Carole Hooven: ‘It’s obvious that men are much more driven by sex than women’ - "Evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven says that “sex is real… it’s biological. It’s in your body. It’s not in your head.” Hooven has served as the co-director of undergraduate studies in Harvard University’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and she is aware that such statements might be seen as shocking in certain environments. “Your body’s plan for gamete production has a lot of implications, but it doesn’t dictate anyone’s value or rights, and it shouldn’t… in some places, sex is important. Like maybe in sports. Maybe in prison cells. Maybe in the data that we collect about sexual violence,” she says. Hooven believes that it is important to be able to talk about sexual differences in order to make the best decisions, and that it is necessary to include data from scientific research in such discussions. With that in mind, Hooven wrote the book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. In it, she draws on her experience as a professor of human evolutionary biology to analyze studies about the role the hormone plays in sexual differences in both humans and animals... there are some very strong and consistent norms across cultures that also are consistent with what we know about biological differences in humans and non-human animals. All cultures have norms about sexual behavior and regulating sexual behavior to some extent, and most incorporate greater latitude for male sexuality than for female sexuality. So, that’s something that is fairly consistent across cultures that I think has a strong biological influence... there’s a reality there that we have to understand and work with so that we can accommodate the reality of male sexuality instead of denying it, as many, many people do. Many feminists in particular seem to be under that misapprehension, or they’re intentionally misconstruing the evidence in order to try to achieve sex equality. There are a lot of social problems caused by the differences in sexual appetite between the sexes and what that means for relationships, what that means for society, what that means for happiness and thriving. So, the solution, first of all, is to stop denying the facts, because I think this just causes suffering and makes it harder for us to maximize human thriving... differences are not just limited to sex and aggression. As it turns out, there are differences in professional interests. Women are more likely to go into helping, nurturing professions, and men are more likely to go into professions that involve more risk and risk-taking. Physical risk-taking is one of these sex differences because it could shorten a man’s life relative to not taking those risks. If taking risks has strong reproductive payoffs, that can outweigh the costs or the risks of dying, basically. So, for men, physical risks have reproductive payoffs, but that’s not necessarily true for females who need to live a long, healthy life to maximize their reproduction... striving for equality of outcome – meaning we have equal levels of men and women across different professions – seems totally misguided to me, because I do think there are differences in preferences. And I think what we should strive for is equality of opportunity and equality of pay. It would be great if teaching and caregiving, say, nursing, paid more than they do because these are more female-typical professions. But males are involved in professions that are pretty brutal in terms of their physical demands, and they deserve to be compensated for that too... females who take male levels of testosterone as part of a gender transition report, pretty much across the board, with some variation obviously, but on average, the sense that a female gets when she takes male levels of testosterone is, whoa, this is the way that males go through the world. They start really obsessing about body parts, for one thing. This is somewhat consistent with the literature. So if you look at the scientific literature, it’s clear that sex drive is one of the strongest psychological responses from taking testosterone, that it really cranks up when you go from living as a woman to living as a man and take male-typical levels of testosterone. And I’ve had many conversations now with trans men and trans women, as I did in the book. It’s sort of mind-blowing for a female to start living as a male with high testosterone and to feel how strong the sexual urges are. Not only does the libido really shoot up, but the nature of sexual attraction changes. And again, this isn’t true for everyone, but many females who transition into living as males also feel this reduction in the requirement for emotional intimacy before sex. And there is that increased attention to the body and an increased attraction to the body as a sexual object, as opposed to the sense that sex and sexual attraction are about a whole human being. So this is something that actually happens: sexual objectification sort of rises with testosterone. And we see the same thing happen in the other direction when males transition and start living as females"
Damn neurosexism! Clearly we must listen to Cordelia Fine, since she wrote Testosterone Rex, which got an award, instead of a biology professor, and we need to cancel anyone who says men are hornier than women, because that's being a dinosaur
Inquisitive Bird on X - "Recent study, based on large UK Biobank samples, finds that sex can be predicted from brain morphology with close to perfect accuracy, 99.7%. This is much higher than previous studies I reviewed some time ago, see next."
