37 males vs. 2 females!

Ok. I was expecting more women here. Well.

Female. Representin with Kaleidoscope

All I can speak from is my own personal experiences, and from that I can tell you that I've met plenty of psychedelic users, both male and female, but I've only met males that use DMT with the reverence and frequency that I do, in addition to meeting males who use it to see "cool shit." I've only met one woman who has tried DMT, and she won't be doing that again for a while. But this is from an extremely small population, so I really have no clue about the general public and usage. It is interesting to ponder though, and I'm wouldn't be surprised if there were differences in consumption related to sex.

I want to say more... but I don't want this to turn into a gender debate, we're all awesome in our own ways.

but... thanks snozz

I think women are in general just more careful. With their mother instinct and all. I ended up using psychedelics because originally I was just seeking some thrills. And I was very irresponsible when I was younger. Males are more irresponsible and are I think more ego centered. Therefore more likely to do things that are considered dangerous by society. And I think the general public believes psychedelics are the most dangerous drugs you can find. They make you go crazy!

You mean women or psychedelic's?

I was looking for the, "It's been almost two years..." button. :evil:

I've met MANY more women that have had at least one experience with Ayahuasca than men. But none of them hang out on internet forums, and most of them were affiliated with the Daime (safe, familial, church setting?). And, Ayahuasca excepted, the men I've met are generally more adventurous with psychedelics in general than women.

All the planets in my natal chart are yang, with the exception of lots of Scorpio--which is the most dominating sign of the zodiac, anyway, and chicks with Scorpio tend to have a lot of "masculine" energy. I'm just a FREAK!!!! YEAAAHHHH!!!!

I'd be so grateful to meet another person who actually smoked DMT of his/her/its own accord in the flesh... but I've met none.

Interestingly, I've shared changa with three men and three women.

(Still looking for psychedelic prince charming... )

I'm female, but i guess ever since i was little iv been more interested in male activities than female ones. I find the poll statistics really fascinating, to be honest i don't know any females personally who are on an entheogen journey. I wonder why though?


Much Peace and Happiness

I've introduced DMT to 7 males. I don't know any women interested in trying this stuff out. Well maybe one or two but I know a hundred guys that would do DMT just for curiosity's sake. They would be ready to try after me explaining DMT to them for a minute or two. But the females I know that I think might want to try would definitely want to know more about DMT before trying that out for the first time. Men are more irresponsible. That's for sure.

male, defo male i think..

I am male.., and have a female wife.. I dont have any friends, so my wifes friends are my friends.

She has quite a few.. and all are female, and all his dogs are female, but i dont think they count (though they all seriously enjoy smoking the herb.)

I think that ive met FAR more women psychedelic users then men.. then again... im an introvert, anxiety-ridden, insomniac that doesnt go anywhere but work and herb shop..sooooooooo

-gir

I'm a woman, and I agree with this observation. However, I am far more adventurous than anyone I know or have ever met, regardless of gender.

Women are generally more carefull with substances, although this distinction between men and women is decreasing.
A few years ago there would have been significantly less female alcoholics, cigarettesmokers, etc.

The amount of female bingedrinkers is relatively on the rise but still these sort of things is typically thought of as male behaviour.

That makes sense, since for women there is more at stake when dealing with intoxication.

Women are basically more wary of substances because they don't like the thought of waking up somewhere along the side of the road being made pregnant by some unknown guy with syffilis.
Many man, on the other hand, don't mind the thought of waking up somewhere beside an unknown women that might be pregnant of them but who they will maybe never see again.

Although psychedelic's are quite a different thing, i think the waryness of women towards all substances also aplies to psychedelic's.

The main principle is still that for women there is more at stake.

If some guy tells you that you should take some substance and that it is totally safe, etc. I think most women will be wary of the possibility that this is some new date-rape drug they've never heard of.

Men don't think like that.

i must come from a alt world
the biggest parters i ever meet where female
but thay all loved cane crystle and drink
my best dmt friend is a woman
but mabey there is somthing to this she never did any drug drink included till she meeet me
opps
now she still dont do drugs
but
she loves dmt and aya

I just ran across this topic. I am surprised by the statistic outcome too.

