different culture norms

I knew it. I had always observed that Chinese men were different from American men in several ways, but yesterday's class confirmed my thoughts completely: Chinese men are generally more effeminate by Western standards than American men. Put another way, Chinese men value different things than American men.
We started class with a friendly discussion of students' hometown, school, and family life. Then we started talking about the differences between Chinese men and women. This came up because of some exerpts in their textbook from the pop psych book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, by Dr. John Gray. The students were asked to comment on whether they identified with the descriptions of life on Venus or Mars. According to this book, life for men on Mars involves doing things to prove themselves and develop their power and skills. Life for women on Venus, on the other hand, involves valuing love, communication, beauty, and developing harmony in relationships. Despite the fact that all of my Oral English classes are 94% female, the males in the class are a very vocal minority. Interestingly, the men in my class strongly identified with life on Venus (the women planet) along with all the women. Many of the students, males and females both, objected to the value of attaining power on any level for any human, and strongly related to developing harmony in relationships for both men and women. I knew this to be a cultural value for my Chinese students, and wasn't particularly surprised when Marvin, the most vocal of the students, finally concluded that "American men must be different from Chinese men" because of the ideas expressed in the article about men being preoccupied with things that can help them achieve power and results. Granted, Dr. Gray's ideas are highly controversial even on an American college campus. But I would have been hard-pressed to find anyone to have an inkling of agreement with Dr. Gray on his opinions about life on Mars for men. Once again, I felt like I was on a different planet than all of them anyway.