Why Men Don’t Iron
The New Reality of
Gender Differences
ANNE AND BILL MOIR

Copyright

William Collins

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1998

Copyright © Anne and Bill Moir

The Authors assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780002570350

Ebook Edition © FREBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007468911

Version: 2015-12-17

To Bernard Cornwell

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE: He’s Not Part One, Part Another

The bisexual fallacy

CHAPTER TWO: Foodsex I

Perhaps he’s a rabbit

CHAPTER THREE: Foodsex II

Where’s the beef?

CHAPTER FOUR: Brainsex I

Bottom of the class

CHAPTER FIVE: Brainsex II

The malady of boyhood

CHAPTER SIX: Brainsex III

The neurological edge

CHAPTER SEVEN: Extremes Are Not Rules

Top and tail at work

CHAPTER EIGHT: Painting Him Green

He resists her dream

CHAPTER NINE: Sex

His drive and her drive

CHAPTER TEN: The Real New Man

Home truths

References

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

Introduction

This is a book about men.

About what makes them different. So inevitably it is a book about women too.

A small box sits on Anne’s desk. The top reads: ‘All that men know about women’. Open it and there is nothing inside. Funny? Sad? Humbling? An innocent admission that men have tried to follow women’s pattern of thought and failed? Or is it an insult? The box could imply that a man is incapable of understanding a woman because her complexities are beyond his simplicities. That is to define him in her terms. Or perhaps it reflects the traditional male view that she is beyond understanding because she is silly – irrational? Which is to define her in relation to himself. We tend to see in the other sex a lesser version of our own. Yet the manner in which we describe another’s mind shows the limits of our own.

‘Why keep the box?’ asks Bill.

‘To turn it over,’ says Anne. ‘To puzzle out what it means.’

‘Isn’t it insulting?’

‘Didn’t you say that we often hide behind clichés?’

‘Did I?’

‘When you gave me the box.’

It is a cliché that men cannot fathom women. But what of her image of him?

Roseanne Barr, the weighty sitcom actress, summed up her view on men in the television programme Hollywood Men: Boys Will Be Boys: ‘The real Hollywood man,’ she said, ‘is a terrified little boy and wants his mommy.’¹ Hers is the classic female caricature of the male. ‘Yes they can have control, but only in two areas,’ says Barr. ‘Starting barbecues is one; the other is walking around in packs and peeing on things.’² Such expertise was rewarded when Barr was appointed editorial adviser to a special issue of the New Yorker devoted to the subject of women.

Men are nothing but overgrown children, really.

They need to be told what to do.

The only difference between men and boys is the price of their toys.

Boys will be boys: they have to watch football.

Wars are little boys fighting.³

In Alison MacLeod’s postmodern novel The Changeling,⁴ the big themes of boys’ history – war, political intrigue and empires – are represented as comic and trivial.

It is common for women to describe men as ‘boys’. To her way of thinking he never grows up, while she does. This attitude is as matronizing as his is patronizing. He puts her down by claiming not to understand her, that she is indeed beyond understanding, and she keeps her self-respect by claiming the opposite. Men and women are seldom more equal than in their lack of understanding of one another. Why else would women enjoin men to ‘get in touch with their feminine side’? But where does he find it? How does he look for it? Does it even exist? Perhaps, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California, ‘there is no there there’. To ask men to improve themselves by relating to their feminine side is to ask them to become like women, but men are distinct: they are possessed of the differences that make for a real difference.

So why, some women ask, must his differences make him so brutally dominant? For too long, she feels, he has forced her into his social frame, into the role of the wife or the little woman, excluding her from his privileged world. As a result women feel anger and resentment, which are not unjustified. There is a need to strike a better balance between the traditional male view that he must manage her world (protect her; give her what he wants) and the hardline feminist view that she should gain power over his world (to protect both her and him from himself).

One way out of the conflict between his view of her and hers of him is to claim that there is essentially no difference between men and women. Anything he can do, she can do. Underpinning that conviction is the idea that, when we look beyond the obvious physical attributes, men’s and women’s brains are the same. But they are not. Science has upset the egalitarian applecart by conclusively showing that the sexes are distinct in how they act and think.

Some people will argue against the science, while others will accept that while there are differences between the sexes, those differences are socially engendered (they even claim that the brain differences are socially engendered) – and what society can construct, society can also destroy. In other words, by a conscious act of will, we can create the egalitarian ideal. This is the message of most university-based ‘Gender Studies’.