The last post is dated in April 2010. This topic should get some attention again and who knows after all these years new members will vote and the outcome will change.

girls club here............
we rarely smoak with guys.

it does appear to be a boys club.
i suspect it has to do with so few "all girl" ops.

i lose lab rats to kids and boyfriends all the time.
its an issue.
( i have a " no minors" anywhere near me policy)
i dont tolerate meddlesome boyfriends either.

neither of my husbands smoaked with me and maid ever.
to them it was just a wacky thing we do in the lab.

i know of another girls club on the island.
but i also know of at least 3 boys clubs.

It's worth remembering that sex is not a binary, but a spectrum. There are a constellation of different qualities that, when present together, causes society to ascribe a 'male' or 'female' label to them. This includes: external genitalia, secondary sexual characteristics, hormone levels, and your internal representation of your own sex (which does not always match the hardware you were born with - some people can be born with vaginas who will experience 'phantom penis syndrome,' as if their brain is mapped to the wrong body as is expecting to find a penis where there isn't one - VS Ramachandran has written about this).

We know that at least 1/2000 children is born 'visibly' intersex, and their genitals are often altered by the doctor without their consent, while they are infants. Given that many people don't even know they were born intersex, that number is probably larger, and doesn't account for 'invisibly' intersex people (who often might have external characteristics consistent with one sex, but hormones or genes consistent with another).

Not all people with XX have vaginas and not all people with XY have penises (look up de la Chapelle syndrome for one of several examples of this).

Tl;dr - Sex may be a useful heuristic (as an EMT, I generally use it quite a bit, especially when dealing with unconscious patients), but that's all it is. As biological sciences learn more about how our bodies work, we're finding that sex, like gender, isn't as 'real' as we might believe it is.

Also: obligatory reminder that sex =/= gender.

Blessings
~ND

I believe femininity and masculinity goes beyond sexual organ arrangement. It appears to me that we live in a dualistic universe and beautiful things occur when we have a balanced union of opposites, like creation of life.

I think that female and male energies are different, and they have different rolls to play. Please realize I'm not talking about genitalia, but energies, and I don't believe them to be black and white but on a spectrum as with all things in the universe.

Male energy seems to be motivated to exploration with more of a disregard of safety and consequence, this roll is necessary in order to "trail blaze". Conversely female energies seem to be more geared to nurture and support, concerned with safety and stability. It is easy to see how these to aspects work together and one without the other is likely to fail. For a simplistic illustration we could use the cliche of a hunter gatherer family. One must have disregard for safety in order to tackle the risks of going out to hunt for food. Of course one needs to be at base camp looking after the offspring, or there would be no mouths to feed when the hunter gets back. Of course it is infinitely more complex and intricate than this...

As well I believe female energies tend to be more intuitive and in-tune with the, for lack of a better term, ethereal realm. Where male energies seem more tuned the physical realm. They are more likely to find balance in things such as ritualistic entheogenic use, where female energies may be more likely to find unbalance.

I think anyone regardless of their psychical arrangement has qualities of both aspects to varying degrees, and some have an almost perfect balance of the two. I also don't believe it to be static in individuals, nothing in the universe is.

I don't wish to offend anyone and definitely don't assert this as fact, I write it for the sake of discussion and thought. Its just how I feel about it at this particular moment while pondering the OP.

Why do you have to gender these forces? We don't live in a dualistic universe - with the exceptions of some very fundamental physical laws (which aren't dualistic, but rather, quantized), pretty much everything we've ever found is a spectrum. Sex and gender are no exceptions.

To say "we're all some combination of masculinity and femininity forces us all into a heuristic that completely ignores the fact that gender is a fiction, as well as completely ignoring the fact that many cultures have more than 2 genders (Hijra in S. East Asia, some indigenous tribes have multiple genders, and people in the west who identify as agender or nonbinary).

Also, why do these kinds of thing seems to always end up producing 1950's gender roles, and reinforcing Western stereotypes about what 'men' and 'woman' should behave like.

Blessings
~ND

I think fundamentally the universe is dualistic, it exists because of two fundamental aspects. You have the medium and the form. The dance and the dancer. The thing and the action. You can not have an observer without a thing, and your can not have thing without an observer. You can not have matter without movment or movement without matter. Matter is vibration of the field. Sure we have a whole bunch of different elements, particles, forces etc., but they are all just different combinations of two things, vibration and the field. Its a spectrum, yet it is dualistic because you have two absolutes and then the infinite combinations of in-between. So I agree with your spectrum sentiment.

One could argue that dualism is an illusion, yet a necessary one for the existence of our reality.

