In recent years there has been a concerted effort to pretend that differences between men and women are entirely the product of socialisation despite decades of evidence to the contrary.
The desire to see men and women as interchangeable pieces comes from the ideals of equality. If we accept that there are differences between the sexes, we have to accept that there may be differences in terms of choices, behaviours and outcomes. This has now led to it’s inevitable conclusion, the deconstruction of sex itself to the point where you have men identifying as female, on the basis that they like things women like or women identifying as men.
Our politicians don’t dare tell you what the definition of a woman is. We no longer have mothers, we have “birthing persons”. We can no longer say “mankind”, it’s “personkind” even though the epistemology of man in this context is actually human, rather than male. Wereman is the original word for man and woman means man with womb if you want to knit-pick language.
Sex differences shouldn’t be things we should be scared of. Different doesn’t mean better. Understanding, and in fact, embracing the differences should aid our ability to empathise with each other, not diminish it. We need to be able to look at the world as it is rather than trying to project onto it what we would like it to be.
However, as much as there are very clear differences in behaviour spread across an aggregate population, it is not cut and dry. Every single person has a combinations of characteristics and some of those characteristics are more common amongst men and some of those characteristics are more common amongst women.
The reason why we are a sex dimorphic species in the first place is because it allows diversity to be introduced into the gene pool. Variation is introduced via the Y chromosome and mutations that lead to an advantage for survival thrive and those that don’t recede amongst the population, be it chimps, fish, birds or humans.
It’s not a question of nature (our genetic code) versus nurture (our environment). It is both interacting with each other in a dance as old as time. There are reasons for the differences, some we understand, some we think we understand and others that we do not.
It shouldn’t be controversial for me to explain but the fundamental difference between men and women is that women have the gift to birth new life into this world and men do not. A gift can also be a curse, there are different pressures on men and women as a result. The pressures change through different phases of life too, from cradle to grave and there is also a great deal of overlap too.
I could talk about these differences all day, especially when it comes to dating choices and behaviour but I want to concentrate on something that is both controversial and important to grasp.
Have you ever heard people bemoan the sexism in women being judged harshly for sleeping around, aka slut shaming, whereas a male exhibiting the same behaviour is considered a stud?
It seems unfair, doesn’t it. A man can sleep with whoever he wants and be praised for it but a woman will be judged. It does sound unfair, until you understand the flip side of that coin and the reasons for it.
Firstly, I would like to point out that it is predominantly other women that will slut shame their peers. I find this true with a lot of the friction between the sexes, very often it’s people of the same sex that are responsible for the majority of the social shaming but it is projected onto the opposite sex. Another example of that is when a man is sexually assaulted or raped by a woman, it’s often other men that will come along with comments like “lucky boy”, “I wish she were my teacher” etc, etc.
Secondly, there is an equivalent of “slut shaming” for men. Have you ever heard comments like these: “he’s not a real man”, “he lives in his mothers basement”, “he’s an incel”.
It’s the same sex-shaming technique but there’s no point calling a man a slut because what you are essentially saying is this man is attractive to women. Instead they imply the opposite, that he is unattractive to women.
Calling a woman an incel, or suggesting no man would sleep with her just doesn’t work as an insult because the reality is, even a very unattractive woman could walk into any bar anywhere in the world and find a man willing to sleep with her. She might not be able to find a man willing to still be there the next morning, to have a relationship with her or to commit, but access to sex is not a problem for women, if they choose to seek it out.
It all comes back to the fact that if a woman has sex with a man, she risks getting pregnant. Pregnancy is a huge drain on a woman’s body, it can even be a threat to her life if it goes wrong. No man is taking that risk by having sex with a woman. He is still taking a risk, but it’s an indirect one.
It makes absolutely perfect sense that women would value their wombs and not want to risk getting pregnant with a man that is not committed to be part of that life journey of raising a child. Deep down, she knows that the best chance she has for her children to thrive is with a dedicated father helping her raise their children together. If you look at the statistics, there is at least a correlation between a strong family unit and positive outcomes for children. I know that’s not what people want to hear, but it is the truth.
This does not mean that single parents are useless and their children are doomed. Sometimes we don’t get a say. A father may die, a relationship might breakdown to the point where it’s worse to stay together than to live apart, he could run away. I am not criticising single parents here when I talk about this topic. There are many single parents that do an amazing job and put their children first all the time and it’s incredibly hard work. All I’m saying is that the optimal scenario for raising children is both a mother and a father heavily invested in their children, bringing the best of masculine and feminine energy to meet the different needs of the child.
Women will always be the gatekeepers when it comes to reproduction. Studies have shown through DNA analysis that 80% of women historically reproduced and only 40% of men did. A tiny minority of men have been incredibly successful in terms of reproduction, thing of historical figures like Genghis Khan. The majority of men become evolutionary dead ends and don’t reproduce at all.
To be clear, this is not a criticism of women or a call out for them to be less selective. There are very good reasons for women being selective. They should be selective. It’s not a good idea for a woman to sleep around, even with modern contraception that makes it possible to separate sex and pregnancy for the first time in human evolution. Our minds have been wired over millions of years for women to be selective and for men to prefer women that are “pure”, biology works on a very slow scale and although technology has changed the interaction between the sexes on a surface level, our mammalian cortex still controls our instinctive behaviour.
Both sexes have two mating strategies. The dominant mating strategy for women is the pair bonding strategy. Find a man that is willing to protect and provide for you. Not just any man but the best man you can find so that your children are higher places in the social ladder than you were. It’s the reason why we see so many relationships whereby the man has greater status than the woman he commits to. He really doesn’t care at all about her earnings or what she has achieved in life. There are always exceptions, sometimes people just fall in love, but when purposefully searching for love, women tend to default to this strategy.
