I have breaking news from the dawn of civilization: Men and women are different.
Note that the last time I said this I got accused of being transphobic, which is utterly baffling since if men and women were the absolute exact same, then what would be the point of changing? And why would you feel like your mind and your body didn’t match, if minds were exactly the same?
Now, with the understanding that these mental modes are indeed a continuum, with women who are on the spectrum functioning closer to male minds, hormones cause different brain development, before you’re even born. The different hormone baths that males and females get create very different structures. (Yes, those can go wrong, So there’s a small percentage of people who do indeed have a mismatch.)
How different? Well, men’s mental pathways tend to be more straight forward. They think point A to B to C. Women’s brains are more interconnected and resemble a web rather than a railway. So a woman will think from A through D to B, then pull in E and F before with all that input arriving at C.
“Ah, you say. So men are more logical.” Um… no. Both sexes can be taught to use logic. I don’t think it’s natural to either. There is a reason the default of human society is the tribal mob and witch hunts But both can be taught logic and reasoning based on facts.
It’s more that each extreme mode of human brain (again, remember it’s a continuum, though the most direct of women will still be more “webby” than the most “webby” of men.) is suited to a different kind of problem. And it is the way you imagine that evolution would shape them (though it’s best not to invent just so evolutionary stories, because… it’s never that simple.) Men’s brains are awesome at solving engineering problems and math problems, and plotting a direct journey, and…. Women’s brains are great at managing complex group issues, like how to get different people to work together, or creating complex narratives that take a lot of details into account (not fiction, necessarily. There’s modes on that too. Men normally write great plot, women write great characters. The failure mode being when they don’t LEARN to do the other side.) or how to coordinate involved, complex stuff.
This is where “diversity” comes in legitimately, because having a woman in an engineering team, even if she’s mostly male-brained, helps bring factors the guys might forget. And having a male on the planning of some gigantic corporate meet up will allow him to go “hey, how about we plan the THING and stop getting lost in the weeds.” Unfortunately that requires equal footing and not special considerations and leftists exist.
The failure mode on either side is obvious. What the left likes to call “Toxic masculinity” gets so obsessed with “doing the thing” it tramples over every other consideration. And toxic femininity gets so obsessed with the people part of the project that it all devolves into the politics of the serraglio.
Because yes, the aggression modes of each sex is also very different. I have a tendency to not understand female aggression and to just wade into a confrontation with both fists and the occasionally steel-pointed boot. Which has not served me well while moving in mostly female environments for work. It’s not expected of a female, makes the other females hate you. And makes me very vulnerable to female-aggression.
Female aggression is the poison in the cup, the dagger between the ribs in an embrace. In less obvious or lethal forms, it’s the politics of the serraglio, what you imagine concubines did to advance themselves (and their children.) No, not that part of what they did. Take your mind out of the gutter. I mean a war of petty aggression with words and rumors and indirection. I always know I’m in the middle of a female war (and not armed for it) when someone approaches and says “Did you see what that bitch posted this morning.” And I go and read the post and it says something about her dog throwing up on the carpet. And I don’t get it. And then the first person unpacks it into this complex hint about how the poster is implying the first person is a bitch who messed up something. … Is it true? Sometimes it seems to be. But I don’t get it. I don’t get it when applied to me, I don’t get it when applied to someone else. And I sometimes think I give people this kind of “hint” without meaning to. I don’t give hints. if I have a problem I’ll tell you. Or as I tell people “I am not passive aggressive. I’m aggressive-aggressive.” This might have something to do with coming from a line of females who were taller than most men and built like brick sh*thouses. It allowed us to survive being physically aggressive. Most women can’t, because most women are smaller and weaker than men, so they had to develop underhanded ways of fighting.
Male aggression will break your ribs, plaster your face or kill you. It’s direct and brutal. In its less disguised form, it will give you a dress down at top of voice. It will demote you or duck your pay or generally be obvious.
Both aggressions can create failure modes for society, but society has favored the female mode of aggression since people congregated into cities. WHY? Because male aggression leaves people dead, which is counter-civilization.
So men had to learn to tame the beast and fight with words. For the same reason women had to. Because they are powerless before more powerful individuals (or the state. If fighting gets you killed, you learn to just call names.)