Gender refers to sex differences, both social and biological, but most who teach gender studies today choose to define ‘gender’ to mean only those differences that are the results of cultural pressures. ‘Gender is constructed and social,’ (neither more nor less) says a contributor to Feminist Approaches to Science. It is ‘the politics of the socialisation of sex’.⁵ Note the finality of the claim. Of course biological differences can be socially created; anything that socialization does to behaviour it achieves by affecting the brain. But in the usual course on gender studies, the differences between men and women are ascribed not to biology but to society, and thus an academic course on gender can exclude any reference to the hard science that demonstrates substantial biological differences between the sexes; differences that are not, and cannot be, culturally engendered. ‘Gender studies’ is too often an academic course on sex differences that excludes the real study of sex differences – which must include biology.

It is insulting to the reader to qualify everything to death. This is a book about the biological science of gender differences, and science is about the probable. There is no need to keep saying this. So when we write ‘Science finds such and such’ it plainly means that this is the best bet: no more, no less. Similarly, a word like ‘men’ is used as a general term for most men – men in general. In the use of such a general term there will plainly be exceptions. Thus, when we write: ‘Men run 8% faster than women’, we leave it to the fourth-rate mind to point out that some women run faster then most men.

Our aim is to explain, not to campaign.

Today’s man is under pressure to change. He is told to get in touch with his feelings, to be more considerate, to be more communicative and open to his emotions. Yet this new, softer, more caring male, just like the old-fashioned patriarchal man, is a one-dimensional caricature of what it is to be masculine. It is a form of sexism, a masculine stereotype as extreme and as crudely reductionist as its predecessor, the traditional male.

The traditional male is a dominating bully, a misogynist who stamps his views on women. He believes the female is merely a pale and inferior copy of himself, an adumbration of the superior male. This male sets the standard: he is normal, she is deficient. He sees only one side, his.

Any man who matches this stereotype is indefensible, for he reduces women to an inferior status by denying her essential and valuable feminine qualities. But equally, those with a gender agenda deny the essential male qualities.

The new, caring male has recognized his shortcomings and corrected them. He sees that the old sex boundaries had nothing to do with biology, but were the results of social pressures (perhaps he was given toy guns instead of dolls). This is the male who has got in touch with his ‘female side’, and the defining quality of his masculinity has become the denial of his masculinity. She is the new standard, and he can only aspire to be more like her.

The reader may find one or both of these views a farrago of nonsense. But both viewpoints, if only because they are widespread, must be taken seriously. Each highlights a set of social aspirations and both lead to false expectations. Past and present views of the male – traditional and postmodern – are equally poor measures of the masculine.

The traditional male is well known; the postmodern version is less so (at least outside the academic world). The ‘new’ man is predicated on the understanding that all significant differences in gender are socially conditioned, constructed or learned. This is crucial. A man is not born a man, but is made into one by the assumptions of the culture in which he grows up. Take away the assumptions and he would grow up – what? A woman? There is an ambivalence here, but we need to recognize that there is a ritual obeisance in postmodern studies to all things complex and ambivalent. Postmodernism is a rejection of hitherto accepted certainties. Uncertainties are therefore good. The ambiguous is good, the clear-cut is bad. Seeing things as good or bad is also bad; right or wrong is wrong, and clarity is out.

When ambiguity becomes the answer then the clear distinctions between male and female disappear. Differences are there to be ironed out. Conventional gender boundaries are there to be erased. The war between the sexes can be ended by the realization that there are no sexes (‘we are all the same’). This belief rests on the perception that gender differences are a social construct (on the same grounds, this perception might appear no more than a social construct of the academy). The dispersal of our identities offers the hope of social and sexual reconciliation and thus an end to confrontation.

‘Do the postmodern academics really believe all that?’ asks Anne.

‘Worse,’ says Bill.

Postmodernists assert that all knowledge is constructed. Therefore there is no scientific truth or facts; only several versions of ‘facts’, constructed out of every individual’s cultural conditions. No one person’s version of the ‘facts’ can take precedence over any other’s. However, they often go on to say that, in the interests of ‘diversity’, the version of the ‘facts’ held by minority groups is to be given precedence. Somehow, postmodern women consider themselves a minority group.

‘No scientific truths –?’ asks Anne.

‘Maybe they give equal weight to the theory that the earth is flat,’ suggests Bill.

