What Are the Effects of Innate Sex Differences on Society?
Briefly put, they can be devastating—unless society is determined to control them, as it did in the nineteenth century. Alas, we have long since sowed the wind of sexual egalitarianism, and we are reaping the whirlwind. For, as George Gilder poignantly argues in Men and Marriage, the unconstrained public philosophy of males the world over, to the great detriment of society, tends to focus on immediate gratification. Single young men are a distinct hazard to society and its procreative health for the following reasons. They vastly prefer hit-and-run sex. They are wildly more aggressive than females. Although single men represent a percentage in the low teens (and falling) of the population over the age of fourteen, they commit nearly ninety-percent of major and violent crimes. They drink more, have more—and more serious—car accidents, than women, or than married men. Young bachelors are twenty-two times more likely to be committed for mental disease—and ten times more likely to go to hospital for chronic diseases than married men. Single men are convicted of rape five times more often than married men; they have almost double the mortality rate of married men, and three times that of single women, from all causes.
Because homosexuality is overwhelmingly a “hit-and-run” phenomenon for males (distinctly not so for females), and suits their predilection for immediate – and often anonymous – gratification, such homosexuality is in accord with the sexual nature of males and thrives when male/female role distinctions are suppressed. Cultures that want to guard against the threat of homosexuality must therefore drive a cultural wedge down hard between maleness and femaleness, for it is no simple coincidence that homosexuality is flourishing in a time of feminism. They go together like the two sides of a coin.
Just so, the attempt of the State to neutralize male and female differences is manifest in its parallel effort to “normalize” homosexuality, marketing it to us in its agencies and schools as a “value-free” matter of sexual “orientation.” In such matters, the State is promoting and financing the elimination of meaningful and socially useful differences. Of course, homosexuality is much more than an “orientation;” it is also an ideology, and today, there is a whole feminist school promoting homosexuality as liberation from men, marriage, and traditional society, and true feminism, as lesbianism. In its heyday, the January, 1988 newsletter of the U.S. National Organization for Women (NOW), we read: “The simple fact is that every woman must be willing to be identified as a lesbian to be fully feminist.” Some make the weak argument that heterosexuality is also ideological. But that is a manifestly absurd argument blind to the biological facts and truth of human nature in human history.
The real truth is that this whole matter of sexual liberation – which is code for liberation from natural biological propensities – has backfired. Men have benefited sexually in the short term, but certainly not in the long. Women have lost in both because they have surrendered the one sure means of control they had over men, the one sure method that enabled them to have children, provide for them, protect them, and nurture them personally at the same time—all paid for by doting males—if they so desired. Now, in some despair, millions of abandoned mothers are turning to the patriarchal State for sustenance. But of course, the State can only be such a Father either by employing women in huge numbers (about 80 percent of low-paid public-service clerical staff in all Western social-democracies, are women), or by taking the tax money the increasing number of low-income female-headed families requires from singles, and from fathers and mothers in intact families. Even worse, as Gilder explains, feminism, by default, has allowed men to create a system of serial polygamy—one in which the stronger (wealthier, more successful) men can enjoy many partners. But a woman loses out in the sense that for the purposes of child-bearing her chances of locating a strong husband are biologically confined to a few fleeting years of her life. If she waits too long to marry, the strong males her own age get taken in a rapidly-peaking, concave-sided pyramid of diminishing choices.
