Girls Don't Talk about Sex Differences

But someone should, so we can all understand each other better.

As I wrote last week, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus gets truly an insane amount of hate for daring to talk about sex differences, especially given how egalitarian and conciliatory it is about them. Why does it get so much more attention than the dozens of “trad” and “red pilled” books that argue that women shouldn’t vote or hold jobs?

MMWV is provocative precisely because it’s not seeking to provoke. Most people find the edgelord books retarded and the convoluted bits of anthropology or neuroscience in them inaccessible. In contrast, “men should listen to women complain without offering suggestions” is the perfect scissor: everyone has an opinion on it from their own experience — just a slightly different opinion from everyone else’s. MMWV is controversial precisely because its subject matter is so mundane and familiar.

A criticism I haven’t seen levied against the book is: what about all the other sex differences? Men and women greatly differ everything from physical power to voting patterns to whether they know twhat “retrograde” means. MMWV elides these, but not because they have no implication on dating and relationships. Perhaps Gray wanted to focus on the one message he was sure of. Perhaps he was hoping to avoid controversy. LOL.

These other sex differences are uncomfortable to talk about both because of the subject matter and because the average discourse on the topic is so partisan and retrograde. Alex Kaschuta blames the same reactionary polarization that MMWV got belatedly dragged into. Feminism declared that all sex stereotypes are socially constructed and can be abolished at will, and so the anti-feminist position became that all sex stereotypes are immutable and true of every single individual. Alex concludes:

The tragic irony? The science of sex differences could have increased understanding between the sexes. Instead, it's become an information hazard - technically true at the population level but toxic when internalized as a guide to individual interactions. We've learned about averages but lost the ability to see individuals. In our quest to understand the opposite sex, we've made them more foreign than ever.

I agree with Alex’s assessment, but with a caveat: understanding the opposite sex means understanding precisely how they are foreign. Inter-sex resentment is born of seeing the other as a malfunctioning version of one’s own sex. It comes from missing the fundamental ways in which men and women are different, the things each of them sees that the other is blind to.

Is it a public service to try to open each gender’s eyes to what they’re missing, or an infohazard? Perhaps it is a hazard to the foolhardy, and a service to those with an open mind. To be safe, I’ll save that for subscribers only.