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Ute Heggen's avatar

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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Steersman's avatar

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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Nancy Robertson's avatar

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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Nancy Robertson's avatar

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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Ann Menasche's avatar

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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Nancy Robertson's avatar

During WWII, millions of US women did factory work or entered the military, not necessarily because they wanted to, but because the country told them their labor was needed to defeat the enemy. The harsh requirements of wartime made their work outside the home essential to keeping the country going. After the war ended, some women obviously weren't happy about losing their independence and livelihoods. But other women no doubt felt great relief after the existential threat ended, the men returned, and life went back to normal.

Back in the 50s and 60s, it was possible for one income to comfortably support a family. But beginning in the 70s and 80s, middle class salaries no longer kept up with the cost of living and two incomes were needed. In short, most women, whether single or not, entered the workforce, and stayed in it because they had to in order to get by.

It's a gross exaggeration to state that many women left work "when they were subjected to severe sexual harassment by their male coworkers and bosses." Women leave the workforce for many reasons, the vast majority of those reasons have absolutely nothing to do with sexual abuse or with the threat of violence. Women may be laid off, they may hate their stressful, meaningless or unsatisfying jobs, or they may have feel they want to do something other than paid work outside the home.

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Ann Menasche's avatar

I’m speaking about the 70’s and 80’s from women in the trades who I knew personally who loved their work and who left the trades in the 80’s (they did not leave not paid employment) due to the sexual harassment. There were hearings at the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco in the mid 80’s regarding what was happening to women city workers working in the trades. I heard story after story of what women went through and why many just gave up because the harassment was so terrible. It wasn’t worth the stress.

As far as WWII, the Rosie the Riveter film documents this best.

Yes, work doesn’t pay as well as it used to, especially for white males and families need two incomes just to cover housing costs. And lots of jobs are no great shakes. Everyone should be able to work less and get paid more..But a woman being economically dependent on a man and confined to caretaking of children and housework was not a good deal for women. I saw my mother struggle in the 50’s and 60’s with the boredom and frustration, and to try to regain control over her own life and to go back to school and get a profession. Though the relative prosperity was nice in the 50’s, those traditional roles were stultifying for women.

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Damian's avatar

"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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Matt Osborne's avatar

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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Signme Uplease's avatar

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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Nancy Robertson's avatar

Except for a small US uptick in 2021 from the depths of the pandemic in 2020) the birthrate is dropping in most countries, and in every continent except Africa. The birth rate in Europe is dropping in countries that have have paid maternal leave and those that do not. It's even dropping in countries that pay women to have babies. It's just dropping.

One or two hundred years ago, children were considered a major economic asset because as soon as children were older, they could help run the family farm or other business. And because birth control wasn't effective back then, couples who had sex also had children, often one right after another.

Why don't people have babies anymore? Because in the 21st century it no longer makes economic sense for a couple to have and raise children. Children are no longer an economic asset; they are a major economic liability. And this goes far, far beyond the cost of childcare. Have a child, and you need a larger place to live. You're on the hook for two to three hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in extra expenses. And that's not even including college.

Of course, there's also the dismal outlook about the future with the ever-present threat of declining living standards, climate catastrophes, pandemics, political instability, and nuclear war. It doesn't take a crystal ball to see the world is circling the drain with no way out. And who wants to subject themselves or their future hypothetical child to a world like that.

Because women have reliable birth control, the birthrate will continue to go down. And then plunge as conditions get worse and worse. Just ask China.

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Justin Gaffney Samuels's avatar

Historically, people have always had children and had to deal with plagues, war, famine, and whatever else. Things could happen and it was just the way life goes.

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Nancy Robertson's avatar

They had children only because there was no other option. My grandmother, who came to the US at age 13 in the early 1900s, had nine siblings. Almost all of them were gassed in the Nazi death camps. Not a great incentive to become a parent.

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Justin Gaffney Samuels's avatar

Well, go extinct from not having children if they are so bad. That is happening to some groups of people.

