Brand New Sentence

I understand your ... well I'm not sure whether to call it 'well placed skepticism' or 'trauma response'... yeah, there are a lot of assholes who basically just hand wave away anything 'weird' in female/woman's behavior as 'must be starting her period' or something like that.

Yeah, I've not thoroughly researched this myself, like I said 'only thing I've even heard of' that seems to have at least some actual body of published literature.

The observed effect, the sex based difference in VR motion sickness ... that seems to be well observed and documented.

But, the proposed explanations are just that, proposed, not conclusive. The rest of that page that I cited, it essentially says that they think its a confluence of their proposed explanations, that all play some role in explaining the 2:1 difference... basically if you add them all up, that's how you get the 2:1 ratio.

But, as uh, SailorFuzz says, I think a big thing they are missing is that they're not taking into account just... actual previous experience with video games, playing different kinds of video games.

If you take a person whose never played like a PC FPS game before, they'll often be just totally baffled and disoriented by the concept of moving and also looking around at the same time.

I've got to imagine that VR is like that, but magnified, and the more time you've spent learning how to pilot an avatar character in a traditional PC FPS set up... thats got to build mental skills and neurokinetic pathways or patterns as a kind of muscle memory.

Soo, given that gals have for a long time been stigmatized out of the gaming space... less time or likelihood to develop those skills.

I think that's actually a very compelling explanation, or at least part of the explanation, but I'm not aware of anyone whose actually studied that.

Ok now lets see your actual papers here...

The first one says that broadly, men and women have roughly the same actual amounts of motion sickness, its just that women report it more often, essentially because that's socially acceptable/expected.

Yeah, sure, I believe that. But, it doesn't specifically go into... what stage of their cycle they were in. They didn't ask about or track that.

The thing that I referenced said that basically at a certain point in a womans cycle, vestibular system is more unbalanced than otherwise.

So, both these things could be true at the same time. Take a random sample of women at random stages in their cycle, vs random sample of men, on average, similar amounts of actual motion sickness, because during most of a woman's cycle, there is no difference in susceptability to motion sickness.

I can't actually access the second paper because my security settings on my web browser are telling Google's recapcha/redirect to go fuck itself...

Third link/paper unfortunately only displays for me the Abstract, so I can't actually read the full paper for methodology.

It does say more studies need to be done, taking 'susceptibility' into account... I'd suggest to them that maybe actually tracking what stage of her cycle a woman is in could be a mechanistic, explanatory factor, and that you might end up with: on average, men and women have broadly similar rates of actual (vs reported) motion sickness, but more women tend to get more motion sick during a certain brief stage of their cycle.

Of course, maybe... motion sickness susceptibility has something like a genetic or epigenetic component... and maybe there is some kind of inheritance kind of thing going on. Maybe its more likely to be carried on or expressed by the X chromosome, maybe not.

Lots of possible mechanisms could be at play, but yeah again, I don't know that there is something approach a solid 'theory of precisely why some people get more motion sick than others'.