Caitlin Moran’s new book, ‘What About Men?’ although generally sympathetic to people with a penis and a scrotum like myself, rather hedges the question ‘ but are men and women fundamentally different anyway’.?
She acknowledges that there are differences but - as has long been fashionable - insists that such differences are a purely cultural construction. Or so I understand, because I haven’t actually read the book, since I am up to here with male or female persons writing books about other males and female persons and how they get up one another’s noses one way or another. Anyway, Moran is speaking up for us poor benighted blokes in the face of the last fifty years of feminist narrative. Apparently, we are loyal, protective and hard-working, which is encouraging to hear. Though it is not quite clear where these qualities come from. Are they inborn? Or enculturated?
The publication of the book did get me thinking about this whole ‘culture vs nature’ debate as regards the construction of gender. Because I have never been able to get my head around the idea that gender is purely a construction ( or sex, for that matter, as some trans activists will insist).
I don’t want to go into opinions - yet - about this highly charged arena. I just want to reflect for a moment on some facts.
Men, in general, are more violent than women. They are more criminal. They commit suicide more often. They constitute most of the paedophiles, rapists and serial killers. They live on average eight years less than women. They are more avid consumers of pornography. They are generally more enthusiastic about some sports, including football, rugby and cricket. They tend to prefer cars and gadgets to yoga and wellness programs. They are the ones that work as dustmen, drivers, labourers, builders, carpenters, plumbers and most forms of hard outside work.
These are not opinions. They are easily verifiable facts. Feel free to look up the stats.
Likewise, women in general are more interested in fashion than men, beauty products, clothes, gossip, ‘Love Island’ and the raising of children (cf Mumsnet). They are far more common in primary schools and nurseries than male teachers and in the ‘caring’ professions such as nursing and social care. Who buys all the beauty magazines and the fashion press? Who buys all the childcare products? Who buys ‘Chat’ and ‘OK’ off the newsstands? Who reads romantic fiction?
Not many men, that’s for sure.
These are not opinions either. They are also facts. How can they be established? By a brief look at employment statistics, consumer activity and viewing figures.
This isn’t ( or shouldn’t) be controversial. Men and women very clearly behave in different fashions as a group ( which doesn’t restrict any individual from varying their behaviour away from the mean). To dispute this is to duck some very obvious realities.
As for whether these differences are somehow hard-wired into the biology of each sex - well that’s much harder to say. The brain science seems far from settled. And despite the efforts of the trans activists to suggest otherwise, women seem to bear the overwhelming number of children. About 100 per cent I would say. This is a biological fact that has huge cultural consequences.
I can’t possibly say for sure, since I am a male, but I imagine having another human being grow inside you for nine months - or a number of them over a period of years - is likely to have a fairly profound psychological effect. And given this has been true for all of human history, its cultural effect is also bound to be profound. Because yes, there is male and female culture, obviously, just as there is male and female biology. The effect of being effectively enslaved by another sex, to some extent or other, as women have been in nearly all cultures and at all times, would, for instance, lead to greater solidarity between women grown out of their common experience of oppression.
Given the enormous shift in the power and understanding of the potential of women over the last few generations, I can understand the temptation to think we are infinitely malleable as human beings whatever our biological sex. Because the changes HAVE been enormous - and are clearly positive. Anyone who watched the women’s football team win the European championship can be in no doubt of the potential of women’s sport for instance, as it encroaches into traditional male areas. And the ubiquitous sexism that was directed at women when I was growing up in the 60 and 70s., while far from disappearing, has definitely shrunk in its power and reach.
However, I have my reservations about thinking we can be whoever we want to be ( as the modern mantra has it). After all, all those uncomfortable facts of consumption and employment I quoted earlier have remained fairly stable since feminism first burst into public consciousness in the 1970s. That’s more than 50 years. Given that there have been huge leaps forward in other areas for women - in media, education and professions like law and business and medicine - the stubborn refusal of these facts to change is somewhat perplexing ( as is the failure for there to be any change in the patterns of violence, criminality etc among men). Maybe it’s sexism that stops women working as motorcycle messengers, but it isn’t obvious why that should be.
It’s beginning to look like there are some patterns of sex behaviour that are too deeply entrenched to shift much, even over the space of half a century of Zeitgeist change. This suggests to me not that gender is fixed, but that there are perhaps limits to its fluidity. In another sixty years of social change will there be we an equal number of men as primary school teachers and nurses, and an equal number of women working as refuse collectors, soldiers, builders and taxi drivers? I leave it as an open question. But the older I get, the more I suspect that some things just never change.
Really interesting Tim. Isn't the essential tension today between the choices of the individual and the permissive structure/ norms of their societies? Empirical evidence can be found that this structure determines what roles people may select, including gender categories. For example, gender roles now are not the same as they were in ancient Rome, nor are they the same across cultures, nor socio-economic groups. Moreover, social construction is not an imposition by one gender upon another but a shared and emergent social process - think how the 'ideal' body shape or personality changes as people attempt to be attractive within the prevailing social norms, for example. There are facts about biological sex that are evident but how do they manifest in somone outside a social structure to imitate?
Interesting observations, Tim. We certainly live in weird times where certain debates are concerned, (men redefining themselves as women and demanding to play sports against biological women, for example) and some of these ‘debates’ are conducted like warfare on social media and best avoided. Yes, men and women, in the main, are very different, but then within those groups, there are huge disparities of taste and temperament. One thought: when I was growing up in the 1950s, there was a perception that boys were emotionally tougher than girls. This, I think, was an entirely false premise.