The Difference Between Men & Women: Nature or Nurture?

[Laurel]

Friends of mine assume that men are more "visual" than women - that women want touchy-feely-sex-in-the-dark, while men want doggie-style lights on down & dirty. After reading the fantasies of women and men for the last few years, I'm seen that men can be just as sensitive and romantic as any woman, and women can be just as horny & nasty as any man. The same women who will sneer at men with their pin-ups are the first to leer at a nude male model.

However, there are obviously major physiological differences between men & women.

In your humble opinion, how much of our sex drive & sexual needs are preprogrammed genetically, and how much is environmental? If a boy & girl baby were raised exactly alike, would they both have the same libido? How much is nature and how much is culture?

 

[p_p_man]

I reckon sex drive is genetic...

As it's a chemical reaction it's unlikely that the environment would have much influence on its strength or weakness.

Likewise if two baby's were brought up in identical circumstances they would not necessarily grow up with the same amount of sexual drive.

Ergo: You either got it or you ain't!

 

[registered "^^"]

Sex drive is about equal, women just hide it better. As p_p_man stated, you got it or you don't, thus it is more then likely genetic.
I know that men rolling over and snoring after is gentic, the same as animals.

 

[Mensa]

This is an old question that rarely has total agreement attached to it. Nature or nurture? If a boy and girl were raised exactly the same would their libidos develop likewise? I believe it isn't reallly a question of one or the other, but rather a combination of both. Your inner character combined with your environment determines how you develop.

They've had instances of identical twins separated at birth being reunited and comparing their lifestyles to see whether or not they parallel each other in their likes and dislikes. It seems the evidence indicates a natural affinity to certain things between them that can only be explained by nature. How they express their common desires, however, can be effected by their environment.

Growing up, little boys seem drawn more to certain activities than little girls. Feminists have in the past lamented this and tried to blame societal prejudice for the differences. Unfortunately, all intensive studies in the matter indicate otherwise, that boys and girls have different interests and desires because they are different. Boys enjoy video games with lots of action and a distressingly high level of violence, whereas, girls want activities of a more nurturing nature. When boys play with "action figures" they make them do violent and dangerous things, girls with "dolls" make them play house and dress-up. It seems this difference is inbred and natural and difficult if not impossible to break.

Men do prefer visuals. Women prefer psychologicals. Men want to look at pretty women, preferably naked. Women prefer reading about romantic encounters and let their minds fill in any necessary details. These are not universally hard and fast rules, there are exceptions, but in the main they hold true.

 

[*Lazer*]

I think the same qualities are found in each sex but the expression is individual. I had a doll but jumped from the roof of our house to the tree next to my window several times a day. I played war games and was as ruthless as my brothers. I dressed barbie up in her wedding dress and then blew up her playhouse with cherrybombs. I hid six baby kittens from a neighbor who was going to destroy them for three months. What does that prove nothing. My mother was a cross your ankles not your legs, don't SPRAWL on the couch kind of person. I think it is a combination of genetics and environment. Men have just as much nuture in them as women it just comes out differently. Perhaps it is not that there is so much difference as it is that we have limited visual capacity. Oh and Mensa if guys are so much more visual how come most can't match ties and shirts?

 

[Lord Wolf]

Nature v Nuture

I tend to agree with Mensa in that females seem to be hardwired towards nuture, while males seem directed more to physicality.

But it is not a matter of black and white in that there gradiations on the line between the two poles, male and female. Any girl who grew up in the Fifties and Sixties must remember the wars in the girls' washrooms using rat tail combs sharpened with a pencil sharpener. No nuture there!

But how many times do we see women moving towards babies, dragging their menfolk out of comas and serious illnesses, and in general patching up men's boo-boos?

My wife has said that part of the Godess' Triple aspects is "nuture, fuck, and kill".

As to sex drive, women are far more driven by sex than are men. Until recently however, sex carried more risks and had to be repressed. Which is why, even in the twenties, store catalogues carried discreet ads for vibrators, so women could burn some of that libido off. Now, thanks to the pill (and condoms), women have charged into the soi-disant sexual revolution, knickers flying!

No man ever gets consensually laid unless the woman has decided, usually within the first ten minutes, that sex is going to happen, and most guys are too dumb to notice until she's naked and dragging him into the sack.

As to visual arousal, my experience has been that, in general, women enjoy porn as much as men. What they don't like is seeing women portrayed as mere receptacles of men's lust. Films that portray women as equal and cheerful participants are well received by women, in my experience.

