Profile of squippy

yeah, Peer pressure doesn't Start in Kindergarten or basic school. Lol.
Hormones are a kind of script. Prenatal development, puberty, love, a women's period, all rely heavily on hormones to "steer". How can you be so ignorant of biology?

I'm not at all ignorant of biology, thank you very much. hormones are not remotely complicated enough to constitute a "script"; therefore they cannot be relied upon to explain things so complicated. That men wear trousers and women wear skirts is not a function of biological drives.

why would there be more variability?

Because it's quite easy for a given female baby to get a bigger testosterone dose than a male baby. If there were some sort of scale of testosterone response that determined enjoyment of ball sports, or whatever, then it would vary pretty widely across sex.

And not to mention that oestrogen is also used in fight/flight responses etc, undermining the correlation in the first place.

And your second example is total bollocks. Cloth color? That has nothing to do with our basic instincts.

Hahahaha..... really? But apparently, playing RTS's does? We've some instinctive drive to like or dislike RTS's, but not clothing? Hilarious.

Even better, you apparently didn't even understand what I was getting it. First of all, dress has a lot to do with sexual display, which is definitely something we have evolved, biological traits for. But more to the point was that what was considered normal and "natural" for men and women CHANGES, which shows that in fact it was neither normal nor natural.

Why should your claims about what is normal and therefore natural be regarded as any more reliable? I certainly don't think they are.

Better talk about things like war. The only example I can think of where primarily women went to war instead of men are the Amazon's. That is pretty much zero variation.

I don't recall anyone talking about women PRIMARILY going to war. That's a straw man. Doesn't look like this isn't going to go well for you.

So OK, lets look at those Amazons. AKA, Massagatae, Scythians. Scythian burials definitely show female as well as male skeletons buried with arms (note, not exclusively female, you're taking the legend as if it were real). One of the markers of Scythian culture is the "timber-grave" burial, which is also found among the "Celts", along with other typically Scythian traits such as horse-fetishism. Famously, of course, Caeser noted the propensity for violence of Celtic women.

Now, the Celts spread all the way from Britain to Turkey, and related cultural forms, like plaids, are also found with mummies in the Takla Makan desert. So what we've actually got, from the example you thought was the exception that proved the rule, is a cultural complex featuring horse-riding nomads and warrior women that stretches across the bulk of Eurasia.

Far from invoking an argument that shows how unusual female fighters are, it's actually a fantastic demonstration of how widespread it used to be.

Even in cultures we didn't have contact with for ten thousand years, the basic principle is the same. Men are aggressive, dominant, go to war. Women are responsible for the kids and the household, so social and communicative

There are several problems with your argument, the first of which is that you are going from the general to the specific. You can't go from such a broad (and as I've already shown, inaccurate) generalisation to saying that this specific woman won't like a specific something. Most people like tomatoes, but I knew someone who couldn't stand them. People are not stamped out of a factory machine.

If we assume that the audience of CoH2 is restricted to Europe and the USA - and it isn't, of course - then that's a combined population of a billion people, slightly more than half of whom are female... and yet apparently it is beyond your capacity to imagine that some of them might be interested in this game? That's a claim that beggars belief. Especially considering that the video, and a post upthread, both made the point that other games, even more closely associated with violence like FPS's, have a significantly larger female following.

The second problem is that in actual historical cultures, this generalisation of yours is only partially true. There are plenty of early societies which Europe encountered during the age of exploration which, say, involved men equally with child-raising. And even more damning for your position, that internal/external divide originally meant that men had little or not political power; it was women who made the decisions. Thus, the Iroquois had a war-leader, who was male, but he was appointed (and could be deposed) by a council formed of female elders; which means that while mean did most (but not all) of the fighting, it was women doing most of the strategy. And this is a strategy game, is it not?

Interesting fact: men and women have different eyesight. Men can see fast movements at the borders of the fow, while women can see the center better ( which explains why men often suck at searching). Examples like these show how different we really are!

Sure, I'm aware of this. You seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that I, or anyone, has argued that there are "no differences". That isn't what I'm arguing, or indeed, anyone that I know of has. Instead the issue is that people should be treated as individuals. It is quite possible for THIS PARTICULAR man to have less effective motion tracking systems than THIS PARTICULAR woman, if that's the thing you want to measure. Hell, it's increasingly clear that body tissues don't all share the same sex, because there's a fair bit of variability in sex hormone exposure in utero.

Most women can bend their elbows back further than most men. But there are men who can bend their elbows back further than some women. It's just not the case that sex is any more of a fixed and totalising attribute than any other property that people have.

So even if it were true that the generalisation that MOST women may not be interested in this sort of thing holds, it;s not a sufficient explanation for the sheer scale of the polarisation we actually see.


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The Machine's video quite reasonably and intelligently attempted to steer clear of this very morass by dealing specifically with the issue of why RTS's specifically have a smaller female following than other topically similar games. However, as is always the case on the internet, there's always some arse who's got to pop up and make some absurd claim to biological essentialism, and for whom this is an issue that shouldn't even be discussed. That dog don't hunt.

woot? the onset starts at 12-14??? i dont know what "scientists" made that up, but the social pressure starts much earlier (the princess playing with barbies (age5), etc)

Im not writing a paper here; obviously I'm not including every possible pertinent fact. The difference is that between parental pressure and peer pressure.

12-14 is rather the point where puberty hits, so hormones come into play. but of course, most genderstudy antiscientists dont like the word hormones or anything that has to do with biology=real science

That of course is entirely untrue. Pleading "hormones" isn't going to get you anywhere, becuase hormones are not chunks of programming script.

Jesus wept.

Generally speaking girls are less competitive and/or less inclined to like cognitive activities, which is why there aren't very many girls at university getting degrees in physics or engineering but rather education or biology.

Inconveniently for your argument, there's a lot of evidence that something else is going on. Repeated studies have shown that girls exhibit the same degree of interest in "hard" sciences as boys, at ages below 12-14. After that point, interest and participation in STEM topics declines rapidly. Most people interested in the topic don't believe that this is some sort of cosmic accident, seeing as it correlates so neatly with the onset of social pressures to conform to gender stereotypes.

It's not as simple as you depict; there's much more going on than just some sort of assumption that everything we see is the way it "should" be.

Back in the day, I used to play a lot of Counter-Strike, and I became convinced that many people were cheating. Especially when I would ambush someone from behind, and they would spin around and one-shot me in the face. This seemed so impossible to me that I was convinced they must be aimbotting.

Until one day I did it myself. Shot at from behind, reflexively hit jump, spun 180, single deagle shot right in the noggin. Purely because by that time, with more experience my instincts and reflexes were better, less conscious.

Now I know there really are hackers in CS, I've seen them too. But it's also true that I thought there were more than there actually were, because their skills seemed superhuman. But humans beings are, it turns out, capable of quite amazing things.

Imperial Glory, a Napoleonic era RTS, had melee fighting in buildings. Regiments could occupy a building much as they do in CoH2; if the enemy sent a unit to attack that building in melee, the attackers would charge in and the fighting would begin. Neither side had any control over the fighting, nor could they order retreats; you just had to wait until the issue resolved itself.

I certainly can see no particularly good reason for abilities being disabled in buildings. In fact I find it very strange you can't throw grenades out of windows.