What do men want?

[Aliantha]

OK, here I am again, and so soon!

I think the one thing we all seem to forget about when we discuss issues of nature or nurture are the hormones. They're so different in men and women, and there's really no one I can think of, man or woman, who hasn't obviously behaved in a way which has been predestined by their hormones. Some minor exceptions would be those with gender identification issues, which research has suggested might be due a hormonal imbalance in utero.

Yeah, plenty of men and women are not slaves to their hormones in that they pick a fight with any man who looks at him sideways or become a blithering mess once a month, but that doesn't mean they aren't affected. They've just found a way to control those urges. To my mind, that doesn't mean they're any less of a man or woman, but they're definitely different, and can be fairly confidently predicted to behave in certain manners in certain situations. The only difference is the extremity of those behaviours.

About the child thing, I think most kids aren't really boys or girls till those hormones kick in. Till then, it's about the parents influence one way or another. We try very hard in our house not to influence the kids into any type of gender stereotype, but the boys have still turned out to be much like boys, and the girl is somewhat undecided. lol She's just a little ratbag atm really. You could dress her in anything and not know her gender by her behaviours.

I agree with foot on this one. I think it's a little from column A, and a little from column B as far as the how of us becoming masculine or feminine in our behaviours, but physiologically, it's pretty hard to beat nature.