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Message:: [QUOTE="ewomack, post: 4750043, member: 15588"]There is nothing inherently "male" or "female" in coin collecting or numismatics in themselves, but there is something decisively "male" - to be more specific, heterosexual male - about the culture of coin collecting. It's a little bit ineffable and I can't quite put my finger on it, but the culture of coin shows just seems to permeate an unmistakable "maleness." The most obvious explanation is that often 90% of the people there are in fact male, so the collective culture probably reflects its aggregate members. I felt the same mood when I used to attend sports cards shows years ago. And, when I was even younger, I sensed the same at model rocketry gatherings. I have also sniffed the same aura in the many IT departments that I have worked in over the years. Though I never sensed an actual attempt to exclude girls or women from such things, there always seemed be an implied and invisible "no girls allowed" sign at the entrance. Again, no one willingly put one there, but such gatherings had this "feeling" that no girl would ever dare set foot there. If one did appear, the girl might get labeled a "Tom Boy" or some such nonsense. The strict and almost confining gender roles of the past arguably played a part in this. As the saying used to go "boys do boy things and girls do girl things." For some reason, coin collecting became a "male thing" and its overarching culture hasn't really changed. I think it's also fair to say, and I say this as a male-type person, that men generally tend to not excel in creating atmospheres and social cultures that are open to women. The opposite also happens. As one of the few men in a local French reading group, I don't sense any of the "maleness" that I feel at coin shows. I feel something else that remains just as hard to define or pin down. Again, there is nothing "male" or "female" about reading French, but the group tends to overwhelmingly attract women. When I first started attending, maybe it was my imagination, but I swear that I received strange looks that felt like "why is he here?" No one made me feel uncomfortable or unwelcome at all, but I could tell that I wasn't a typical attendee. I just hoped that they didn't think that I was attending for salacious reasons, though some probably did, but I can read French and I didn't say or do anything that would imply that I was "on the prowl," so everything seemed fine. Nonetheless, I do still feel a little bit like an outsider and I often wonder if this is how some girls or women feel at coin shows, or sports cards shows or rocketry launches? No one seems to be trying to make a "male" or "female" culture around these things, it just seems to happen organically. This is just based on my experience - I'm no expert on any of this - but American culture has traditionally been bifurcated pretty strongly into "male" and "female" segments. Once something gets associated with one of them, it often seems pretty difficult to alter it to accommodate the other. This situation extends well beyond coin collecting, but at some point coin collecting became associated with "male culture" and it has stayed that way not because anyone has maliciously outright tried to exclude women (well, some might have), but because the larger culture "works that way." These are the "unwritten rules" that we never really articulate to ourselves syntactically, but nonetheless they play a massive role in our lives and shape how we act, who we associate with and they also guide our interests. Obviously, to a degree this is all a generalization, but it seems to explain, at least partially, many of the "male" and "female" things that seem endemic to American culture. I think parts of the up and coming generations will attempt to tear down some of these walls and some in the older generations may not like this. Some younger people that I have interacted with seem to have less of a sense of "guy's things" versus "girl's things." In fact, at a rocket launch that I attended last year, a young girl made a large pink and purple "Princess Rocket" covered in flowers and ponies and it launched beautifully into the sky and she was ecstatic. I was very happy to see numerous club members, many of them middle-aged cigar-sucking alpha males, personally encourage and congratulate her. I feel that the answer to the male dominance of coin collecting lies somewhere in that experience at the rocketry range. These men went out of their way to genuinely include a little girl in their "manly" enterprise. The genders probably just need to interact more outside of a "dating" context and begin to explore what each "culture" has to offer. In the end, the situation seems to stem more from heavily imposed "gender cultures" than from anything genetic or biological. It will take empathy, courage and tolerance to break down these barriers on all sides.[/QUOTE]

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