Worse still, in societies that choose both to neutralize natural sex differences and to permit “liberated” sex, the homosexual under-culture always vies for normality with the core culture, attacks traditional values, and recruits otherwise procreative (and usually younger) males. In other words, “polygyny produces homosexuality.”[1] It does this both by liberalizing the sexual choices for strong males (thus destroying the equal apportionment of possible mates) and, in its feminist guise, by setting the female ethos against the male ethos, thus encouraging sexual resentment between men and women. This, in turn, leads to less marriage, something seen immediately in Sweden when it took the lead by enthusiastically embracing sexual liberation. Sweden’s marriage rate between 1966 and 1973 did a freefall to around 50 percent of its former level); more people began living alone (more than 63 percent of the residents of Stockholm now live alone); and divorce – or “couple dissolution” – as the Swedes call it, rose drastically.[2] Multiple mates? Easy sex? Multiple mistresses? Homosexuality? Easy divorce and cohabitation? A booming pornography industry? All these inevitably undermine heterosexual monogamy, which is unfortunate, because “monogamy is designed to minimize the effect of sexual inequalities—to prevent the powerful of either sex from disrupting the familial order . . . any sexual revolution, therefore, will tend to liberate more men than women.”[3]
It is for this reason that “the crucial process of civilization is the subordination of male sexual impulses and biology to the long-term horizons of female sexuality.”[4] Gilder convincingly argues that because of the male-female hormonal difference in biology, society basically must be set up to tame men and their barbaric proclivities. For without the long-range reproductive goals of women, men would be content to fight, enjoy their lust, wander, make war, compete, and strive for power, glory, and dominance. In his view, in terms of the larger purposes of human civilization that depend utterly on sufficient procreation, successful child-nurture, and strong families, males in general are inferior sexually to women, who, because of their biology, control the entirety of the sexual and procreative order (or disorder) of human life. In fact, males are in this sense only neither sexually nor morally equal to females, and therefore “the man must be made equal by society.” That is, men rely for personal meaning and success on the socially-purposive roles created for them by their culture. Thus is the contract struck between men and women whereby he provides and protects, she processes and nurtures. Again, a woman who wants to try all four of these things, or switch it all around, is free to try (at least, in a free society this is true). But most, the world over, do not—because the system works. What this means is that men, lacking in the distinctiveness and biological determinateness of women, are “deeply dependent on the structure of society to define [their] role.”[5]
In short, women channel and confine the generalized male sexual desire in such a way as to protect themselves and their children, and in so doing teach men to subordinate their impulses to the long-term cycles of female sexuality and biology on which society has always been based. In order to avail himself of the intense and intimate sexual meaning a woman can give to his life, and the extension of himself into the future through children that only a woman can provide, a man must give something in return—and this must always be “the external realm of meaning, sustenance, and protection in which the child can be safely born.”[6] And that’s just the start. When you stop to consider deeply the complex, life-long physical, emotional, and financial requirements of the average family (I have five children), the seriousness of this undertaking sinks in. It requires what the anthropologist Margaret Mead called a “commitment of permanence” from each sex, and a “deal” struck between the parties, the terms of which are supplied by the culture. We break the deal at our own—and especially at our children’s—peril.
While one can always quibble with details, or find exceptions, it will remain difficult to argue with Gilder’s main thesis because it is so overwhelmingly supported by anthropological studies around the world, in every culture studied, past and present. In view of this, we must ask why, in our present society, the state-financed radical feminist program has been so influential? Sex-education classes now take the experience of very early fornication for granted,[7] male/female differences are downplayed or outright denied in school textbooks, even imagined as wholly imaginary differences; homosexuality is presented as just another normal “orientation;” so-called “value-free” discussions and “self-esteem” codes of “ethics” (the word “morality” has completely dropped from usage) are promoted as primary, and the crucial importance of procreative marriage and the family is all but forgotten. But the question to which all citizens ought to demand an answer is this: Why does the State legitimize and finance only radical-feminist advocacy groups, and not those that promote traditional family life? Why does it massively fund abortion-on-demand, but only token sexual-abstinence programs for the young? Why does it fund extreme left-wing radical organizations like the former National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), but not conservative pro-family organizations? If its interest was really equality, wouldn’t the funding be more even-handed? At a minimum, readers should begin to suspect that the sorts of programs introduced in order to achieve an ideologically asexual, anti-biological society, with equal outcomes regardless of gender has beenestructive of our social fabric.
[1] Gilder, Men and Marriage, p.77. Polygamy, a general term, refers to having multiple opposite sex mates. Polygyny means having more than one female mate at the same time. Polyandry means having more than one male mate at the same time.
[2] Allan Carlson, “Charity Begins at Home,” in Chronicles (Rockford, Illinois: The Rockford Institute), August 1988, pp. 12-15.
[3] Gilder, Men and Marriage, p. 78.
[4] Gilder, Men and Marriage, p.5
[5] Gilder, Men and Marriage, p.10
[6] Gilder, Men and Marriage, p. 14
[7] In and around Toronto where I live, the current rage among some teenaged girls, is oral sex, offered quite freely by many of them, even on school buses, and often for a fee. Twenty to fifty dollars is the going rate, and many teen-aged school girls see this is as much easier way to buy a new dress than working at a regular job, and they are happy they don’t need to “have sex” to earn this kind of money. This is reported to me by credible 14 year old boys.
