Are women better than men?

Often it seems like men are the problem, and that women are the innocents. And we have often treated them like that historically. And there seems to be an urge now to eliminate men. Whatever purposes they served have been taken over by technology and government. In the world of today, we don’t need men. They don’t fit into polite society. They aren’t nice, aren’t safe, and wreck everything. They’re the origin of the world’s problems.

All these arguments seem perfectly understandable. Yet it seems odd to me that it should be so. We’re one whole species, and it’s hard to see how all evil could be concentrated in one sex and all good could be concentrated in another, apparently by biological destiny. Is this simply because we teach men to be awful brutes? I can’t give much credit to the social constructionist theory. First, because I actually have children, and I have many neices and nephews, and I have actually seen how boys and girls are different close up, despite your best efforts to the contrary. Second, because of the the universal continuity of gender differences across all cultures throughout time. No matter how you alter the circumstances, no matter what you do as a parent, the same patterns emerge. They’re innate. And it’s only reasonable that large physical and genetic differences would also be expressed in behavioral adaptations, much as we see in virtually every mammalian species on the planet.

So I think we can safely agree that men and women do have some real differences, as groups, and that those differences are not merely arbitrary constructions but have some innate basis. But is it plausible that one of those differences is an innate tendency toward moral inferiority in men, or an innate moral superiority in women? Some men have certainly argued the reverse in the past. And a lot of people seem to be making this argument now. Men are primitive brutes and the future is female.

I think there is an argument that the way that the world has changed, for the moment thanks to technology, has created social situations to which certain male qualities are not well adapted. Modern schooling, complex interconnected societies, constantly shifting social and employment conditions, a lack of good manual labor jobs, the need for greater verbal communication skills, all of these are not a great fit for your traditional man, who is less agreeable, less interested in people, less verbal, less neurological flexible, less sedentary, more competitive, and more aggressive. The reduced need for hard physical labor and warriors, reduced need of women for men to provide such services (making men less attractive), and increased power of technology and government programs has made classical men somewhat obsolete.

The greater variability of men is less useful in a stable society where you don’t really need it, and the accompanying downsides of very low capability and very aggressive men, and especially criminal males, becomes a burden that is not easily eliminated or carried. Perhaps we could start chemically neutering them? Surely that’s better than filling the jails with them. Some people would argue that were already doing that with ADHD drugs and Prozac and porn and video games. That those, as well as the prisons (and profesional sports to a lesser degree), are great sinks we’ve devised to absorb the excess aggression and competitiveness of men.

Having said that, I want to set aside the assumption that men are just generally worse as a sex, period, as needlessly pessimistic and reductive. Surely some men are bad, very bad. But some men are very great. And their masculinity is part of that greatness, not simply something to be overcome or extracted and removed. Men seem to be given more to extremity, but that doesn’t mean you can reduce them to their worst extremes, or simply declare that humanity doesn’t need half of itself any more. Or that you can simply ignore or suppress it without doing harm to it.

There are certain things that are true about humans in general. The human condition includes such things as the moral struggle. Women aren’t exempt from being human. They aren’t a completely different kind of thing. And men aren’t such a radically worse kind of thing; they also participate in the higher goods of humanity. And I’m not at all convinced that harmlessness and dangerousness are themselves moral categories. They’re normally variable psychological qualities, not moral qualities. Being more dangerous doesn’t make you worse, but it does alter how you affect the world, how your strategies and outcomes are expressed. Morality is a further process of judgment that we apply across the full range of psychological qualities, not just some of them.

And I’m not convinced that women aren’t (and haven’t always been) extremely powerful and dangerous themselves. Women are human. So they might express themselves most commonly through different strategies and methods, which result in a different set of outcomes and find different avenues of expression. But that’s a matter of embodiment, not moral value.

The way that I tend to go right or wrong differs quite a bit from my brother and sister, even though they’re from my own family. The way our moral actions differ, how we make use of and apply who and what we are and what we can do, might be conveyed differently. But we’re all equally subject to moral failures, and we all have to strive for moral excellence. Someone who ignores or antagonizes a group might be more obviously antisocial than someone who manipulates or abuses a group in the name of preserving it, but it’s not clear that one is really better than the other. There are some very gentle prisons and kind abuses. There are some weapons that are so finely honed you can’t even tell they’ve cut you off at the feet until you try to step away.

