Why Men Don’t Iron: The New Reality of Gender Differences. Anne Moir

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СКАЧАТЬ prison example). If cultural influences were stronger than biological ones, then we might expect to see individuals reacting to societal pressures, veering from homosexuality to heterosexuality and back again as their circumstances change, but we do not see it. The only reasonable conclusion is that biological influences are far stronger than cultural pressures, and that an individual’s sexual orientation, be it gay or straight, is unchangeable. For the vast majority of men that pattern is heterosexual, for a small minority it is homosexual, and for most there is no in-between. Straight males do not fear the hidden gayness inside themselves because it simply is not there.

      There is a divide between gay and straight; the two are largely distinct, though there is a bisexual minority among the gay category. The studies put the incidence of bisexuality at 3% (of gays), but it is probably far less.⁵⁹ We also need to clear up another popular misconception here. Some men are hormonally primed to be less competitive and aggressive than other males, but that does not make them gay. We are discussing sexual orientation, not general personality traits. Some gays are every bit as macho and aggressive as the most belligerent heterosexual males, while some straight males have a gentleness and passivity that is often labelled ‘queer’, a confusion that probably arises from Freudian-inspired ‘pop psychology’.

      The debate over homosexuality is mired in confusion. Much of it is generated by the gay lobby, with its insistence that gayness is latent in all men, more is generated by those who condemn homosexuality as an aberration, something unnatural, unhealthy and ‘sinful’. That argument can only work if gayness is believed to be socially conditioned and thus ‘correctable’. It used to be thought gayness could be ‘cured’. In the 1950s the American Psychiatric Association declared homosexuality to be a deviant condition that could and should be treated. One, however, might as well try to ‘cure’ blue eyes.

      Homosexuality is natural, just as is the aversion that heterosexuals feel for homosexual sex. It is equally natural for gays to resent the aversion, to feel condemned by it, but those with a troubling sexual identity too often generalize from their own state (it is a common failing to generalize from one’s own experience to that of others) and find androgyny to be the biological template. That is a one-sided denial of male sexuality.

      Are you bald if you still have one hair on your head? If you have ten? Or ten thousand? Or a hundred thousand? (There can be three hundred thousand hairs on a head.) Here a subtle fallacy nips at the retreating heels of the first. So there is an indeterminate middle? We all have a female template that is variously modified by male hormones, so how can any of us be either all male or all female? We must be both male and female. The fallacy makes the subtle error of arguing that because there is no distinct break between the gradations, then there is no distinction between the extremes, that all is grey. It concludes there is no real difference beween a one-haired man and a man with three hundred thousand hairs. Or between men and women. So they settle on an ‘in between’: neither one thing nor the other … both/and. On the surface this may seem the essence of moderation, yet in truth it is to incorporate the peripheral into the centre. The ‘in between’ is, statistically, nowhere in the middle, but at the far end of the spectrum. And, having reasoned that the exception is the rule, they proceed (like social revolutionaries everywhere) to stamp out difference in the name of moderation, in the name of universal humankind. Thus they elide the critical differences between the male and female.

      The conservative, or traditionalist, prefers plain black versus white. We must all be one or the other, and anyone beyond the categories is an unnatural aberration. No wonder that those beyond the categories resent their exclusion and, just as their opponents attempt to straighten the ‘bent’, they respond by trying to curve the straight. But the opposite to nonsense is not the opposing nonsense, it is good sense and sound science.

      Assertions of androgyny, that the male has a ‘female’ side waiting for his embrace, is made nonsense by science. To tell a man to ‘get in touch with his female side’ is an insult, for it implies that his male side is inadequate. Do women alone show concern, love, compassion, sympathy or kindness? To suggest as much is as offensive as to suggest that only men possess courage, honour, audacity or determination. For a man to have compassion or for a woman to display courage does not require a peculiar internal facet of the opposite sex but common humanity, and within the pool of common humanity lies an extraordinary range and variety of people.

      Some of those people are unrestrainedly masculine, others feminine, and a very few are in between, but none of them is a perversion of humankind. Until recently we thought homosexuality was such a perversion and we tried to ‘cure’ it with medical treatment, but the new orthodoxy declares that it is the unreconstructed heterosexual male who is in need of therapy, sensitivity training and de-clawing. We disagree, and this book is a defence of the male who, probably, is incapable of much change anyway. Many people wish he were more like her, but he isn’t and he won’t be, because he is what he is. ‘If my grandmother wore rollerskates she’d be a trolleybus’ (Old Yiddish saying).

      SUMMARY

       The normal incidence of male homosexuality is 1–4%, not the 10% usually quoted.

       The heterosexual is no more part gay than the gay is part heterosexual.

       Homosexuality is natural.

       Heterosexuality, in the male, is also biologically determined – not socially conditioned.

       There is no intermediate female side in most males.

       The accusation of ‘homophobia’ is too often a form of inverted ‘heterophobia’.

      DESIRABLE AIMS

       Recognition from the gay male that the heterosexual needs his own sexual space would do far more to reduce intolerance than the delusion that he is hiding from his own gayness.

       Biological awareness is more likely to undermine than reinforce stereotypes.

       An early stage in preparing the ground for nondiscrimination is to deny differences. The mature stage is to respect differences: the bio-integrity of the heterosexual male and of the gay.

       CHAPTER TWO

       Foodsex I

       Perhaps he’s a rabbit

      ‘What am I,’ asks Bill, ‘a f-f-fasting rabbit? All those raw leafies and tofuburgers. Even the meat – when it’s on the menu – is fatless and bloodless, shapeless and tasteless. No skin. Not a bone to chew …’

      ‘And I thought you were chewing on one,’ says Anne. ‘Where’re you heading?’

      ‘Out to buy some charcoal before the barbecue is banished. Food is going female.’

      ‘Perhaps it’s healthier?’

      Two months later …

      ‘I did a MedLine search on male and female, food and mood,’ says Anne, ‘and what the whitecoat world finds is that this health food diet isn’t for him.’

      ‘What are you on about?’

      ‘What we were talking about. Whole food. СКАЧАТЬ