Just a few random thoughts for this entry, my second of the day after finding out I was one day behind in entries and having had trouble enough doing the one for yesterday, although once I got going, I kept going.  (Warning: some of the material is politically-incorrect.)

Triumphancy, is much more a male goal than a female one.  Women, much more often than men, can be heard saying, “It’s only a game,” and they mean it.  Men say the same thing fairly often, but non-wimps don’t really mean it.  Men have always been the ones going off on quests.  It goes back to the sexual division of labor that Nature gave our species, and most other species, one result of which, for us, was making males responsible for hunting, females responsible for gathering–and hunting is a much more questlike activity than gathering.  But geographical exploration became primarily a male activity, too, the physique, temperament and kind of mental abilities that make males better hunters than females making them better for exploration, too.

In addition, and this seems always overlooked by feminists, wimps and academic anthropologists, males are much more biologically expendable than females, so it makes biological sense to fit them for much more risk than females, and make them desire the challenge of danger to a much greater extent.  Males are much more physically courageous/foolhardy than females.  Genetically.  (Yes, there are exceptions, Nature never obliterating exceptions, and they are interesting but in a brief discussion not worth consideration.)  Females have other equally valuable characteristics–such as a superior self-preservation instinct.  And a stronger instinctive desire for kinhood, or at least a different desire for it than males’.

Here’s a test of that psychologists could carry out: gather some short stories emphasizing a character’s thoughts and feelings but hardly going anywhere narratively (some of Henry James’s, for instance) and the same number of “action stories”–stories high on plot but low on characterization.  Then have fifty female and fifty male college students read them and rank them from most pleasurable to least pleasurable.  I’m sure male and female ratings will be opposite each other.

One problem: action stories generally have male protagonists so it might be hard to make half of one’s selection of them concerning female protagonists; it would be easy, I think, to split the character studies into two equal groups according to sex of protagonist.  Unfortunately, there are many other problems because of the many variables involved, like quality of writing, amount of violence, seepage of interesting characterization into action stories, and good plotting into character studies.  But the rough idea makes sense.  Probably just a study of who buys what kind of reading matter could decide the matter.

One thing seems clear to me: there’s no way one could claim that either of the two kinds of stories is superior to the others–although I suspect English professors would vote for character studies–which I would say proved my point in spite of the sex of the professors.  I suppose it would be too difficult to categorize the greatest literary works, though, to settle the matter, most of them being complex mixtures of characterization and plot.

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