Look, it was a process. If you don’t believe me, go and see when dueling was outlawed. it’s quite recent, pretty much everywhere. But the point here is that one sex can function as the other. It’s just harder, and only some individuals manage it.
NEITHER SEX IS DESIGNED FOR FAIR PLAY, HONORABLE INTERACTION, GIVING THE OTHER GUY A CHANCE.
Go read that again. Neither sex is naturally honorable. This is nonsense based on Noble Savage illusions. Honor, duty, gentleman’s code, lady manners? All of that are triumphs of — by and large — Judeo-Christian civilization. Don’t believe me? Go see how other cultures operate, particularly those barely touched by the west.
You won’t find honor or gentleman’s code anywhere. Just nature, red in tooth and claw, be it among males or among females. Even the vaunted Greeks and Romans…. I mean, go read unexpurgated histories, sometime.
Now I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: Making women’s way of climbing dominant in business via DEI initiatives has borked a sytem not designed for it.
Forcing that proverbial engineering team to take on a majority of women, particularly when women were being hard-pushed into engineering regardless of inclination, and to take their opinions FIRST causes the engineering team to get caught in a loop of “what she said about my lug nut” and completely forgetting to DO THE THING that brought the team together in the first place.
I don’t know what forcing a man into nursing would do, because men aren’t being forced into “female professions” but my guess is a much more direct approach that misses things.
Also in the management fights men are curiously defenseless in front of women, the same way I’m defenseless. They have no idea what code the women are reading, but they don’t have the decoder ring.
So, if you are really invested in women in business AND the fairness code of the west, you MUST — MUST — teach your daughters to be gentlemen in the classical Western fashion. It is doable. My dad achieved it. And that will restore to the west the ability to DO THE THING and the fairness of competing for position in an open and non-underhanded way.
But other than that? Men can default to “female ways of fighting” when they feel powerless. And btw men that do so are very, very good at it. Which makes them rather despicable.
Most of our politics, particularly on the left (because they perceive their time is passing, I think) is now “feminine coded” as is a lot of our boardrooms. This is mostly because the centralization of the industrial age made most people feel powerless and have to fight underhand.
…. and because we no longer teach ANYONE to be gentlemen. Not men, not women. BUT we do hard-forbid private male aggression. So in public, men have to fight underhand and by stealth. As do women. And the Western habits and ability to do things fall.
All of which is to say: We need to restore the unspoken principles of our culture.
We also need to stop attributing its fall and its destruction to the other sex.Yes, sure, Marxists used feminism as a stalking horse. And women (and men) fell for it. But Marxism used everything as a stalking horse. And it’s not the fault of anyone alive now. (Unless they’re very old.)
What we have now are males who are told from birth that they’re bad evil, and all the ills of society are their fault because they were born with a penis. And women who are told they’re discriminated against and ALWAYS victims, because they were born with a vagina. And it’s all the fault of the other sex.
Piling on with more creative ways of demonizing men and women (which this education predisposes both sexes too) does nothing except increase the distance between men and women. And because men and women NEED each other for balance (that true diversity) it skews society more and more.
Also at a very fundamental level it stops men and women being able to build a marriage which is the ultimate relationship of trust between sexes. Which in turn prevents family formation and the raising of a sane next generation.
In the war between men and women, the only ones who win are those who want the extinction of the human race.
Yes, right now both men and women have been twisted into operating at the most toxic, particularly when relating to the other sex.
This is neither natural nor accidental. And it’s time to walk it back rather than pile on either side.
Start today. Tear down the wall. Extend a hand to the other side.
The future you save might be your own.
According To Hoyt 
Amen Sister Sarah!
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For the record, male nurses are largely fantastic. I’ve met very few that I didn’t trust their judgment, and even they were amazing at one specific thing even if they were horrible at everything else. They are generally a joy to work with because I’m firmly in the category of being more male-coded. I highly encourage more male nurses.
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The NCIU in El Paso had the absolute best male nurse I have ever met– he managed terrified family, stressed out co-workers, and had an absolutely great Clark Kent impression going on.
