The Greatest 'Noble Lie' of Liberal Democratic Society
Sex Differences of Mind and Experience Between Men and Women
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The ‘Noble Lie’
FOR AT LEAST A GENERATION NOW, children have been told a ‘noble lie’: That the minds and the experiences of men and women are indistinguishable from each other. By the time I finished secondary school, 2010, the lie had so consumed our collective consciousness that we had forgotten it was a lie; it had now morphed into ‘fact.’
Of course, psychologists knew better; they studied minds. Or said they did. It was apparent to them, that men and women had quite different minds, and that their cognitive and emotional differences helped explain so much of what it meant to a man and what it meant to be a woman.
And then something weird happened. Much of the research was suppressed. The study of ‘sex-differences’ became a regressive sub-discipline, the people studying it presumed to be misogynists or patriarchal maniacs. By the time I had started my post-graduate study, 2021, I came under sharp criticism from both students and staff for stating men and women have clear and observable psychological differences. I had, quite naively, thought I would be able to escape the dogmas of ‘high-culture’ with its fiery untruths, by coming to university. In reality, I had waltzed right into the furnace!
I was to learn why such a statement of truth stung those who most vigorously clung to the lie, often aggressive and insecure young radical females. They had misinterpreted my stating the psychological differences between men and women for the belief that women are somehow of lesser inherent quality or value. I suspect some did this intentionally to me, but likely, most had just been brainwashed into thinking that difference = lesser, which of course, are not the same thing.
Even so, there were some who would discuss the possibility of differences. There were even some of those who actually accepted sex differences of mind. However, many such individuals had a backdoor escape: Social constructionism.
I plan to thoroughly take-down social constructionism in the context of sex differences in a future piece, but for those that don’t know, social constructionism is the belief that culture - and whatever similarities and differences we see between individuals and groups - is manifested by the organised weight of top-down imposed cognition; meaning that everything of culture lacks a biological basis, and instead, stems from our ideas and these ideas becoming enforced as norms, etcetera. In the context of men and women, this means that whatever psychological differences we see are due to certain ideas and norms, oft-generated by men - like sex roles - and not due to their evolved biological characteristics at all.
Another example of my naivety: I was astonished to hear such an argument. To me, it showed how far our scientific experiment of ours had fallen. I likened it to astrologists or cosmologists suddenly deciding Copernicus was indeed wrong after-all, and that we, on Earth, were the centre of the Solar System, not that yellow-orange fiery goblet in the sky.
It was that absurd.
But the consequences, they are not merely absurd. Indeed, I fear average developing boys and girls of today, when they think, feel, and behave in harmony with their sex - and clearly expose the reality of this lie - are, directly or indirectly, told they are vehicles or victims of oppression. That a man’s innate desire, his lust for sexual pleasure, that needs to be understood, is somehow ‘evil’. That a woman’s innate desire for the care for and raising of children - to make this her life’s goal - is ‘backward and regressive’; that she has been somehow ‘tricked’ by the historical patriarchs of our culture.
That when a man banters with his friends, when he lets fly politically incorrect jokes and jibes, he is told he is ‘being mean’, not realising that how men connect with each other is through such humour. That when a woman desires to be protected by and provided for by someone stronger and more powerful than her - a man - that this is ‘old nonsense’, and instead needs to be ‘strong and independent’.
That young boys who are abrasive and competitive, willing to fight physically, and above want all a rollicking adventure, are told they need to ‘calm down, focus, and be nice’. That young girls who construct mini-worlds via the conversations of dolls, and then reflect this in the class-room or at break with her friends, are told that instead, they need to ‘go outside and play a sport’.
I could go on, but the point is, we are losing - as a culture - what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman. We are pretending men are women, and vice versa; and while of course there is incredible overlap, that indeed much of the human experience between the sexes is the same, there are identifiable and predictable differences between the male and female experience, and that the positive aspects should be celebrated, and stories should be told of them.
