Hombres, mujeres y trabajo

Men, women and work

Vanilla is not the only flavour
Apr 17th 2008

The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap.
By Susan Pinker.
Scribner; 352 pages; $26. Atlantic Books; £12.99

WHY can’t a woman be more like a man, wondered Henry Higgins of his protégée Eliza Doolittle? Susan Pinker, a psychologist-turned-journalist, thinks the question is still being asked, sotto voce, by those who fret about the absence of women in boardrooms and laboratories.

Male, she says, is the “vanilla gender”; the norm from which female deviates. Now that women are free to work in any field, their choices are expected to mirror those of the men around them. So discrimination, albeit covert, is often held to be the cause when more women study biology and education than computing and physics, or take part-time and public-sector jobs rather than work the 80-hour weeks needed to get a seat on the board or a partnership in a law firm.

Ms Pinker sets out a different hypothesis: that the Western women who on average do different work from their brothers do so freely and with reason. The theory is attractive, given that the common alternative view is that women are all too often “either patsies or victims”. It is also controversial. Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University in 2006 because of the fuss caused by his suggestion that discrimination might not be the only reason so few women make it in science. But Ms Pinker marshals much evidence to back up her contention (some of it more contested than she acknowledges) of differing brain structures, hormones, motivation, empathy and risk-aversion.

Diferencias entre sexos al ducharse

(Vía Café de Ocata.)

Peleas matrimoniales

Los idiomas masculino y femenino (II)

Los idiomas masculino y femenino (II)

María Victoria Ramírez* - 15/01/2008

En el artículo anterior comentamos que es frecuente que hombres y mujeres usen estilos de comunicación diferentes. Esto es, que hombres y mujeres usan el lenguaje de manera distinta, y para cosas distintas. Hoy continuamos abordando ciertas diferencias de la comunicación femenina y masculina, que con frecuencia producen malestar y discusiones que a veces acaban en terapia… o en ruptura.

Muchas veces las parejas discuten por cuestiones que desde fuera parecen insignificantes y sin importancia, pero que desde dentro se contemplan de otra manera: tras la discusión desproporcionada acerca de qué programa de televisión ver esta noche, de qué hablamos, o qué comemos hoy, a veces se están cuestionando los sentimientos presentes en la misma relación.

Es interesante resaltar que en las terapias de pareja una queja muy común en las mujeres de parejas heterosexuales es que “él no habla”. Lo cierto es que pareciera que muchos hombres sufren un periodo de locuacidad transitoria durante los estadios iniciales de una relación y, después, cuando la relación se ha asentado, se muestran mucho más callados y reservados, y esto no complace muchas veces a su pareja.

Según José Antonio Marina, una mujer no debería preguntarse: “Pepe, ¿me amará siempre?”, sino más bien: “Pepe, ¿me hablará siempre?”, porque lo que después se manifiesta como una queja frecuente de muchas mujeres no es que el no la ame, sino que no le habla. En terapia, son comunes diálogos como los siguientes, que muestran la forma diferencial en que mujeres y hombres entienden el lenguaje y hacen uso del mismo:

El hombre desnudo: estudio del cuerpo masculino

The meaning of Desmond Morris’s hair-do

11/01/2008

Jan Moir reviews The Naked Man: A Study of The Male Body by Desmond Morris

In his new book Desmond Morris points out that the hair that grows on top of a man’s head is one of the strangest features on his body. Indeed it is! Back in the jungle, man was the only primate to grow a mop on his roof. In the days before combs, scissors and Carmen rollers we must have been a frightful sight, yet this covering served an important purpose.

Head hair was our species signal visible from afar or, in Mick Hucknall’s case, outer space. However, thousands of years of evolution have proved that a lack of hair is equally as fascinating as a surfeit of the stuff. Why, Mr Morris’s own tonsorial arrangements have been the subject of much contemplation and discussion over the decades.

At the height of his fame, he chose to disguise his own lack of thatch with increasingly elaborate camouflage techniques. This bizarre ‘display’ behaviour is surely worthy of proper scientific investigation from a zoologist of his standing, but seek and ye shall not find.

Morris has been far too busy investigating the evolutionary success story of mankind to look skywards and check out the social upheavals that have taken place on his own pate. Therefore it falls to me to commemorate a famous hairstyle once regaled as the most fanciful comb-over in the business; a Charltonesque black skein unravelling from ear to ear over a clear dome of pink skin otherwise untroubled by follicle.

