screwdriver identifies as hammer

nailing the source of the division

is a screwdriver a useful tool? yes.

is a hammer a useful tool? yes.

which one is better?

this is a silly question, it depends upon what you need to do.

this is a set of discernments so obvious and inarguable that only an academic or a troll (increasingly, sadly, often the same thing) could find fault.

tools are designed for tasks and suited to some and not to others. it’s not about better or worse, it’s about “better suited” in any given context.

evolution works the same way. which is better, a dolphin or a wolf? well, it really depends upon where you drop them off and what you ask them to do, doesn’t it? 2 miles offshore, a wolf is in trouble. 2 miles inland, well, that’s a very different story for flipper.

these are ideas so simple that a half concusssed 5 year old will instantly grasp them.

“i am a screwdriver that identifies as a hammer and i demand that everyone acknowledge not only my right to drive nails but that i am just as good at it as any ball peen!”

this is just stupid. we’re not all the same and as the great sage tells us

but it’s a funny thing: an awful lot of people seem desperately invested in pretending that it does.

we see this in the trans movement where “boys who tuck” start dominating track and swimming meets and volleyball matches while some core of reality denialsts proclaim that “there is no biological advantage to being male” in these sports. but there obviously is. it takes an ostentatiously willful level of denialism to pretend that it does not.

what really fascinates me on this topic though is that those directly victimized by it seem more inclined to support it than those who are not.

it seems a varietal of the “suicidal empathy” we were discussing the other day.

women support “boys who tuck dunking on the girls” at roughly twice the rate that men do and while male support for this has dropped by about 1/4 since 2023 (18 to 14) among women, it’s basically the same (33 vs 32).

that’s an interesting trend especially in light of all the bad press this has garnered and problems it has caused.

but even the people who see this and say “no way” have this weird block when it comes to other male/female differences and seem to fixate upon this bizarre tabula rasa obsession with pretending that men and women are the same, want the same things, have the same capabilities, and ought to be doing all the same stuff.

it’s an oddly telling perceptive duality that the same people who say “obviously, duh” when you say that men are, on average, larger, stronger, have denser bones and muscle, and have body geometries more conducive to athletics and violence than women suddenly flip to “nuh uh” when you speak about any sort of large enduring difference in attitudinal norms, intellectual capabilities, or even the natures of trait distribution.

it’s like they somehow think that size and muscle mass come from genes but verbal or math ability are magically all some sort of “nurture.”

these variances are not cultural or sociological, they’re biological. you can see this all over the place, especially as our tools of analysis get better. it’s flat out embedded at the neurological level.

and, of interest, one of these hardwired variances may well explain the differential rates of support for “boys in girls sports” and quite a lot more as well.

consider this study on gender variance in conditional empathy.

they’re basically measuring one thing: do you perceive punishment differently if you view it as warranted?

the answer is, provocatively, “it depends” and what it depends upon appears to be your gender.

in men, yes, the two are different. men show empathy for the unfairly punished but lack it for those they view as justly punished. instead, their reward centers light up.

in women, the responses are not different. they show empathy either way. they do not experience the positive feedback of punishing a cheater.

put simply: male empathy is conditional and female empathy tends not to be.

the part of the brain that would be used to make it so is simply not engaged.

this is supported by a fairly broad body of research and linked to testosterone levels, which seem not to limit overall empathy (the high T are still empathetic) but rather to drive a delination around “do you deserve empathy or not?”

this pathway is less active in those with lower T and thus tends to express as large differences between men and women. this is a likely fundamental aspect in “female judge won’t hold the suspect” and “female victim (or her low T male friend who ran away on the subway abandoning her to the attacker) won’t press charges.”

the concern is less “who started it?” than “who is crying right now?”

this is a classic example of a set of claims that every sort of jerk with an axe to grind seizes upon to stir up a war of the sexes, so let’s just head that off right here:

this distinction almost certainly exists for a reason and if it didn’t, we probably wouldn’t be here.

do you really want women, who birth and nurture babies, to be wired to ask whether the baby is justified in crying before deciding whether to help or feed it? would any of us have survived our infancy? so give it a rest guys, this is not about which sex is superior.

that’s an argument as tiresome as it is pointless.

women are better at being women and men at being men, those are not the same thing, and there are some basic imprinted realities there. and one of them is that lower testosterone people are less likely to punish others, even when they think the others deserve it.

i don’t make the rules.

it’s foundational biology.

there have been some fascinating studies on “weak” democrats (those with weak rather than intense) affiliation. to begin with, they had significantly higher T (19%) than those who identified as “strongly dem” but the interesting bit is that when dosed with additional testosterone, these people immediately had mood improvement and started to lean more red. (12% drop in strength of party affiliation (p=0.01), 45% warmer feelings towards republican candidates (p<0.001)

hormones shape your perception and cognitive function.

