[september]

Originally Posted by Mr_A

But ordinarily the nature of human beings is that women are core feminie beings and men are core masculine beings. Why? this is what creates a passionate relationship.

This, along with the ad hominem comments, misses the point of what I was saying in the meat of the post. I think it's useless to go with the core conception of masculine and feminine. I see it broken all the time.

I'm not mad at the concept, though I think it's wrong. I'm frustrated that it's being abused to make fun of women, by way of bits like these:

Originally Posted by cylon

Take everything the women say they want in a guy, do the opposite, and you're set.

Originally Posted by blazer1

What woman want is a man who is the total opposite of what they need. They are sexually attracted to men who are selfish, arrogant, cocky ... basically more masculine.

Originally Posted by callum828

For some bizzare reason, women never tell the truth when you ask them this. Ask a woman if she likes a guy who is rich. She will either say no or give some euphemism for rich like 'hard-working', very rarely will a woman be honest about it. Yet if you look at who women marry, money is a huge factor.

...

Here's an idea. Start a new thread, and ask any women on the board to describe their last boyfriend, completely honestly, warts and all, without trying to sanitise the description. Your answer is what women want.

They're not directly hurtful things... they're just shoving words into women's mouths that most thinking women wouldn't agree to. Making generalizations like these are disastrous. They're the result of shallow thinking and the misinterpretation of the distinctions being made. If women are unsure about what they want in a man, mightn't it be because women change, as well as men? I think the "we're different, so I'll blame it on that" argument parallels the "God of the gaps" argument in many ways -- where if we can't explain this or that argument, it must be a reason God exists.

Now, I'm a big advocate of discernment. It's not that I want to sanitize thought, and that whatever you say is fine as long as it's not sexist. People can be non-sexist and wrong, and people are often sexist but right about other things. But when making distinctions in the ways men and women think and act rides down the slippery slope into stereotyping, it confuses and conflates what issues you're actually referring to. And it happens a lot in here because Steve and Erin "went there" on the gender issue.

Is that a bit more cool-headed for you?