This just in: I am a woman! Again. At least according to a blogger calling herself miliefisathand, who recently wrote a post about that “are nice guys sociopaths?” post I wrote a while ago.
Her evidence? When writing her response to me, she repeatedly found herself referring to me using female pronouns — so therefore I must actually be a woman.
Yes, that’s actually her argument:
While editing my article I lost count of the number of times I had to change “her” or “she” to “him” and “he”. I don’t normally make gender pronoun errors so I have a deep suspicion that the author is a woman impersonating a man. I’m spiritually sensitive to such things.
Hate to break it to you, but your guy-dar is way off. Protip: I post under my real name, and if you google that name, you will find ample evidence that I am, in fact, a real, living dude.
In the case of MRA dudes who misgender me as a woman, it’s clearly the result of their misogyny. In the case of miliefisathand, a self-described Smartassed Burmese Transwoman, I don’t quite understand what exactly is going on.
She also misses the point of my post, and the comments from regulars here that offered some pretty sensible criticisms of what I wrote, but at this point it’s not exactly a shock to see a Man Boobz critic arguing against things I didn’t say rather than things I did say.
Sorry, most of that didn’t make sense. lowquacks shouldn’t try to post before breakfast.
Also, I remember there was an internet gadget a while back that said whether you were writing more like man or woman. This isn’t an endorsement or any other kind of opinion or even saying that such a thing makes sense, and I can’t find the site; it just seemed vaguely relevant.
I was thinking “Man! I blog like a woman.”
I hope “ruining song titles/lyrics to make them into something relevent to the topic” isn’t going to be a regular feature. 😛
I took a test once that claimed to be able to tell whether you are a man or a woman based on your answers to the questions. Obviously it relies primarily on stereotypes, but it’s full of enough snark that it’s still funny.
http://community.sparknotes.com/gender/
Incidentally, it claimed I was a man.
Wait, you resist that urge? I don’t, and it may explain why they’re looking at me funny at work today.
As a non-parent, I find the people who do that so freaking annoying that I try to make a point of saying sympathetic things to parents of crying kids, because, geez, trying to deal with a wailing child is frustrating enough without idiots acting like you have some sort of secret kid-muting device that you’re just refusing to use for shits and giggles. (And it really makes me sad how often parents, especially moms, act absurdly grateful when I literally just do something like say, “Long day, huh? I hope you get to go home and get some sleep soon,” make stupid faces at their crying baby to make it laugh, or just reply when children say things to me instead of glaring at them in horror for daring to exist in my presence. Those things are so easy! Why do other people not do them by default? Sigh.)
/random rant
@swankivy, According to that test, I’m a man too!
[looks around nervously]
MISANDRY!!! It’s everywhere!!!
As am I!
If David takes the test and he tests as a woman, we’re going to have to concede this one to miliefisathand.
That test did actually correctly decide that I was a woman (with 8% certainty, to boot!). So I guess so far it’s only twice as unreliable as just guessing at random.
holy shit, I am also a appartently a man…28$ accuracey…some of those questions are just odd though, like which word do you like better? what does that have to do with anything
I suppose that is another point for my boyfriend’s insistence that I’m really a teenage boy not a 30 year old woman.
Sparknotes thinks I’m male (10% sure).
Is everyone getting male as a result? O_o
I got 14% male too.
Alright…the second time i took it said 32% certain….has anyone gotten female? The test is rigged!
*delurks about empathy* Empathy is the ability to feel another’s pain. Neuroscience is actually finding out we have specific areas of our brain specialized in reflecting other people’s feelings (from birth, called mirror neurons) which activate often more strongly than when we feel a stimulus ourselves (still in studies – functional MRIs For The Win). There is also an area specialized in thinking solely about what other people know (learned throughout childhood, usually vaguely in place at around 4-5, only fully developed in teenage/adulthood). I have no doubt that as use of FMRIs to studies brains as they are used over time widens we’ll discover all kinds of interesting things about both how our brains work and how they can not work.
Sociopathy/Psychopathy/Antisocial disorders are an area of extreme murkiness in terms of experimental data (since anyone termed a sociopath is pre-existing that, no causal studies can be done comparing them and non-termed-sociopaths). In addition, the operational definitions for these disorders are pretty subjective and often open to a lot of bias.
The theory of Antisocial Personality Disorder that I know of is that this may be a subset of humans whose mirror neurons simply don’t work – so when they observe another person in distress, they feel nothing. The side effect of this would be to largely view other people as objects, not as subjects, because they are incapable of experiencing what others experience. Usually in tandem with this is blunted affect in general, which theoretically leads to more and more extreme behavior (setting fires, killing animals, etc…) in order to feel an emotional response. I know of no FMRI studies to see if any of these theories are actually true – it’s all based on observation and conjecture right now.