Los idiomas masculino y femenino

Los idiomas masculino y femenino 

María Victoria Ramírez* - 08/01/2008

Tras los periodos de vacaciones, el más reciente de Navidad, un gran número de parejas acuden a consulta debido a las dificultades que tienen para entenderse y convivir. En los días libres de trabajo, los conflictos de pareja se multiplican. Además, precisamente en Navidad hay factores que contribuyen a incrementar la posibilidad de desencuentros, como la no siempre fácil convivencia con la familia propia, y la familia política.

Puesto que existen multitud de factores que pueden influir en los desencuentros de una pareja, en el presente artículo voy a centrarme en uno de los más frecuentes: los estilos de comunicación masculina y femenina.

Detrás de muchos problemas hay una gran incapacidad para la comunicación y la negociación entre los miembros de la pareja. Las preguntas que suelen hacerse y hacer generalmente al terapeuta son:

“¿Por qué discutimos tanto? No somos capaces de ponernos de acuerdo. Nos queremos mucho pero aun así nos peleamos frecuentemente. Recuerdo que al principio de conocernos no era así, pero ahora no se que nos pasa pero estamos todo el día riñendo. No es capaz de ceder en nada. Cada vez que hablamos nos peleamos. ¿Por qué no somos capaces de entendernos?”…

Todo esto con la extrañeza característica que acompaña a este tipo situaciones: si hay amor ¿cómo es posible que no exista felicidad en la convivencia? Tal y como venimos diciendo, la comunicación y las dificultades para entenderse suelen estar detrás de muchos problemas relacionales en la pareja. Tanto es así, que podríamos afirmar sin temor a equivocarnos que puede ser éste el motivo de un gran número de rupturas y separaciones y, en general, de mucha infelicidad.

¿Cuándo hablan más los hombres que las mujeres?

The Last Word: Men Talk as Much as Women

By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Staff Writer

05 July 2007

Toss out the stereotype that women blab more than men. Women and men both speak about 16,000 words a day, according to a new study.

For more than a decade, researchers have asserted that women speak much more than men do, with one neuropsychiatrist reporting in a book (“The Female Brain”) that women use 20,000 words per day compared to only 7,000 for men.

The author of the book, Louann Brizendine of the University of California, San Francisco, said she later found out those numbers were based on an “unreliable” study.

The old “chatty Kathy” claims are questionable, even though they have circulated through the popular culture, according to the authors of the current study published in the July 6 issue of the journal Science.

“Although many people believe the stereotypes of females as talkative and males as reticent, there is no large-scale study that systematically has recorded the natural conversations of large groups of people for extended period of time,” said study co-author James Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin.

To record informal conversations, Pennebaker, along with Matthias Mehl of the University of Arizona and other colleagues developed unobtrusive digital voice recorders programmed to record snippets of ambient sounds periodically. Between 1984 and 2004, nearly 400 university students from the United States and Mexico wore the recorders for up to 10 days.

The researchers transcribed the conversations and analyzed them, finding that women spoke an average of 16,215 daily words while men averaged 15,669 words a day. The difference between the two groups was not statistically significant, and the scientists rounded up to say that both men and women used an average of 16,000 words each day.

La pareja represora

La pareja represora

VICENTE VERDÚ
EL PAÍS  -  Sociedad - 24-11-2007

Se lee El arte de amar de Ovidio, escrito a partir del año 1 a. de C. y se obtiene la sumaria impresión de que la estrategia amorosa apenas ha cambiado a lo largo de los siglos. Los celos, las infidelidades, las armas del halago y el regalo, la preparación de las apariencias incluida la depilación de los varones (entonces con piedra pómez) y el bronceado de la piel, el cortejo, la insistencia, componen un repertorio altamente familiar. Incluso una táctica especialmente estimada por Ovidio como era la interrupción del contacto amoroso por intervalos constituye una tendencia boyante en la evolución de la pareja actual.
No es necesario considerar este recurso como una artimaña calculada. La discontinuidad de las relaciones amorosas procede ya de la misma dinámica del mercado. Cada vez más cónyuges que trabajan fuera de casa tienen su empleo en diferentes localidades y se ven sólo de vez en cuando.

El fenómeno apenas empieza en España pero se registra con claridad en el conjunto de Europa y elocuentemente en Estados Unidos donde los matrimonios formados por commuters han pasado de 1,7 millones en 1990 a casi 4 millones en 2006. Algunos commuters se reúnen cada fin de semana, otros cada quince días y no pocos algunos días al mes.