And for all the men and women do differ, they also overlap enormously. Their personality curves differ in general proclivities and most especially at the extremes, but you can’t judge an entire sex purely by its extremes. And the extremes of any personality trait tend to be equally dangerous in different ways. So where exactly are men meant to smuggle in all this evil, and how are women meant to overlap so much with men and indulge in their own endemic extremes and yet avoid the universal human tendency toward moral evil?

There is some possibility that the feminine role has had some protective moral element to it. That the act of being close to people you know intimately and having to live with people of differing types and managing a host of complex values and interests in the service of a relationship with others has given them key experiences that favored a more balanced and morally excellent approach to life. Men, as the competitive cannons that humanity fires against its own external and internal challenges and defects to destroy or subdue them (and themselves), were in a more fraught situation more prone to intemperance and extremity (a tendency they already possessed).

Or perhaps both sexes had, in their own domains, their own particular virtues, as well as those that extend across all humanity. And perhaps those are what we have often striven over and misunderstood and abused and invested in and coddled and criticized. Identitarian, contingent ones rather than universal ones.

And perhaps that is what makes it so easy to mistake the other sex as lacking in the virtues we take for granted as universal but are actually particular, situational, specific, and finite. Perhaps we have even believed and internalized our rhetoric about one another. Believing in actuality that certain traits or strategies or ways of being in the world are genuinely bad, instead of merely being bad for the kind of thing weren’t trying to be, in the context we’re trying to do it. Probably that sounds intolerably vague. But I do have something in mind, conversations I’ve had where women complained about men criticizing or demeaning certain behaviors that they themselves didn’t see as problematic or even identified with (and although they havent had as much to say about it, I’ve certainly been around men with similar feelings about the criticisms of women of behaviors they don’t see as a problem or identify with).

The hard thing to explain to them is that it’s not that that kind of behavior is really bad in any universally objective sense, although some men do make that mistake of generalization, it’s just that it’s bad for men. It goes against male virtues oriented around masculine values and roles. Those same behaviors may be valued and virtuous among women. There are, after all, virtues general to all cars, but there are virtues particular to pickup trucks that differ from those of sports cars. How those qualities are used will vary as much as the individual owners of those vehicles, just as the individuals that inhabit the sexes vary immensely yet have certain commonalities.

It’s perfectly reasonable to claim that a saw makes a bad hammer. But maybe it wasn’t meant to be a great hammer, maybe it’s meant to be a great saw, so the complaints about its hammering properties aren’t really that applicable as a universal condemnation of it, but only as a specific and situational observance of mismatching of tool to use in that particular case. Maybe men aren’t meant to be great women, but are meant to be great men.

Perhaps our complaints about the other sex aren’t always truly moral complaints of character, but are rather complaints about the specificity of sex itself. Maybe we don’t like that particularity of the other. Maybe we just don’t like the complexity of having to admit and live with these differences. Maybe we don’t like sharing territory, or know how to handle having our value systems and differences laid on top of one another. Maybe we don’t like the challenge it presents to our own conception of ourselves and our values and strategies as universal. After all, if we leave room for the virtues of the other sex to exist alongside our own as legitimate, we might find ourselves subject to criticism by them, to being misunderstood and undervalued, and we might lose the ability to freely and thoughtlessly misunderstand and undervalue them.

How mamy of our grievances are with the fact of sex itself? The indignity of difference, of finitude, of dependence, of limitation, of insufficiency? The fact that we alone, as one, cannot be all, cannot be humanity as a complete and sufficient singularity. That we must be a divided god, in tension with its opposing face, instead of an all in one. There’s plenty of existential and psychological tension there to struggle with for the rest of eternity. Add on top of that the actual flaws and differences of actual people and no wonder the sexes have had a tough time with one another. Really, it’s a miracle that they’ve come together and cooperated at all and can share the same spaces at all. Some species are quite bad at that, despite their simplicity compared to us.

