Many people, women especially, see their work as consisting mostly in the fair distribution of goods, taking little thought for how things are produced, but rather assuming it. This isn’t a fault, it’s simply a tendency of how their thought leans, an approach, an area of special interest. But what lies outside that interest? We don’t know. We assume that our question is the primary, and perhaps only, one worth addressing. How are goods being distributed? 

   Production will take place because that’s what it does. It happens somewhere, we know not where. It’s just part of the nature of the world. And so we criticize what we have to work with and bemoan the negative factors we must deal with that mess up how the goods of society are distributed, including dangerous and predatory men.

   We take little responsibility for having produced these conditions, and believe that there is no special reason why they should have been produced, had all been administrated as we desired. A proper and equitable and caring hearth would suffice for all and provide all with equal and equally good and plentiful outcomes. Whatever it is that provides for the hearth is not only taken for granted, but assumed so deeply as the be believed not to exist. The variability and contingency of the world, and even of individual lives, is not only not understood, it is deemed to be an affront, an injustice, a barbarity. 

   Men, conversely, concern themselves primarily with production, to the exclusion of other concerns. What specific consequences it has, what costs it demands, how its results are apportioned, all of these are of little concern in the struggle to make the contingent become real. It will all sort itself out, somewhere, somehow. It will all happen as it should. It will take place somewhere, we know not where or how, nor do we care. That is not our business, and that is not where the real work of life takes place.

    It seems perfectly natural that some must suffer and the weak and inveterate must be left behind, pushed aside, or even destroyed, so that what can succeed may come into being. The future is bought with the blood and sweat of not only the men who must succeed to make the contingent future and the production necessary to reach it actual, but by those who must fail and be paid as a cost in reaching that future. It is the law of nature that few can reach the finish line, and even fewer reach it first and take the highest prizes, and only those will determine what is able to survive and succeed and carry the species into the future.

    Survival of the fittest can take whatever form it wishes, in whatever age, for it is a purely empirical proposition, and only the trial can prove its truth. To refuse the trial may preserve your life, but only at the cost of living, at the cost of avoiding the business of what it means to be alive, and to be a man especially. We fight for the production of what is and is not to be, and we purchase it within our own bodies, in our blood and sweat, and even in our deaths. Women also purchase the future, but by sustaining and nurturing and conserving it. They also secure it with their own bodies and hold it within them, in a cradle of life, instead of death. 

   So what is behind all these assumptions, these drives, these areas of concern, and this mutual blindness? This inability to even think about the other half of the business of living? The answer is, I believe, the division of labor between the sexes. And that extends even to the division of psychic burdens, what we think about and don’t think about. That’s something that’s built so deeply and unconsciously into us that we take it for granted as part of the very nature of the universe. Because it’s been there since long, long before we could ever articulate or analyze it. It needed to be able to function on an instinctive and implicit level, without even self-awareness as a crutch to rely on for its maintenance. 

   The division of labor is so deep of biological and psychological reality that it is built into who we are, into what we assume and what we ignore and take for granted. It is built into our own blind spots, assuming that even if we are ignorant that someone stands in that place. We are motivated each to our own seperate business because for so long we really had a seperate business and hardly saw or cared what the other did, though we relied upon it. Our natures assume that the other sex stands in our collective blind spots, so much that we take what is actually their great work and concern for granted as mere facts of the universe.

    The rule of biological instinct is that an organism does not need to know how or why a behavior works for it to function. That’s how instinct works. It is an implicit framework and effective mechanism that is inseparable from our natures and the way we see and interact with the world. In this way all animals get through the business of living as they have through all the long eons, ourselves included.

   Often, the hardest things for us to understand are those which we have always understood without thinking, or that which we never needed to understand. Such things took place and functioned without our needing to maintain or question them much. Their operation takes place before the level of conscious thought. Far from being noticed or articulated, they are assumed. They structure how we see the world as operating, how we define what it is, how we define progress, success, failure, and penury, and what we assume our tasks are within the world.

   In a way, they are articulated, but not as conclusions, as foundational premises. They are that from which people reason, not the articles they arrive at. And so they must be reasoned back to in order to discover them. From what underlying assumptions did you begin, so different from my own, as strange and inconceivable as that may seem, that you should arrive at such a different opinion on everything?

    And this, I think, is part of why the sexes struggle to understand one another. We seem almost sensible to one another. We share the same spaces far more than we ever used to. We meet not only for the purposes of conjugation, but in one another’s territory and work. And we have brought great alteration to the very nature of one another’s work and spaces. Men changed those of women largely through technology, women changed those of men largely through society, through themselves and the power of their own presence and social constructions.

   And that is pretty much exactly what you would expect from each sex, one being more interested in things and the other more interested in people and leveraging their power and experience with each to alter the world. Women work from within the social structure, and their discrimination and power decides what stays within and moves toward the center of care and attention and what is forced out to the fringes and forgotten.

   Modern people are, perhaps, more unidimensional and mysoginistic than previous generations, for their failure to understand or appreciate the nature of the feminine power structure. They seem to have bought their own propaganda that it doesn’t even exist or matter, and only masculine systems and concerns do. Men didn’t really care what women thought about or how they stood within their masculine system, and they couldn’t really understand or escape the feminine system. Each was something we just had to live with and live within, in large part unconscious of how or why it worked. Because we had our own concerns and systems to navigate. Our own business of production and selection, of distribution and cultivation. 

    Both systems are equally pervasive and inescapable, in truth, as both sexes are an inescapable aspects of the species. And both can be very intimidating and even dangerous. How status and position in the group are apportioned is an all-encompassing system of soft power. It is a powerful and benevolent, but often merciless and demanding hierarchy that demands you sacrifice yourself to the group to maintain your position within it. It seeks to bring all in and provide for all. But its demands are very high and both its anger and its perversion are poisonous. It won’t kill you outright, but will mark you and devour you from within, spreading a stain of infection for all to see, making you stink in the nostrils of all who perceive you. It is the kindest cut. You hardly need to be chased away. You will chase yourself away if you know what’s good for you. That is the mechanism of feminine social power. It’s different from the more individualistic, confrontational, competitive proving ground of masculine systems, but no less powerful, and no less pervasive. Masculine power is like a wave that smack you in the face and rolls on. Feminine power is like the tide pulling relentlessly at your feet. 

   The strangest fact is how much we either resent or ignore the power and value of the other. When we live in instinctive unconsciousness, we mostly ignore and assume the action of the other, while we busy ourselves with our concerns as if they were the limit of the whole world and how it works. Only when our lives are restricted, impacted, or impeded do we notice the action of the other, and resent it. When it is working we don’t see it at all, we just assume it and get on with our own business. When it imposes itself and becomes conscious, it is always a problem. But we cannot even address it then except through the skewed lens of our own instinctive prejudices. 

    That, I suppose, is the price we pay for being what we are and having what instincts we have. We are not, after all, some strange creature among all the hundreds of thousands of others with no instincts to speak of. No implicit assumptions. Nothing we specially see and attend to nor specially ignore yet depend on. We are different, unlimited, complete. 

   Leaning to make room for the work and interest and nature of the other sex is part of the business of being human. I won’t say understanding each other, because I’m not certain that understanding is one of the demands of nature. But relationship is. Whether we truly understand one another, or even ourselves, may not be necessary for our survival. But we are are necessary for one another’s survival. Our relationship with one another is necessary.