In an article entitled ‘How Feminism is Now Alienating Women from Science’, Noretta Koertge says: ‘Feminists add a new twist to this old litany of repudiations of analytical reasoning by claiming that the standard norms and methods of scientific inquiring are sexist because they are incompatible with women’s ways of knowing.’⁶ These ‘subjectivist’ women see the methods of logic, analysis and abstraction as ‘alien territory belonging to men’ and they ‘value intuition as a safer and more fruitful approach to truth’.

Paul Gross and Norman Levitt note in an abstract of their book Higher Superstition that: ‘if they [the recruits to the cause of feminist science] attempt to hold fast to the most emphatic tenets of feminist dogma – for instance, the stylish assertion that “women” can’t be “scientists” under the present order, because society constructs these as mutually exclusive categories, and therefore that scientific practice must be reconstituted along radical-feminist lines before women can participate – they will quickly find themselves effectively excluded from serious scientific work.’⁷

Listen to Rosi Braidotti, Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Utrecht, describe her postmodern version of science:

It is because of this dynamic, life-giving element that I have chosen the term nomadic to describe this feminist style. Nomadic subjects are capable of freeing the activity of thinking from the hold of phallocentric dogmatism, returning thought to its freedom, its liveliness, its beauty. There is a strong aesthetic dimension in the quest for alternative nomadic figurations and feminist theory such as I practice that is informed by this joyful nomadic force … I think it is extremely important for feminists to break away from the patterns of masculine identification that high theory demands, to step out of the paralyzing structures of an exclusive [read, ‘scientific’] academic style.⁸

The shift is from the modern to the postmodern world: to a world without graven rules or certitudes (except for the law against laws). The overriding cliché is that there is as much variance within a sex as exists between the sexes. The postmodern, deconstructed intellectual cannot say simply, ‘Women are like this’ or ‘Men are like that’, because such statements acknowledge a biological difference; there can be no such difference if sexual identities are constructed and, consequently, capable of being deconstructed. This view, which became popular in the 1980s, was labelled ‘deconstructive feminism’. ‘This form of academic feminist thinking,’ wrote Lynne Segal, a feminist theoretician, ‘was increasingly sceptical of any generalisations about “women” or women’s “distinctive perspective”. Some feminist theoreticians were now questioning all types of fixed categories, identities and relationships, stressing what they saw as the complex, shifting and plural nature of the social meanings.’⁹

Plainly the traditional male, the deeply unreconstructed brute himself, is a sad anachronism in this shifting, boundary-free world, and so the attempt is being made to change him. This can only be done, of course, if we accept that masculinity is a social, cultural, political or historical construct in the first place. At Hobart College in New York State there is a men’s study programme, Course 245: Men and Masculinity, and the course summary offers the underlying assumption that ‘masculinity is problematic – for men and for women – but also socially conditioned and historically variable, and therefore subject to change.’¹⁰ ‘Male and female created he them’, but the academy is at hand to undo the damage. The academy holds to a common subtheme that the world was first constructed by men and the female’s role in the world was also made by him; that being the case, women can now return the compliment by reconstructing the world and his role. Call it revenge, if you like, but there is a conscious attempt to undermine masculine identity.

‘In the social sciences,’ says Bill, ‘there is too often a presumption against things that are not socially conctructed.’

‘But,’ says Anne, ‘there are other, harder sciences that show real sex differences.’

‘Hmm …’ says Bill. ‘Then in exploring the new science of gender differences we also explore the limits of social theory and its capacity to transform the sexes.’

If (and it is a big IF) gender is socially conditioned, then it must be true that it can be socially unconditioned and that sexual roles can be unlearned. In part this is true, inasmuch as the male who stamps his views on women can learn to recognize the existence of another mind (and vice versa). What then of the view that the sexes are alike, but the male can never be wholly deconstructed because he lacks the female experience? He cannot experience the menses, birthing or lactation. Trivialities, says the feminist. Failure to experience such physical processes does not affect the male’s ability to embrace and adopt feminine virtues: peace, co-operation, holistic dreams. The time when the lion will lie down with the lamb or, even better, the lioness. How much the world would be improved if only they, men, were more like women.

When the communicators of our society (the academy and the media) fail to get a grip on a subject – fail, that is, to understand what they are supposed to be explaining – the failure is often depicted as a deeper form of understanding. It is presented as a kind of wry humility, summed up by the adage ‘the more we know the less we know’. Lack of understanding is taken as a virtue instead of a failing. It seems that one cannot be sure about anything except the advantages of not knowing. It is the postmodern understanding; and, perhaps, the foxhole for the spooked and lost in every generation.

