2,644 words

Introduction

Some people think that the sexes only differ because of discrimination, “society,” or “the environment.” Were it not for the way they are treated, their upbringing, or the advertisements they see, women would be just like men. In case you ever meet someone such as this who is teetering on the brink of enlightenment, here are 12 things you can say to him that might push him over — after you have explained that it is only women who bear children, of course, which explains most other innate sex differences.

1. A narrower range of interests

Women have a narrower range of interests than do men, as seen in the businesses they start up. On Dragons’ Den, the original Shark Tank, where entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to the “dragon” investors, men might have started businesses in anything from aviation, construction, computing, or electricals to soup, strollers, perfumes, or labor-saving devices for the home. By contrast, almost every woman has started a business to do with babies or children, fashion and cosmetics, or baking. Skin cream for the under-threes, hair extensions, dresses that keep women cool, coffee bags, and muffins are the sort of things they offer. No one has told them to limit their interests to women, children, and the kitchen. Quite the opposite: for 50 years unstinting efforts have been made to attract women to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. But they still have their characteristic interests.

2. Happy in supporting roles

Despite a parallel campaign to get women to aspire to be leaders, they more often choose supporting roles. Whereas a man might devote himself to trying to climb the corporate ladder, many women are content to be dental assistants, personal assistants, and the like. Also, women’s attitude to work and their reasons for working are not the same as men’s. A former finance director saw no humiliation in switching to the role of dinner lady so that she could see more of her family. Many so-called career women only aspire to go part-time. The reason two women I know work at the local pub is that it is the only way they can see their busy friend: the landlady.

It is true that there were always headmistresses and matrons, showing that no one ever tried to stop women taking charge of quite large numbers of people, but few aspired to lead big companies. When we see a woman in a leadership position today, we can be fairly sure she got it not on merit but so that we might conclude that the only reason few women were in such positions before her is that men were keeping them out. Nor is it surprising that such diversity hires don’t always perform very well. Not long after Dany Cotton was put in charge of the London Fire Brigade in 2017, despite not being qualified to drive a fire engine, an apartment block caught fire. When she should have been supervising the response, she kept having to go into a nearby house to use the bathroom.[1]

3. More coordinating, less competitive

Girls are more interested in social coordination and less in competition than are boys. No one tells girls to focus their playground games on being in step with each other and synchronizing their hand-patting, yet this is what their games are all about, and they are remarkably good at them. Meanwhile, the boys run round all over the place trying to get the better of each other in various ways.

Women’s lesser interest in competition could help explain the fact that they are poor at sports compared to men. When the Australian national women’s soccer team played a regional side of 15-year-old boys, they lost seven-nil.[2] It is for this sort of reason that the film Gregory’s Girl (1981) had to be made, where Dorothy was a better soccer player than Gregory. Women’s small interest in competition could also help explain the fact that they are comparatively poor at chess, there having been just 37 women among the world’s top 1,600 grandmasters in 2020. This is why the Netflix series Queen’s Gambit, about a female chess prodigy, won so many awards. The more obviously false an idea is, the more it must be celebrated as the truth. Fortunately, most women are too sensible to mind admitting that they do not excel at soccer or chess. They lack the envy and resentment of feminists. Besides, what do they care about soccer or chess?

4. More egocentric and less rational

Women tend to be more egocentric and less rational than men. Complaining about an advertisement, a woman once said: “They shouldn’t be allowed to make ads showing new-born babies when there are women about who have just lost theirs.” If she had just lost her baby, that was terrible for her, but it didn’t mean that pictures of babies had to be banned, any more than pictures of holiday destinations had to be banned for the sake of people who had had to cancel their holidays.

5. A less prehistoric self-image

Women are less inclined than men to compare themselves to early humans. When word got round that geneticists at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig were researching the Neanderthal contribution to human DNA, several people approached them saying that they thought they might be Neanderthals. All were men. Some women approached them, however, to say they thought they might be married to Neanderthals.[3] This sex difference is unlikely to result solely from women being raised to foster the feminine ideal rather than to think of themselves as ape-like hulks. They foster it by nature, having found over the millennia that the closer they get to it, the better their chance of attracting a decent mate.