The best part was watching him read a social situation and defuse it so everyone could do their job, even if I also got to hear some quiet complaints that he didn’t get to do much nursing stuff. (I am good at sitting and being quiet, so they kind of forgot I was there with my kid.)
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The biggest reason why most male nurses are largely fantastic is because usually only men who have a calling, a predisposition for it, for that vocation actually go into it. I’ve also noticed that male nurses tend to burn out faster that women nurses, and seek non-hands-on patient jobs, or move completely out of the healthcare fields entirely.
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As an actual male nurse (retired), I say thank you.
I didn’t work bedside, I was a nurse at an assisted living place, and as one about 60 at the time, I got along famously with the residents. The ones who were still with us, that is. Different story.
As a student, had an amusing experience with one crusty old patient, foul mouthed and grumpy. All the little girl students and the licensed little Pilipina nurses were very reluctant to care for him. I got to go into his room and ask him to lighten up – he was scaring the nurses! At least while I was there, just that one day, he was better after that.
Out of about 60 in my 2007 class, I think it was 6 of us who were male.
In our little town, my wife and I each had occasion to use the ER, and both times we had male nurses – brisk and focused, and friendly and chatty when they had time.
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One of the things I recently realized in Attachment Theory is the secure vs insecure attachment styles are really whether you’re running in a High Trust society mode, or a Low Trust one.
And the low trust survival modes basically boil down to either being Mad Max expecting everyone to be trying to steal your dog food, or Grima Worm-Tongue toadying your way through everything because you know you’ll get a kick in the ribs, or worse, if you don’t fawn hard enough to please the big guy with the steel toed boots.
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Visual came to mind:
Is it more correct to model the flow of water as “always flows down-hill,” or with fluid dynamics?
Well, it depends on how fiddly you’re getting, and how accurately you can know those fiddly bits. Water pressure is a very obvious reason that water will “flow up hill,” for example.
Even a very simple stream ends up doing a lot more going all over the place than a simple a-to-b would show, so which is better depends on what the job is.
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Breaking things– which includes killing pets, or people– because they believe you care about them.
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A lot of my favorite things went away that way.
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😢
The people that do that kind of thing trigger my kill-it-with-fire impulse.
(The left is chock-a-block with those very people…one of many reasons why it’s not much exaggeration to say I’m a rabid anti-leftist. I do have to remind myself from time to time that The Left is not some monolithic entity, and that most of the “nice left” has no concept of the cruelty lurking behind the things they support.)
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Amen.
What horrifies me is I see it opening up in the Right, too.
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Breaking what the other person cares about is terroristic, but unfortunately not confined to men. The legend of Medea comes to mind, and for every Geirge Lucas trying to scrub the mark of his ex wife the gifted editor off the movies that made him famous, there is a Kathleen Kennedy.
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None of the behaviors are confined to either sex!
For example, the sneakier “undermine the thing they like so it’s weakened and then accidentally fails while they struggle to upkeep it” is more common in female attacks, but the first example that comes to mind (an animal) was almost-murdered by a male.
The strongest pattern is if the showing off of power is more important, or the effect is more important. (And yeah that sounds biased– now remember that seeming strong can keep folks from attacking in the first place, and thus be more effective.)
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Somebody recently noted to me that I’m better at picking up interpersonal conflict than I think I am. I corrected that I present as dumber than I am as a survival strategy. Keep me OUT of it.
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“It will demote you or duck your pay or generally be obvious.”
::Quack!::
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This could be an interesting and useful neologism, combining dock and duck in the specific context Sarah is using. Ducking is a term from audio mixing, in which one audio source is reduced in amplitude to make way for a more important audio source. For example, if you listen to music or podcasts in the car and also use voice navigation, often the navigation will duck the other audio—the music or podcast—to make sure you hear the instructions.
(My personal preference would be pausing rather than ducking, but that doesn’t appear to be an option on my phone.)
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So, if we were to reduce the pay and authority of one worker to make way for a less efficient or less effective worker who just happens to be the CEO’s nephew, would we call that faux-ducking? I don’t think we want to contract that to a four-letter word.
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“But other than that? Men can default to “female ways of fighting” when they feel powerless. And btw men that do so are very, very good at it.”
Yes, because they turn it into an engineering problem and go at it in that aggressive A to B to C fashion you noted. Instead of “nudging” things whenever the opportunity arises, they structure events to fall like a series of dominoes.