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Justin Gaffney Samuels's avatar

Children don't have to go to college, and if they do there's financial aid. In Western countries feminism or perhaps I should say masculinism disparaged motherhood and marriage, and that's a huge part of the declining rate. Making it cool to be LGBTQ is yet another way of lowering birth rates.

Lower marriage rates, higher divorce rates, and higher singlemotherhood rates contributed to lower childhood rates. Western nations, in order to stop population collapse, have relied on massive immigration from countries with high birth rates. Which means things are exploding as communism, so called concern about the environment, feminism, are potentially causing white people to go extinct in predominately white countries they will be the minority in a generation, thanks to the propaganda from colleges.

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Nancy Robertson's avatar

These are just not compelling reasons for people who don't particularly want to have children to actually have children. And that's why the birth rate will continue to decline.

This situation is like the old English tragedy of the commons. Each person or couple makes their own decision based on what they believe is best for them. And that decision may have disastrous consequences for the group as a whole.

But you can't force women to have children. What are you going to do? Forcibly impregnate all fertile women over 16 by artificial insemination and lock them up until they give birth. Then take the babies away and raise them in group orphanages. That would get the birthrate up.

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Justin Gaffney Samuels's avatar

We should also be real. Women's colleges, arts programs, whatever have all accepted transgenders and once those people are in there cannot kicked them out or else, they will be served with a discrimination lawsuit. And once biological men are in organization, the organization cannot discriminate against any man who wants to enter. Thus, transgenderism caused everything to go coed. In other words, it ate up feminism and the damage is irreparable.

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Justin Gaffney Samuels's avatar

Again, , those societies will simply go extinct if not enough children are born. This is I would say feminism does lead to transgenderism. Basically, people hate the laws of nature. A population must have a certain number of children or it will go extinct. As it dies off, other populations that have sufficient children will replace it. That is happening in America and Europe and predominately white societies will soon be a thing of the past. Feminism and its hatred of children, of marriage, of the nuclear family was a huge part of it, and its funny now to see all the women's organizations taken over by men who live as women, who are doing what they believe what's best for them. Enjoy those men with dresses in women's space, dominating.

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Nancy Robertson's avatar

I am very much against "transgenderism" and see it as a most serious threat to the health, safety and well being of women, children and men. I have written many essays about it, hoping to spread the word.

It's not just feminism that got taken over. Every institution in the US was captured. Schools, universities, medical societies, mainstream media, the entertainment industry, local, state and the federal government have all been captured. The ACLU and Planned Parenthood were also captured and now lead in the assault against women's safe spaces, the protection of children, and the reality of human sexual dimorphism.

Here's an essay I wrote a few months ago under a pseudonym, an anagram of my name. https://www.womenarehuman.com/martine-rothblatt-mad-architect-of-genders-final-solution/

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Justin Gaffney Samuels's avatar

And much of the damage transgenderism has done to those other institutions is permanent as well. You have a lot more parents homeschooling thanks to gender ideology. A lot of people no longer trust the mainstream media and look to alternate media due to the transgenderism. ACLU and Planned Parenthood have ruined reputations and those won't come back. The numbers of young people going to college has declined and some colleges are going out of business. There's a lot less trust in medicine now thanks to transgenderism.

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Justin Gaffney Samuels's avatar

The women's movement is a joke, and it has been taken over by men who feel as women.....

If husband's die, women can access social benefits, go back to work, get family support if they have families, etc. Most women in that situation got by in a variety of different means.

I find that certain feminists took the worst case scenarios and tried to apply them to all marriages or all stay at home wives. After destroying tradtitional roles for much of the public, then they were powerless to stop men who live as women from taking over women's colleges, women's programs, and women's sports. Feminism is owned by transgenderism, as it tries to disparage traditional femininity, including motherhood.

As for children, neither the mother nor the father gets compensation for having children. The parents have always had to work out how to support their children. Until the industrial revolution, most families farmed and supported their children that way.

