(no subject)
Presentation day again. I guess I'm set, although I still feel inarticulate, and very very tired. Today's article is on vervet monkeys, and how they have preferences for gendered toys. That is, the males prefer stereotypically masculine toys (ball, toy police car), the females prefer stereotypically feminine toys (doll, toy cooking pot), and they both like "neutral" toys (picture book, stuffed toy dog). There's been research done on how girls with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (a disorder where the person produces too much androgen, so they are often masculinized, both behaviorally and physically (particularly genitalia)) exhibit more stereotypically male behaviors, such as preference for "boys" toys, male playmates, sports, etc. Research on them has shown that high amount of androgen in them has seemed to masculinize their behavior, and they aren't just reacting to having more masculine bodies (ie - their behavior and preferences are biologically based, not socially based). Of course, some people still aren't convinced, so that's where the monkeys come in.
Monkeys have not been socialized. (For the most part) they have not been brought up observing gendered behaviors or being given "gender appropriate" toys. They're a clean slate. So researchers gave them a chance to play with different toys that children rate as "girl", "boy", or "either", and it turns out that monkeys tend to prefer "gender appropriate" toys anyway. There wasn't a statistically significant difference for most of the toys, except the doll (which females preferred), but the overall trend was the same as with children. For me, this brings up more questions than answes. We usually think of animals as having a sex (male or female) but not a gender (boy or girl), but if monkeys prefer gendered toys, are they actually aware of gender? And why on earth do female monkeys prefer a cooking pot, and male monkeys prefer a toy police car? Monkeys should have no concept of either, especially in the gendered sense - they're outside of monkey experience. So shouldn't they react neutrally to both those? I'm puzzled.
I found two more subjects for my research project this morning. It would have been three, but apparently the third subject (non-traditional age student), felt I was taking too long, and that her class was more important (which she informed me of, looking very irritated, when I wandered up to her classroom to see what became of her). I get that school's important, but seriously, the experiment takes three minutes, and they weren't doing much in lab anyway. I think you can afford three minutes of class time to help out a fellow student. Anyway, only 36 more subjects to go!...
It's way too hot and humid out. It better cool down tomorrow, like they're predicting, or I'm going to end up with heat stroke again. I walked out of the CDC after lunch, and felt like my skin was on fire.
It's Minnesota Private College Week. Lots of high schoolers on campus checking us out. They're so easy to pick out. Jenny and I discussed this yesterday. It's not just that they look young (which they do, no matter how much they try to look older), but they're all immaculately groomed and dressed in whatever the latest style is. Long highlighted blond hair with not a strand out of place, makeup, those funny ballet type shoes, layers of tanktops (what's the point of that?), beads (again, what?), pinstriped khaki shorts. We don't do that here. Maybe at St Thomas, or even the U, but not here at St Kate's. You dress for the weather, put on clothes that look and smell mostly clean, make your hair look reasonably normal, and off you go. High schoolers have so much to learn... (I was in the bio dept yesterday and a tour group came through. I wandered down the hall to take a look and see if any of them looked normal. No one did. Sadness.)
Monkeys have not been socialized. (For the most part) they have not been brought up observing gendered behaviors or being given "gender appropriate" toys. They're a clean slate. So researchers gave them a chance to play with different toys that children rate as "girl", "boy", or "either", and it turns out that monkeys tend to prefer "gender appropriate" toys anyway. There wasn't a statistically significant difference for most of the toys, except the doll (which females preferred), but the overall trend was the same as with children. For me, this brings up more questions than answes. We usually think of animals as having a sex (male or female) but not a gender (boy or girl), but if monkeys prefer gendered toys, are they actually aware of gender? And why on earth do female monkeys prefer a cooking pot, and male monkeys prefer a toy police car? Monkeys should have no concept of either, especially in the gendered sense - they're outside of monkey experience. So shouldn't they react neutrally to both those? I'm puzzled.
I found two more subjects for my research project this morning. It would have been three, but apparently the third subject (non-traditional age student), felt I was taking too long, and that her class was more important (which she informed me of, looking very irritated, when I wandered up to her classroom to see what became of her). I get that school's important, but seriously, the experiment takes three minutes, and they weren't doing much in lab anyway. I think you can afford three minutes of class time to help out a fellow student. Anyway, only 36 more subjects to go!...
It's way too hot and humid out. It better cool down tomorrow, like they're predicting, or I'm going to end up with heat stroke again. I walked out of the CDC after lunch, and felt like my skin was on fire.
It's Minnesota Private College Week. Lots of high schoolers on campus checking us out. They're so easy to pick out. Jenny and I discussed this yesterday. It's not just that they look young (which they do, no matter how much they try to look older), but they're all immaculately groomed and dressed in whatever the latest style is. Long highlighted blond hair with not a strand out of place, makeup, those funny ballet type shoes, layers of tanktops (what's the point of that?), beads (again, what?), pinstriped khaki shorts. We don't do that here. Maybe at St Thomas, or even the U, but not here at St Kate's. You dress for the weather, put on clothes that look and smell mostly clean, make your hair look reasonably normal, and off you go. High schoolers have so much to learn... (I was in the bio dept yesterday and a tour group came through. I wandered down the hall to take a look and see if any of them looked normal. No one did. Sadness.)