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Women: Why? Men: Why Not?
So yesterday as I was running errands around town (north central Texas), I saw a car that looked like a banana.
After confirming I was not hallucinating, I mentioned it to Mrs. Tabby. She responded, “Why?” Whereas male friends generally responded, “Cool. What’s it built on?” (An old Ford pickup chassis, for those interested.)
The Banana Car is a homemade affair and apparently travels around the country to do publicity appearances. As a homemade, the Banana Car is a little different from the commercially prepared Oscar Mayer Weinermobiles, of which several travel the country for Oscar Mayer.
(There’s a good story behind the Weinermobiles: https://www.mashed.com/1210268/the-story-behind-oscar-mayers-wienermobile-and-other-popular-food-vehicles/)
Mrs. Tabby’s “Why?” versus my male friends’ “Sounds great!” responses to the Banana Car reminded me of responses I encountered many years ago (during the early days of robotics) when several students at a nearby university (with a large engineering school) developed a robot to retrieve soft drinks from the hallway vending machine in the dormitory while they were playing video games. To this student robot project, women almost universally asked, “Why?” while most men responded, “Cool” or “Great idea!” Around that time, some of the same students also produced an early prototype of a couch with a built-in refrigerator for beer or soft drinks. It generated the same divergence of responses.
This “Why?” versus “Why Not?” difference has long stood for me as emblematic of some personality traits that tend to be different between men and women. Men’s “why not?” approach is why most innovators and entrepreneurs are men. Of course, it’s also why boys and men do things that cause them to be hurt and die in accidents at play and at work at higher rates than women do.
And of course, like all such broad generalizations, they are not universal. MOST.
I (a man) do not have the “Why Not?” response (though I’m fascinated that people do such things). Our daughter-in-law has a fair amount of the “Why Not?” response.
Are you “Why?” or “Why not?”
Published in Culture
Depends on the situation. On a banana car, I am definitely why? On going to Mars, I am why not?
Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
This gender difference happens in many species. See the cardinals below.
The most stark differentiation for me, famously, or at least politically, has been in terms of that expressed by Robert F. Kennedy, Sr, as quoted here:
“Some people see things as they are and say, ‘why?’ I dream things that never were and say, ‘why not?”
I’ve never found the sentiment remotely emblematic of anything to do with the differences between men and women.
I have never watched this show, but those two clips were hilarious!
One of my fraternity brothers did a year in a Wienermobile. He was two years older and, naturally, brought it to visit the ol’ Rockpile (fraternity house), so that particular vehicle is well-celebrated among my group of peers. Our house has academic buildings on all sides and campus tours can’t avoid it. I’m sure the administration loved it. Thinking of our university president in those days, I’m certain he was much more ‘Why?’ than ‘Why not?’. With that particular example, the language was probably a bit stronger.
Should definitely start from the beginning.
Why? Or why not?
Okay, I found my inner ‘Why?’.
Just “NOT”
Even if that really is a female…. ick.
There might be something cute behind that mask, but one needs a decent imagination.
A more normal color and lack of nose ring would certainly help. Whether it would be enough, I don’t know.
I was in Logan Airport one night when my flight was delayed. I was waiting in the sitting area near the gate. I noticed a couple from Japan having a serious argument in Japanese, which I don’t speak. (And as I wrote that, I realized they may have been Chinese or Korean or something else.) At any rate, I did not speak their language, but I understood the gist of the argument just from the expressions on their faces. :) :)
The universal language of arguments between husbands and wives. :) :)
I wonder if it is AI distorted
If I’m remembering ancient history correctly, one of the first devices attached to the early ARPANET (which later evolved into the Internet) was a temperature sensor placed in a cola machine so the geeks could find out whether the Dr. Pepper was cold before walking all the way down the hall.
Men: “Why?”. Women: “Why not?”.
Carnegie Mellon University..
When I got married, I was quickly introduced to shams. Some skepticism was expressed, and some laughing directed at the idea. A bed pillow you don’t use?! My bride didn’t get upset and laughed as well. Nonetheless, our bed has shams and I accept them. I guess the sham people got the last laugh.
Yeah, I’m sure we all have seen odd things that we found amusing and charming, and others that seem like exercises in stupidity.
Is that like the famous male/female divide on the Three Stooges?
While I don’t do much unnecessary engineering, I’m amused by people who do, so I guess I straddle the why/why not divide.
I suppose the do-it-because-you-can trait is sex-linked because the drive for security is sex-linked, and the drive for security is sex-linked because gestation is expensive and, despite the best efforts of the “trans” movement, sex-linked.
That fact explains, I think, the seeming (at least at first glance) paradox that men tend to be radical builders but conservative voters, whereas women tend to be conservative builders but radical voters. Women tend to vote for security on the scale of a home (as opposed to a nation), and that drives the (misguided) support for paternal government.
That’s closest to how I’d characterize myself. Partly because I’m basically too lazy.
For a couple of decades, I was part of a small group of guys who got together once a month for dinner and conversation. We were all employed in the software industry in one capacity or another. It was a common occurrence for our conversations to include extended, collaborative brainstorming sessions, wherein we talked about possible implementations for some utterly ridiculous idea. None of us had any intention of actually pursuing any of these ideas.
Some examples I recall were how to get Spam out of the can without opening it, and whether you could define a workable specification for transmitting data using Smarties packets.
At one of these gatherings, we were laughing about this tendency in ourselves. Making up an exaggerated example on the spot, I said something like “Yeah, we end up spending the evening trying to come up with a way to make toast without heat.”
You guessed it. My intentionally ridiculous example sparked an extended tangent during which we brainstormed various approaches to the problem. We talked about various methods of dehydrating and carbonizing the surface of the bread, but none of that accounted for the Maillard reaction. I think the most promising approach was a genetically engineered bacterium.
If, during one of these conversations, someone had asked us why?, I don’t think we would even have understood the question.
Or this happened? https://www.reddit.com/r/TheFarSide/comments/1ei3xb5/the_domestication_of_bob/#lightbox
“That’s awesome!!” is my why not with some “well played Sir” sprinkled in.
Thinking this over, I do believe a person who–along with her husband–sells the house they live in, and moves for the summer into a tent in a field out in the country about 40 miles away, so that the two of them can start building a new home together must have a fair amount of “why not?” in her makeup. Perhaps even a healthy dose of “why the hell not?”
We bought the entire DVD set and watched it. Hilarious! For the first 2 or 3 shows, it seemed to us as if the writers and actors were figuring out who and what their characters were about. After that, things took off. Lots of laughs, surprises, joy, and tears. And the series finale is one of the best . . .
Aside. There’s a YouYube clip of the reading for the series-ending episode. At the end, they play the show’s theme song, but it was revised for the end of the last show. Everyone broke into tears . . .