Computational limits to the legibility of the imaged human brain
Opinion | I Was the Fastest Girl in America, Until I Joined Nike - The New York Times - "A big part of this problem is that women and girls are being forced to meet athletic standards that are based on how men and boys develop. If you try to make a girl fit a boy’s development timeline, her body is at risk of breaking down. That is what happened to Cain. After months of dieting and frustration, Cain found herself choosing between training with the best team in the world, or potentially developing osteoporosis or even infertility. She lost her period for three years and broke five bones. She went from being a once-in-a-generation Olympic hopeful to having suicidal thoughts."
Ironically, you usually need to pretend that men and women are the same (e.g. that testosterone is the only difference between them, or that if you think they think differently it's neurosexism), or you get cancelled
Genders Have 'Distinct Brain Patterns' Which May Explain Behavior, Study Finds - "“We successfully separated brain patterns between sexes,” Stanford University psychiatry professor Dr. Vinod Menon said to Fox News. Some people have called it a matter of synapse “wiring” or structure, But the newest study finds certain areas are “hotspots” that have different activities based on gender. One key area is the limbic system, which regulates emotions and behavior. Stanford researchers say it’s also involved with memory. Another hotspot is the “default mode network” of the brain, where personal thoughts are stored. “Our findings suggest that differences in brain activity patterns across these key brain regions contribute to sex-specific variations in cognitive functioning,” Menon said. Menon’s research team used a form of artificial intelligence to reach its conclusions. “Explainable AI” processed 1,500 MRI brain scans and found subtle differences between males and females 90% of the time. Menon told The Daily Telegraph in Britain that one major goal of the research was to find how much gender affects “human brain development, in aging and in the manifestation of psychiatric neurological disorders.” For instance, studies show females are twice as likely as males to have clinical depression. But males are more likely to become alcoholics or have drug dependencies. On the positive side, males usually have better working memory while females have a better long-term memory."
Damn neurosexism! But of course, trans people have brains resembling those of the gender they identify as and if you deny that you're transphobic
Meme - "Paying, and being paid, for sex. Have you ever paid someone else for sex? Have you ever been paid for sex?
Paid for sex: Men 12% Yes, Women 1% Yes
Was paid for sex: Men 6% Yes, Women 6% Yes"
Of course, we must still believe that women are as horny as men, if not hornier and anyone who disagrees is a stone age dinosaur misogynist
i/o on X - "Studies typically find that men have more general knowledge than women. A variation on this is the male proclivity for ranking and listing things by subject or classification — a pleasure that seems to elude most women. I could spend hours a day ranking and rating stuff. I've never been able to get any woman interested in doing this (most just seem mystified and baffled by my interest), and rarely have I met a man who didn't enjoy ranking and rating things at least occasionally."
Ian Miles Cheong on X "“There is no meaningful distinction between men and women.” *woman unable to fire artillery piece after 45 seconds of struggling, but man succeeding with one tug*"
Daily Caller on X - "BIDEN: "There's not a single thing a man can do that a woman can't do as well or better. Not a single thing."
Claire Lehmann on X - "Had a chat to a veteran researcher of sex differences in neuroscience. He told me that the new AI tools are so good that they are picking up enormous multivariate sex differences that researchers never even knew existed"
Damn neurosexism!
A gender equality paradox in academic publishing: Countries with a higher proportion of female first-authored journal articles have larger first-author gender disparities between fields - "Current attempts to address the shortfall of female researchers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have not yet succeeded, despite other academic subjects having female majorities. This article investigates the extent to which gender disparities are subject-wide or nation-specific by a first-author gender comparison of 30 million articles from all 27 Scopus broad fields within the 31 countries with the most Scopus-indexed articles 2014–2018. The results show overall and geocultural patterns as well as individual national differences. Almost half of the subjects were always more male (seven; e.g., Mathematics) or always more female (six; e.g., Immunology & Microbiology) than the national average. A strong overall trend (Spearman correlation 0.546) is for countries with a higher proportion of female first-authored research to also have larger differences in gender disparities between fields (correlation 0.314 for gender ratios). This confirms the international gender equality paradox previously found for degree subject choices: Increased gender equality overall associates with moderately greater gender differentiation between subjects. This is consistent with previous United States-based claims that gender differences in academic careers are partly due to (socially constrained) gender differences in personal preferences. Radical solutions may therefore be needed for some STEM subjects to overcome gender disparities."
