As a scientist, I sometimes run experiments. I know I don't run the perfectly controlled experiments with double blind studies and control groups etc,  but I am a curious person who wants to see what happens in different situations.

I used to frequent lambda moo which was the red light district of the old Internet and they had anonymous guest access like many other moos and I would try experimenting with gender and gender roles. What I found when I set my gender to male it was extremely difficult to get attention. Indeed I felt invisible. All the men were competing for the attention of the females. And in the noise it was nearly impossible to get anyone's attention especially not another males, when I pretended to be male.

However, in less popular areas, women were much nicer to me when my gender was male, than they were to me when my gender was female.

However setting my gender to female in populated areas meant I would get a lot of attention from both males and females.

I have often wondered whether men are always struggling for attention, and this causes them to act more extravagantly to get it. This allows us to easily divide the male population into invisible and visible men and thus leads us to never generalize about men. 

Men have to prove themselves to each other when jockeying for positions in their hierarchies. they have to demonstrate their worthiness to other men, especially, and this likely leads to the Peter principle.

I also run a women's group on Facebook and I asked: why do men rape. The question was quickly dismissed and answered: men are seeking control. This worried me because we are often dismissing the question of men and why they are acting antisocial lyrics in the first place and seldom lingering on the population of men as a whole.  We move straight on to the victim and wonder if she was drunk and what she was wearing. the implication is men just can't control themselves and it's not their fault. I personally think this extremely sexist. Most men are quite capable of being able to control themselves.

Boys in college are probably not raping girls for control,  but rather because they feel inadequate at/or not ready for relationships, the usual way to get sex, or can't afford it. This is just a hypothesis of course. I would love to know why boys and men rape.

Some men are dreadful at maintaining relationships leaving women feeling frustrated with their marriages  (and as I have said before this I think is because we spend too much time watching TV where they don't really have relationships). And we don't discuss why some men are violent with their family, and perhaps this is because they don't know how to have relationships without violence - it's what they saw when they were growing up. Men do struggle to get our attention but are ignored in general and perhaps this is why they spend so much time observing, and trying to control women.

This article about a men's rights activist says his main objection is that the female lead got more lines in the trailer! Men do have problems and perhaps it includes the articulation of the problems they don't understand themselves. Also, MRA men are likely invisible men who have a voice purely because the Internet gives them one, it suggests they lack inner dialog with themselves. And while I know it can be difficult to explain what it is that I am thinking and sometimes it may take several attempts to say what it is that I really mean, I think men need to start articulating their feelings and realize that women have feelings too.

We are animals and as much as like to think we aren't,  we are.  If you think there was some designer, then that designer did a hell of a lot of cheating, because we not only share a lot of our DNA with monkeys,  we also share much of it with other mammals all the way down to our skeleton which we share with invertebrates. Even trees share much of our DNA. There are modifications here and there but the similarity is unmistakable, even and including how women give birth, just like other mammals.

We are animals because we need to do things other animals do, like sleep, eat, we have a powerful urge to mate and reproduce to pass our genes on. We need sunlight and nature and use the bathroom.

Because we depend on our environment we must care for the environment as a means of caring for ourselves. We depend on our atmosphere to protect us from radiation and to breathe. We depend on plants to produce oxygen and recycle our carbon dioxide. We must live in a symbiotic relationship with the environment but we don't. We pretend it is purely at our disposal.

This is because our brain is so powerful.  We have developed stories that are fantasies about our origins, such as believing we were created distinct from other animals because we somehow think we are special and thus these stories a tapestry of superstitions that are religion.

We depend on each other completely for our understanding of reality that we need contact with other human beings for our sanity and these stories we tell each other shape us into who we are.

We are clever animals who have evolved hands to be able to craft and utilize tools. We have also learned the value of communicating, storing and sharing information.  Indeed, some of our landmark discoveries has been the storing and transmission of information,  cave paintings,  the Gutenberg press, math, telegraph, cinema, radio, television, computers and the Internet. 

But our experience of reality depends largely on who and what we believe.  And knowing what is fiction can be difficult if we believe it. It's nearly impossible to find the flaws in our own thinking (or believing) and this can make it difficult to communicate with others who don't believe what we believe. It's nearly impossible to be objective enough to see our own hypocrisy, even when we are aware we may have flaws in our own thinking. Since we attach so much importance to sanity it can be deeply distressing to find out our beliefs are wrong.

I used to know a born again Christian who delighted in telling me about her favorite t-shirt which said: Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven. She didn't realize this was her license to be completely immoral.

Milgram performed his famous experiment after world war 2 to find out why German soldiers engaged in the Holocaust. The experiment is there is an authority figure, the person who is being experimented upon, who is given orders by the authority figure to punish a person for answering a question wrong. The authority figure is a scientist in a white jacket and a clip board, who tells the person to administer electric shocks to the victim if they get questions wrong. Initially the shocks are mild but as the victim gets more questions wrong, the authority figure tells them to give stronger shocks to the victim. The victim isn't really harmed but really a paid actor, who is paid to simulate pleading, pain and eventually death.

Despite seeing the victim suffering and in pain, the person who was ordered to give the shocks to the victim followed orders 65% of participates were prepared to administer the lethal shock.

There are three possible explanations as to why people do as the authority figure tells them too.

1. They want to please the authority figure by obeying.

2. They are afraid it will happen to them and are prepared to show they are willing to kill.

3. They secretly have a desire to do it anyway.

the experiment has been repeated several times mainly to find out who will refuse the order to kill. they did find women were less likely to especially those who have defied authority before such as feminists and union delegates,  however, there seems to be little research as to why people are so obedient to the authority figure.