing the other's depth of information.

I would not consider blogging on such clearly subjective matters were I not deeply impressed with how true it is to my experience, and how curious I am if it is true of those of others. And were I told that my findings are baseless, I would be far from dogged. However, if there is any kind of consensus on this issue, I would be curious what other think it means? On essentially all discussions involving general categories, I (like a good student of the modern Western academy) take any resulting generalizations to be the result of social and historical forces and contexts rather than innate or pre-programmed constitutions. If this is so, what are the social forces out there that produce such a propensity for (1) among males that do not exist with as great an intensity among females? Any intuitions? Any additional academic theorizing that can be brought to the discussion?