“but I am skeptical that any man fully understands women or vice versa”
Oh, for heaven’s sake—do you really believe this? If so, that explains a lot.
I’ll admit, I once thought something similar… back when I was 16 years old and was growing up in a mostly female family. It took me maybe five or six years past that point to catch on to the fact that (surprise!) men are people. They are people just like any other people, and their individual abilities, interests, and social roles are far more useful cues for guiding most social interactions than is their biological sex. In fact, looking at interactions prospectively, biological sex has exactly one use: determining potential sexual partners, for those of us who happen to have a preference.
If teenage me with my limited social skills can learn this lesson, surely anyone can.
I am not denying the existence of psychological differences that correlate with sex. I respect Tooby & Cosmides as researchers and I’m married to an evolutionary biologist, so you’re not going to see me trying to claim that millions of years of selection have not left their imprint on our brains. But (let me emphasize again), these differences tend not to be terribly useful as prospective cues for how to conduct any given relationship.
Spending a lot of time with small children (especially your own small children) is an excellent way to get a rough sense of psychological sex differences. It is, of course, no substitute for structured, empirical, peer-reviewed research, but here in all its potentially-biased glory I present to you one of my personal observations: boys tend to be more entranced by big shiny things that move fast, than girls are. The mean difference is small and the overlap between the two distributions is massive, but I believe that difference exists even apart from the social pressures that bolster it.
So what? Knowing this is not going to tell you whether your new girlfriend wants to go to a monster truck rally with you. ASKING HER if she wants to go will tell you that. It’s not going to tell you that NASCAR races are a bad place to pick up chicks: the overlap in interest between men and women is so large that there will still be plenty of women there, and if you happen to be passionate about cars, wouldn’t you enjoy dating someone who shares that passion?
Okay, all of this is just the wind-up to my ultimate point, but since I understand there is a preference around here for short comments, I will conclude in another installment.
To continue:
Cultural constructions of gender, like biologically-defined sex, also have significant weaknesses as prospective cues for social interaction with individuals. Yes, we’re all swimming in the same cultural soup, but different people perceive different parts of it more clearly, or have different parts emphasized more during their formative years, or whatever—the result is that different women can have surprisingly different takes on what it means to be female in our culture and how they as individuals relate to those cultural norms.
As a result, you really can’t go wrong by approaching social interactions with women as if they were social interactions with human beings.
Gender and sex are far more useful retrospectively than prospectively. If in your best efforts to make your way through this world of human beings, you encounter a problem that you believe you cannot solve without adding the variable of sex/gender to the equation, go ahead and try it and see if it illuminates anything. But which facet should you look to first—sex or gender?
It is my personal and potentially-biased belief that in the realm of human psychology, looking to gender first rather than sex is going to be more useful to you in the long run. Let me explain: if a woman or multiple women do or say something that you don’t understand, can’t agree with, doesn’t fit your perception of reality, etc., you can ask, “I wonder if this is because women are different?” Well, what if the answer is yes? What does that buy you? You (not the abstract you, I mean you the bloggers) seem convinced that there is a neurological gap that you cannot bridge. So if the answer is “Women are different!” you throw up your hands and give up.
Instead, you could ask, “I wonder if this is because women typically experience certain things in our culture that are different from what men experience?” CONCRETE EXPERIENCES ARE SOMETHING THAT YOU CAN IMAGINE. Experiences are something that you can read about, ask questions about, educate yourself about. Then you can put yourself in the “female” position: “Would a human being who had those experiences look at this problem differently than a human being who had my experiences?”
If you approach this process honestly and openly, you will be surprised at the “mysteries” that suddenly become clear to you. Good luck.