6. A different use of language

Women use language differently from men, often attenuating their statements as though not to upset a child. A woman assisting at a supermarket self-checkout who intends to put something down won’t say that she is going to put it down, but that she’ll just pop it over here. A female receptionist about to look something up will say, “I’ll have a little look.” A female forensic expert said that sheets are placed over the deceased at murder scenes because it “allows us to control the area a little bit better.” A man would not have added the last four words.

Women seek concord. Even as journalists, who might be expected to be in a position to make authoritative reports, they seek the agreement of their interviewers. When asked why the Duke of Edinburgh’s grandsons would not be walking together behind his coffin, a female journalist said, “Well, I think the Queen has put her foot down, really, hasn’t she, with regard to the uniforms?” What this meant no one knew, but it sounded like something everyone could agree with. When a reporter put a question to three young women walking down the street, they didn’t answer independently but looked at each other before the first one spoke, after which the other two said the same.

When writing, young women use exclamation marks liberally, as though in a permanent state of excitement. Their handwriting tends to be rounder and loopier than men’s. Many find it cute to put a little circle over an “i” rather than a dot. They also find it cute to give themselves short names ending with this letter. Whereas a boy named Robert or Gerald might call himself Robbie or Gerry, a Patricia or a Catherine will call herself Cathi or Patti. No one knows why they do this, but it is not because they have been told to do so by the patriarchy.

7. Happy to be subject to a higher authority

Women have a greater need than men to believe that they are being looked over and looked after by a higher authority, which is why any church congregation contains four or five times as many women as men, at least in Britain. When a 45-year-old mother-of-two went missing here in 2023, women commenting on videos about the case often said things such as “God bless her and take care of her wherever she is”; “May a miracle happen, may she return back safely soon, Amen”; and “My prayers will be for those little girls.” Men rarely appealed to the divine authority.

Women are more likely than men to appeal to any kind of higher authority. It is in their nature to demand that someone do something, like the one who was upset by the advertisement. During the 2020 lockdown, a woman told on local social media how she had been “having a nose to see how many non-locals are about,” reporting that in one minute she’d seen about ten. “It’s only gonna get busier if someone with authority doesn’t sort it,” she concluded.

Women with husbands who take responsibility appear happier than those whose husbands only want to please them. Women seem to take more pleasure in submitting to a man who will take care of things than in finding that they are supposed to take care of things themselves. Of course, feminists say the opposite and make a point of defying men rather than deferring to them, but what do they know of women’s nature? When they’re not trying to defeat it, they deny that it exists.

8. Not made to be daredevils

A woman who had been raised under feminism to believe that a woman could do anything a man could do was given the chance to perform a “doughnut” — a wheel-spinning stunt in a car.[4] When she said she didn’t know how to, her instructor told her she was going to learn. She was afraid she’d wreck the car — but it was already wrecked, he said. He told her what to do.[5] She told him to guide her as she did it. It didn’t work. After trying three more times without success, she said, “I don’t think I have it in me.” He explained, “You’ve got to get the tires spinning.” She tried and failed again before giving up. “She made it longer than I thought she would,” he said, before doing the stunt with her in the passenger seat. “That’s what you’ve got to do.” “I can’t do that,” she replied.

Women’s risk-aversion was also seen in a husband-and-wife human cannonball team, where he was the cannonball while she made the bookings and did the paperwork. In a small fishing business, it is the husband who goes out in the boat while his wife stays at home and keeps the books. These sex differences do not result from social conditioning. With or without social conditioning, what woman would want to be blasted out of a canon or go out alone in a boat in all weathers trying to catch fish?

