Gender socialisation and maturity; thoughts?

GaborFrame · 2020-05-29T16:59:52+00:00

If you only speculate hard enough, literally everything you see can be interpreted as a result of the oppression of women – and if it were the other way around, it would still be due to oppression of women. Such discussions are so useless.

thereslcjg2000 · 2020-05-29T17:31:06+00:00

That honestly makes me laugh. In my experience boys are taught from a pretty young age that they need to protect and be cognizant of the needs of the people around them. I think it’s absurd to say that boys aren’t pressurized to grow up.

lorarc · 2020-05-29T21:00:42+00:00

We send 18 year old boys to war, if that is not the sign of treating them as mature I don't know what is.

Also I'm not sure what is mature, I know that girls I went to highschool with have started families much earlier than boys. They were raising kids while we were hitting bars and riding motorcycles. But at the same time we were studying and starting careers because we were expected to first make money and then think of family.

OkLetterhead9 · 2020-05-29T17:40:04+00:00

Feminists blame everything on "socialisation" ! men and women are different. biological differences are real.

Alataire · 2020-05-29T19:57:23+00:00

Girls are said to be more mature faster in the social aspect. However there seems to be a stark disconnect in how society treats boys when they do something wrong. 17 Year old boys who did a crime - or were victim of a crime will be reported and treated as young men, while if it were 17 year old girls they will be treated more as girls instead of women.

ParanoidAgnostic · 2020-05-30T02:34:13+00:00

Physically, girls mature faster than boys.

Mentally, I'm not convinced.

What I have seen is when people observe that a girl is "mature," what they mean is actually that the girl is conformist and compliant.

They are teachers and parents equating "easy to deal with" with "mature."

VaderTarts · 2020-05-29T17:22:58+00:00

I believe maturity is largely based on what people value in accordance to personal responsibilities. In ancestral history men and boys a like (as seen in tribal cultures) have primarily had responsibilities as hunters, localized defense forces, scouting parties, and a alpha (or comity of the most valuable tribal members) fighting for decision making and “leading” the tribe. Females have had the equal responsibility of being overall care takers for the tribe, child rearing, supplemental cooking, weaving, home economics as well as other numerous other responsibilities. What might seem as a failure to mature maybe could be a slight misconception in relation to values. A boy’s desire to only want to run outside, hunt (or sport), and sometimes bully other kids (gain power through social structure) might be a different form of maturity.

*Obviously this is a broad statement with plenty of room for conjecture, accompanied by a cultural bias, and incomplete source of overall background knowledge of time period and cultural revolutions (Yes I know. Holy run-on sentence).

Strikester101 · 2020-05-29T21:08:16+00:00

I do believe that boys mature slower or are less conscientous than girls. But socialisation could play a role, as well as how it's a possibility that boys mature differently from girls.

MMDT · 2020-05-30T02:02:06+00:00

They're not wrong but the reason is biological. Girls peak in sexual value somewhere in their late teens. Whereas most late teen males have little to no sexual value.

Contrast once a women enters into her 30s and espeically 40s her sexual value plummets. Whereas men's could well be equal or higher than it has ever been.

Women peak early, have an extremely high peak, then it quickly falls. Men are slow burners.

I mean, an 18 year old girl HAS to be mature. Everywhere she goes she has guys hitting on her, flooding her with attention. She's basically thrust into the life of a minor celebrity. Much older guys who are offering her a chance for things... travel, eating out, sex, all kinds of experiences. An 18 year old guy is basically invisible and worthless. So most end up retiring to their room jerking off and posting on internet message boards.

red_philosopher · 2020-05-29T23:48:13+00:00

All you have to do is read the history and etymology of the word "woman" and you can see that feminists just love to complain.

https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/short-reads/article/3052639/where-word-woman-comes-and-how-it-has-evolved

bkrugby78 · 2020-05-31T22:46:49+00:00

It probably depends more on class and parenting style. I can think of my own experience, it took me longer to mature than my brother's. My life growing up was very comfortable. (I have 5 older brothers). The top 3 matured probably quicker than the bottom 3, because my parents at that time were working a lot, so more responsibilities fell on their shoulders. By the time my next eldest brother and I came around, my parents were doing much better financially, so there was less of a push for us to go out and provide income to help the family.

I generally have a problem with anything that posits "boys are better/worse at this than girls" and vice versa.

I look upon my nieces and nephews and see little difference in maturity among the boys and girls. Sure, opportunity has much to do with it, as well as family structure. I think those growing up in difficult situations will mature quicker and I don't know if they have the time to wonder if boys mature faster or girls do.

mewacketergi · 2020-06-01T16:11:55+00:00

None of this is hardly news, u/Xemnas81.

Look up what blank slate thinking is, and maybe read a book by Steven Pinker. Camille Paglia also diligently explained this many times – biology does not really exist in the worldview for modern feminism, as women's studies departments were formed in a hurry from people whose entire training was in English language and literature.

So what you and I might explain by predominantly hormones, or sex-related biological differences, they explain almost entirely by "socially constructed" factors.

If caught red handed and pressed, a motte and bailey trick is most often used, and words like, "oh, we don't really view things like that" are uttered, or a sob story from how women were mistreated by 1800s medical science will be brought up, while ignoring similar mistreatment of men from that era...

They might have meant well, and coated this in a layer of wanting to change society, and provide ammunition for their activism, but blank slate resulted in a huge part of scientific literacy being excluded from their worldview. This is similar to how evolution-related parts of science do not exist in the view of Christian fundamentalists. This is literally the same phenomenon, and as feminist theory and other fields with "studies" in their name are being taken more seriously, it is starting to take a toll on fields like psychology and sexology.

Razorbladekandyfan · 2020-06-04T15:08:40+00:00

How are girls pressured to mature faster? Literally all responsibilty for anything is pushed on boys.

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