A young family I knew did things together with my young family. We went to dinner together; we were in a cooperative babysitting pool; we vacationed together. On Saturday mornings, the two fathers would take their young children to the Empire State Building or to the Central Park Zoo so as to give the wives the morning off. Then, as happened in those years, my family moved to a larger apartment in Manhattan where we spent most of our lives, while my friend and family moved up to Westchester, finding the suburbs a more appealing way to live. But not too much later, that other family divorced and the woman raised her two sons by herself. We kept in touch. When the eldest son was in college, he had a first love affair and, when it broke up, he was heartbroken. His mother said to me that she understood that women are upset, very badly upset, when boys break up with them, but she hadn’t quite believed that boys could also get heartbroken. Now, understand, she was exaggerating a bit and didn’t mean quite what she said. She had intellectually known that men also had feelings. It was just that it had never penetrated her very deeply until she had seen it happen in her own family life that men and boys could be emotionally crushed. My wife had the same experience when our son broke up with his first serious girlfriend. My wife kept asking me what was happening, whether he would recover, whether we should send him into therapy, and I said that is what happened to young men and he would get over it-- or not-- and he did.
So the lives of men and women are different from one another because they have different lives from one another even if the two experiences are parallel. It is just that women see the same thing as from their point of view while men see the same thing as happening within their own sex however much husbands and wives are intimately involved with their lives and those of their families of both sexes.Men and women are each what Georg Simmel would call a secret society, each of the sexes having rituals and experiences known only to within their own sorority or fraternity and not communicated with the other even if only for the very profound reason that each group is barely aware that the same thing happens to the alternative group. Those within the group don’t have to maintain silence, an effort of seclusion, because the secrets of the sexes just don't occur to them as other than the natural way to be, much less project their own view to that of the other party. Men and women are very different even though people in both groups do the same thing to and with one another.
This difference between the sexes that I have alluded to is very important in that it goes much more deeply into ordinary life than many of the ordinary frictions that occur between the two sexes that are more overt and that are matters of public discourse such as when, today, women take umbrage when men are fresh with them or even when young adult men and women deal with one another in some asymmetry, such as the fact that women in their late teens seem more fully formed, more assured as to what they are as people, while men at that age seem more awkward and less sure of themselves. Women have to be patient to let young men grow up, though some women might claim that men never grow up, are always more limited in their bearings however aggressive they may become and however devoted to some ones of them they may become. It is the nature of things that way and the sexes have to deal with that-- or decide to do otherwise and some women wonder whether men are necessary or that men have to put up with women because of sex whether they like them very much or not, what with their high falutin’ ways: “why can’t a woman be like a man?”
There is another aspect of the secret societies of women and men where the members of each of them are painfully aware of what they each have to manage while those in the other camp are less acute about or well informed or are embarrassed about the problems that the other group manages, just as is the case, I have suggested, with the awareness of the romantic hardships of one’s own side and the unawareness of romantic hardships on the other side. This has to do with personal grooming and it presents itself as a part of a group culture that is more overt within the group as is the case with rituals and ceremonies whereby a pre-literate society supposedly manifests its beliefs and emotional tone even if rituals and ceremonies are superfluous to the heart of the intellectual and emotional structure of a culture, as happens when modern reform Jews and progressive Catholics mouth what is said in synagogue and church because it is the thing to do even while having reservations about those posturings, as is clear when Catholics have fewer children even if they say that they agree with church doctrine about eschewing birth control and Jews just disregard the passages in the prayer book that God is so munificent to the long suffering Jews. In the case of men and women, they have to deal with their limitations even if they do not want these concerns to dominate life.
All societies recognize that women and men are different from one another because, as the anthropologists would say, women have a wound that never heals and is therefore somehow magical and dreadful, and so women can be segregated into separate huts during their menstruation so as not to convey the danger associated with them. Women are more annoyed or bothered rather than stigmatized by having periods but it is still true that modesty requires dealing with this matter in secret. Men, for their part, are disadvantaged in that from the age of thirteen or thereabouts just about all men have a continually permanent erection, a problem that also has to be managed in private, even if it is pleasurable while menstruation can be painful. Men and women find their sexual attributes strange as was made very clear in a “Seinfeld” episode when George Constanza lost his trunks at the beach and felt the need to explain to the women who had seen it that penises shrink when they are cold and so should not reflect on George’s true manhood. This is something only George would feel the need to explain, and so he is, as usual, the butt of the humor. The women in the episode were not perturbed but one did notice to another woman that men had strange bodies. That was a comical turn on the cliche that it is women who have strange and peculiar bodies.
Some of these peculiarities of the two sexes are social rather than biological and women do seem to me, as a man, to have the worst of it. Women walk on high heel shoes or in flat shoes that provide less foot support than is the case in a laced man’s shoe. Women also have to remember to cross their legs in short skirts so as to preserve modesty, something they learned as pre-teens, men not having the equivalent, and so allowed to slouch and sit wide while women always have to be aware of a presentable posture. Indeed, it struck me that getting rid of high heel shoes and short skirts was more a sign of women’s liberation than many other things such as equal pay for equal work. But women also say that clothing is freer for women than it is for men because there are so many ways in which they can dress, can express themselves as businesslike or casual or all dressed up. They have so many ways to express themselves in the clothing choices they prefer,being flirtatious or dowdy or young looking, some Veronicas and some Bettys, while men for the most part are either presentable or just schlumpy, only a few men making a fashion statement with how they dress. Women go shopping with one another as a source of entertainment, haunting the malls and department stores, while men tend to shop on their own or with the accompaniment of a wife or girlfriend rather than with fellow men. That would seem strange.
