> Name a positive masculine trait, something which men tend to have and women tend not to
This question is wrong. I mean, in the sense that a valid english sentence does not mean a valid question. See for example "which colour is the number 4" or "how many notes does the capital of france have". They are syntactically valid questions but have no real meaning.
There are no masculine traits that men have and women dont, that is not what masculinity even means. What traits, behaviours and modes of expression are related to masculinity (in western culture) are things such as leadership, honor, aggresion, competitiveness. There is a long history as to why this is the case, some cultural, some historical some arguable biological essentialist. But just because testosterone makes you more aggresive, and more competitive does not mean women are not, or can not be, competitive or ambitious.
In the same veing that feminine traits like emotional regulation, teammwork, compassion etc are not something men do not have. It is not like men only do individual sports and women only do team sports.
in other words, pitting them as exclussionary is framing the entire conversation wrong, and therefore even haviing this as an assumption "should go without saying - it's not a "masculine" trait otherwise" makes the entire question wrong.
From false you can prove anything, is an old adage in formal logic F -> any(P) . but you cannot, and should not form a basis of "masculine traits are those not expressed by women", but "masculine traits are the cultural aspects related to masculinity in a specific culture". Now you can define masculinity and time period and culture and get an answer. But the definition of "not expressed by women" is just wrong from the offset.
> But just because testosterone makes you more aggresive, and more competitive does not mean women are not, or can not be, competitive or ambitious.
People always jump to biology when there isn't much to support a cultural observation. Often than not conclusions based on hormones tend to be false.
Testosterone makes people aggresive as estrogen make people hysterical. The trouble with this model is that when tested (within levels that occur in nature), Testosterone does not make people aggressive nor does estrogen make people hysterical. Hormones are about sexual reproduction and neither aggression or hysteria provide benefits in that domain.
What Testosterone (using more modern research) does (among other things) is to increase behavior towards maintaining social status based on whatever social behavior has in the individual person culture been imprinted. To use other words, Testosterone trigger learned behaviors in specific circumstances in order to maximize chances of sexual reproduction in specific cultural environments.
Estrogen too is significant more complex and research on this subject is even more spotty. There are multiple forms of Estrogen, and the effect is generally about its proportional relation to other hormones.
The conversation is very technical and I just wanted to point towards a "simple" example that most people can relate to.
Yes the behavioural effect of hormones goes beyond simple "aggresion up" nonsense, however it is reported that feelings of loneliness, aggresion and hornyness are reported in many transmen when starting the test treatments. Between this observation and the memories of male puberty many cis men have I think using aggresion as a proxy to describe some of perhaps bio causes of our societal understanding of masculinity is not a terrible example.
I used pink/blue as an example of non bio masculine and feminine traits that point towards the core issue of masculinity being entirely a social construct and the bio argument being almost irrelevant when discussing the whole thing. I just thought it was a simple example, but I do concede that hormone effects on the body are multiple, complicated and in many ways misunderstood so perhaps it was not a great choice.
> There are no masculine traits that men have and women dont
This is not true. There are obvious traits as humans aren’t unique in biology. It’s not to say that these things are unique to women or men, but that they are more common.
Male swans are larger than female swans. This doesn’t mean that all male swans are larger than all female swans. But it’s a masculine trait.
There are obvious traits that are masculine and feminine and some are positive or negative. And some were more positive or negative historically and in the future.
This doesn’t mean that one sex is superior to another in general.
All humans have equal rights to dignity even though different sexes and genders have specific advantages and disadvantages.
But just showing the height differences of men and women is pretty clear. That was more useful 800 years ago when people wore armor and fought wars and less useful in the future when people work in space.
> Male swans are larger than female swans. This doesn’t mean that all male swans are larger than all female swans. But it’s a masculine trait.
So it depends on definition here right. The trait "taller" is masculine with respect to female swans. But Height, is not something that women do not have.
Dutch people are taller than the rest of the planet, that does not make Dutch women more masculine than American men. hence my point that something that is masculine cannot be defined as something women do not have.
> But Height, is not something that women do not have.
Height is not masculine. Higher height than women is masculine. The average man is taller than the average woman.
The average Dutch man is taller than the average Dutch woman.
Traits doesn’t mean only one sex has it. It just means a difference.
Both men and women have testosterone and estrogen. But the levels are the traits difference between them.
I’m not sure what you’re arguing as the request was to name something that men are better at than women, some characteristic. You should be able to do that as it’s simple.
It doesn’t seem that you’re arguing that there’s no difference. Just some weird semantic debate with yourself about what “trait” means.
> The average man is taller than the average woman.
Yes, but that was kinda my point. "Taller" is a comparative trait not an intrinsic one. If you are the last person on earth, things like your height, your test level, how you keep your beard etc remain. But you are not taller than anyone.
> Traits doesn’t mean only one sex has it
That is how the dude above me defined it, hence my complaint, thanks for agreeing with me here.
> But the levels are the traits difference between them.
Yes, but also those traits individually are not enough. Similar to Species in an animal group, what we look for are clusters. Clusters of traits that are masculine/feminine etc makes us read a human as feminine or masculine.
> It doesn’t seem that you’re arguing that there’s no difference.