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Signme Uplease's avatar

You're right. The women's movement IS a joke. That's because it's been co-opted by capitalism and the porn industry to make young women believe that they're empowered by selling their bodies. This was NOT why women in the 1900's fought and died to gain voting rights, equal pay, the right to earn and keep their income, the right to make decisions about their own bodies and so on.

Now, women's basic rights are evaporating because women have been brainwashed to believe in the trans narrative that they should be compassionate even to the men who become predators pretending to be women and who, through the porn industry, have fetishized womanhood for their sick sexual perversions.

How has this come to be? Through the pharma billionaires - who are themselves male transgender fetishistic autogynephiles who spend millions promoting transgender ideology because the profits they make with drugs and surgery on confused kids are astronomical. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/01/the-billionaires-behind-the-lgbt-movement.

This leaves the real feminists like me - those who simply want women to be treated with the same rights and respect as men at home and in the workplace - fighting against the women indoctrinated into the trans cult by stealth, the male predators, the media who are paid millions to promote this transgender ideology, and the medical industry making millions mutilating and drugging children. It's exhausting and debilitating and radical feminists are completely overwhelmed.

Many women (though curiously not men so much) who've been speaking out against this travesty have received rape and death threats from the transgender extremists, been deplatformed, lost their jobs and even careers, homes, families, social standing, experienced financial ruin. You just don't hear about the women who ARE fighting back because we are silenced and smeared. Thankfully, some men are starting to come forward, finally. But women have seen this unfolding for years now.

So, PLEASE, for the love of your mother, sister, wife, daughter, try to understand the extreme injustice that is being done to women and even more, children. Because they're actually coming for the children. And the women who are fighting on all fronts cannot win this battle alone. If we lose the the transgender battle because men refuse to see who our real enemies are and attack us instead of the predators coming after all of us, there will be no future. It will be a hellscape for women, children and inevitably men.

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Justin Gaffney Samuels's avatar

Quite clearly the goal is to turn all children into LGTBTQ activists. Its a form of experimentation, as well. Yes, I know that in recent decades the so-called feminists have had nothing to do with the early waves of feminists who fought for women to be able to vote, own property, etc.

You have a lot of female to male transgenders as well, not just male to female. It is destructive all around.

Many of the editors, journalists, etc are very much apart of gender ideology, so it is difficult for people of either sex to get their stories through to the masses. For this, its time for people to learn that no, people are not silenced because they are women. They are silenced because gender ideology wants to block views or information that could destroy it.

Feminists won't be able to do anything against trans ideology. Indeed, transgenderism conquered feminism. It will take the masses of people.

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Nancy Robertson's avatar

I agree. "Transgenderism" is extremely dangerous. But there are TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) like Kellie Jay Keen, Karen Davis, and Exulansic who are trying to spread the word. And men on the right like Matt Walsh also play an important role in exposing the dirty truth that underlies all things "transgender."

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Justin Gaffney Samuels's avatar

When all women's colleges and arts programs accept transgenders, that let's you know transgenderism has destroyed feminism. The remaining women's colleges, as I said in another post, are now going officially coed one by one. Once you let transgenders in, ultimately you have to let other men in. The snake ate its own tail.

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Nancy Robertson's avatar

A few years ago, I was stunned to learn my alma mater, a woman's college, accepted men who pretended to be women, and wouldn't admit real women who mistakenly thought they were men.

Thank goodness I'm not young today. I would have a very rough go of it, trying to hide my opposition for all things "transgender."

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Damian's avatar

I beg to differ with you in your description of child rearing by women as "free labor" in the home. Because, if the husband is going out and having a career, how much of his money is being spent on his wife and kids? And that makes everything she is doing PAID labor.

Now, I mean, if he were arranging for her and the kids to get government benefits, and so that he can go and save up his salary to buy a snowmobile, a boat, a fishing pole, an off terrain vehicle, etc., then ok fine I will grant you that his wife is engaging in unpaid labor to do all the housework and raising of the kids.

But that is usually not what goes on.

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Mórrígan's avatar

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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