Sex differences in mental rotation and line angle judgments are positively associated with gender equality and economic development across 53 nations - "Mental rotation and line angle judgment performance were assessed in more than 90,000 women and 111,000 men from 53 nations. In all nations, men's mean performance exceeded women's on these two visuospatial tasks. Gender equality (as assessed by United Nations indices) and economic development (as assessed by per capita income and life expectancy) were significantly associated, across nations, with larger sex differences, contrary to the predictions of social role theory. For both men and women, across nations, gender equality and economic development were significantly associated with better performance on the two visuospatial tasks. However, these associations were stronger for the mental rotation task than for the line angle judgment task, and they were stronger for men than for women. Results were discussed in terms of evolutionary, social role, and stereotype threat theories of sex differences."
The power of patriarchy! Objectively measurable gender differences like blood pressure are bigger in more gender equal countries. There is no paradox because misogyny is everywhere!
Empathizing-systemizing cognitive styles: Effects of sex and academic degree - "This study tests if the drives to empathize (E) and systemize (S), measured by the Systemizing Quotient-Revised (SQ-R) and Empathy Quotient (EQ), show effects of sex and academic degree. The responses of 419 students from the Humanities and the Physical Sciences were analyzed in terms of the E-S theory predictions. Results confirm that there is an interaction between sex, degree and the drive to empathize relative to systemize. Female students in the Humanities on average had a stronger drive to empathize than to systemize in comparison to males in the Humanities. Male students in the Sciences on average had a stronger drive to systemize than to empathize in comparison to females in the Sciences. Finally, students in the sciences on average had a stronger drive to systemize more than to empathize, irrespective of their sex. The reverse is true for students in the Humanities. These results strongly replicate earlier findings."
Would Most Men Really Sleep With Just About Anyone? - "Men who appear to have low standards are likely doing it in the context of short-term mating and at times and locations that lend themselves to casual sex. Can we use this lens of long- and short-term mating to help us? I think so. If you’re looking for a stable long-term relationship, it may be worth thinking about what you can do to ensure you come into contact with those seeking long-term rather than short-term relationships. You may find someone using a short-term mating strategy anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in nightclubs than libraries and in large groups of people with weak social ties (e.g., universities) than smaller, close-knit groups where everyone knows each other’s business. It might also be worth considering what strategy you are following. Many people claim to desire a committed relationship but hold the preferences and desires of someone interested in short-term mating."
GayLumberjack on X - "Controversial question: Why are so few women interested in history? The people in my life who read and discuss history are all men. All of the YouTube history channels are run by -- and watched by - men. What's up, ladies?"
Shay 🌈🌸✨ on X - "Controversial question: Why are so few men interested in reading? The people in my life who read and discuss books are all women. All of the YouTube book channels are run by -- and watched by - women. What's up, men?"
Rob Henderson on X - "Women tend to be interested in people (e.g. as depicted in YA fiction and literature) and men tend to be interested in things (e.g. historical facts and dates of various battles)."
Thread by @datepsych on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "This is a neat paper: men and women designed the most and least attractive bodies, kind of like character creation in a video game. What men and women designed as the ideal body was pretty different. "Males focus on prominent masculine and feminine traits, while women focus on traits that make both male and female bodies more elongated and slender." Men made the attractive male avatars more muscular than women did... "Interestingly, our participants generated avatars whose SHR is almost identical to the measures obtained on male and female fashion models." "Attractive male and female avatars also have proportionally longer legs." Meanwhile, short legs: the least attractive bodypart. The most attractive waist to hip ratio for women was within the normal range. Combined with a high shoulder to hip ratio, this is basically a "sporty" female physique. Fitness model or athletic look. However, these were not "masculinized" female physiques and usually also were characterized by some other supernormal female trait, like large breasts or buttocks. Summed up, men have a stronger preferences for masculinity in male bodies and femininity in female bodies than women do. These results are similar to the Gigachad facial ratings. Men found him very attractive, women not so much on average. Men tend to think extreme dimorphism in other men is more attractive than women do."
Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers - "According to cultural stereotypes, men are more eager for sex than are women; women are more likely to set limits on such activity. In this paper, we review the work of theorists who have argued in favor of this proposition and review the interview and correlational data which support this contention. Finally, we report two experimental tests of ihis hypothesis. In these experiments, conducted in 1978 and 1982, male and female confederates of average attractiveness approached potential partners with one of three requests: "Would you go out tonight?" "Will you come over to my apartment?" or "Would you go to bed with me?" The great majority of men were willing to have a sexual liaison with the women who approached them. Women were not. Not one woman agreed to a sexual liaison. Many possible reasons for this marked gender difference were discussed. These studies were run in 1978 and 1982. It has since become important to track how the threat of AIDS is affecting men and women's willingness to date, come to an apartment, or to engage in casual sexual relations."
I don't seem to have linked this classic paper before
Sex Differences in Personality Traits and Gender-Related Occupational Preferences across 53 Nations: Testing Evolutionary and Social-Environmental Theories - "Using data from over 200,000 participants from 53 nations, I examined the cross-cultural consistency of sex differences for four traits: extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and male-versus-female-typical occupational preferences. Across nations, men and women differed significantly on all four traits (mean ds = −.15, −.56, −.41, and 1.40, respectively, with negative values indicating women scoring higher). The strongest evidence for sex differences in SDs was for extraversion (women more variable) and for agreeableness (men more variable). United Nations indices of gender equality and economic development were associated with larger sex differences in agreeableness, but not with sex differences in other traits. Gender equality and economic development were negatively associated with mean national levels of neuroticism, suggesting that economic stress was associated with higher neuroticism. Regression analyses explored the power of sex, gender equality, and their interaction to predict men’s and women’s 106 national trait means for each of the four traits. Only sex predicted means for all four traits, and sex predicted trait means much more strongly than did gender equality or the interaction between sex and gender equality. These results suggest that biological factors may contribute to sex differences in personality and that culture plays a negligible to small role in moderating sex differences in personality."
The power of patriarchy!
Meme - blondie wasabi @blondiewasabi: "If a girl tells u you’re cute she probably thinks ur cute but if a guy tells u you're cute I promise that man is thinking about baptizing u in cum"
Men and women process emotions differently, brain study shows - "Women rate emotional images as more emotionally stimulating than men do and are more likely to remember them...It is known that women often consider emotional events to be more emotionally stimulating than men do... female participants could freely recall significantly more images than the male participants... Using fMRI data from 696 test subjects, the researchers were also able to show that stronger appraisal of negative emotional image content by the female participants is linked to increased brain activity in motoric regions. "This result would support the common belief that women are more emotionally expressive than men," explained Dr Klara Spalek, lead author of the study. The findings also help to provide a better understanding of gender-specific differences in information processing. This knowledge is important, because many neuropsychiatric illnesses also exhibit gender-related differences."
Study: Women's Brains Are More Sensitive To Negative Emotions; React Differently Than Men's - "Overall, women reported being more reactive to the emotional images. Meanwhile, higher levels of testosterone were most frequently associated with lowered sensitivity to the images, while higher estrogen levels, regardless of the person’s sex, almost always meant increased sensitivity... “A stronger connection between these areas in men suggests they have a more analytical than emotional approach when dealing with negative emotions,” said Stéphane Potvin, associate professor at the University of Montreal’s Department of Psychiatry. “It is possible that women tend to focus more on the feelings generated by these stimuli, when men remain somewhat ‘passive’ toward negative emotions, trying to analyze the stimuli and their impact.” Researchers also observed that testosterone made this connection between the amygdala and dmPFC stronger."
More evidence that women are more emotional than men (the memory effect is also interesting given that women are archaeologists in always digging up the past)
Damn neurosexism! Dose-response relationships are unimportant when dealing with ideology!
