Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes
Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes
Kicking the hornets nest by talking 'sex differences' on International Women's Day
Marketers know it. Comedians know it. The fashion and beauty industries know it. Film-makers and authors know it. Teachers and most parents know it. Women and men on average like and want hugely different things.
My scepticism as to whether this is all due to social conditioning only increases with age and my journey as a parent to both sexes - observing first hand not just them, but the 100s of children around them. Women come together to celebrate many of the ‘female’ passions - book clubs, crafting circles, fashion shows and romcom nights - yet still, few seem able to accept that these same differences in aptitudes or hobbies might also play out in life-priorities or career choice or bear any responsibility for inbalance in certain professions, (where it seems only female under-representation is an issue. Never male. Which btw, makes zero sense…)
It seems that comedy is one of the last places where the differences between men and women are allowed to be explicity enjoyed. I asked people to share funny memes along these lines and I was deluged. The selection included men unable to find things in the fridge; their clothes only able to make it as far as the floor around the laundry basket; a male gorilla trying to turn on his uninterested mate by tweaking her nipple; and videos detailing the mental load of women with 100 jobs that need doing distracting her constantly as she walks through her home (links below). Marriage gags are, of course, ever-green (and if you don’t laugh, you’d cry) but the instantly-recognisable male-female differences they showcase are rarely a lens through which sex-imbalances are examined.
Women love romance; men love Star Wars. Women love gossip; men can spend a whole day with a best mate who’s just got divorced and not think to ask him how he’s doing. Women face each other when they speak; men angle themselves at 45 degrees (which is fascinating, right? Just watch). Women never forget; men rarely hold a grudge. The list goes on and on and I’d highly recommend Caitlin Moran’s hilarious book ‘What about Men’ where she compares men to dogs in terms of their typical traits of loyalty, adventure-seeking, people-pleasing (aka ‘banter’) hole-digging, tinkering, crotch-fiddling and love for their mums.
Talking of which, here’s book preferences by sex to give another example:
Once more, I’d suggest the antidoters are the ones injecting (professionally risque) caveats into mainstream assumptions to nudge conversations in more nuanced directions.
Louise Perry, Mary Harrington and Mary Eberstadt are just three interesting counter-thinkers on feminism who I’ve tuned into recently. Where my TedX started (with some pretty superficial questions), they’ve gone much further.
They’ve given deep thought to questions including: how much ‘progress’ has actually been made by feminism as opposed to (predominantly male-invented) technology e.g. labour-saving devices, the pill, the growth of the knowledge economy etc.; how far women have actually benefited from a sexual revolution that massively over-burdens them at work and home and is now turning off their daughters from wanting to emulate; how 20%+ of women are now childless at 40, 80% of whom, not through choice; feminism’s partial culpability for the huge growth of single-parent families (a burden normally borne by women); and then there’s what it’s done to children… thrown into childcare at younger and younger ages and ‘over-parented’ by time-poor parents. Phew! And don’t even get them started on the huge growth of porn-addiction and how it’s damaging relationships between the sexes.
There’s a course a great deal more to all of these issues than feminism, but start peeling back the layers and the ‘wins’ suddently don’t seem so impressive.
A powerful video I was shared a few times shows a strong, articulate woman biting back to the statement ‘We need to talk about the patriarchy’ with this fast-paced monologue:
We could…
Or we could consider that there are actually more women than men in universities, more women than men who hold PhDs, women are being preferentially selected for jobs, not for being the best candidates but to fill equity quotas that they- were women. Women hold all the power in divorce courts, laws incentivise women to leave their husbands and take the kids, destroy men and get paid to do it, or skip marriage altogether and just have children to get the paycheck. Are there really any opportunities we want that we do not have? I know there are plenty of things that we dont want and we can… just leave that to the men …while this evil-patriarchy ideology conditions little girls to cringe at the thought of being just a mom and debases building homemaker skills in favour of building an army of boss b*** ready to tear down the patriarchy when all it's really doing is tearing apart families tearing apart relationships and tearing down our femininity and with that goes our chance at peace in our home, peace in our communities, in our nation and on this planet… and maybe that’s the point.
Ouch. But maybe this growing sentiment is why International Womens’ Day seems, at least to me, a bit muted this year?
It’s not complacency about the significant challenges that still disproportionately impact women (sexual violence, especially) to recognise much of the above and want to have a conversation about them… and about men. Neither should it be a battle between women and men for who has it worse. Feminism shouldn’t need to be countered by Men's Rights Activism (or god forbid, Andrew Tateism), but the pendulum does seem to be shifting back.
A lot of the confusion about sex differences and how they play out in society seems to stem from people’s inability to understand bell curves, or the different distributions of average traits. Any data along these lines is immediately countered with ‘but I know a brilliant female engineer or firefighter; a guy who knits or loves romcoms’… Well, of course, that’s how bell curves work. Sex differences exist, but this tells us absolutely nothing about individuals. The average British man is 5ft 9 and the average woman 5ft 4 but few people remark upon a 5ft 9 woman. It’s the ends of the distributions where it makes a difference and in population-wide statistics. More male geniuses, CEOs and leaders maybe, but also much more male autism, violent crime, suicide and homelessness. The female bell curve is flatter and less extreme.
A stereotype, no matter how borne out of accurate data, is still a stereotype which can be harmful if it prevents any one individual from pursuing opportunities outside it, so they are always worth challenging. One of the (many) conflicts between gender identity ideologues and radical feminists speaks to this with the former evoking the psychological ‘innateness’ of feminine stereotypes that the feminist movement has worked so hard over recent decades to dismantle.
No easy answers here and it’s a hornets nest that I should probably have avoided the week of International Women’s Day… but ho hum… food for thought...?
Further reading/ watching
Credit: Blog title quote - Jim Carey
Women vs. Men memes (best viewed on a mobile)
Video: Gary Neville’s super-confused face. Text: ‘Dads being informed of all the plans they agreed to for the weekend on a saturday morning’ (link)
Video: Women saying ‘Me telling my husband I need more affection’. Video cuts to male Gorilla tweaking a female gorilla’s nipple, text ‘My husband’ (link)
Old man saying ‘I’m proud of you, you know that. I hope you do’ Text: ‘When you husband opens the fridge and finds the ketchup all on his own’ (link)
Video: Woody, from toy story, emerging triumphant from a box: Text: Dad coming out of the bathroom ready to leave after mom just got herself and the kids ready for the last 2 hours (link)
Woman getting out of shower, drying as she goes; man throwing water all over the floor (link)
Video - woman eating alone (sad music playing). Text: Eating another family dinner alone whilst my kids run feral and my husband takes his third dump of the day’ (link)
Video - confused/ worried spaniel. Text: When you ask your wife where something is, she describes its location , but you still can’t find it and now you hear her walking towards you muttering under her breath (link)
Man tricks woman into ‘getting lucky tonight’ (link)
Video - man walking solo in the wild. Text: Maturing in marriage is learning the only thing your wife wants from you is to give her attention and to be left alone at different moments but all at the same time, most of the time and never but always’ (link)
Video of a day in the life living with a husband (music - Beyonce - ‘if i was a boy’) - scenes of shoes left, sandwich-making ingredients and crumbs on kitchen side, wet towels left on floor, socks everywhere, 4 glasses of water next to bed, full-to-the-brim kitchen bin. Unchanged loo roll (link)
(more sad, than humorous) The actress who plays Sally from Home & Away responding to a psychologist talking about a Mother’s Mental Load (link)
Bonus, totally unrelated link: Lovely X thread of photos taken at exactly the right time