My argument is that masculine and feminine are mostly made up social constructs that we mold based on many times silly stuff. Like people in croatia used to ride a horse with a necktie to not get swea on their shirts, and the king of france liked it so much he copied it but made it expensive with silk, then rich twats in france followed and 400 years later all men in banking wear ties, as peak masculine work uniform. There is nothing "masculine" about a french king copying a necktie and yet culturally it is enshrined.
So I was arguing that the position that masculine is something women tend not to do/or have is wrong. That is not how masculine or feminine things start, they start at random many times and culturally stick.
You've attempted to subtly rephrase the question - I said "tend" for a reason, thus I will sadly have to discard the rest of your post. In fact, it puzzles me why you bothered writing a wall of text here, surely you didn't believe this wouldn't be seen through instantly?
> You've attempted to subtly rephrase the question
I didn't. I just pointed out that definying masculinity as exclusionary from women is wrong by definition. Pointed out a number of traits that are currently considered masculine in modern western society and also pointed out how despite their definition we see tons of overlap on those formal categories.
The part I objected too was defining masculinty as "should go without saying - it's not a "masculine" trait otherwise".
To give a very obvious example. Blue is masculine and pink is feminine, this is inarguable however less than 100 years ago the opposite was true. It does goes with saying that masucline is not something men show and women tend not to. Because masculinity is not defined on biological essentialism, it is largely cultural.
By starting with a false assumption "It cannot be masculine if men do not showcase this trait more than women" you can come to wrong conclusions, because from false you can prove anything.
You did, you even replied for a moment removing the "tend" with an imaginary quote:
> You said tend sure, but still defined masculine as "something women do not have". See the lack of Tend there.
Tend was always there in my comment - twice.
But even excepting that, there are still flaws in your argument.
Firstly, my question was not related to biological essentialism. You can define "masculine" and "feminine" in a cultural context and still run into the same problem - which masculine traits, in the current cultural environment, are positive?
Secondly, we can trivially see from your examples that toxic and positive are flip-sides of the same thing. Traits you might define as positive, e.g. competitiveness and leadership require a degree of stoicism which would, in modern feminist terms, also be "toxic". Leaders of businesses can't be too concerned with putting their competitors out of a job, you can't lead an army (never mind fight in one) as a quivering wreck.
Let's call it a misunderstanding, and I apologise, I thought the part within parentheses was a bait and switch and I shouldn't have expected bad faith.
> you can define "masculine" and "feminine" in a cultural context and still run into the same problem - which masculine traits, in the current cultural environment, are positive?
That was already in my original comment, but traits like leadership, honor, strength, bravery, competence, intelligence, humour are all in some form or another in western culture male coded. Those are all insanely positive, and a real treat to not have to constantly be asserted.
> we can trivially see from your examples that toxic and positive are flip-sides of the same thing. Traits you might define as positive, e.g. competitiveness and leadership require a degree of stoicism which would, in modern feminist terms, also be "toxic".
So this is an important point. Yes, almost any trait CAN be positive or negative. Being competitive and wanting to win is good, training hard, pointing our flaws and working on them is good. Shouting at your coworkers, punching them and treating them like dogshit isn't, regardless if Michael Jordan thinks it is what made the chicago bulls win or not.
Also no modern feminist believes stoicism is inherently toxic. Stoicism is in many ways the basis of CBT which is considered by most modern psychologists as a cool tool to work on stuff and many modern feminists constantly talk about CBT. Youtube stoicism where a bald dude tells you to treat women and business as a goal, shut your feelings out and be an unfeeling terminator that only thinks of hustling and business is toxic, but calling that stoicism might make you rich because you can have infinite energy by using Marcus Aurelius spinning in his grave as a source of energy.
> Leaders of businesses can't be too concerned with putting their competitors out of a job
This is entirely based on the wrong assumption that the economy is a winner takes all market. Which it isn't. Yes you cannot think of your competition if you want to be an oil baron. But most software companies open source work, which benefits their competitiors because there are added benefits to strong ecosystems, healthy competition and interoperability of systems. See NATO having interoperable munition despite every country working in secret in the design of their own planes, tanks etc. If america (leaders in business in this example) sought to conquer the market, yes they would, but we would all have worse optics as France is a world leader.
This question is wrong. I mean, in the sense that a valid english sentence does not mean a valid question. See for example "which colour is the number 4" or "how many notes does the capital of france have". They are syntactically valid questions but have no real meaning.
There are no masculine traits that men have and women dont, that is not what masculinity even means. What traits, behaviours and modes of expression are related to masculinity (in western culture) are things such as leadership, honor, aggresion, competitiveness. There is a long history as to why this is the case, some cultural, some historical some arguable biological essentialist. But just because testosterone makes you more aggresive, and more competitive does not mean women are not, or can not be, competitive or ambitious.
In the same veing that feminine traits like emotional regulation, teammwork, compassion etc are not something men do not have. It is not like men only do individual sports and women only do team sports.
in other words, pitting them as exclussionary is framing the entire conversation wrong, and therefore even haviing this as an assumption "should go without saying - it's not a "masculine" trait otherwise" makes the entire question wrong.
From false you can prove anything, is an old adage in formal logic F -> any(P) . but you cannot, and should not form a basis of "masculine traits are those not expressed by women", but "masculine traits are the cultural aspects related to masculinity in a specific culture". Now you can define masculinity and time period and culture and get an answer. But the definition of "not expressed by women" is just wrong from the offset.