It is always fascinating to talk to a women’s studies major. They advocate a thing they call “feminism,” even though most of them have no operative definition for it. When you ask about their beliefs, they generally only have very vaguely defined notions. But one popular notion among feminists is that the notion of gender needs to be minimized in society, if not eliminated altogether. This would not involve any surgeries, mind you – just the removal of all societal notions of what it means to be a “man” or a “woman.” Perhaps we could all walk around in completely neutral outfits that show completely equal amounts of skin, as if male and female sexual ornamentation worked in exactly the same way. Obviously, the notion that manhood and womanhood are trained into us in a socially constructed way, as opposed to simply being a part of our physical and neurological natures, is a total farce.

This makes it very hard to understand why anybody is surprised that women and men go online in different ways. While both genders go online to find information and entertainment, men tend to go to sites where they can absorb info without trying to build relationships, whereas women tend toward the polar opposite intention. Women tend to seek out information from actual people, and share strategies in an equal sense, instead of trying to build up their personal social status the way men do. Obviously, this speaks to the different ways in which our species has always survived and reproduced itself. But often the most intelligent among us take the longest to figure out the obvious things in life.

Apparently, women are a substantially larger part of the Facebook user base than men are. And while men tend to look at social networking sites as a chance to climb the social ladder and store the contact information of people who may be useful to them later, women tend to go onto such sites wanting to actually communicate with people. From one gender’s perspective, the other tends to seem ridiculous. What do feminists think of that?