The Null Device

A new book takes to task the accepted belief that men and women think and/or communicate differently, as expounded by popular psychology books like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus:

The bones of Cameron’s argument, set out in The Myth of Mars and Venus, are that Gray et al have no scientific basis for their claims. Great sheaves of academic papers, says Cameron, show that the language skills of men and women are almost identical. Indeed, the central tenets of the Mars and Venus culture – that women talk more than men, that men are more direct, that women are more verbally skilled – can all be debunked by scientific research. A recent study in the American journal Science, for instance, found men and women speak almost exactly the same number of words a day: 16,000.

Where the book becomes interesting is when she asks why we have become interested in these myths. “The first point to make is that in the past 20 years we have become obsessed by communication,” she says. “And that’s not just in relationships; it’s in customer care, it’s in politics. All problems are seen to be communication problems.

Cameron is not simply irritated that the Mars and Venus books have filled too many Christmas stockings. Her fervour on this issue runs deeper. There is, she thinks, something regressive, deeply conservative, in this outlook because what it seems to be saying is that we can’t change.

“You had people like Prince Charles and Norman Tebbit inferring that if people were making spelling mistakes it was only a short step to them coming in dirty to school and then there’d be no motivation for them to stay out of crime,” says Cameron. “There were these illogical slippery slope arguments: how, if children didn’t know how to use the colon properly, it was only a few steps from drug-taking and criminality. There was a deep moral and social dimension to it all.

¶ biology communication culture gender human nature language neurology psychology science [no comments]

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. And the latest invention is a voice changer for female video gamers, allowing them to contend in the macho culture of online games without fear of harrassment or inappropriate sexual attention from prehensile, undersocialised geeks.

According to research conducted by the company, "The number of female online game players is not small", would you believe. In fact, "Many of them have reached the highest level of some very difficult games such as World of Warcraft (60th level), which is considered the game for men only."

The software comes with presets which turn lady voices into big deep Blessed-esque ones. You can also create your own new voice by mucking about with pitch and timbre settings, and other features include advanced tune and noise reduction.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ culture gender gibson's law machismo sex sexism tech videogaming [2 comments]

Four women teaching in a remote village school in Saudi Arabia had a dilemma: they needed a way to get to the village, but women are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. So they found a driver who lived in the village, and married him:

They were married in a short ceremony, and all the women have agreed to pay the driver a share of their monthly salaries, Al-Watan said.

Women are still not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, while men can marry up to four women according to Islamic law.

(via chuck_lw) ¶ gender islam patriarchy saudi arabia society [1 comment]

This just in: psychological studies find that differences between men and women are, for the most part, negligible. This includes in areas commonly considered to be gendered, such as communications, spatial reasoning and assertiveness.

Dr Hyde said gender differences accounted for either no or a very small effect for most of the psychological variables examined. She said only throwing distance and physical aggression showed marked gender differences.

Dr Hyde highlighted one study where participants were told that they were not identified as male or female nor wore any identification, which led to neither sex conforming to a stereotyped image when given the opportunity to act aggressively.

They actually did the opposite to what was expected - they did not stick to the stereotype of aggressive males and passive females.

¶ gender nature vs. nurture psychology society [2 comments]

Toru Iwatama speaks about his famous creation, Pac-Man:

In fact, Iwatani acknowledges that, while a eureka moment for the annals, that event represents the official birth of Pac-Man: "The whole thing actually started with me walking around games arcades watching how many boys were playing and the fact that all the machines were about killing aliens, tanks or people. Girls were simply not interested, and I suddenly had a motivation for my work: I wanted game centres to shed this rather dark, sinister image, and it seemed to me that the way to raise the atmosphere of a place is to entice girls to come in. The whole purpose of Pac-Man was to target women and couples, and get a different type of player involved."