La relación se mantiene, sin embargo, con insólita firmeza. O más aún, pervive tanto o más que aquella en que sus componentes duermen juntos a diario. Sin la independencia económica de las mujeres y el abaratamiento de los transportes no habría sido posible este modelo pero, a la vez, esta modalidad, hija del nuevo mercado, introduce un tipo de vinculación funcional y afectiva inesperado. Introduce un tipo de eslabón que, multiplicándose, altera la naturaleza de la familia y de la sociedad, de la paternidad y de la aventura amorosa.

¿Por qué discuten hombres y mujeres de manera distinta?

From The Times
October 30, 2007

Why men and women argue differently
Women want to talk about it, but men are more likely to retreat into stoney silence. Our correspondent investigates the science behind how we argue

Damian Whitworth

In Gapun, a remote village on the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea, the women take a robust approach to arguing. In her pithy new book The Myth of Mars and Venus, Deborah Cameron reports an anthropologist’s account of a dispute between a husband and wife that ensued after the woman fell through a hole in the rotten floor of their home and she blamed him for shoddy workmanship. He hit her with a piece of sugar cane, an unwise move that led her to threaten to slice him up with a machete and burn the home to the ground.

At this point he deemed it prudent to leave and she launched into a kros – a traditional angry tirade directed at a husband with the intention of it being heard by everyone in the village. The fury can last for up to 45 minutes, during which time the husband is expected to keep quiet. This particular kros went along these lines: “You’re a f****** rubbish man. You hear? Your f****** prick is full of maggots. Stone balls! F****** black prick! F****** grandfather prick! You have built me a good house that I just fall down in, you get up and hit me on the arm with a piece of sugar cane! You f****** mother’s ****!”

Such a domestic scene may be familiar to some readers, but for most of us arguing with our partners is not quite such an explosive business; except, perhaps, when discussing who is most responsible for a navigational hiccup on the way to lunch at the home of an old flame of our partner’s, or getting to the bottom of who left the ****** ******* cap off the **** ******* toothpaste for the third ****** ******* time this ****** ******* week.

Human beings argue about everything from adultery to Zionism and we do so in different styles, whether we are submissive, passive, aggressive, abusive, abusive-passive, aggressive-abusive, submissive-aggressive or submissive-passive-aggressive-abusive.

But are there any broad differences between the sexes in the way that we argue? US research into marital stress on the heart has thrown up an intriguing finding about the way some are prone to “self-silencing” during arguments. The research by Elaine D. Eaker, published in Psychosomatic Medicine, found that more men than women had a tendency to bottle up their feelings during confrontations with their partners.

Encantos ocultos

Human evolution

Hidden charms
Oct 11th 2007

Lap dancers earn more when they are most fertile

“BECAUSE academics may be unfamiliar with the gentlemen’s club sub-culture, some background may be helpful to understand why this is an ideal setting for understanding real-world attractiveness effects of human female oestrus.”

No doubt readers of The Economist are equally unfamiliar with this sub-culture, but for Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico, who penned the words above in a paper just published in Evolution and Human Behaviour, such clubs are a field site as revealing of human biology as the Serengeti is of the biology of lions and antelopes. Dr Miller is an evolutionary psychologist—and the author of the theory that the large brains of humans evolved to attract the opposite sex in much the same way that a peacock’s tail does. His latest foray, into the flesh-pots of Albuquerque, is intended to investigate an orthodoxy of human mating theory. This is that in people, oestrus—the outward signs of ovulation—has been lost, so that men cannot tell when women are fertile.

This theory is based on the idea that in evolutionary terms it benefits women to disguise when they are fertile so that their menfolk will stick around all the time. Otherwise, the theory goes, a man might go hunting for alternative mating opportunities at moments when he knew that his partner was infertile and thus that her infidelity could not result in children.

¿El mito de Marte y Venus?

From The Sunday Times

October 7, 2007

The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages? by Deborah Cameron

OUP £10.99 pp204

Reviewed by Susannah HerbertIn

In the village of Gapun in Papua New Guinea, when a woman is annoyed with her husband, she swears at him for 45 minutes, at the top of her voice so the neighbours catch every nuance. During this “kros” — the word means “angry” — the target is not allowed to answer back, nor may anyone interrupt until she’s given her feelings full expression.

And what expression it is. The anthropologist Don Kulick recorded a typical kros: “You’re a ****ing rubbish man. You hear? Your ****ing ***** is full of maggots. You’re a big ****ing semen *****. Stone balls! …****ing black *****! You *****ing mother’s ****!”