 

[cymbidia]

Intelligent people make me so HOT!

Intelligently stated opinions, reasoned and coherent, go straight to whatever little section of my brain is responsible for the release of slippery fluids into my female parts. Well-reasoned and cogently offered opinions make me want to jump someone's bones.

No, i am not being facetious at all.
I am not being sarcastic or making fun of anyone.
It's all true.

Whew. You people on this thread are so sexy.


Questions: Do men and women feel the same about words like this?

Are arousal cues different for the genders when it's a visual medium like this board?

Are these kinds of words, and the images they offer so tantalizingly, images slightly different in the mind of each reader, sexy in the same degree for men and women?

If not, is it because we have inherently different responses to such cues (nature)?

Or is it that we've learned to respond differently to the flow of black-and-white imagery-prompts across the screen (nurture).

If we respond similarly to these kinda of cues, is it that we've learned to do so because these kinds of cues were not present when we were evolving as a species?

~~~~~
BTW, i'm pretty firmly in the camp with those who feel we are as we are, Homo sapiens, as a result of our speciation, i.e., the birds and bees don't have this concern, it's peculiar to humans.

Within the human family, men evolved to go out, hunt the meat, kill the meat, drag the meat back to the cave, eat the meat, fuck, sleep, and then get up the next the day and go do it again.

Women, otoh, evolved to go out in groups to sift through the plants in the harsh will-kill-you-if-you-choose-wrong environment and find medicinal/edible plants. Women did that in groups, requiring a LOT of interpersonal dialogue and skills to remember where/what the good plants were. We did community child care from earliest times, too, and clothing preparation, and the myriad other homey chores that have been the lot of women through the millennia. We did it all in groups, with our sisters and mothers and girlfriends.

Is it any wonder we respond differently to almost everything, sexuality included?

(Personally, though, i don't WANT it in the dark. I want to see, too. )

 

[bluntforcemama]

While others now say that there is too much biological evidence that personality development is based on innate precursors to deny the fact of sexual difference, we cannot ignore the effect of learning. For a start, the idea that we are the helpless products of our heredity takes away our free will.

We must not allow those who insist on the difference to blind us to the similarities and we must not allow the biological stereotypers to get away with the idea that there is only one kind of man and one kind of woman. As Sandra Bem puts it: "Fluffy Women and Chesty Men."

As Sayers (3) puts it: "When one examines these supposedly purely biological accounts of gender roles one finds that they are rooted in appeal to social, not biological, considerations. This is true not only of recent biological analyses of sexual divisions in Society but also of the analogous biological explanations of these divisions advanced in the nineteenth century. The similarity between earlier and current versions of the theses that 'biology is woman's destiny' is striking."

-GENDER ROLES - GENDER VARIANCE - GENDER IDENTITY

http://www.gendys.mcmail.com/about/00_diffs.htm

 

[Mensa]

What we need is incentive

Oh and Mensa if guys are so much more visual how come most can't match ties and shirts?

It's just a tie, but put a picture of a pretty woman on it and we'd match them up perfectly every time!

 

[morninggirl5]

One of the most interesting lectures I ever listened to was when a professor (who is also a Neuro Psychologist) tried to explain the differences between males and females based on brain differentiation. (The other professor for the class, a school psychologist and his wife was interestingly quiet the whole time.)

There is one known difference in brain structure that accounts for the men are visual, women are verbal. The areas of the brain responsible for language begin to be specialized in one side of the brain in early childhood. (For most of us, this is in the left hemisphere of the brain.) This specialization begins earlier in females but is more complete in males. This "incomplete" differentiation in females explains why females want to talk about everything, according to the professor.

His theory made sense and can be used to explain why men and women have such a hard time understanding each other.


To answer the question, I don't believe it's libido, per se that is different. But the expression of that libido is usually different and that's not only a function of being male or female but also your individual personality. We all have differing preferred modes of communication (and learning styles) and these correlate pretty well to other areas of our lives. Whether these were determined by nature or nurture is almost like the chicken and the egg.

My solution is to figure out what works for you and don't worry if it's nature or nurture.

 

[pabloback]

definitely nature
a mans sexual cycle lasts about 7 minutes , a womans lasts about nine months , the difference between a man ejaculating and a woman giving birth
read the book "why men dont listen and women cant read maps " by alan and barbara pease
it is excellent and explains [nearly ] all