The social practices of dress and posture, however, seem to be superficial matters however ingrained they may be, just as religious practices are superficial however much that is the substance of what religious people do because religious people take what they believe and what they experience personally as the bedrock of their faiths. Only anthropologists care and that is only because it is easier to talk about what is visible when the internal invisible aspects of religion have to be dealt with in theology and in psychologists like Kierkegaard. “Tootsie” was a movie that offered an engaging and profound consideration of the differences between men and women because Dustin Hoffman had to work so hard to learn his female dress, posture and manners when the real issue was that he maintained himself as male because he was assertive even while playing a woman. His female sidekick, played by Teri Garr, has to learn to stop whining and become proactive if she is to become a full human being. Character is more important than the customs assigned to one or the other secret society.
Here is a third aspect of the two gender related secret societies that is quite controversial in the very obvious sense that people get all hot and bothered about it and also because it is more about opinions than about facts, when facts, however obvious, were the ones I cited as evidence for the first two characteristics of secret societies. Both men and women are mysterious because they may think differently from one to the other. Women are no longer described as having feminine intuition or having a clarity given by God and men are no longer attributed to being rational rather than emotional, but the idea may be that the mental processes of men and women are different for subtler reasons having to do with the way to form judgments or come to conclusions or to notice events and so each of the two groups are insular: knowing what the other kind of people do not know and not knowing why. That surely would make each of the two groups a secret society in the most profound of ways, much more so than one group having key rings or passwords or a separate language, like Cantonese or Bulgarian, that others did not find fluent. Considering how the sexes may think differently is not a popular topic, however. Larry Summers got thrown out as President of Harvard University for, in part, suggesting that women did not seem to be able to be Nobel Prize biologists (though there have become some) and that differential achievement at the very highest levels is just a fact of life. After all, men and women are so different from one another biochemically that it would stand to reason, the evidence even though unavailable, that men and women might have subtle differences in their brains just as there are subtle differences in the way the heart muscles differ in that women have less dramatic heart attacks than men do. We know, or at least current day educators say, that girls are better students than are men students in elementary school because girls are more obedient than boys and because boys get more restless at sitting still than do girls and so schools are organized to suit girls rather than boys and girls do better in school grades than do boys. Maybe so. I have known, as a matter of personal experience, that I know very few dumb girls but that I have known a lot of stupid boys, but that may be the result of a highly selective sample or because I am besmotten with girls and women and so don’t see them as stupid even though they are. Charm trumps intelligence.
Consider the history of disciplines so as to speculate about this matter. Women have been good writers ever since there was writing. There was Sappho and the woman who may have written down the Odyssey, the evidence for which is mostly that the epic is so concerned with women’s lives. Certainly, women flourished in the Nineteenth Century novel and have done well ever since. But women have not done well at science until recently. Hildigard of Bingen, the Medieval mystic, did not really make much of a contribution to mathematics and women did not do much for economics before Beatrice Webb and Janet Yellin. Yes, it does seem to me that it takes an extra muscle to do mathematics and maybe that attribute is differentially distributed by gender. All of the differences may disappear when there is more equal education and encouragement, just as happened when Black people were understood as leaders in finance and the military once the shackles of inequality had been lifted for a few generations. Time will tell if women really are more down to earth than men while male testosterone may lead men to remain ahead of being abstract and intellectually adventurous.
There is a different approach to deal with the problem that is sociological rather than historical. John Dewey in “Human Nature and Conduct” presented in 1922 an argument that has proven extremely useful for the subsequent hundred years for those of the Liberal-Pragmatist persuasion. Answering Social Darwinism, which said that biological groups were in competition, Dewey said that there were two things: nature and nurture. Nature meant that people had biological endowments that limited the capabilities of species, breeds and even races. Each one had a range of each one of their abilities, whether strength or intelligence or speed, and it was not necessarily the case that the range was not lower or higher than that of the others. So, possibly, black people or Chinese had a higher or lower level of intelligence than was the case with other races. But nurture referred to all the ways in which the range of the biological givens could be affected. Better nutrition and childhood emotional support could increase the abilities of a group even if the group had a range of intelligence that was narrower or lower than that of another group. Klausner showed in the thirties that black kids from the South who had lived for some years in Chicago could significantly improve their I. Q. scores. And so a few generations of good nutrition, family environment and education led to significant Black financiers, corporate executives and even a President. Nurture trumps nature, even if some people think that people fall very close to the tree, that giving people a settlement house will make a delinquent into being less so.
What about women? Are women on a higher range of a scale of intelligence then are men or is it that there is a tone or a quirk in their intelligence to let them see things differently or with certain nuances, syllogisms, perhaps, short circuited so as to move them more quickly? It is hard to say because children, both boys and girls, have been so deeply educated at early ages that they do not have a chance to try out different paths of reasoning and understanding. I was aware at the time when i was learning my sums and sounding out difficult words, that I was already suiting myself to a particular way of learning and therefore of thinking and therefore excluding other paths where I might have wended my way if I had not followed instruction. Maybe that is what real thinkers are able to do. But I followed the conventional suit and learned a little of the path to knowledge that had provided me as the benchmarks. In that way, people learn a lot more than do the cavemen but not nearly as much as humanity might. Dewey said in “Human Nature and Conduct” that imagination outpassed intelligence because it made new rather than old conceptions. Dewey also praised desire over intelligence and so people learn because they want to learn more than because they have the ability to learn. It isn’t that men or women should trust their instincts; they should just notice that their biological endowments are a small part of the story. Men and women, about important things, are in the same boat. Each person has a secret that is undisclosed to any other people, which is that no one has much of a clue about what is really going on. That existential fact is more important than gender differences.