Warning: Trying to start some discussion, so wrote up a lot. If it's not your bag, or you don't care about the subject of gender or sex differences outside of calling out bullshit from the left's ever-evolving bonkers theories, probably not for you :)

One of the things the left loves to do is "Starting discussions". You can find it on who knows how many topics. But what it almost always has in common is they're not "starting a discussion" so much as stating "Here's the discussion, here's the only acceptable opinion and if you don't agree you're a <bigot/racist/homophobe/etc>."

As a result, it essentially stalls out pretty much any progress on those actual topics, whatever they may be. But obviously gender is one of the big ones, and seeing as the left can't shut down a conversation here, seems a good place to have an actual discussion on the topic of gender.

For me, to start with I see men and women as falling under "equal, but different". We're about 90% the same, 10% different. In that 10% different though you've got biological factors, psychological factors and sociological factors. Those differences matter sometimes, and in others are really not too important at all.

I also see gender roles as things developed over time that tend to smooth out relations between men and women. General guidelines that if you follow them relatively closely remove a lot of friction. At the same time, they're not perfect by a long shit because people are actually diverse - meaning, men on average are more aggressive than woman, but it's not by a huge margin: about 60/40. A more aggressive woman paired with a less aggressive man might both find typical gender roles to chafe and be frustrating for example.

That said, they're just guidelines that have worked out well for people. My hot take here is that people want things to go smoothly and to not have to think too hard about it and this applies to both men and women. We want relationships to just sort of settle into place rather than discussing things to a great degree, or being pedantic or annoying about it. A natural flow rather than a well designed one. Either way can work, but one tends to require more time, effort and energy and rarely supersedes the natural flow. At least, that's my feel from my own life and that of closer personal friends.

But I also think a deeper look is rather important when dealing with the opposite sex. It's not the most original take, but flipping the gender of someone and trying to perceive how you'd react to them if that were the case is often at the least an interesting mind game. For example, feminists would likely say something like "Tulsi Gabbard would've had more success and be taken more seriously if she had been a man - women are treated differently in politics, and not in a good way." Is that really true? If she were instead "Bob Gabbard", a balding but fairly athletic middle aged guy from Hawaii, but with the same opinions would you have had more respect for her? Or would she have come off as kind of decent, but generic candidate?

I think swapping someone's sex and trying to view them differently - if you can do so relatively fairly and with little bias - is probably one of the better ways of trying to understand people and it works well with both sexes. Guys who have wildly inflated opinions of a woman can end up cringing when the cute, bubbly edgy girl they are into are viewed as an edgy, emotional guy who likes some of the absolutely worst music. At the same time, the more busy woman, the one who works part time, goes to school full time, and is constantly helping out with her parents, her siblings, being that friend who's picking people up at the airport at 12:30AM, looks way more attractive.

Equally, the same is true of looking at other guys in not to deep a light. A male co-worker who's kind of negative, always looks worn down and never misses a moment to vent about shit. He's married, a couple kids, and just looks worn out and tired all the time - has to travel pretty far for work, because a home is cheaper further away and he wants his kids to have separate bedrooms. Pretty normal for a guy, not rare at all. Flip that around to a woman though, keep the story the same, and given the current cultural and gender situation, that woman is amazing, she never calls out sick, she's working hard for her kids, etc. Makes you appreciate the individual more.

At least, this is generically how I saw things when I was in my mid twenties, and even in my late twenties - I was pretty heavily influenced by mostly leftist talking points and media without thinking about things much. Guy, whatever, meh, shitty, at best maybe OK - woman, doing the same thing? Unbelievable, amazing, praise. So my views on men and women have shifted the further away I got from leftist talking points about these things - and shockingly found that the right-wing people I met were MUCH better at being judges of character and treating people better in general - those they looked down on, they had some good reasons for looking down on, and those they spoke well of, they had reason to speak well of them. But I feel all of this is sort of lost on people who just default to "Well, left is the good guys, and I agree with wanting women to have rights and stuff" - it avoids critical thinking and let's the left control the discussion that they start.

Of course, there's plenty of other sex/gender stuff to talk about, but this one was interesting to me and I was hoping to stir up some discussion on it :)