Men and women, what else is new

[oceana]

I like to watch people. Drinking coffee somewhere with a good friend, watching people is one of my favourite hobbies. I like to imagine what they do for a living, where they come from, what their lives are like.
And the Paris' Metro is a heaven for people-watchers like me.



So I made an observations in the Metro during the last weeks that was new to me: many women look like men.
I tried to imagine them without the long hair that many of them have, and kind of detached from their bodies, to see if I would still recognize them as female if I only saw their face.
And many of them I wouldn't recognize. It was really kind of scary.

The older the women were, the more they looked like men.
The less they smiled, the more they looked like men (and this is Paris, 7.30 in the crowded Metro, people sure don't smile much. And the look tired.)

It was harder for me to imagine them as men if they wore a lot of make up. but some faces were so very male that even the make-up didn't hide it.
There were only a few of whom I thought that they would have made "bad" men, i.e. in this case, men with female looks. The reasons for this were mostly very round chins, large lips and large eyes.

It was really kind of scary, and it got me wondering:
What makes us female? Why do we recognize some faces as female immediately, and some as male? Because I didn't have any problems identifying the people I obsevred clearly as male or female. But when I looked only at their faces, the faces often looked very male to me, and I had no trouble imagining them as a man.

So, the only difference between women and men are breast, make-up and large eyes? Somehow, that seems very wrong to me.

I remembered reading about a study once, showing that faces aren't male or female per se. Instead we see something as male female in accordance with things we've seen before. We are taught to see some faces as female, others as male.
I'd link you to an article, but I can only find german ones.
I did however find a picture that shows what I mean.

Apparently the smae things works with happy/unhappy faces and asian/caucasian faces. It is possible to create a neutral, and test persons will categorize the neutral face according to the faces they've been shown before.

I find this fascinating: how would that affect someone who has grown up with only one sex? And what does it mean to people who lived 500 years ago, when our modern beauty standards didn't apply? Did they have the same perception of male and female?
In many old pictures, women's faces don't differ much from the men's faces, all the feminity seems to come from their clothes, their breasts and the things they do.

I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this, probably nowhere, but it wouldn't let me go. I smet so much time looking for the "perfectly female woman" these last days, I just had to write my thoughts down.

All these gender/sex issues are fascinating to me. There is no other area that is shaped so much by society. But there has to be more. Being a woman or a man cannot be a simple matter of definition. And if so, who gets to define it?

And why did I have no trouble seeing women as men, but there where next to no man whom I could imagine as a women?
Thank god it's the weekend, now I can stop staring at strangers and relax a little.
Go out for a coffee, maybe, watch people.
*g*