9. Not anglers

Speaking of fishing, it is the most popular sport in Britain, yet one rarely sees a woman with a fishing rod. Do men conspire to stop women fishing or does it just not appeal to women? Perhaps the sexes evolved so that the men went off to catch the food while the women looked after the children and involved themselves in the life of the community. It would have been no more in the interests of ancient woman to go fishing than it would be in the interests of a female bird to look for food when she should be sitting on her eggs. But feminists think that women should do the equivalent at no matter what cost to their children. They want to show that they can emulate their mates, by whom they claim to be oppressed when they do not succeed.

10. Poorer spatial awareness

Women notoriously have poorer spatial awareness than do men. This can be confirmed by noting the sex of anyone who blocks your way in a supermarket, who, had they been more aware of what was going on around them, might have moved their trolley to the side, got out of the middle of an aisle while having a chat with someone, or refrained from stopping dead in front of you as you walked behind them. 19 times out of 20 it will be a woman, and there are not 19 times as many women as men in supermarkets. Women are also comparatively poor at reversing. I was once in a group where three of the five women freely admitted that they didn’t like having to reverse a car. One said that she would go out of her way when parking to make sure she never had to. But of course, many women can reverse a car perfectly well. They faithfully do as their driving instructors told them, as obeying instructions to the letter is another female trait.

11. Preoccupied with the personal and particular

Women take more interest in the personal and particular than in the abstract or the general. In the 1960s the journalist Michael Frayn commented on his paper’s new women’s page, noting the contrast between its preoccupation with individuals and the impersonal character of the rest of the paper. He was a little taken aback by some of the more extreme female journalism, as when a woman wrote about her mother-in-law, whom she said drove her crazy. She found the older woman’s mannerisms irritating, her conversation infuriating, and her feet silly-looking. Frayn could only hope that members of his family wouldn’t start writing this sort of thing about him in a national newspaper.

Women are more interested in what is near at hand than in what is far away, both in time and place. They take more interest in yesterday or tomorrow than in the distant past or distant future, and more in the state of the children’s bedroom than in the state of Mars. So do men, but to a lesser degree. Explorers, futurologists, and astronomers are rarely women.

12. More inclined to cry

Women are not just more inclined than men to cry — or to “get emotional”, as they put it — they like being that way. When a woman started crying during a choir practice for the funeral of a member, no one noticed until she drew attention to the fact by saying, “I’ve started crying!” The other women laughed delightedly and with understanding, as though to say, “Yes, I was almost crying, too!”

If something like a speech or concert makes a woman cry, she rarely fails to mention the fact when reporting on the event later. Not only does she imagine that her emotional comings and goings will be of general interest; for her the fact that it made her cry proves that the event had quality.

When women cry to attract help or pity, this is related to their comparative lack of adventurousness and independence, as seen in experiments where babies are separated from their mothers by a barrier. Baby boys try to crawl round the barrier, whereas baby girls stay where they are and cry.[6] This is not unlike the way in which a woman with a blowout stands by her car looking helpless until a man changes the wheel, whereas a man with a flat tire changes it himself.[7]

Conclusion

If when you have made these points, your friend accuses you of putting women down, you must retire. There is nothing you can do for him.

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Notes

[1] “Statement of: COTTON, DANY,” February 21, 2018 (Dany Cotton’s statement to the Grenfell Tower inquiry).

[2] Evening Standard, May 26, 2016, “Australian women’s national team lose 7-0 to team of 15-year-old boys.”

[3] See a talk by Dr. Svante Pääbo, University of California Television, Oct. 10, 2014, “A Neanderthal Perspective on Human Origins – 2014.”

[4] vehcor, July 23, 2021, “A 2012 Camaro SS auction car with a valuable surprise under the seat.”

[5] Namely step on the brake, hold it down, press on the accelerator, and when the back wheels start spinning, let off the brake and turn the steering wheel.

[6] Glenn Wilson, The Great Sex Divide (Washington, DC: Scott-Townsend, 1992), 110.

[7] This was pointed out by Esther Vilar in The Manipulated Man (London: Pinter and Martin, 1971/1998), 15.