In high school, I remember having conversations with my first real boyfriend. I was accustomed to having long, deep talks with my girlfriends, going on for hours, exploring our feelings about everything going on in our lives. If there was one commodity we had in great supply, it was feelings.
So, imagine my surprise when I attempted to have a similar conversation with my poor, unsuspecting 17-year-old beau. Asking about his feelings elicited a very different response: bewilderment, which in turn bewildered me.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? How could you not know how you feel?”
It was utterly foreign to me.
Last time, I began a conversation about the differences between male and female — about how we, while being equal in dignity, are very, very different. So much so as to constitute, as St. John Paul II said, different ways of being human. I didn’t intend it to be just the beginning of the conversation. But I realized I gave a very big topic rather short shrift in that 1,000-word missive. Given that the entire Theology of the Body is based on our creation as male and female, I thought perhaps it would be worth spending a little more time unpacking the ramifications of our duality of gender.
This time, I want to start by summarizing just a few of the many established differences between men and women that science has cataloged.
The best resource I have found on this topic is the book Brain Sex by Anne Moir and David Jessel. It explores the long-neglected subject of the differences between male and female brains and how they impact our behavior. All the data here comes from that book. It’s fascinating, and I highly recommend checking out the entire book if this topic interests you.
Before we even start, let’s be clear that we are discussing different tendencies here. Every human person is an individual, and any individual’s mileage may vary. For instance, men tend to be taller than women — on average, about 7% taller. So, if you took all the men in the world and all the women in the world, you’d find about 7% more height on the male side. That doesn’t change the fact that my beautiful niece, at 6’2”, is taller than many of the men I know. That is the way God created her, and that is a good thing.
But the exception doesn’t prove the rule, and these tendencies have been observable and observed in scientific study for centuries. The first quantifiable difference seems to be the discovery that men and women excel in different areas in IQ tests. Particularly significant differences are found in the areas of spatial and verbal abilities. It has been confirmed by literally hundreds of scientific studies that men excel in spatial ability — the ability to picture the shape, position, geography and proportion of objects — in far greater numbers than women do. At the top end of mechanical aptitude, we find twice as many men as women. This is why boys generally outperform girls in the types of mathematics that involve abstract concepts. In studies of children exceptionally gifted at mathematics, researchers found thirteen exceptional boys for every exceptional girl.
On the other hand, women tend to do better on tests of verbal ability. Studies show that women can receive more sensory information and can better put that information together and communicate it. Overall, we learn to speak and read earlier than boys and tend to be more fluent and less prone to stuttering or other speech defects. We are more sensitive to sound. We are six times more likely than men to be able to sing in tune. We see better in the dark, while men see better in bright light. We are more easily able to pick up on social cues.
Across cultures, surveys show that men value assertiveness, practicality, competition and self-control, while women give higher value to sociability, love, affection and generosity. And men score higher — much higher — in virtually every measure of aggression.
The most interesting — and for many couples, most exasperating — differences show up in our emotional lives. Like my poor, hapless boyfriend, men are not as adept at identifying and expressing their feelings as women are. In one study cited by Moir and Jessel, 81% of women say they are the ones who initiate deep conversations in the relationship, trying to get the men to express their feelings. Often unsuccessfully, apparently, as Moir and Jessel report that three-fourths of women in long-term relationships have given up trying to improve emotional intimacy.
Meanwhile, the men express their love, but their wives often do not recognize it. Being more action-oriented, men are far more likely to express love through acts of service — holding doors, fixing what’s broken around the house, shoveling sidewalks and giving gifts.
The same is true in broader relationships. Women tend to respond to another’s distress with empathy — by listening, sympathizing and talking. Men tend to respond by serving — searching for practical solutions and trying to address the cause of the distress.
The differences go on and on. I could write an entire book about it. But since Moir and Jessel already have, I can refer you to them.
I want to be really clear that I write none of this to label either side “bad.” These are merely variations or differences. Of course, each gender’s tendencies lead to different challenges in achieving virtue. But the raw material in itself is just that — raw material to be channeled in healthy or unhealthy ways. It is how we were created by God, who clearly knew what he was doing, and they serve us in ways we will explore more in the coming weeks.
But how do we explain it? Is it really our inherent nature?
In a world that wants to minimize the distinction between the sexes, the theory has frequently been that social conditioning is the culprit in the vast differences between men and women. We tell girls to play house and encourage boys to take advanced math classes. But anyone who has ever tried to induce boys to play with dolls or girls to play with trucks knows that the explanation could not possibly be that simple. And now brain science is catching up with what so many already knew — that these differences are more than accidents of culture.
And that is what we will discuss next time.
