WE DON'T balk at some of the most bitter truths modern science teaches and even propagandizes: for example, that mindless subatomic particles govern all things, or that whatever is eternal is indifferent to us, if it exists at all. Yet, for all our sophistication, there is one new scientific truth so disturbing to current prejudices that few in academia dare voice it: the discovery, or rather re-discovery, of natural sexual inequality.
Men and women are, of course, very different. We all knew this when we were kids, but since then, people have taught us to think about it in only one way, and this pressure to think in a respectable way causes many people to mistrust their own eyes, their own experience, their own instincts. As kids, who liked to get into fistfights and beat up the weak? Who was more obedient to teachers, boys or girls? Boys get into more trouble with teachers and with parents, and men get into more trouble with the law and each other. Men fill the prisons and start the wars.
Men are more interested in sex than women. If one really needs studies to discover this, no study will be enough. But in one study, whose results match those of many others, college students were approached by a member of the opposite sex and asked whether they would be willing to have sex. Three-quarters of the men who were approached said yes, and none of the women did. Such a difference is telling, even after making allowance for fear. There is almost no demand for pornography or prostitution catering to women.
Men go it alone and are more self-reliant than women; men draw away from their families much more than women, and men are slower to become dependent or form attachments. Women define themselves more by their relationships, and by the feelings others have for them, than by their own drives and self-perception. Women tend to be more compassionate and nurturing. Men are more oriented toward freedom and toward conquest. The Don Juans, to take a low example of this, are usually male.
If I may mention what got the president of Harvard fired, men vary more widely than women do. There are more men in prisons and insane asylums, and there are more men among the most gifted. Average men may also have a slight edge over average women in abstract or mathematical thought, but this is actually much less important than the difference in variance in explaining the predominance of men at the top of the bell curve. For example, there are seven times as many boys as girls who score in the top percentile (800) on the SAT math test. Not surprisingly, this leads to a disproportionate sex imbalance in physicists and mathematicians, who are selected from this extreme of the curve. Despite predictions to the contrary, there has been no closing in the last several decades of the huge gap between men and women in chess scores -- women make up only one percent of grandmasters, and the top ten male players far surpass the top ten female players. On the other hand, women on average tend to be stronger at gauging their own feelings and those of others, and to be more socially skillful and perceptive than men.
Politics Prof. Steven Rhoads has in his courses and his book, "Taking Sex Differences Seriously," ventured to draw some practical conclusions for students from the new research examining sexual difference. He suggests that young women should be taking more seriously than they now do the costs of trying to combine motherhood with demanding careers, and given those costs, whether they will be more satisfied by their public or their family life. Second, he points out that young men are no longer "forced to make a choice between keeping their social status and sleeping around;" to take one extreme, a rake like Wickham in Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" need not fear today that he would not be able to "dare show his face in society again." Perhaps, he suggests, women may be able to revive some small part of that older social ostracism by the power of their disapproval, if not of men directly, then of promiscuous women, since women care about the judgment of other women.
It is true that the push for sexual equality has not succeeded in changing the nature of men or women, though it has, through ignorance of how to appeal to male pride, made men less likely to take responsibility and more likely to be coarse and callous towards women. But I am skeptical that substantial reforms are currently possible, for this is a great and powerful revolution that we are living through. Who would have guessed that anything could so strongly obscure, even temporarily, something as obvious as our sexual natures? We will be the laughingstock of future ages. And it comes at a great price: Much of the beauty of the world as we have known it, in art and literature and faith, has been tied up with the recognition and even promotion of sexual difference and inequality, however unjust we may now conceive it to be. I doubt that the grey and mirthless world of sexless legalism and professionalism will produce anything as good, or as interesting, as men and women can be.
Manuel Lopez's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at mlopez@cavalierdaily.com.
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