Men are notorious for refusing to ask directions. Can the Left concede any differences between men and women?
I left the Starbucks at 10 Light Street, and went into the Charles Center subway station to catch a train to a doctor’s appointment. When I got to the trains level, there were two tubes. I wondered which one my train would come on. End of the line westbound was Owings Mills; eastbound, Johns Hopkins Hospital, my destination. But I was shocked to find I had no sense of which way was east or west.
It’s real easy for a man to lose his sense of direction inside a skyscraper or subway station, surrounded by a maze of girders and rebar.
In the outside “smoke pit” where we’re allowed to smoke, I have been astonished at men who, asking or telling how to get somewhere, point in what I know to be the wrong direction. “How can you not know?”
It’s unconscious. There’s no thinking or emotion involved. You just know. And so, a man expects himself always to know. So he refuses to ask for directions.
Women aren’t like that. Research has shown this.
Research has also shown that it’s not so much a matter of maleness, of the Y chromosome, as of masculinity. Gay and bisexual men are significantly more similar to straight females in this regard, than to straight men.
Will the Left concede this? Will the left concede any difference between men and women?
Any difference that fails to make women nobler than men?
Any difference that’s just that — a difference?
A dogma of the 1970s: visitors from an alien race, it was said, would never be able to tell female and male human beings apart.
I can’t tell female and male fish apart. It’s easier with some birds than others — easier with sparrows and ducks and, God knows, peacocks; harder with pigeons and swans. It’s very hard with members of the parrot family. My brother owns a conure, and for 15 years or more we assumed it was male. It certainly acted male: noisy, aggressive, destructive. Then one day it laid four eggs.
I’ve had my doubts about Elizabeth Warren and Sarah Sanders, but there’s no mistaking that Gigi Spice is female.
Gigi Spice
A Google engineer, James Damore, got fired because he published a memo questioning Google’s drive for “diversity,” specifically its determination to hire and promote equal numbers of women and men in all fields related to mathematics. I have not read the memo, and it’s possible it does contain statements I myself would call misogynistic. But the proposition that more men than women have talents in mathematics does not deserve dismissal on its face.
All ideology, left or right, begins with antipathy toward What Is, whether it’s antipathy toward the poor, antipathy toward the rich, or antipathy toward the differences that exist between women and men. To understand the universe, it is well to embrace What, in fact, Is.
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