Sociopathy/Anti-social colloquially usually refers to someone who actively works against the society. That’s why it’s so difficult to define – because people have different opinions of what “society” is and should include and so draw their lines in different places. Even murder can often be “justified” in some societies where it isn’t in others (I know pedantically that makes it Not Murder, but we would consider dueling to be murder now whereas once it was a discouraged but valid way to solve disputes). In addition, there’s a lot of political and rhetorical weight to labeling people “sociopathic” as a way of discrediting them and it’s semi-commonly used against dissidents of all kinds of flavors. Then you have situations when the term is used more as an indication of consecutive-criminal-action which doesn’t respond to punishment; there was a “sociopath test” which had an 80% rate of predicting re-offending which seems to point more toward the colloquial use of sociopath rather than the clinical antisocial personality disorder (though the two are often conflated). I’ll leave the problem of the fate of the 20% false positive category as an exercise for the reader. 8/
There is growing evidence that certain environments effectively “create” criminal elements, though. I’m reminded of cases where the family of the parolee were in public housing, so they left jail to be homeless which meant they couldn’t get a job which often meant their choices were starving or re-offending (felons can’t get food stamps in most states). In other cases, a parolee needed to get something in the mail and return it, but he had no mailbox or means to send the letter back even if he could get it. Etc.. etc.. etc… the way we fail our fellow humans continues.
…and damn, sorry for the wall of text.
I got 16% male.
“Statistically speaking, you are a man—whether you know it or not.”
I like the “heaving chest” as a description of a female attribute, along with “silken hair” and “careful primping” and “delicate features.”
(Yes, the french bee is female. rawr.)
Millie says:
I don’t see how you can complain of David’s hatefulness while actually wishing death upon people who are not really dangerous… Express one opinion or the other but not both.
However, I do agree with her that genuine psychopathy should not be conflated with mere insecurity, social anxiety and bitterness – though the first two traits certainly don’t predict the last one.
Commenting on previous comments, then I’ll take the sparknotes test (I totally am an androgynous ninja btw) — Is Garvan a poe or troll? Consensus says troll who isn’t very good at trolling?
miliefisathand —
“Another thing, The whole David’s-gender-thing is just me talking shit.
Saying I’m spiritually aware of such things is a component of my shit talk: The punchline to my joke if shit talking can be considered humorous; which it is.”
So wait, the joke is that David must be a woman, no because that’s wtf you said before you called in a joke, so the joke is that you find misgendering people funny? How is that a joke?
Ozy — “Also I’m pretty sure that sociopath isn’t a thing anymore, I’m pretty sure the term is “diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder.”” — I don’t think sociopathy was ever a psych diagnosis, it is/was, afaik, a legal term. Checking DSM-III now (I have a second hand copy for shits and giggles) — nope, not in there.
Polliwog — “…Those things are so easy! Why do other people not do them by default?” — idk, my default reaction to a crying child is to glare at anyone glaring at the child, and then smile at the child/parent. Because they really don’t have some magical off switch.
I’m apparently 4% woman…”50% more male than you — 7% like you — 43% more female than you” — that I think circle-square-circle-square-etc-square ends in a circle, not some random diamond shape makes me female I guess? Not, you know, logical? (2, 4, ? = argh 2 numbers do not a sequence make!)
<blockquoteI’m apparently 4% woman…”50% more male than you — 7% like you — 43% more female than you” — that I think circle-square-circle-square-etc-square ends in a circle, not some random diamond shape makes me female I guess? Not, you know, logical? (2, 4, ? = argh 2 numbers do not a sequence make!)
Yay, someone else is a woman! I was beginning to worry I was the only one here. :-p
(Also, the circle-square thing was making you choose whether you cared more about picking the right shape or the right color to continue the pattern. A lot of the questions were basically “choose which of two equally correct/incorrect answers you just LIKE more.”)
Dammit, blockquotes. *sigh*
It is 0% sure I am female.
O.o
“Also, the circle-square thing was making you choose whether you cared more about picking the right shape or the right color to continue the pattern.”
Well yes, but they should’ve thrown some other shapes in there then! (Even more hilariously, my fondness for circles is because they’re easier to draw, a compass is less work than measuring 4 sides.) — They did that better with the “2, 4, ?” as either 6 or 8 could be correct, while two shapes in a rainbow does not somehow suddenly make a random third shape correct. (Toss a star and triangle in there or something!)
Quackers — you managed to score perfectly androgynous? Congrats!
…I am both scarred and eager to take that test.
Will be posting results after a word from my sponsor.
If they’re 14% sure you’re a man, doesn’t that mean they’d be about 3 times more likely to be right by flipping a coin? That’s some awesome testing.