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RE: the masculine and feminine brains/modes of thinking, it’s occurred to me before that one of the things I’ve always liked most about my wife is that, however stereotypically feminine she is in most ways, she actually does have a somewhat more male way of thinking. Especially when we were dating, I appreciated that she wasn’t into the female mind games that had made me swear off the whole scene not long before. If she wanted something, liked something, or didn’t, she didn’t drop obscure hints that I’d never get; she just outright *said* things. Never really had to wonder where I stood, and I’ve appreciated that for almost 30 years now.
On the other hand, she’s been very vulnerable to female social games and has lost multiple friend groups, having suddenly found herself at the bottom of a pecking order that she didn’t know was developing, being suddenly ostracized, or discovering that she’s the designated scapegoat for something that had little or nothing to do with her. (There’s a couple of bitches out there that I’d gladly shiv if I ever see them again; on the other hand, the one or two truly constant friends who’ve proven over the years that they would never do that are worth more than all the gold in the earth.)
Anyway, while not precisely an Odd herself, she’s very much a Speaker to Odds. Decided she wanted to marry me, which was really a very odd thing to do, and without doing anything unusual at all as far as we could tell, always got designated The Cool Mom by our kids’ friends (a mixture of Odds and smart/creative/misfit types) in their school days. Thinking about it, I’m realizing again that I do kind of like that lady. :D
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Something even evil Centauri overlords value:
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I loved that scene.
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sounds exactly like my wife, and my daughter, both odd adjacent who married odds.
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Had a conversation with my sister, the engineer, about a conflict she was having with a coworker. After a bit listening to her talk about what this guy, it was a guy, was doing I asked her: “is he gay?” Closeted was her answer. I said to her, you’re expecting him to react to you the way a man typically does and he’s reacting the way a woman does. Change your approach. I’ll make the standard disclaimers, but men and women do tend to react differently to things and, in office politics anyway, one ignores that at one’s very great peril.
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Chinese historical “romance” webnovels aimed at women include a lot of “I am going to kill everyone in the emperor’s harem who get in my way,” and a lot of “my in-laws are evil people who got my family executed, and so I will kill them all and destroy their businesses, and also my husband.”
Also a lot of “I am taking my dowry and leaving this unpleasant new family, before they can murder me for my money and businesses.”
Also, your husband’s step-sisters, female cousins, or friend’s widows are almost always evil bitches out to steal your man, kill your kid, and frame you for financial crimes or treason. Plus they are involved in a plot to steal army rice, or working with the barbarian steppe tribes.
So naturally it is okay for the female lead to use dirty tricks, frame them for crimes, get their kids killed or injured, kill them, kill their servants, drown the girl who wants to push you into a pond, and paralyze people for life. Because she is righteously getting revenge on the wicked!
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Some Chinese female leads are nicer, and some webnovel situations are nicer. But yeahhhhh.
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something from Edward Dutton, who’s been the victim of what he’s writing about, regarding the Arday thing at Cambridge and the academy’s reaction to Cofnas. Both Dutton and Cofnas have been attacked mostly by women and effeminate men.
”There are two key reasons. The first involves something that may be quite difficult for many readers; understanding the mind of a Leftist. Leftists are high in Neuroticism; in negative feelings. As a consequence, they are also high in Narcissism and Machiavellianism. With regards to Narcissism, they create a false self in which they regulate their negative feelings by telling themselves that they are morally superior. With regard to Machiavellianism, the world is experienced as a frightening and dangerous place, so they yearn for power over it. However, neurotic, they fear a fair fight, so power must be played for covertly, via virtue-signalling. But they have to seem like they are genuinely kind, or they will raise suspicion that they are playing for power, so they identify with “marginalised” outbreaks and force themselves to kind of care about them. Naturally, they are paranoid and, hence, assume that those who disagree with them—and, thus, might puncture their false self and the morality associated with it—are utterly malevolent.”
sorry for the long block quote but feelings over facts is one way of summarizing the difference between men and women — yes, I convict myself — not all women and certainly not all men but the tendency is there.
I suspect the harpies and flying monkeys will be coming for me now.
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