"So there I was, wondering what sort of things women would look for in a video game. I sat in cafés and listened to what they were talking about: mostly it was fashion and boyfriends. Neither of those was really the stuff of a good video game. Then they started talking about food -- about cakes and sweets and fruit -- and it hit me: that food and eating would be the thing to concentrate on to get the girls interested."

It may have been aimed at girls, but boys converted to it immediately: Pac-Man's most interesting revelation was gamers' affinity to living things. And that spark of inspiration has taken the industry from a 2-D yellow disc through Mario, and on to a 3-D Lara Croft.

Strangely, that is exactly how Namco saw his achievement: as just a game. Pac-Man, quite apart from the lucrative sequels Ms Pac-Man and Pac-Land, made the company more than $100 million. Iwatani was merely promoted to supervisor level, and still lives in a house too small to accommodate a Pac-Man arcade cabinet.

(via 1.0) ¶ gender history pac-man society videogames [1 comment]

Found on Adrian Talkshow Boy's LiveJournal:

Mother's Day is 9 months after Fathers Day. This means that Father's Day is a celebration of getting laid whereas Mothers Day commemorates the physical pain of childbirth. ANALYSE THE SUBTEXT. What a skewed coincidence. Or is it!?

Weren't there two alternative dates for Father's Day a while ago; one in the first half of the year and the other in the second; I seem to recall that Australia went from celebrating it on one date to the other, with possibly one year in which both were, confusingly, celebrated. I'm guessing that the old date is the traditional colonial one, dating back to the greeting-card fads of Victorian England or somesuch, whereas the new one is the American date, set by Hallmark Corp. or someone, and harmonised on in the interest of globalisation, or something like that.

¶ father's day gender hallmark mother's day sex society [no comments]

When men experience stress, they respond with a flight-or-fight reaction; when women experience stress, they respond by maintaining friendships with other women:

Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just fight or flight; In fact, says Dr. Klein, it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is release as part of the stress responses in a woman, it buffers the fight or flight response and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead. When she actually engages in this tending or befriending, studies suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect. This calming response does not occur in men, says Dr. Klein, because testosterone---which men produce in high levels when they're under stress---seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin. Estrogen, she adds, seems to enhance it.

(I'm not so sure that stressed men don't experience the impulse to talk about it with friends; though maybe when they do, it's the result of a modern living and/or oestrogen-like chemicals in the water supply turning them into a bunch of big girls' blouses. Which ties into the whole nature-vs.-nurture debate.)

The discovery that women respond to stress differently than men was made in a classic "aha" moment shared by two women scientists who were talking one day in a lab at UCLA. There was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee, and bonded, says Dr. Klein. When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own. I commented one day to fellow researcher Shelley Taylor that nearly 90% of the stress research is on males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew instantly that we were onto something.

The article suggests that this difference between men's and women's responses to stress could be the reason why women outlive men on average.

¶ biology gender nature vs. nurture stress [no comments]

The Gender Genie is a CGI implementation of the Koppel/Argamon algorithm for determining the sex of the author of a piece of text. The results are mixed; it accurately determined that Graham and Jim are male and that Beth, Beth and Shauna are female, though it also pegs Cos, Grant and Charlie Stross as female. It also thinks most of my blog entries are either female or sexually ambiguous (hmmm); however, my LiveJournal reads as unambiguously male. Odd...

¶ gender language sex [no comments]

The front page of today's Onion has the following observation on the differences between the sexes: Woman Masturbates To Concept Of Commitment:

PORTAGE, MI--Soaking in her bathtub Tuesday, area resident Linda Marston, 32, pleasured herself over the thought of a long-term committed relationship. "Mmmm... oh, yeah, baby... I want to settle down with you forever," moaned the never-married Marston, as she gently massaged her clitoris with two fingers. "Oh, God, yes... two kids, maybe three... and a house in the country. Big swingset in the backyard." Several hours later, Marston masturbated again to the idea of loving someone unconditionally through good times and bad.

