Men and women — how different are they?
It depends who is doing research
Let’s debunk some “scientific” myths about men and women.
Every day our experience confirms it, and science adds its research results on this topic almost every month: There are innate differences between men and women. And, of course, these differences are natural, despite all feminist efforts, because men have in their brains and elsewhere what women do not have, which is why they deeply envy men: testosterone. This is what makes a man a real man, even before birth, and even more so afterwards.
The evidence is confirmed by numerous works of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, archaeologists and theologians. It is, as everybody knows, an established fact, that:
- In the Stone Age, men hunted dangerous animals (e.g. mammoths), while women anxiously guarded children in caves, gathered a few roots and eagerly awaited the return of their strong protectors.
- Women are naturally monogamous because of the high cost of raising children, while any man could please 100 women at any time and produce just as many offspring (multiplied by a testosterone-dependent “masculinity factor”). Men are therefore naturally polygamous or simply “poly”.
- Men tend to take higher risks, for example in sports and banking, while women prefer to be cautious.
- Women can communicate better because their corpus callosum, the nerve-connecting cord between the two halves of the brain, is thicker.
- Boys automatically and instinctively choose cars, cranes, trains and weapons from a pile of toys, while girls immediately grab dolls, pans, cradles and diamonds.
- Men play football, women dance. The opposite violates the laws of nature.
- Men are intellectual (have a bigger brain), women live in and from feelings (have a bigger heart).
- Men are naturally aggressive, which is why they wage wars. Women are naturally compliant, which is why they spin wool.
- Men choose their wives, women say yes if he is masculine enough, which means, for example, that he drives a black BMW or a red Porsche, but not a Toyota van.
And so on. In several highly amusing and instructive books, Australian professor of the history and philosophy of science Cordelia Fine has examined these myths and torn them apart piece by piece. See, for example: “Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of our Gendered Minds”. I will briefly summarize what she said (and what I know from other publications or from personal experience). Let’s go through the individual points:
Myth (1): the happy Stone Age life (see illustration)
The myth of the “mammoth hunters” emerged in the Victorian era. Some recent but little-known excavations have shown fine line patterns in the stone floor near caves. They are interpreted as imprints of nets, and this interpretation turns our ideas about Stone Age life on their head: Women used nets to catch small mammals (rabbits, squirrels, mice), thus providing daily food, while the men hung around somewhere, got bored and then made up great hunting stories that no one at home believed.
Myth (2): One man gets a hundred wives
No way! In the Stone Age, women were infertile after birthing a child for about four years because they breastfed their children during that time. After that, there was a small “window of opportunity” to conceive a child, and the women were pregnant again. But even this window of opportunity was usually not long enough, because the competition was fierce, and the strongest did not prevail, but rather the most trusted. This then led to monogamy, in which a man had many more opportunities to produce offspring. (Unless his name was Genghis Khan. But that’s another story, long after the stone age ended.)
And the women? They want the best genes, which are transported by sperm cells. Who supplies them is not so important. That’s why numerous females of the most diverse animal species, from insects to primates, collect sperm cells of various males in order to use them when needed. From there it follows: For purely ecological and biological reasons, men are naturally monogamous, but women are poly! Incidentally, in the entire animal kingdom, women choose and men apply.
And what about men as protectors? The group offered enough protection, a single man was neither necessary nor desirable.
Myth (3): Men are willing to take risks
Women take significantly higher risks than men ever could. It starts with the “natural destiny of women”, i.e. pregnancy and childbirth. In the past, women died in large numbers in childbirth, and even today the financial risks of mothers are significantly higher than those of fathers. The risk of poverty is greatest for single mothers in Germany. Men stay in their jobs and look for another woman after a separation. And as far as dangerous sports are concerned: Women have caught up quite a bit since they were allowed to take part in such activities.
Myth (4): better connection between left and right brain
The evaluation of all possible studies on the subject has shown that the corpus callosum — the bridge between left and right brain hemisphere- is the same thickness for men and women. If men communicate less, they cannot blame their nerves being too thin. They are simply too lazy or too cowardly. Or they think it’s “cool” to refrain from talking.
Myth (5): gender-specific toys
What so-called “science” does in such studies borders on bottomless stupidity or deliberate fraud. If you send boys and girls (children) into a room with randomly scattered toys, what the psychologists describe actually happens. But not because boys have a natural attraction to weapons and girls to diapers, but for a completely different reason that you can see immediately if you watch a film about this experiment: The children are confused at first until one of them starts. Then all the boys pounce on their leader’s toy because they are programmed (indoctrinated, brainwashed) by society to choose “male” toys, otherwise they are excluded from the group as weaklings. It is probably similar for girls.
This behavior continues later: Girls are bullied at school because of their mathematical interest or, still worse, their talent, and boys are teased and dismissed as gay because they like (and practice) dancing. Apparently, in our culture — at least in Germany — there is an equation: mathematics = intellectual, i.e. without feelings, and a woman who is even interested in something like that must be cold-hearted. Then she is not a real woman. And: dance = emotional, i.e. unmanly, and a man who is interested in something like that must naturally be gay. Then he is not a real man. Culture preserves these myths. Parents pass them on to their children; if not, the group ensures that classmates behave in accordance with the myths.
Myth (6): intelligence
The German neurophysiologist Paul Julius Möbius (1853–1907) is remembered for his work “On the Physiological Imbecility of Women” (1900). In it he showed that women have smaller brains on average than men (which is true), and consequently they are dumber. Later, someone came up with the idea of relating brain size to body size. The result: Women have, relatively speaking, larger brains than men. From which the researchers concluded: Women are still dumber than men. Because they need larger brains to achieve the same level of thinking. That is the logic of science!
One more example: “Women are weaker, they are smaller and they are less intelligent,” said the Polish EU MP Januz Korwin-Mikke. Of course, this means they should earn less than men, the man thinks. Well, the man knows his science.
Myth (7): Men wage wars
Why humanity wages wars is still unclear and requires its own investigation. In any case, warfare has nothing to do with human “nature”. War is not “natural” because there are numerous cultures that were or are peaceful. The so-called “Indus Valley Civilization” existed for a thousand years without war, and numerous “primitive” (non-civilized) peoples have never waged wars.
The hormone testosterone is said to be to blame for all of this. But male and female hormones are present in men and women, at different times in different amounts, depending on whether they are needed or not. It is always convenient to blame something or someone for everything, then you don’t have to deal with yourself!