The second strategy is a variation where she will find a man that’s secure and stable and gives her the environment she needs to raise children but she will secretly seek out a higher status male to mate with. It’s the best of both worlds. The higher status male won’t commit but has the best genes. The lower status man fulfils her basic needs but isn’t exciting. If she can convince the husband to bring up the children of the more exciting fling, either through past relationships or by deception, this seems like a pretty good strategy. It’s also known as cuckolding because it’s the default strategy for a lot of birds, such as cuckoos. It’s actually not a great idea long term because children are far safer with their biological fathers than another man that doesn’t have the same biological investment. Also, in the case of deception, it can completely destroy the lives of the child and the deceived partner when they discover their whole life was a lie.
The predominant strategy for men is the same as the one for women, pair bond. Preferably with a younger woman as fertility declines fast in women. Women have a limited number of eggs and the quality declines with age. It makes no sense for a man to seek out a woman in her late thirties or above if his goal is to have a family. If he already has a family or doesn’t want children at all, then that’s different, but most men will find younger women more attractive.
This is often made out to be some form of perversion or creepy but it really isn’t, just as it’s not creepy for a woman to prefer a man that earns more. The sexes value different things in each other, purely because of the pull of biology.
The secondary strategy for men when it comes to mating is the scattergun. Few men have the opportunity for this because women are selective but the men that do tick all the right boxes tend to find they tick the right boxes for the majority of women, therefore they have greater opportunity to sew their seed far and wide. They have little intention to commit, they don’t need to, they’re spread betting.
The fact that these men have slept with lots of women doesn’t diminish from their sexual attractiveness to women, it enhances it. From her point of view, if lots of women want to have sex with him then he has something valuable because she knows that women are more selective.
The opposite is true for men. The more men a woman has slept with, the less attractive she is to a man looking to pair bond. Why? Every man that has had sex with her has left behind his DNA. He’s not just sleeping with her, he’s sleeping with every man she’s ever slept with too. That’s how men see it. They don’t care if it’s just about sex but if it’s about a lasting relationship that he’s going to invest all his energy and resources into, it matters, a lot.
If a woman sleeps around a lot, he will be worrying that she’s going to continue doing that behind his back. He knows about the cuckolding strategy and that’s his worst nightmare, investing all that energy into a child that isn’t his own.
It’s not something that a woman can commonly experience. With the exception of a baby swap at birth or IVF, she knows any child developing in her womb is from one of her own eggs. A man doesn’t have that certainty, and it’s only since the 1980s that we have had the technology to confirm paternity at all.
I’ve heard women say things like “but it doesn’t matter who the biological father is, it takes more than just DNA to be a father”. Well, yes, that’s true to an extent but if you say to her ok, instead of having your own children, why don’t you adopt, suddenly there are more excuses.
There are lots of guys that fall in love with a woman and opt to take care of her children, and that’s fine, but it’s an informed choice and he will have had to think about that and what’s more important to him but when it happens through deception, it is absolutely devastating to find out a child isn’t yours that you believed was yours. Often men in that position lose everything. Suddenly they have no parental rights, but simultaneously can still be expected to have parental obligations.
For this reason, I strongly believe that all new-borns should be paternity tested by law. It takes away the doubt. There will be the odd case where there is some natural anomaly but I think it would save a lot of men from a lot of heartbreak and also keep women more honest. Not that all women are uniquely dishonest, we all tell white lies occasionally but the impact of this particular lie is life defining.
Earlier this month I had the devastating news that my wife of 20 years was unfaithful. It may just have been the one night and a big mistake and from what she tells me, she regretted it straight away but had something not triggered my suspicion, had I not forced the truth from her, I could be in a very different position now.
She says they used condoms but suppose the condom failed and she fell pregnant. It would have been slightly unexpected for me, but also not miraculous given that we are sexually active and don’t pay particular attention to her ovulation cycle, after a period where we were actively trying to conceive. Just a very slight twist of fate and I could be getting incredibly excited right now, looking forward to introducing my own child into this world and I may never have found out the truth that it was somebody else’s baby.
Suppose at some point in the child’s life there was a medical emergency and our blood types proved that he or she was not mine after all. My whole life would have unravelled into a lie. It already feels a bit like that anyway despite there being no children.
It’s not a harmless, little white lie. Cheating is always despicable in my eyes regardless of whether it’s a man or woman doing the cheating but the paternal uncertainty adds a dimension that only men can experience.
Honestly, now I can understand why so many men don’t trust women any more. Of course, there many lying, cheating men out there too but the opportunity to cheat isn’t the same for both sexes as there is a plentiful supply of men that will sleep with women regardless of their looks or personality. I used to think that the men that went from one car crash relationship to the next needed to take a look in the mirror to understand why that kept happening to them and I still think that is the case and the same with women too but you can choose someone that appears to be loyal, someone that you wouldn’t put down as the adulterous type. You can share everything with them, give them a good life with lots of affection and tenderness and still they can be doing things behind your back that put everything at risk.
I don’t think I could accept bringing up another man’s child given what we had been through with our miscarriage. It would have ended our marriage, and quite probably, my life. Thankfully that’s not where we are, my wife had her period but although I’ve forgiven her and we’re trying to move on, if by any chance we did get pregnant again, I will need that assurity from a paternity test. When that trust has been broken once, it can be broken again. My doubt is the price to pay for the absolute faith I had in her that she threw away.
Rant Over 