¶ gender humour satire sex the onion [no comments]

In the UK, a Harley Street gynaecologist has revealed that he prescribed testosterone implants to five women MPs, to help them be more aggressive and assertive in parliament, and thus compete better with male colleagues. Which raises a number of questions; is the Westminster parliamentary system inherently macho and masculine? Is politics really just atavistic territorial posturing, with all the haughty rhetoric about "rational debate" being little more than a polite fiction? And will the increased number of women in parliament lead to a less confrontational, more conciliatory style of politics (as many have hoped), or will it, coupled with medical technology, just create a unisex gladiatorial arena?

¶ aggression better living through chemistry gender politics sex testosterone uk [no comments]

Researchers at the Illinois Institute of Technology have written a program which identifies the sex of an author by their word usage frequency. Apparently women use relationship-related words like "with" and "for", whereas men use more specific and absolute words like "the", "this" and "as"; which brings us back to the old rock-logic/water-logic cliché.

The results showed that the words favoured most heavily by men were what grammarians call determinative words such as "the," "a," "as," "that" and "one." Female writers favoured "she" and relationship words such as "for," "with," "in," "and" and "not."

"This is surprising, since, unlike conversation, writing a book or an article does not involve direct social interaction"

Hmmm; if one wrote up such a program and applied it to, say, blogs on the web, I wonder what proportion it would sex accurately.

Update: the paper may be found here (though you have to subscribe to get the PDF). However, there is also a copy on the personal page of Prof. Moshe Koppel, one of the authors. And it appears that they're from Israel, not Illinois. (Perhaps the journalist confused the abbreviations?)

¶ gender language sex [2 comments]

Scientists have found out that women need larger computer monitors for working in graphical environments than men do, because of their lower spatial processing ability. With a standard monitor giving a 35 degree viewing angle, women tend to be on average 20% slower than men at certain spatial tasks; given two screens with a 100 degree viewing angle, this difference disappears. If this is true, this could affect the big-arse monitor's significance as a macho status symbol.

¶ gender human interface psychology tech [no comments]

Another amusingly apt Onion piece I missed earlier: One Look At My Music Collection Will Show You How Much I Respect Women.

Unfortunately, at this point in my life, I haven't really made as many connections as I'd have liked. If I could just get a woman to see my CD collection, I know she'd realize that I'm not like the other guys. I can really understand the female experience.

¶ culture gender humour satire sex the onion [no comments]

Why are many men avoiding marriage these days? Because it's a mug's game. (via one.point.zero)

¶ gender marriage society [no comments]

An interesting article about the next generation of female hackers, and how they are challenging stereotypes (like the ones which say that they don't exist, or that they're all web designers or somesuch):

Gweeds, one of Marcelo's male hacker friends, confirms this. He wants to see more women hackers, and he tells me excitedly about an all-female-authored distribution of the operating system Linux called Cervix. "I like the idea of Cervix, because it says that girls can do this," he added. "It's like an all-girl band."

(via rotten.com)

¶ diy gender hackers riot grrl riot nrrd stereotypes women [no comments]

This week's Onion has some good pieces, such as God Finally Gives Shout-Out Back To All His Niggaz, and Plan To Get Laid At DragonCon 2001 Fails,

"I imagined some girl and I talking about the new Lord Of The Rings movie," Melcher said. "Then I could say, 'Oh, I have the trailer on my laptop back in my hotel room if you want to see it."

Though a distinct minority, some females were present at DragonCon. "There was this one girl dressed up like Black Canary. She had the boots and the fishnet stockings and everything," Melcher said. "I couldn't really talk to her, though, because there was a pretty dense crowd of guys around her at all times."

not to mention this gem: Oh, Girls Are No Good At Genocide.

The Khmer Rouge picked Pol Pot because they knew he'd be good at murder and torture and all that other boy stuff. A girl probably would have planted flowers in the killing fields.

¶ geek gender genocide hip-hop humour role-playing satire sex the onion [no comments]