Are women truly “more emotional” than men? Sex differences in an indirect model-based measure of emotional feelings - "Common beliefs regard women as being more emotional than men. However, assessing differences in emotional feelings holds methodological challenges because of being based on explicit reports. Such research often lacks an explicit measurement model, and reports are potentially biased by stereotypical knowledge and because of existing sex differences in the ease of emotion-label retrieval. This pre-registered analysis employed an evidence accumulation model that has previously been validated for describing binary (un)pleasantness reports made in response to normed emotion-eliciting pictures. This measurement model links overt binary (un)pleasantness reports with the latent variables processing efficiency and a bias to report a certain emotional feeling. Employing online rather than retrospective reports that do not involve intensity rating, together with an explicit measurement model overcome the aforementioned methodological challenges. Across nine different experiments (N = 355) women generated negative emotions more efficiently than men. There was no sex difference in the bias to report negative emotions and in positive emotions. Post hoc account of the results emphasizes the greater relevance of negative emotions for women, given their evolutionary role as primary caregivers who should show enhanced sensitivity for dangers to their offspring (“fitness threat”), given their heightened likelihood of being themselves exposed to physical violence and given their traditional social roles that still remain relevant in many societies."
This replicates the above result
Do Men Really Want More Sex Partners Than Women Do? - "When all potential mates are attractive, women pursue more of them."
As expected, the paper does not support the claims made here. The participants had to give a total of 10 for the number of times they had to have sex. So even if the women didn't want to have s e x with any of the men, they were forced to give a breakdown of sex with all men that added up to 10. Without participants being forced to give a breakdown adding up to exactly 10 sex sessions, we know from other research that men and women would give very different numbers
Yes, Men Lose Weight Faster Than Women. Here's Why. - "it wasn't just that men dropped more total pounds than women — the researchers also found that men had larger reductions than women on other measures linked with better health, such as a lower heart rate and less body fat as well as a decreased risk of diabetes and metabolic syndrome... The low-calorie diet affected womendifferently in other ways, the researchers found — and not all of the differences were positive. For example, compared with men, women experienced larger reductions in HDL cholesterol, the so-called good cholesterol—a change that could be bad for heart health. What's more, women in the study saw larger reductions in both bone mineral density, which may indicate weaker bones, and lean body mass, meaning less muscle. However, women did lose more inches in their hips than men... Men, thanks to their body composition, have more muscle and a higher metabolic rate than women, Lowden said. Since all of the participants were following a roughly 800-calorie-a-day diet, and men typically consume more daily calories than women when following their usual diets, they would have experienced a larger caloric deficit on the study diet and thus would be expected to lose weight faster than women, she said. But the study went one step further to show different metabolic effects of the diet in men when compared towomen. Men typically have more weight in their midsection, known as visceral fat, which surrounds the internal organs, Lowden said. When peoplelose visceral fat, it improves their metabolic rate, helping them to burn more calories, she explained. Women, on the other hand, typically have more subcutaneous fat, which is fat around their thighs, rear and hips that is important for childbearing, Lowden said. When people lose subcutaneous fat, this does not improve their metabolic risk factors, because this type of fat is not metabolically active"
Paolo Shirasi on X - "We find that sex differences in total brain volume are not accounted for by sex differences in height and weight, and that once global brain size is taken into account, there remain numerous regional sex differences in both directions."
i/o on X - "Nothing makes the left more uncomfortable than brain differences between sexes and population groups. In the two decades or so prior to about 2010, it was extremely difficult to get funding to conduct research into sex brain differences — purely for ideological reasons. But advances in imaging and other tech finally burst the dam, and the result has been a flood of research showing sex differences in brain anatomy and processing."
Damn neurosexism!
Why Men Have More Sex Partners Than Women | by Nicole Barbaro, Ph.D. - "That men have a larger variance in number of sex partners is often deduced from what is called Bateman’s Principle. Bateman’s Principle has been around since 1948, and is the result of research on reproductive success, or number of offspring, in fruit flies (Drosophila). The study showed that male fruit flies have greater variance in the number of offspring compared to females... To understand why scientific studies, like my own, do in fact show differences between men’s and women’s mean average number of sex partners, we can examine the assumptions, or what we take for granted to be true, of the mathematical theory described above.
(1) The model assumes a closed population — that all men and all women are accounted for, the whole population is sampled, no one has died or run off to a place unknown, and no other normative dynamics of human populations are observed. Pretty unrealistic.
(2) Everyone’s reports of their sexual histories are 100% accurate. Also, pretty unrealistic.
(3) The model assumes heterosexual sex only — no one is having sex with a same-sex partner. Again, unrealistic...
At the most basic level, the reasons boil down to Bateman’s Principle, both in theory and in reality."
Liberals will claim that humans are not fruit flies, so we can't apply the same principles to humans
