The planet Mars is interfering with my normal reticence, pushing me to throw away the last shred of my pretense of being a Nice Person by finally revealing that I believe men and women are significantly different from one another. The transiting moon is contributing to the problem because it has entered the house where my natal moon, and that house is ruled by Aries, the sign of Mars! Meanwhile, Uranus is currently in Aries, too, and (energizingly) trine to my natal sun. Uranus is my ruling planet, and basically in charge of craziness, which is what it’s mainly energizing in the present case. So add it to the mix. As for Mars, it is conjunct to (with?) my natal sun, which is why it’s having such a great effect on me. Nothing, I fear can now save me. I must now continue with my follow-up to what I mentioned toward the end of my letter to William Voegeli.
What I believe was standard educated thought for at least a century before I was born and possibly until 1960. Somewhere along the way the feminist movement ordained that it was invalid, and that was it. I’m sure many males, and perhaps a few females, still believed it, but we kept our mouths shut. Let me be as honest as I can (an Aquarian defect): as an unfortunately close-to-100% male (tall, thin, bald-headed, heterosexual and much else I won’t get into): I not only consider men to be vastly superior to women but consider that a healthy point-of-view (and expect healthy women to believe women to be vastly superior to men). But I’m intelligent enough to see that men and women have to put up with each other. Needless to say, my innate sex drive makes that unavoidable for me personally, although not nearly as much now as it did earlier.
I believe men and women are innately psychologically different from one another in a way that increases both their need for each other and the friction between them. Men give life meaning; women make it livable. To lunge beyond the minor infamies of popular men-as-Martians, women-as-Venusians books. Back to what I said about a focus on aspiration and a focus on compassion.
Also: men are oaks in winter, needing the foliage that women are more or less as much as women need the structuring mean can provide them.
Men lead, women follow. Margaret Thatcher was a rare exception, an effective leader, there being about as many effective female leaders as there are superior male leaders, but only a hundredth as many effective female leaders as effective male leaders. Another effective female leader was anthropologist Margaret Mead. I don’t think much of her standard anthropological views (what makes effective leaders is their ability to think standardly better than most others, and avoid thinking unstandardly, and sometimes standard views make sense), but I think her right when she concluded that while male and female roles varied from one society to another, males always took the roles that society considered its most important ones (as I’m pretty sure it was her, but I’ve never called myself an effective scholar [believe my ideas, not my data]). I therefore more than half-think political positions are rapidly losing status in our society now that women are taking them over, and that college degrees have almost most entirely lost status with superior males now that females are proving much better at getting them than all but a few males.
As you may have noticed, I’m into my note-scattering mode now, writing thoughts as they occur without trying (much) for any kind of logical presentation. I’ll try to make connections between notes when I can, though. Like the connection of what I’m about to get into back to my honesty about myself. I said I healthily consider my sex superior to . . . my sister’s. I bring her into this because something she said to me as a little girl (around ten when I was eleven and the two of us were on the wonderful roof of our wonderful childhood house where no one could see us because of the M-shape of the roof we’d climbed down into where its two sides came to a point). I don’t remember how we got into it but we were arguing about who was better, boys or girls. I was winning because my sister couldn’t deny that men were physically superior to women, and in our family even my mother (who graduated from high school at the age of 15) agreed men were smarter than women (although, oddly, I thought my mother much smarter than my father until puberty when I realized that he, though slower by quite a bit than she, was deeper).
I had no reply to what she next said: “Only girls can have babies.” Later I learned of something called “division of labor,” than feminists seem not to believe in. But it caused me as the asexual objective being that I am to about an equal degree that I am a male to come to understand that sexes as equal but different–however much the male in me scoffs at the idea.
That reproduction is maximally complex in human beings is central to the division of labor between the sexes. Women have a womb, and it is not some minor organ they have and men don’t. For one thing, it must require energy for maintenance that must reduce a female’s energy for other things like boxing and writing symphonies. It more substantially affects the amount of energy a pregnant female has for various activities.
Meanwhile, the male has no womb holding him back. One major, rarely-mentioned side-effect of his womblessness, however, is how biologically-expendable it makes him, something I immediately recognized when at the age of 32 I learned about copulation. (Slight exaggeration in hopes that the wittiness of it will keep any female or girly-boy friend of mine who is reading this from being too mad at me.) Males are close to biologically irrelevant when it comes to reproduction, because one male can keep a village of a hundred nubile females and no males but him doubling in population yearly, and in eleven or twelve years, more than doubling whereas one nubile female in a village of a hundred healthy young men and no females but him will need help from daughters to ever double the population of her village.
