From: Max Garcia Subject: SOC: "nanosex" (was Re: CONF: SIGGRAPH "nanosex" panel) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 93 19:09:09 -0700 someone writes: >She did have one good point, in that men are more visually >oriented,and from my personal experience (which may or may not >be worth a hill of beans this is true. >What to do about this? Who knows...accept and deal with it maybe. I've always felt that there is a difference between truth and reality. While someone could argue that evidence would prove empirically that men are more visual (a truth?), what is the cause (a reality)? In other words, is this a nature/nurture question. My own feeling is that if men are more visual the reason has to do with the nurturing. It probably all goes back to males being raised as the dominant, aggressive, favored gender in charge. We (males) probably read more comic books as kids, played more sporting games (anyone who argues that baseball, basketball, football, etc., is not an act of taking in information and visualizing an entire playing field probably hasn't played), war game simulations, board games. We probably read more adventure books (the Hobbit, fantasy games for that matter) that require more active visualization of the material we read. This is all visual training, imaging training, etc., that readies us for even more active visualization as we get older. I don't have any empirical evidence to back this up. I'm just going by my own childhood experiences growing up with about 15 cousins and a whole slew of friends from the neighborhood and school. In addition to this, I have architectural education, work experience and a great deal of experience in computer modeling - in other words I deal in three dimensional environments every day as my profession - and I couldn't begin to find evidence to suggest that men are inherently more visual than women by nature. By the way. Reading postings like this is kind of .... well .... shocking. I may be misreading them, and if I am I apologize, but reading statements about males having more (better?) skills than women without really thinking about why and whether it is true and if it is should it be? does it have to be?, etc. strikes me as a scary Orwellian kind of logic. Again, that may be kind of a harsh criticism generated from my own naivet, but I've seen dialogues like this transgress into more bigoted kind of statements. It scares me that it is presented so matter of factly and almost without question. Maximillian Garcia Max@city.arch.wustl.edu