the deep tectonic movements of the earth. Hers is more like the weather itself – constantly changing and hard to predict.’
Here’s an idea. Maybe we could rid the world of feminism by regularly measuring feminists’ hormone levels, then adjusting the levels until they started to think and act like normal women. Think how much happier they’d be and, by extension, how much happier the other 95% of the population would be. I’m sure feminists would look favourably on the idea if I and other right-minded men just explained it to them slowly…
11| FEMINISM: THE TRIUMPH OF EMOTION OVER REASON?
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil women is that good women do nothing.
on Harriet Harman, a British feminist politician, and her like
Mike Buchanan 1957- British writer: The Glass Ceiling Delusion (2011)
Are women in general more emotional and less rational than men? Of course they are. Are feminists more emotional and less rational than normal women? Of course they are.
There, that’s a potentially thorny issue dealt with by the trusty and powerful weapon of man logic. Let’s move on to the different natures of men and women.
12| THE DIFFERENT NATURES OF MEN AND WOMEN
‘Mrs Merton’ to Debbie McGee: ‘But what first, Debbie, attracted you to millionaire Paul Daniels?’
Caroline Aherne 1963- English comedienne, writer and actress: The Mrs Merton Show (1994-8)
The first part of this chapter is drawn from The Glass Ceiling Delusion (2011) and it mainly covers the issues of why men and women tend to have different natures, and how those differences manifest themselves in relation to the world of work. In my critique of marriage in the developed world in the modern era The Marriage Delusion: the fraud of the rings? (2008) – later published as a paperback with the title The Fraud of the Rings – I covered the question of the different natures of men and women in the context of marriage, and why they are so often a problem in the modern era.
There are men among us with faces which (let’s be kind) only a mother could love. Some of these men happen to be rich, famous or powerful: ‘alpha males’. They commonly share an attribute, having (or having once had) remarkably beautiful partners. One thinks of the musical theatre composer Andrew Lloyd-Webber (Sarah Brightman), the magician Paul Daniels (Debbie McGee), the entrepreneur Bernie Ecclestone (Slavica Radić, a former fashion model 11.5 inches taller and 28 years younger than lucky Bernie), the tennis player Andy Murray (Kim Sears) and the French president Nicolas Sarkozy (Carla Bruni).
Notably beautiful women do not, it would appear, fall in love with poor unattractive men. Perhaps they’re not as beautiful as we think. I would look pretty stood next to some of these men. We shall return to the important phenomenon of female attractiveness later in the chapter.
Why should we have an interest in gender-typical traits? Why can we not treat everyone as individuals, thereby avoiding the cardinal sin of stereotyping? The reason is that women campaign collectively – and effectively – for women’s interests at the expense of men’s interests, while men rarely campaign for men’s interests, effectively or otherwise. The ‘shortage’ of female engineers is seen to be a problem requiring to be addressed, while the ‘shortage’ of male nurses isn’t. The inevitable result? A considerable amount of taxpayers’ money has been spent trying to encourage young women into engineering (and other ‘male typical’ fields) but with minimal impact: even today, over 90% of engineering graduates are men.
For the avoidance of doubt, when I refer to men and women from this point onwards I shall mean gender-typical men and women – by definition, the majority – unless I make it clear I mean otherwise. I don’t consider either gender innately superior to the other, but I think it’s clear that the genders are in general different in their habits of thinking and acting. I’m now 54, and the different natures of men and women have been clear to me from an early age. ‘Nature’ being a word whose meaning may be ambiguous, let me state clearly what I mean by it in the context of this book. In general, I believe, men and women differ with respect to:
-their relative interests in interpersonal relationships, in particular those with family members, friends and work colleagues
-their relative interests in work, politics and business
-their attitudes towards risk
-their attitudes towards ‘work/life balance’: the types of work they seek, the hours they devote to work, and their drives to be promoted
-their styles of operating in the world of work: men being more naturally competitive, women being more naturally co-operative
If these differences are real, it follows that they will impact on men’s and women’s life choices and therefore their average incomes. The most commonly cited measure of the ‘gender pay gap’ relates to the incomes of male and female full-time workers regardless of the equivalence of their lines of work. The gap, while it exists, is not the result of discrimination against women. It’s attributable to the choices men and women freely make in their personal and working lives, including the greater readiness of women to take career breaks to look after babies, young children and ageing relatives. If and when women in significant numbers make different choices, the pay gap will disappear.
If we accept for the moment that, in general, men’s and women’s natures are different, what might be the source of those difference? Could it be something as obvious as men’s and women’s brains being different? For answers to this question we turn first to a book written by an American professor of the female persuasion, Louann Brizendine, on the time-honoured ‘ladies first’ principle. From Wikipedia:
‘Louann Brizendine is a neuropsychiatrist and the author of The Female Brain, published in 2006. Her research concerns women’s moods and hormones. She graduated in neurobiology from UC Berkeley, attended Yale School of Medicine and completed a residency in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is board-certified in psychiatry and neurology and is an endowed clinical professor. She joined the faculty of UCSF Medical Center at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute in 1988 and now holds the Lynne and Marc Benioff-endowed chair of psychiatry. At UCSF, Brizendine pursues active clinical, teaching, writing and research activities.
In 1994 she founded the UCSF Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic, and continues to serve as its director. The Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic is a psychiatric clinic designed to assess and treat women of all ages experiencing disruption of mood, energy, anxiety, sexual function and well-being due to hormonal influences on the brain. Brizendine also treats couples in the clinic.
Additionally, Brizendine teaches courses to medical students, residents and other physicians throughout the country, addressing the neurobiology of hormones, mood disorders, anxiety problems, and sexual interest changes due to hormones.’
Professor Brizendine is clearly far more qualified than I to make statements about the female brain and to compare it with the male brain. What startled me when I read The Female Brain was the sheer extent of the differences between the two brains: men and women truly do inhabit different mental worlds. Brizendine outlines how a range of hormones affect women’s brains as they progress through life stages: foetal, girlhood, puberty, sexual maturity/single woman, pregnancy, breast feeding, childrearing, perimenopause, menopause, and postmenopause. She reveals in the book that during her medical education at Berkeley, Yale and Harvard, she ‘learned little or nothing about female biological or neurological difference outside of pregnancy’, and continues:
‘The