we like to feel that we’re in control and to tell stories about our full agency and choice, and i am a believer in free will, but also a believer that it has real limits. what would you like for dinner? an idea pops into your head and some preferences. you can (likely) override them, but where did they come from? what said “burger” instead of “chicken”? no one has access to that. “did that make you angry?” ditto. the machine is mostly ghost.

we like to style ourselves as creatures of pure reason, but we’re not. that’s the skin on a large, large orange and most of the juicy parts are underneath. (as anyone who has ever had their hormones disrupted can tell you)

and one cannot help but wonder: is the collapse of testosterone levels in the west directly tied to the newfound surges in suicidal empathy? it certainly stands to reason.

are we all simply shifting to a non-conditional empathy state that is easily abused by those least deserving of (or able to secure) conditional empathy?

is this why men and women have been having such an incredibly intense political bifurcation of late? is it because we’re seeing the same stimuli and high T is saying “punish that” and low T is saying “punishment is mean and i don’t like it. i feel bad for the attacker/thief/whatever.”

are male and female at biologically driven odds here?

i suspect maybe they are.

and again, this is not about better or worse. is a hammer better than a screwdriver? if you’re driving nails it is. if you’re trying to remove a screw, it’s not. can we seriously not grasp that this same pertains to a great many forms of male/female variance and that the exact same trait “being empathetic with less regard to culpability” is highly adaptive in the child rearing that every single one of us needed in order to be here (and perhaps to being a doctor, which attracts women to that profession) but perhaps becomes problematic when setting bail for violent felons?

because this seems like one of those obvious things that a civilization forgets right before it declines. the 70’s and 80’s made it vogue to pretend that all the old stereotypes lacked basis, and likely some of them did, but likely some had a point as well and all this pretense that they could not, cannot, and must not is leading to forms of reality denial and a profound “talking past one another” sort of situation where, because we are not allowed to name or define the issue properly without having words ending in “ist” hurled at us, we simply cannot make any progress toward understanding or solution.

let’s keep a few things in mind:

given the variance of humanity and its bell curve nature, nothing behavioral or cognitive like “men are this and women are that” is ever absolute. there are women at the far end of the curve who out express most men in many male traits and men (like our subway hero who ran away and left a 23 year old woman to face burke alone) who, well, act like that.

but what’s astonishing is how accurately one can infer political party just from behavior and how that party affiliation and behavior track to basic issues like “testosterone.”

i have not looked up the judge in the rhammell burke case, but i’ll stake $20 blind that we can all guess her politics. same goes for the woman and her runaway male compatriot.

these things are all of a piece. it’s a basic assortative divide.

and you cannot change it. you could not “fix” it even if it needed fixing.

but the good news is that it does not. it’s fine and has worked for millennia.

we just need to stop being ridiculous about it.

i’m going to say this as simply and directly as i can:

men and women have demonstrably different brain structures. hand a neurologist 100 brains, 50 male, 50 female, than they can, just by looking at them, sort them into male and female piles with pretty much perfect accuracy. it’s everyhting from size to white matter/gray matter ratios, connectivity patterns, and the size and proportions of specific areas. men, for example, have larger amygdalas, this leads to greater propensity and capability in emotional salience determination, threat tagging, reward relevance, and socio-emotional cues. women have larger lateral prefrontal cortexes. this leads to larger working memory, greater task switching, and multi-tasking capability.

men and women are optimized differently. this is a simple, demonstrable fact. taking brains that different and bathing them in hormones as different as men’s and women’s are and winding up with “these work exactly the same” would be the most outlandishly improbable coincidence in the entire universe. it’s just not a thing.

everyone always wants to make this into some “better or worse” debate as though somehow noticing a difference is some form of bigotry or misogyny, but this is just the screwdriver vs a hammer argument again.

has there been such a thing as sexism in human history? of course. does it still exist? certainly in some places and to some degree. but in others, it seems to have been turned inside out into a new dogma of “screwdrivers can do everything a hammer can do but backwards and in high heels” and i suspect this is not really helping anyone, women least of all.

the idea of gender roles and preferences is not oppression, it’s “noticing things.”

forcing those roles on people against their will is oppression.

but so too is indoctrinating people into social pressure enforced belief sets that conforming to any sort of biological gender role makes one some sort of gender traitor or weak.

i mean, can we seriously not just figure out how to be different and not in conflict, to work toward happiness and capability instead of politicizing gender variance into lysenko level conflict generation?

you can be pro man and not be anti-woman. you can be pro women and not be anti-man.

it seems to me that a significant part of the problem right now is this “the genders are talking past one another” issue that no one can resolve because we’re not allowed to admit that genders see things differently and that women being women and men being men are both important and desirable.

start from there and the structures you build are workable.

start from “we’re all the same and need to be the same” and you’re just opening up a new misery factory.

the deck is stacked in our favor here guys. the war of the sexes has no future. it’s always been too pleasurable to fraternize with the enemy…