| Are Men and Women from Different Planets? |
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The split in our thinking between "masculine" and "feminine" is probably as old as language itself. Human beings seem to have a natural tendency to divide things into pairs: good/bad, light/dark, subject/object and so on. It is not surprising, then, that the male/female or masculine/feminine dichotomy is used to classify things other than men and women. Many languages actually classify all nouns as "masculine" or "feminine" (although not very consistently: for example, the Spanish masculine noun pollo means "hen", while the feminine polla is slang for "penis"). This is perfectly natural; it is part of the way categorization works in language. This does not, however, mean that it is right. It is probably unimportant whether a table or a chair is thought of as masculine or feminine. It may not even be very important these days whether we think of the sun as male and the moon as female (like the ancient Greeks) or vice versa (like most of the German tribes). However, when we start associating abstract concepts like Reason or Nature with men and women, we run into serious difficulties. The association of Reason with men and Nature with women is well known, and has been widely criticized. Aristotle defined Man as a "rational animal", and by that, he really meant men, not human beings. Unlike Plato, he saw women as less able to reason, hence less "human" and more "animal". In Europe, well into the twentieth century, women were generally seen as somehow intellectually deficient. An English woman recently became Oxford's oldest graduate because although she had completed her degree course in the 1920's, at that time the university did not award degrees to female students. Nearly all societies, from hunting and gathering tribes to post-industrial nations, offer some kind of compensation to those who lose out in the status game. For example, among the practically matriarchal Zuni Indians of New Mexico, the economically powerless men were credited with the ability to make rain. Black slaves in the American South were thought to be naturally stronger (which they generally were), better at music and dancing (which they may have been) and more cheerful (highly unlikely for slaves, but a good justification for treating them badly). In the same way, women are compensated for their supposed inability to think rationally by a mysterious "women's intuition". Attempts were made to justify this in biological terms; women were seen as naturally more emotional and/or in touch with nature. This was about as scientific as the Zuni Indians' theory that men could make rain. Men and women are, of course, biologically different. There are even significant differences in male and female brains; women, for example, have a thicker corpus callosum (the thing that connects the two halves of the brain). However, it is a giant leap from observing that there are neurological differences between the sexes to assuming that these differences correspond to the classic Reason/Nature or logic/emotion dichotomies. In fact, some of these differences may even indicate the opposite. The left hemisphere of the brain generally deals with linear processing, as found in language and some types of mathematics, and this hemisphere develops faster in girls than in boys. The old "11 plus" test of verbal reasoning used in British schools was actually adjusted to bring boys' scores up to the level of girls'! Whatever the case, it is a mistake to look at people's brains and then decide that they must think in a certain way; it would be far better to try to find out how people actually think, and then to see if this corresponds to brain structure. When we talk about the way men and women think, we are actually dealing with not one, but at least three separate things: how men and women usually think, how men and women can think, and how we think men and women think. Usually when we think we are looking at the first or second subjects, we are actually only describing the third. Since our main guide to how people think is their language, the fact that in most cultures men and women talk in different ways, and about different things, may lead us to false conclusions about the way they think in general. Women's conversation tends to emphasize feelings more, which may also mean that they think about feelings more. It does not, however, mean that woman is more emotional. It is perfectly possible that men are just as emotional, but for social reasons they talk (and think) about their feelings less. Similarly, the fact that in most cultures men argue more about abstract things does not mean that men are naturally more logical, it just means that the things men prefer to talk about require logical argument more than they require expression of feelings. Obviously the more you argue, the better you get at it, hence the prejudice that men are somehow biologically more logical. This would be like assuming that I am biologically better at speaking English (my first language) than Spanish (my second). Problems also arise with the actual words we use: logic, reason, intuition and emotion. Logic is simply a set of principles for getting from something we already knew, to something we did not. If we know that all cows eat grass, and we know that Daisy is a cow, we can use very simple logic to say that Daisy eats grass, even if we have never seen her eat anything. The more complex logic that we use in constructing philosophical arguments or designing computers is really only doing the same kind of thing. The word "rational" is a little more problematic, since it involves an assessment of aims and actions. If our aims are consistent with each other and our actions achieve our aims, then we can fairly say that we are behaving rationally. If we act in a way that prevents us from realizing our aims, then we are behaving irrationally, or in other words, stupidly. For example, if I know that I will have a better relationship with my wife if I don't shout at her, but I still shout at her because I am in a bad mood, my problem is not that I am being emotional, it is that I am being stupid. The opposite of "rational" is not, then, "emotional" but "irrational". If we set up a pair of opposites, rational/emotional, we are likely to assume that women are more emotional and therefore irrational, which is a polite way of saying that women are stupid. While having strong emotions can sometimes interfere with your thought processes, this is not automatically the case. For example, I often get quite excited when I am working on a new theory or project, but this usually makes my thinking better, not worse. Strong "negative" emotions such as rage, jealousy or depression are usually the result of irrational thinking as much as a cause of it, and men are just as vulnerable to this type of stupidity as women. "Intuition" is an even trickier concept. We usually say that we arrive at an idea or solution to a problem "intuitively" when we know something without knowing how we came to know it. A scientist may arrive at a new theory because the idea just "pops into" his or her head, or even turns up in a dream. You may get an "intuitive" feeling that a person is dishonest without actually having heard them say something you know to be untrue. In both these cases, what seems to be happening is that the mind stores and sorts information unconsciously, providing us only with the end result of this process.
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