Why Men Don’t Iron: The New Reality of Gender Differences

A discrete body of knowledge is building up. Evidence is being brought together from mainstream science – from psychology, psychiatry, neurophysiology, endocrinology – and the sum of the evidence suggests that men and women are different. It does not suggest that one is better than the other, it makes no claims for ‘equality’, it simply describes the differences. To understand those differences is to understand each other. Mutual respect can only be based on a clear-eyed acceptance of sexual difference; not on their denial. To insist on sexual sameness – to be blind to male, female or homosexual characteristics – is the sexism of the late 20th-century intellectual. Victorian prudes would be delighted with the postmodern refusal to face up to the physical basis of sexual difference.

Those who look forward to the social transformation of human nature often reject science when it suggests certain things are unchangeable. If something, say a biological finding, does not square with an aspiration, then the science must be rejected, or its findings must be vigorously (though unscientifically) rebutted. Thus those who believe that gender differences are socially caused damn the science that finds otherwise. Yet science moves on and those left behind are voluntarily removing themselves from the real debate.

There is more to life than the social and biological. Awe, love, virtue … so much more. We do not hold, as many do, that the beast lies at the root of humanity. We can all learn to tell right from wrong, learn when not to yield to the primal urge to care only for the family, and learn when not to go along with the social norm. Humans can rise above mob and mafia. We tell of the biology which swims within us and, equally, of the social environment in which we swim, so that men and women might rise above both.

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