[Vol. 22] Debunking the Gender-Difference Myth
As it turns out, men and women are both from earth.
Welcome back to That’s Gay, a candidly queer newsletter for a candidly queer world (cheers to that 😉 🥂), written by me, Till Kaeslin.
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Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, huh?
Well, as it turns out, there’s growing evidence to the contrary. Both of them might even be from *gulp* Earth. That’s right – the very same planet! 🌎
I’ve been watching a lot of Friends lately – I can’t really explain it, but something about the nostalgia and familiarity of that show just calms me down. Not to mention I fucking love Phoebe’s one-liners.
But what does a 90s-era TV show have to do with the gender-difference myth?
I’m glad you asked :)
Friends, I think, is a pretty accurate portrayal of how guys and girls interact in a friend group. Ok, maybe the constant dusting of light sexual tension is just a straight thing, but the way they characterize each other based on their gender is something everyone will find familiar, I’m sure.
Girls do this, guys do this. Girls don’t do that, guys do. Girls aren’t supposed to [insert some normal ass thing that they apparently aren’t supposed to do here], guys aren’t allowed to [insert another very mundane, “why is this even gendered?” thing here].
Friends, as fun as it is to zone out to, enforces the gender-difference myth.
If you were an alien with no prior experience with humanity and you were given nothing to educate yourself but a season of Friends to watch, you’d think we really were born on two different planets; that we were two foreign species dropped on the same planet as some sort of weird, intergalactic science experiment.
And that just won’t do.
So, alien, drop that copy of Friends – you know Ross and Rachel are going to get together eventually anyways (and, yes, you’re right – despite your very limited exposure to humanity, even you can see that Rachel could do a whole lot better than Ross).
Let me give you a different interpretation. Let’s talk about the gender-difference myth.
The gender-difference myth is exactly as it sounds – a fairytale that goes back centuries in which men and woman are basically two different species.
As the American Psychological Association puts it, the gender-difference myth is a series of ““urban legends” of gender difference”, primarily perpetuated by the media we consume – despite there being a big fat lack of hard evidence behind it.
Are we really that different? Or is that something we’ve just been lead to believe?
Psychologist Janet Shibley Hyde, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, doesn’t think so.
After observing the results of dozens of studies related to gender and psychology, Hyde came to what she calls a “gender similarities hypothesis” – AKA her observation that, in all the studies she reviewed, men and women responded and behaved more alike than different on most psychological variables.
Are labels holding us back & keeping us apart?
The nature vs. nurture question is as old as time, and it’ll probably stick around to the end of time. It’s a real thinker.
Honestly, I think both play a role when it comes to gendered differences, but aren’t we leaning a little too hard on the nature end of things?
The gender-difference myth and the power of nurture on the way men and women act is something we just don’t talk about – and I mean that literally. There are countless best-selling books and magazine spreads – just like the now-infamous Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus – that tell us men and women are so damn different that we can’t even communicate properly
*at least, not without the help of whatever relationship guru wrote that “5 Ways to Tell He Likes You” piece vying for your attention at the checkout counter.
It’s not that we’re too different to communicate, Hyde suggests, but that we think we’re too different to communicate. According to her, men and women stop talking prematurely because they’ve been taught to believe it’s hopeless – as hopeless as trying to carry a conversation with an alien.
Now for some masturbation facts.
Surprised you with that one, didn’t I? 😉 I promise it’s relevant and my research really did lead me here – although I would’ve taken any excuse to work sex into the conversation, let’s be real.
Back in the good ol’ 80s/90s (for most of which I wasn’t even a concept of a human being yet), some researchers got together and asked themselves the very formal question:
Do men still masturbate more than women?
Apparently, it had been a long-standing finding that men were more prone to masturbating than women – which fits the girls/guys sexuality stereotypes I grew up believing years later. These dedicated scientists wanted to see if the world had changed its gendered tune on … as my friends across the pond would say … wanking.
From the sample of university students they interviewed (a key demographic for this study 😂) it looked like not much had changed.
According to the abstract of the study, “Twice as many men as women had ever masturbated and the men who masturbated did so three times more frequently during early adolescence and young adulthood than the women who masturbated during these same age periods.”
Confirming gender stereotypes or conforming to them?
Ah, the nature vs. nurture question rears its annoying head once again.
From just looking at the results of this study, and from growing up in a society over-saturated with gender-difference myths – infamously including the idea that men are naturally more sexual than women – you might think these numbers confirm the gender stereotypes of old.
Of course, we know that’s not the whole story.
Women are shamed for their sexuality as part of their nurture, and it’s far from nurturing.
Here at That’s Gay, we do some more reading. We read personal stories of women who’ve grown up feeling intense shame around masturbation. We find out, from their words, that it was once the popular belief of scientists that if women, ya know, got themselves off, they’d end up with all kinds of illnesses – uterine cancer, epilepsy, depression, and *this is where I draw the line* bad posture!!
Shame is learned and passed down through generations. It’s a cycle. I can imagine it’s hard to break out of a shame cycle that has a history as abysmal as this one.
As we share our experiences openly and break down taboo, gender difference myths are losing their power.
As more women talk about their sexuality openly on TV shows, in movies, on their YouTube channels, and on wildly popular podcasts, gender gaps in masturbation, orgasms, porn-watching etc. are starting to slim.
Even a recent study from Sweden on masturbation habits – the compulsory once-a-decade, “how are we doing in the bedroom?” check-in, I assume – shows the gap is much smaller than it once was, with the mass majority of both genders – 98.9% of men and 85.5% of women – saying they’d masturbated before. The overall findings of the study revealed to wanking researchers that “a large proportion of men and women reported similar experiences”.
Similar experiences, huh? Who would’ve thunk that two species from entirely different planets could be more alike than different?
Maybe it’s time we wrote more articles, books, and TV/movie scripts on that. The gender-difference myth is tired.
And that was That’s Gay, Volume 22. See you in Volume 23, folks!
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