One not well-understood way that men and women differ from one another is in their strategies for filling and defining roles. It is often noted that women occupy the great stable middle of social and personal distributions, while men occupy a larger portion of the extremes, both at the top and at the bottom. So you will find more exceptional male geniuses, but you will also find an equal excess of idiots and criminals. Success and failure are more exaggerated and less well-distributed among men than they are among women across a host of domains.
Both sexes seem to be adapted for these differences. Neurologically, their brains are wired this way. Women’s brains are more diversified, and female behavior is often typified by complexity, especially when it comes to value decisions. Men have a greater tendency to go all in on things and to pile everything into a single dimension or strategy or value, and their brains feature less connectivity across regions. Proportions of white and grey matter differ between them, and they react differently to the same neurotransmitters. As a result, it’s easier for women to adapt into a variety of neurological patterns, but male patterns vary more and are more radically developed into those patterns (but are more committed to them). And that translates into behavioral outcomes.
One of the ways that the human race has survived the ages is that it contains these dual strategies of female conservation and male selection. Male inequalitarianism, and female equalitarianism. Males go all in on strategies and test ideas, and a large chunk of them pay the price of error and wash out while others reap the benefits of success. Women meanwhile have performed the dual roles of maintaining a more stable and flexible and distributed position, and then they have also performed the extremely important role of selecting men and identifying the winners and losers in the race.
As I once heard Camille Paglia put it, men test ideas and women test men. Or to put it another way, men struggle and die for the competition of ideas, while women live and cultivate for the integration and cooperation of ideas. I say ideas, because ideas have and currently do serve as the principles behind and proxy for differing human ways of being. But both in the past and in the present and future it is the life of individuals, societies, and the species itself that is at stake and where that testing is realized.
Taking biological and sociological risk management as a kind of economic game, men are like venture capital and women are like mutual funds. One pays out steady and reliable returns. The other results in more showy and notable displays of success, but also a whole lot of catastrophes. And it’s not easy to have your cake and eat it to, to enjoy the advantages of one strategy without its accompanying disadvantages. If you take a complex and nuanced approach to life and are careful to hedge your bets, you lose the benefits of extremism and risky bets. You also avoid their unpleasant outcomes.
Both strategies exact a price that is essential to your ability to enjoy its benefits. And as much as we would like to imagine that there’s an easy way around that (and technology has been hard at work doing just that for men and women, finding ways to insulate us from the costs and disadvantages of what we are and what we do), nature itself has provided only one reliable solution to the problem that individual humans are just too limited to easily contain and maintain the necessary tension between approaches that keeps the human race going. And that solution is the relationship between the sexes (and their respective personality trait distribution curves).
The marriage that is humanity is the primary innate technology that we possess for navigating the many complex and conflicting and ever-changing problems life constantly throws at us. Depending on your religious perspective, it’s either a designed or an evolved solution to an intractable problem, that the best appoach to life can’t be boiled down to a single, static, complete unit, but can be maintained only through unity and relationship.
And this phenomenon is hardly exclusive to humans, who are among the most variable and adaptable organisms on the planet. It is a strategy shared by most sexually dimorphic species and by mammals as a whole in particular. The average lifespan of any male mammal is roughly 20% shorter than females of the same species for exactly these strategic reasons, which are built at multiple levels through the whole nature of the sexes and not merely expressed in their mating habits.
The lesson to take from this, I suppose, is that different strategies come with specific costs and benefits and are assisted by specific adaptations of mind and body. That doesn’t entail sexual determinism. As I said, humans are remarkably adaptable and variable. But it doesn’t mean that they have no general nature and that understanding that nature isn’t useful.
It also means that the historical outcomes we see, including differences between the sexes, are not merely the result of manipulation and social construction, the result of arbitrary power games. At least to some degree, they are also likely to be the result of humans following their own innate adaptations and strategies in the ways that are most useful for confronting the immense challenges that life presents. And before we dispense with the bargains we have made with our own natures and with one another, it’s at least worth understanding what we are giving up and what we are purchasing in a renegotiation.
To a very large degree, people have done what came naturally to them and what they had to do to get by, to survive and to provide a stable present and better future for their children. We relied more on our roles because we lacked the excess capacity and technologies to survive or succeed effectively outside them.
Now that we have more capacity and more technologies, we are less reliant on our innate species technologies, our evolved or designed differences of adaptation and role. Does that mean we can discard them? That isn’t so clear. The challenges that species face are stable enough and essential enough to the nature of life and reality that certain strategies for dealing with them are baked right into our biology and psychology. And let’s be clear, on the scale of biological life, the social and technological conditions of the world since, say, 1960 in a few corners of the globe like America are the merest blip and amusing diversion in the scale of history.
It’s very unlikely that this brief moment represents a large enough stable change in the fabric of life that we are going to redefine what it means to be human in such a short time. And who knows what the future may hold? God or evolution has decided that there are certain unique adaptations we are likely to need again and again across our history. And it’s not entirely clear what or who we would be without them, they are so deeply intrinsic to what we are.
If provenance is any measure of how deep any given feature of our being is to who we are, it’s very hard to find anything deeper than the biological adaptation of the dimorphic sexes. And those adaptations have been expressed behaviorally and structured our social interactions more than almost any other factor, right back to the furthest depths of primordial time.
While personality variation and roles are virtually impossible to specify on a neurological or genetic basis and race is equally as vague and hard to clearly identify, differences in sexual adaptations and complimentary strategies are clearly obvious from just a cursory glance. Long before the major differences and functions of the rest of human genome were seen or understood, the difference between the male and female chromosomes was blatantly obvious.
The point is simply that it’s worth understanding and appreciating these differences before writing them off as a merely relics of times past. Especially when the current situation represents such an infinitesimally small percentage of the total life of the species. If these adaptive differences were important enough to code into our very being over the course of roughly two billion years, it’s very likely they will still prove relevant in another fifty. If we want to learn to live well and love one another well, we need to understand and appreciate one another, including our long history and unique contributions and interdependence.
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