But that’s what’s amazing about humanity. Not what each sex can do or has done. Not what we could do on our own without the other. But what we have done together. That’s the real story of humanity. What we have been able to do as a result of our alliance, our coming together. We’re stronger together. We really benefit from having one another. We suffer too to be sure, but there are deep reasons that we are what we are. We’ve each borne different costs that have brought us to today.

On a less philosophical note, the idea that girls are somehow innately morally superior or somehow escape the general trap of the human proclivity for evil should be readily apparent as a falsehood to anyone who has had children. I have two amazing girls. But I have never had anyone ever treat me as badly as those girls have. I never even imagined anyone could. They’re aggressive, deceitful, selfish, manipulative, vengeful, demanding, greedy, proud, resentful; each one of them contains the full range of nascent human depravity. It’s contained in a tiny human, so it can’t have big effects yet, but it’s easy to see what it could grow to in an adult if left unchecked.

Don’t misunderstand me, my girls are delightful and I love them. But all these tendencies have been there since the very beginning. And as a parent I’ve had to manage and stand up to them and teach my girls how to manage and stand up to them since they were old enough to realize they had interests. And I’ve had to deal with little boys too. And they’re not better. But they are different. And I could see why certain people might prefer one over the other, boys as well as girls. It’s not like both don’t come with their own particular benefits and struggles. My girls are radically different from one another by personality, as much as night and day. And so are my nephews from one another. But they’re also very much members of the groups they’re part of.

My experiences differ from my sister’s because I have girls and she has boys, as well as they differ by the individual differences of our specific children. Each child has their own individual version of how they could be great or terrible, just as each sex does. And one parent’s lot isn’t inherently better than the other. We just have different tasks to manage, and we succeed or fail on those terms. My girls may express their dangerous proclivities differently, from one another and from their cousins, but I’m under no illusions that don’t have them. And all of us are subject to success or failure in our differing expressions.

So no, I don’t think the story of goodness and badness is so simple as we would like it to be. I don’t think the story of the past is, nor the story of the future. And any story that doesn’t carry an understanding of the value of the other sex with it, as well as a realistic understanding of the dangerous potential of both, of all humans, is not one that will help us navigate the challenges ahead. We need one another. And we are at risk from one another. And only love and respect can save us from one another and from ourselves.

We can’t bet peace and the future on everyone being the same as us, or on everyone of one group being all good or all bad. We are all much more individual than we imagine, and our struggles are as well. And yet they’re also much more universal than we imagine. There is a logic and a beauty that is all our own in its particularity and universal in its principle and proportionality. We are both the same and more unique than we give ourselves credit (or blame).

Do we really want to build a world where the sexes don’t need one another? What would that world look like? I don’t think it would be the imagined utopia some take it to be. Can we even know fully what it means to be ourselves, to inhabit our particularity, without the other, without being forced into the uncomfortable reality of our own limitations and another’s gifts? And why is it so hard to admit one another’s virtues, as well as our own faults? Do we worry that if we give one inch that the other side will simply judge and dominate and misunderstand us and walk away from us?

It’s a fear with some real grounding. And it’s easy to let it swallow up our entire interpretation of everything the other sex does and has ever done. But as real as that fear is, it’s isn’t the truth. We’ve loved one another. We’ve treasured one another, striven for one another, sacrificed, loved, suffered, died, faced terrible dangers, endured bondage, and shared hopes. We’ve fought and worked for one another, worshipped one another, journeyed into the unknown for one another. We have done great things. Not alone. Together. For one another. For our children, for our future. We have betrayed and exploited and misunderstood and resented too, as all humans do. As my own children do. As I do.

But we have loved. And we have grown and survived. We have walked the long and terrible road together, surviving only because of one another. And I am thankful for that. We would be nothing without our mothers and sisters and wives and daughters. And we would be nothing without our fathers and brothers and husbands and sons. I would be nothing without all of them. We are one species, both great and awful. And there is no life but the life we share together.