Postmodernists have no answers (answers are unambiguous, and unambiguity is bad), and that is the problem. They confront certainty with the question, ‘How can you be so sure?’ It is a useful logic for unsettling coherence (and is used not only by postmodern academics but also by neo-Nazis in their rejection of the existence of the Holocaust). It also advances all the frontiers of ignorance.

This postmodern ‘understanding’ rides in tandem with a common female approach to the world in general, an approach that is non-confrontational, non-judgemental, unaligned and multi-cultural. The past is seen as having been defined by male certainties, summed up in the dismissive acronym DWEM, which defines and rejects the philosophy, art, literature and cultural assumptions bequeathed to us by Dead White European Males. The old canon – that body of knowledge which was thought essential to an understanding of our culture – has been dismissed by many parts of the academy. To claim that Shakespeare is a greater writer than, say, some previously unknown woman is to be elitist. Thus we witness the feminization of the academy.

What is fixed is decreed authoritarian. What is authoritarian is male. What is male is bad.

We move from a time of sharply drawn lines to a time where the line drawn is against the drawing of lines. Fifty years ago a man was expected to play the dominant role; expected, if successful, to provide for his wife and children. Today the great expectation is of a sexual parity at home and at work, in the ways we relax and in the games we play, in our learning and in our parenting. Lines of demarcation, present for millennia, are being blurred.

The traditional male draws lines too tight, with himself as the norm. Postmodernism denies the existence of any lines, yet to deny the existence of the major sexual differences (always done, of course, in the name of toleration) is to play the most dangerous gender game. Those who believe that our differences are all culturally caused wish to eradicate those differences. Their burning ideology is to eliminate the distinct in society. There are historical antecedents, rooted in the conviction that we are all one; if you disagreed you were placed beyond the pale, and beyond the pale lay the cleansing fire with its waiting stake.

‘Failing to draw the line,’ says Anne, ‘they give equal voice to the absurd.’

‘Which is to say themselves,’ says Bill.

The new orthodoxy claims that there is no distinctive male mind – nor, indeed, a distinctive female mind. The old demarcation between him and her has been replaced with a muddling whirl of complex and shifting social assumptions.¹¹ A reverence for equity in all things has dulled the critical faculties. ‘You can’t generalize about people.’ ‘You mustn’t stereotype people.’ ‘All generalizations are misleading [except, of course, this one].’ ‘We are all different’ [a safely vacuous remark to which is often added] ‘but not that different’ – which is to collapse meaning. Such claims are good ways to paper over cracks; but they hardly lead to understanding.

Return, for a moment, to the postmodern ideal of a man. He rejects the old traditional male assumptions, preferring to recognize the existence within himself of female virtues: co-operation, tolerance, non-judgementalism and an instinctive acceptance of equality (meaning sameness). O brave new world, that has such creatures in it. Get rid of the artificial lines and how the barriers will fall! There will be no more ‘glass ceiling’ (the barrier traditional males erect against female success), no more ‘homophobia’ (the barrier which encourages heterosexual males to treat gays as lesser beings). The lion, lioness and lamb are all one.

But suppose this postmodern ideal is wrong. Not morally wrong, but scientifically wrong. Suppose, perish the thought, that there are lines, not drawn by society but etched by blind, uncontrollable nature. Lines as ineradicable as the leopard’s spots. Lines drawn by biological forces.

That is the subject of this book, which attempts to explain the findings of current scientific research into gender differences. The assumption of the book is not that ‘we are all the same’, but rather that we are distinctly different. That to be a man is not to be an inferior version of a woman, nor a better version, but to be what nature intended. This is not to say that a man (or woman) cannot change, but it is to claim that there are constant masculine values. The postmodernists want men to change, to become, indeed, more like women; when men constantly fail to live up to their expectations it should be allowed that the expectations themselves might be false, and here science can be of assistance.

Science can help because it sets certain limits to the probable. Like an accurate record of the past (postmodernists, of course, claim that no such thing is possible), science is a benchmark as to what is improbable. Science offers a large measure of explanatory power. The probabilities of science, like the events of the past, are impervious to the human will. You might wish the earth were the centre of the universe, but blowing out every last birthday candle will not make the sun revolve about the earth. You might wish men and women to be the same, but the scientific evidence suggests your wishes are fantasies. Men and women possess different neural nets, hormonal systems and neurotransmitters – splendid differences that make the sexes distinct.

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.