The Science Catches Up with Me on the Sexes

For a year or two, based on a lifetime of reading and especially since reading German sociologist George Simmel on women and the public square, I have maintained that men and women have profoundly different cultures.

Of course, being a man I like to make it jokey and insulting, and say that men have a Culture of Insult and women have a Culture of Complaint. Now comes Steve Sailer commenting on a piece in The New York Times and an email from Steven Pinker.

Men can cooperate while ribbing each other pretty hard. I finally watched the fine neo-Western movie Hell or High Water (script by Taylor Sheridan, creator of the hit TV show Yellowstone), in which the outlaws and the law both consist of pairs of guys constantly insulting each other while getting a lot done.

Women, in contrast, tend to compete with each other via snide remarks. So women tend to assume more that of course the authorities should silence anybody who is saying anything not nice.

This was in the context of "studies" that show that men support freedom of speech more than women.

So tell me: Am I right or am I right?

But I have a higher, nobler perspective on all this, which is my analysis of Simmel on women in the public square. He writes that the public square was created by men for men, but that the entry of women into the public square would transform the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility." 

But actually, after long and harrowing thought, I decided that Simmel was wrong, and it looks like "the science" agrees with me. 

It is not that women will transform the public square, it is that women do not get the public square as constructed by men. The idea of guys sitting around insulting each other just does not compute for women. Wherever and whenever women get together they construct a culture based on the women's Culture of Complaint where women "compete with each other via snide remarks."

Now it is my belief that the women's version of the public square, of competition by snide remarks, is completely different and incompatible with the men's Culture of Insult. I expect that in the future we will see two cultures side by side, separate but equal. In areas where men predominate, there will be a Culture of Insult. In areas where women are more than 30 percent of the participants there will be a Culture of Complaint. 

And ne'er the twain shall meet.

Also, of course, there is the intersection of another Battle of the Sexes, that Women Expect to be Protected: as women public-school teachers who don't want to get into the trenches of COVID at school. While Men Know They Are Expendable: as men figure that, well, someone has to keep the grocery supply chain going, and if not me, then who?

But what happens in the future? I think that we will see a segregation of the public square into male and female sectors. Men will gravitate to areas where open competition is needed, such as in the culture of the Road Warrior, and women will gravitate to areas where competition is hidden, as with Burke, where "All the decent drapery of life is [NOT] to be rudely torn off."

I tend to be naughty about all this. But I really think that the feminists are wrong about "you go girl" and girl superheroes. As in clueless. That is just not how women interact with the world, and, more important, how women get their way in the world.

I think that this is an important thing to understand. Women don't get what they want and need by fighting or insulting. They get it by "manipulation," with their interpersonal skills with which they get what they want and need short of insult and actual violence.

As my daughter says: "my job is to keep my kids alive." This sounds rather trite. It is not, especially when you remember that back in the day human babies had a 50 percent chance of getting to age one. Really, there is no more important job in the world than keeping kids alive until it is time for them to leave the nest.

The point is, I think, that in the modern era the job of keeping kids alive has got a lot easier. And that gives women the opportunity to do other things than just keeping the kids alive.

But what? That is the question. And, given that all living things advance with two steps forward and one step back -- if they are lucky -- women aren't going to find a new role for themselves without lots of mistakes and heartache.