While some people - perhaps most - definitely understand the nonsense of such a ‘noble lie’, I suspect that the failure to perceive psychological differences, and therefore wants and needs, in the opposite sex, is one of the reasons men and women are failing to bond. The average man is trying to fulfil the wants and needs that he would want fulfilled; the average woman is trying to fulfil the wants and needs that she would want fulfilled. Because these are often very different, with the man’s leaning toward the physical, and the woman’s toward the emotional, they are like two people speaking different languages without a translator.
About a year ago, a man complained to me that his girlfriend was not having sex with him at the regularity he would like. He said, a confused look on his face, “why would she not want to? Like, it’s great sex, I always [bring her to orgasm].”1 I asked him whether he was meeting her emotional needs. “What do you mean?” He replied. I told him that a woman needs to be emotionally nourished; she needs to be listened to and understood; she needs to know ‘you are there for her’ in a psychological and emotional sense, not just a physical. For a moment he looked confused, and then his face changed - he realised he was doing none of these things.
The irony, is that by pretending each sex is the same in wants and needs, we are creating generations of young boys and girls that cannot converse with one another. As I will lay out in a future piece, this is destructive for our society, and it is an under-discussed reason for the drop in fertility: Men and women just aren’t getting along.
And at the heart of it, is this noble lie.
While I struggle to understand how any lie ‘is noble’, it is not the only one our Liberal Democratic Societies rest upon. We are also told cultures are all equal, that their persons and their abilities are all the same; we are told what we can see with our own two eyes is an illusion. But, because every society, from the most savagely tribal (or romantically natural) to the most noble and civilised (or degraded and indulgent), is founded upon what it means to be man and what it means to be a woman, this lie - in my view - is the most catastrophic.
Confuse men and women at your peril, I say.
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The Delinquent Academic
He said something quite different. I’ll let you imagine it.
Interesting stuff.
I remember being put in the naughty corner a few years ago for saying that a woman friend of mine was 'male brained', a half-serious throw-away comment. I got a lecture on how womens and mens brains were completely the same, from a neuroscientist no less. In the interest of getting along with this person, I didn't push them on that. Of course, I knew there was published research showing that in fact, there are subtle but important difference in our brains, for instance, a women's hippocampi tend to be larger than mens, while men tend to have larger amygdala. There are different patterns of activation in response to stimuli. There are demonstrated differences in intrahemisphere connectivity. Sex hormones bind to many sites throughout the brain, and the effects of these hormones impact cognition. To the end reader: None of that is to say that one is better than the other, of course. But it is to say that the idea of sex-related differences is well supported.
Liberal women I have spoken to over the years tend to be highly suspicious of this topic, a heuristic no doubt, borne of it being employed by people they deem to be patriarchal and sexist (in some cases with good reason).
But it always struck me as rather odd to sweep such things under the rug, when quite clearly people are quite willing to acknowledge differences in our psychology when it suites them. Ask a liberal women why men commit most of the violence in society, keep probing, usually they will arrive at a position that it has something to do with the way men are inclined. Similarly with relationships, it's obvious to any women, no matter how progressive, that men and women, as a mean generalisation, approach relationships differently. Removing individual differences from the equation, there are certainly patterns of similarity between what different men are after, and the same is true for women.
The rub is that few are willing to acknowledge that a large part of it could be an innate disposition. Most only wish to see the learned. In fact, the learned, the social-construction, it became the total, as you alluded to. A suggestion, it might have something to do with agency. Take the violence example. If men are only violent because of how they were taught, then they can be 'reprogrammed', for an anxious person, who may have had bad experiences with men, that notion is likely comforting. If men are violent in part by nature, then men will always have to be viewed with suspicion in that person's eyes, they can never be trusted, and the anxious person can never be fully at ease.
On a personal level also, to some 'I can change what I am' makes them feel agentic. To others 'I am what I am' is freedom.
It is a shame. back in the 80s there were discussion going on about the effect of both testosterone and estrogen on brain development in adolescences. both chemicals are used in the brain and make differences. They also effect glans that produce other chemical that the brain uses. These were college level class room discussion in the 80s if you were in the right science class. I have yet to see data I would trust that say those two chemical do not effect brain development.