This being the case, why wouldn’t Mother Nature make males courageous, sometimes excessively so, and females timid? Why shouldn’t they hunt and fight other tribes while females gathered vegetables and fruit, and fled from another tribe’s warriors? In short, why shouldn’t reproductively barely-relevant males be risk-takers–intellectually, eventually, as much as physically–like me, now, I try to convince myself, never having been much of a physical risk-taker, although I believe I would have been had I needed to because of a confrontation between a scared me and a German Shepherd who bit me (actually, just nipped me in the heel), which turned me instantly into a beserker whose scream of rage as I whirled around to face the dog made the it run away.
Of course, women can take on maleness when necessary, Mother Nature realizing there will be times when males are too scarce to fill all the male roles needing filling; but they won’t be as good males as natural males, nor able to keep it up for very long (generally). Men can make adequate mommies, too, but not usually for a long time.
Women are much better verbally than men . . . practiceptually, which is all that the the verbal portion of IQ tests test (incompletely). Orally, particularly, due to the female vocal cords–and superior flexibility of mind (which is also a female defect that makes them more suggestible than men–in the long term).
Culturally, women’s main value is their female point-of-view; that is, they can add much to any art or verosophy that no male can, even a maximally feminine one–just as males can supply much that no female can.
After skimming what I’ve so far written, I see that I’ve left out how Mother Nature has used common sense to make those who bear children have a much stronger mothering-instinct than those who may not be present at a child’s birth. Indeed, it seems obvious to me that women are the timid sex not only to protect themselves, but to protect the children they bear. And a good reason they are more empathetic than men is to be able to forge closer bonds than men to their children and be able to react faster to their needs, which they feel within to a greater degree than man.
At the same time, this gives men a freedom from domestic responsibilities, to be emotionally as well as physically better able to put aside their families (especially when young and thus more male than they will be) that allows them to go on quests.
I just remembered one other big difference between men and women. I discovered its importance thirty or forty years ago but this will be the first time in print I’ve mentioned it. I can’t believe geneticists are not aware of it, but can’t recall ever reading a discussion of it. It’s the fact that the y-chromosome, which only men have, is so much smaller than the x-chromosome it joins to form the genotype of the potential human being.[1] Unless I’m mistaken, the difference in size between the two means that many genes in the x-chromosome have no gene from the y-chromosome to fuse with; therefore variation is substantially increased: there’s no gene from the y-chromosome to neutralize or modify a freak gene from the x-chromosome as there would be in a fertilized ovum destined to become a female.
One of my speculations, by the way, is that our species and probably others have a mutation mechanism that intentionally causes genetic mutations, and that its target is the an individual’s sex chromosome–perhaps, in fact, an ovum’s sex chromosome. Hence, such a mechanism would increase the possibility of genetic variation.
Be that as it may, this greater male genetic variation would explain why more IQ geniuses as well as more of those of severely reduced mental-capacity are male than female, an empirical fact, I believe. It seems also a fact that males are much more susceptible to genetic defects and to a lesser degree since they are rarer, genetic blessings.
All this would go along with my theory of the biological expendability of males: mother Nature doesn’t mind if a bunch of males are born severely defective, so she can risk them to test new genes on. I further speculate that she keeps a woman’s mutation mechanism dormant until a woman is in her thirties, thus seeing to it that a woman’s first children are “normal” and only taking a chance of failed experiments on late-born children, children, in other words probably “extra.” I particularly like the idea as one such late-born who in his own view must have all kinds of genetic mutations in his XY chromosome. But my impression is that a fair number of superior culturateurs had older mothers. And it is a fact that the late-born are more likely to be defective than those to young mothers.
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[1] Sorry, right-to-lifers, but fetuses are not human beings for me, although I’d prefer they live as much as I prefer tadpoles to live (which I do) though much less than I want living cats to stay alive.
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My intention today was to get all my evil thoughts about the differences between men and women down, to get them out of the way. But there are quite a few more, and details to be recorded, and I’m tiring. To bring this entry past the 2,000-word mark, though, I’ll mention where differences between the sexes get most interesting. Those of temperament are the most obvious: men lean toward being rigidniks, women milyoops (though most are a healthy balance between them.
Otherwise, the main ones are in . . . I can’t remember my name for it: the “cerebrawareness?” All the awarenesses in the cerebrum taken together I mean. That would be a good term for it. Anyway, I contend that the cerebrawarelity of females is substantially different from the males. Females have a more developed anthroceptual awareness than men, for instance. I’ll get back to this sometime, but I think it less important than other things I want to discuss (although right now I can’t think what they might be).
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