I think that at the core of who we are as people, men and women are very similar if not the same. But our different physical makeup causes us to perceive and react to circumstances in the world very differently. The feelings for people I love and care about are probably the same feelings women have toward the ones they love. But how I develop relationships and the criteria for making my friends is quite different than how a woman would do it. My testosterone makes me more aggressive and since aggression is something that is a norm for me, I view the world with those eyes. I make my decisions with those eyes. I judge others based on the composite person I am, which includes my masculinity.
I recently watched a movie called “Clockwatchers” and it gave me a lot of insight into why men would start a war when a woman wouldn’t. In the movie a woman, who works as a secretarial temp has a diary she had been keeping at work, get stolen. After several days she realizes another woman at work has stolen it because the other woman is envious of her life. She finally confronts the thief, and without saying a word, she stares into her eyes as she slaps a note on her desk that says, “I want my notebook back”. The thief wordlessly reaches into purse, pulls out the notebook and hands it to her. The next day the temp sits down opposite the thief in the lunchroom and calmly sets the diary on fire while she glares into the thief’s eyes. Finally she opens up her lunch sack and parodies eating the lunch the way the thief eats her lunch. The thief’s face looks violated and horrified and she leaves in humiliation. The next day the temp finds a new empty diary lying on her desk with a little note saying, “I’m sorry”. The conflict is resolved and maybe even the two will become friends.
If this situation had arisen with men instead of women it would had a much different outcome. A man violated like the woman was when she had the diary stolen would feel this huge need to retaliate, to wage aggression against the violator. Having discovered the perpetrator there would have been immediate retaliation with aggressive psychological attack and possibly even physical violence. There would be no peaceful way to resolve the issue and it would remain unresolved and might even become a factor in a future conflict.
A lot of wars happen because men can’t or won’t resolve the little issues that woman seem so much more capable of dealing with and these escalate into wars. I sometimes wonder if women ruled countries instead of men, if a woman could stop a war by baking the other woman a cake or writing her a nice little card.
As a man I can appreciate the sense that woman seem to possess and the peaceful and inventive way they resolve conflict. In my heart and mind it is even how I think I would like to act, but the reality is that I probably won’t because of my makeup as a man. Aggression is just a part of my makeup as being a man and I can’t separate this from who I am in my inner being.
Men and women are programmed differently because of how we developed in our sexes, but I don’t think we are different in our hearts. If these differences in the sexes can be recognized for what they are, as opposed to labeling them as negative character attributes, then the sometimes-seemly unbridgeable gap between men and women can be closed.
As far as labeling one sex superior to the other, I think the best way is to look at the sexes as different and not get into trying to figure who has the greatest advantage. I am not going to go into the positive aspects of men’s aggression that allows them to go into unknown situations much more readily than woman, but on total men and woman have equal, if different, advantage.