When the flowers of English womanhood carry on like this — at closing time on Friday night in Ipswich, say — they’re thought to be behaving laddishly. When the housewives of Gapun turn the air blue, however, they are only doing what comes naturally to a woman. The village men, apparently, pride themselves on their ability to conceal their opinions and express themselves indirectly: if they need to get a grievance off their chests, they get their wives to do it for them. In Gapun, women are from Mars, men are from Venus.

I sensed early on in this delightfully spiky book that Deborah Cameron — an Oxford professor of language and communication — would give a first-class kros, and enjoy it, too. The only problem would be limiting the number of victims to one. Cameron’s targets are many: there’s John Gray, the author of the psychobabble classic, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, Deborah Tannen, the author of You Just Don’t Understand, Simon Baron-Cohen, the author of The Essential Difference, and the husband-and-wife team behind a slim volume called Why Men Don’t Iron. These writers all subscribe to some version of what Cameron dubs the Mars-Venus myth, which holds that women are more verbal than men, that women talk more about people, relationships and feelings, while men talk more about things and facts, that women use language in a co-operative way, whereas men use it competitively. Oh, and that these differences mean that men and women routinely fail to communicate, but can learn to do better — which might explain why Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus has sold more than 10m copies in 37 languages.

Mujeres rebeldes

September 30, 2007
We’re No Angels

By KATHRYN HARRISON

WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN SELDOM MAKE HISTORY

By Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

Illustrated. 284 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.

“The pervasive theme is rebellion.” Laurel Thatcher Ulrich begins her new book, “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History,” struggling to explain — understand — the appeal of an aside she made in the spring 1976 issue of an academic journal, a comment that has become a popular slogan printed on T-shirts and coffee mugs and bumper stickers, usually without her permission and often without attribution.

It was in an article for “American Quarterly,” about the pious and extremely well-behaved colonial women described by Cotton Mather as “the hidden ones,” that Ulrich made her now familiar observation . Her study of wives and mothers and daughters as they were remembered in funeral eulogies, the sole record of women who lived and labored in silent obscurity, illustrates a critical point. Much of what is characterized as female “misbehavior” is a matter of voice — of a woman insisting she be heard, paid not only attention, but also the respect due a being as fully human and necessary as a man.

Given millenniums of patriarchy, the issue of women speaking out is necessarily that of their speaking out of turn. The mostly male forums of public life may patronize women with token attention and even, sometimes, take their words seriously, but they rarely if ever pay attention to a woman as they would to a man, without consciously taking her sex into account. Is it an accident of fate that “Well- Behaved Women Seldom Make History” is published as we look ahead to what may become the historic first of a major political party nominating a female candidate for president? Has Hillary Clinton arrived at the forefront by misbehaving?

Ulrich, a Harvard historian whose “Midwife’s Tale” won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for history, uses “three classic works in Western feminism” as a springboard for examining the theme of “bad” behavior. Could the popularity of her slogan, she wondered, be explained by “feminism, postfeminism or something much older?” The answer emerges in Ulrich’s choice of texts: Christine de Pizan’s “Book of the City of Ladies,” written in 1405; Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Eighty Years and More,” published in 1898; and “A Room of One’s Own,” based on two lectures Virginia Woolf gave in 1928 — all works by women who “turned to history as a way of making sense of their own lives.” History, Ulrich reminds us, “isn’t just what happens in the past,” but what we choose to remember. As much invention as discovery, history attempts to make the chaotic present into a coherent picture by comparing it to images, equally artificial, fashioned from events long past.

Necesidad de besarse

Mouth-to-Mouth Resuscitated
Kissing moves up the sexual pecking order
by Tristan Taormino
September 25th, 2007

Researchers at the State University of New York at Albany recently published the results of their study about kissing in Evolutionary Psychology. Many of the findings reflect gender differences and back up common stereotypes about male and female sexuality. Women emphasize kissing more than men; men like tongue- kissing more than women. Women are more likely than men to kiss their partners after intercourse. Men feel that kissing should lead to sex more often than women do. The researchers posited that one of the functions of kissing is to “promote, maintain, and assess the status of bonding.” Citing two other sources, they wrote: “If kissing serves to create a bond between two partners, one would not expect to see kissing in situations where bonding is not wanted. . . . For example, prostitutes often refuse to kiss clientele . . . [which] is thought to be an emotional distancing technique.” There is this notion out there that kissing is seen as “too intimate” by sex workers, but is it truth or misconception? What do people who have sex for a living really think about kissing?

