36 Comments
Dec 2, 2022Liked by Colin Wright

I find all of this very interesting, in light of my former husband's claim that he's "female" and in light of his highly successful tech career--he's COO of a successful database management company. But when I discovered the cross-dressing diaries in 1992, he cited his interests in cooking, textiles (knitting and weaving, which men have done historically, as sailors and craftsmen) and childcare (he babysat a lot in high school). What will happen to these studies of sex differences when the actual biological sex of respondents is unclear? Also, have any studies been done of widows/widowers, who had to take on chores their deceased opposite sex spouse had done?

As well, I'd be interested in Dr. Geary's analysis of this linked opinion piece from 4W, observing how disappointed the post-op men who ideate being female are, when they find out there are actually very few options for romantic involvement--potential partners prefer bodies not obscured by plastic surgery which are able to have natural sexual responses during intimacy. And, why has no one studied that? The author had to go snooping on reddit subs!

https://wordpress.com/post/uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com/5199

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Very thorough and impressive essay -- will bear re-reading for greater comprehension.

Something of a wider benefit of Dr. Geary's impressive qualifications may be the "redeeming" of Colin's after the setback caused by those who said "It could be career suicide" to challenge "pseudoscientific nonsense":

https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/the-nurture-of-evolved-sex-differences

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Dec 3, 2022·edited Dec 3, 2022

I lived and worked in downtown San Francisco in the late 1970s, 80s, and 90s. All I can say is the rest of the country isn't San Francisco, and relatively few women in the US work in one of the trades. I held a white collar position for a couple of large companies and never heard of any woman there who complained about sexual harassment or the threat of violence at work.

I now live in the South, and the handyman who is now working on my house told me about the physically dangerous and hellish working conditions he recently faced as a pipe fitter at an oil refinery. Last spring, he was almost electrocuted as a massive bolt of lightning struck the ground five feet away from where he and his coworkers were working. Had they been standing a few feet closer, they would have been instantly killed. Although the money was excellent, it was dangerous incidents like that, and the callous disregard of his managers that caused him to quit and strike out on his own as a handyman. I was his very first customer.

No one forces women to get married today. Reliable birth control is available, and abortions are still and most likely will remain available in most of the country. Women can work outside the home, and they usually have to. But whether those jobs are satisfying or stultifying is an open question. Not every woman has the same positive experience at work that your mother had. I, for one, would much rather be stuck at home for a decade than work one single day in the hellish conditions of a pipe fitter.

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Dec 2, 2022·edited Dec 2, 2022

Ute, it's not just widows who take on the chores of the opposite sex. My husband has just entered late stage Alzheimer's and I am now responsible for him, the house, the yard, the car, finances, and everything else. It's definitely more of a traditionally "male" role.

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Sorry, not at all convinced. Women entered the trades at two times during US history - once during WWII and the second during the 1970’s. The first time they were pushed out to make way for the returning male soldiers (the women weren’t happy about it - see the film Rosie the Riveter) and the second many left when they were subjected to severe sexual harassment by their male coworkers and bosses. I mean porn at the work place, attempting to run over a woman coworker and even shooting at them. If sex segregation is so natural, why all the fear and coercion? And what is “women’s work” changes depending on time period and society. Men were originally the secretaries and that changed as secretaries lost status. And lawyers were not traditionally a “feminine” profession as focused on argument and advocacy, not caretaking. As soon as law schools opened up, in the 1970’s, there was a floodgate of women.

To say women didn’t create tools is a distortion of prehistory. In certain societies like the Hopi, women built the houses and not the men. Women also did the farming. I expect they used tools.

We happen to be living in a patriarchal society everywhere on earth. To claim that you can measure the contribution of biology to personality and career interest differences between the sexes without taken into account how unfree women still are, is, well, unscientific.

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"The punch line is that favorable conditions, those that reduce risk of disease and poor nutrition and that keep social stressors in check, will result in larger sex differences in evolved traits. Ironically, these conditions are most common in wealthy, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) nations [29]—those that promote gender equality. The irony follows from the belief that the promotion of gender equality and overall favorable conditions will reduce and eventually eliminate sex differences [30], but it does the exact opposite."

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See, I think someone should acknowledge that those who say they want to promote "gender equality" don't really want to promote it. And that the words "gender equality" are a euphemism more for the bribery of women by the government and corporate world. A bribery which tries to set them up as passive recipients of largess, in such a way that infantilizes them and makes them LESS equal than the men are, who are the ones producing all the largess eventually distributed to women.

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I study war, the Horseman not mentioned here, though the essay touches on male pattern violence. Warfare is universal across cultures because it is a biological phenomenon rooted in sex difference.

Lots of fascinating stuff here, especially the part about female STEM interests varying between rich and poor.

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Dec 2, 2022·edited Dec 2, 2022

While I agree that there are obvious differences in career preferences between men and women, I will never accept that women's work - including raising children - should consign them to a life of poverty, or dependency on men. Women fought to be liberated from the economic constraints imposed by cultural demands that they raise children without any compensation whatsoever. Meanwhile men can choose to get educated, work and strive for higher income even as their success depends on the free labour of women at home.

Regardless of the temperament, preferences and drives of men and women, unless/until women are valued within society for doing essential economic labour, which they clearly prefer to do, and are paid fairly so that they don't have to give up financial independence to do it, women and children will always be at the mercy of their husbands and partners. That's the central issue between men and women. Even if women love to do the work of homemaking, they shouldn't be required to live out their lives and be left financially destitute should their husbands and families get sick, die or abandon them. This is the travesty and shame of patriarchy. Women haven't given up on motherhood, so much as society has given up on mothers. One need only look at the US which barely has any paid maternal leave at all. It's criminal that a women is forced to work just after giving birth. That is barbaric.

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While really interesting, this analysis fails to account for multiple social factors. For example, let’s say that sexism and enforcement of gender roles has not been fully eliminated, but what has been eliminated is some of the gap surrounding the remuneration of these roles (yes, there’s a persistent pay gap, but it’s not as bad as being completely unpaid or relegated to perpetual low wages, either, as “women’s work” so often is in developing countries). Women *can* get paid enough for going into caring careers, if not as much as men for going into object-oriented careers; therefore, since they’ve been raised since birth to be more nurturing and people-oriented, they do. Meanwhile, in the developing world, women who have the temerity to even do something like go to school will have certainly noticed how caring work is unpaid or paid very little, and will try for careers which will garner social respect and a living wage, ie traditionally male careers in STEM or medicine, for example.

That’s just *one* possible hole in this hypothesis. There are many other obvious ones which have to do with the messages sent to girls and women in cultures at various stages of women’s liberation, something which notably *no* country has achieved, as women’s liberation would entail the end of widespread and persistent violence against women, the pay gap and other professional penalties, widespread objectification of women and everyday sexism, and gender role enforcement.

That’s not to say there’s nothing to this. It’s just not a question of “nature or nurture,” but *always* one of both, and until we have achieved something resembling the end of sexism, we won’t ever be able to definitively say, will we?

All such studies are horribly hampered by the persistence of female oppression in both the developing and the developed world, and the different ways that oppression plays out (I’d call it “traditional vs. neo-patriarchy”).

I’m skeptical of any claims about gendered phenomenon being “natural” as a result.

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