I didn't gender these forces, that was done a longtime ago. I am using the terms that are commonly know and referred to.


Gender is not fiction, there are two genders and everyone falls somewhere on the spectrum between the two. The Hijra that you speak of are no different. Just because the Pakistan government makes a law declaring it a third gender doest mean it isn't a combination of the male and female gender, which is exactly what it is.

"Hijra (for translations, see [n 1]) is a term used in South Asia – in particular, in India – to refer to transwomen (male-to-female transsexual or transgender individuals).[1][2] In other[which?] areas of India, transgender people are also known as Aravani, Aruvani or Jagappa.[3]

In Pakistan, the hijras are officially recognized as third gender by the government,[4] being neither completely male nor female"

I can say I am genderless, but regardless of my belief, I will have traits from both genders, some more pronounced then others, and some subtle and almost non existent.


I believe gender rolls go back farther then the 50's and western culture. I believe genders rolls would have been around for the birth of the first human. In my analogy of the hunter gatherers I would never suggest that a certain gender must stay home and take care of the offspring while a certain one must go and hunt. But one must do the hunting and one must take care of the offspring for it to be a successful endeavour towards survival. If you were to choose the person most suited to hunt, it would be the person with physiological differences like increased testosterone, because this tends to increase capabilities in skills that are advantageous to hunting. If you were to choose a person most apt to take care of a baby, it would probably be the one that naturally produces the necessary food from their breasts. These are female and masculine properties, they exist and they have there purposes.

I would never suggest someone behave a certain way because of their gender. I understand that there has been some unbalanced views of gender that for some reason have been ingrained into many cultures. My post does not suggest that these are correct, or right. Even though the idea of gender has been twisted and manipulated to assert power and control over others, it is something that does exist.

The Hirjra were just one example: here's a list (from wiki) of non-binary genders in cultures all around the world.

"The term third is usually understood to mean "other"; some anthropologists and sociologists have described fourth, fifth,[2] and "some" genders. The concepts of "third", "fourth" and "some" genders can be somewhat difficult to understand within Western conceptual categories."


[Citation Needed] on a lot of that stuff. Where are you getting this 'vibration' and 'field' stuff? String theory? You can totally have a thing without an observer: most of the universe is things without observers, as far as we can tell.
Even if these qualities exist, none of these things necessitate a binary gender. I happen to disagree that the universe is fundamentally dualistic: it seems more likely to me that the apparent duality is more of a quirk of our cognition rather than any kind of objective truth, but regardless, none of these things *require* a dualistic gender system.

You wouldn't say that color is dualistic: it's a spectrum, part of the broader EM spectrum. Why can't gender be like color? A slightly more apt comparison would be politics: political beliefs are not a duality either: even the simplest charts plot a conservative/liberal axis against an authoritarian/libertarian axis to give a 2-D vector space. Gender, like political affiliation isn't something 'real,' it's just a collection of behaviors and patterns that people display.


So just because people have been doing something a long time means that it's right, or has value? That's the 'Wisdom of the Ancients' fallacy. People developed systems in the ancient past that we'd think are deplorable, almost immoral today. I think gender is one of those.


[Citation Needed]

What is a unit of gender? How do you determine what gender someone is? Is there a test? Where can we find it? Gender is a social construct, or a pattern we happen to describe an arbitrary meaning to, no more real than one's political affiliation. You can say that everyone has some quantity of these qualities in some amount, but that's true of any possible behavior you can imagine. We've just taken a sub-set of them, arbitrarily given them social importance, and then forced them on the entire population without their consent.

I could take any other set of behaviors (maybe: tendency to think critically, tendency to prefer warm colors, and tendency to extend one's vowels), put them together and it would be just as 'legitimate' as gender. It's just a random collection of behaviors.

Blessings
~ND

I'm sorry I never meant to state any of this as fact, it's just like my opinion man (The Big Lebowski reference ). But I'll tell you what, you show me something that exist without an observer and I'll admit I was wrong about that part.


I see your point about gender, and I think you are changing the way I have been taught to look at it.

But we need (what we currently call) female and male genitalia to conceive right? Or what you are saying is its just ovaries and testicles and there doesn't necessarily need to be a gender label applied to them? They are what they are and function as they do.

I still believe that the magic of the universe happens with a synergistic blending of opposites, a dance of balance, give and take, push and pull. But I can see that gender labels for these things are actually unnecessary and artificial.

Thank you for sharing your view.