Hombres inmaduros

The Entertainment Industry’s Love Affair With Immature Men
By Alicia Rebensdorf, AlterNet
September 13, 2007

You know the guy. He has a monosyllabic retro name like Hal or Earl or Chuck, mildly wacky hair and a death grip on his adolescence. He’s got frat house furniture and dependency issues with his friends, and is hapless or commitment-phobic with women. The Act One diagnosis is usually that he just “needs to grow up.”

No, not Michael Vick. Though the Falcon quarterback’s explanation for dog fighting — “I need to grow up” — does show just how ubiquitous the Peter Pan excuse has become. Male leads in recent popular TV shows and movies are increasingly portrayed as victims of their own immaturity. If only instead of claiming he had found Jesus, Vick had said he’d found some fantastically attractive and accomplished woman, perhaps the viewing audience would’ve gone along. In today’s romantic comedy scripts, the man-child always meets his Wendy. Only through the innate, successful, high-achieving grace of a female may our hero be saved.

Taken one at a time, it’s easy to pass off this trend as a simple, comedic trope. But considering the storyline’s popularity and how it is affecting gender relations at large, this narrative is worthy of closer attention.

Construcción acartonada de la sexualidad masculina

Rigid Scholarship on Male Sexuality

By CAMILLE PAGLIA

BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY

Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning, by Murat Aydemir (University of Minnesota Press, 2007)

 

Impotence: A Cultural History, by Angus McLaren (University of Chicago Press, 2007)

 

Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid, by Lisa Jean Moore (New York University Press, 2007)

Three provocative books on male sexuality recently published by university presses provide a good barometer of the current state of campus gender studies. A welcome development of the past decade has been the expansion of the gender lens to include men, who were routinely stereotyped by women’s-studies curricula as they took shape from the 1970s on. These books reflect that broader perspective and also display a more liberal attitude toward pornography, which was assailed in the 1980s by religious and cultural conservatives oddly allied with crusading feminists. By the 90s, pornography was legitimized as a field of study by gay male academics as well as an insurgent wing of sex-positive feminism. However, despite their greater sexual sophistication, the three books under review still retain traces of the old archfeminist censoriousness toward men — or, more exactly, toward the majority of men in the world who do not happen to conform to the tidy bourgeois values of political correctness.

¿Tienen algo bueno los hombres?

Is There Anything Good About Men?
Roy F. Baumeister

This invited address was given at a meeting the American Psychological Association in San Francisco on August 24, 2007. The thinking it represents is part of a long-range project to understand human action and the relation of culture to behavior. Further information about Prof. Baumeister and his research can be found at the foot of this page. — D.D

You’re probably thinking that a talk called “Is there anything good about men” will be a short talk! Recent writings have not had much good to say about men. Titles like Men Are Not Cost Effective speak for themselves. Maureen Dowd’s book was called Are Men Necessary? and although she never gave an explicit answer, anyone reading the book knows her answer was no. Louann Brizendine’s book, The Female Brain, introduces itself by saying, “Men, get ready to experience brain envy.” Imagine a book advertising itself by saying that women will soon be envying the superior male brain!

Nor are these isolated examples. Alice Eagly’s research has compiled mountains of data on the stereotypes people have about men and women, which the researchers summarized as “The WAW effect.” WAW stands for “Women Are Wonderful.” Both men and women hold much more favorable views of women than of men. Almost everybody likes women better than men. I certainly do.

My purpose in this talk is not to try to balance this out by praising men, though along the way I will have various positive things to say about both genders. The question of whether there’s anything good about men is only my point of departure. The tentative title of the book I’m writing is “How culture exploits men,” but even that for me is the lead-in to grand questions about how culture shapes action. In that context, what’s good about men means what men are good for, from the perspective of the system.

Hence this is not about the “battle of the sexes,” and in fact I think one unfortunate legacy of feminism has been the idea that men and women are basically enemies. I shall suggest, instead, that most often men and women have been partners, supporting each other rather than exploiting or manipulating each other.

Nor is this about trying to argue that men should be regarded as victims. I detest the whole idea of competing to be victims. And I’m certainly not denying that culture has exploited women. But rather than seeing culture as patriarchy, which is to say a conspiracy by men to exploit women, I think it’s more accurate to understand culture (e.g., a country, a religion) as an abstract system that competes against rival systems — and that uses both men and women, often in different ways, to advance its cause.

Also I think it’s best to avoid value judgments as much as possible. They have made discussion of gender politics very difficult and sensitive, thereby warping the play of ideas. I have no conclusions to present about what’s good or bad or how the world should change. In fact my own theory is built around tradeoffs, so that whenever there is something good it is tied to something else that is bad, and they balance out.

I don’t want to be on anybody’s side. Gender warriors please go home.