In high school, I remember having conversations with my first real boyfriend.
I was accustomed to having long, deep talks with my girlfriends, going on for hours, exploring our feelings about everything going on in our lives. If there was one commodity we had in great supply, it was feelings. So, imagine my surprise when I attempted to have a similar conversation with my poor, unsuspecting 17-year-old beau. Asking about his feelings elicited a very different response. Bewilderment. Which in turn bewildered me. “What do you mean, you don’t know? How could you not know how you feel?”
It was utterly foreign to me.
Last column I began a conversation about the differences between male and female — about how we, while being equal in dignity, are very different. So much so as to constitute, as Pope John Paul II said, different ways of being human. I didn’t intend it to be just the beginning of the conversation. But I realized I gave a very big topic rather short shrift with a thousand-word missive. Given that the entire Theology of the Body is based in our creation as male and female, I thought perhaps it would be worth spending a little more time unpacking the ramifications of our duality of gender.
I want to start, this time, by summarizing just a few of the many established differences between men and women that science has catalogued.
The best resource I have found on this topic is a book titled “Brain Sex” by Anne Moir and David Jessel. It explores the long-neglected subject of the differences between the male and female brains, and how they impact our behavior. All of the data here comes from that book. It’s fascinating, and I highly recommend checking out the entire book if this topic is of interest to you.
Before we even start, let’s be clear that what we are talking about here are different tendencies. Every human person is an individual, and any individual’s mileage may vary. For instance, men tend to be taller than women — on average, about 7 percent taller. So, if you took all of the men in the world, and all of the women in the world, you’d find about 7 percent more height on the male side. That doesn’t change the fact that my beautiful niece, at 6’2”, is taller than many of the men I know. That is the way God created her, and that is a good thing.
But the exception doesn’t prove the rule, and these tendencies have been observable and observed in scientific study for centuries. The first quantifiable difference seems to be the discovery that men and women excel in different areas in IQ tests. Particularly significant differences are found in the areas of spatial and verbal abilities. It has been confirmed by literally hundreds of scientific studies that men excel in spatial ability — the ability to picture the shape, position geography and proportion of objects — in far greater numbers than women do. At the top end of mechanical aptitude, we find twice as many men as women. This is why boys generally outperform girls in the types of mathematics that involve abstract concepts. In studies of children exceptionally gifted at mathematics, for every exceptional girl, researchers found 13 exceptional boys.
Females, on the other hand, tend to do better on tests of verbal ability. Studies show that women can receive more sensory information and can better put that information together and communicate it. As a whole, we learn to speak and read earlier than boys, and tend to be more fluent and less prone to stuttering or other speech defects. We are more sensitive to sound. We are six times more likely than men to be able to sing in tune. We see better in the dark, while men see better in bright light. We are more easily able to pick up on social cues.
Across cultures, surveys show that men value assertiveness, practicality, competition, and self-control, while women give higher value to sociability, love, affection, and generosity. And men score higher — much higher — in virtually every measure of aggression.
The most interesting — and for many couples most exasperating — differences show up in our emotional lives. Like my poor hapless boyfriend, men are not as adept at identifying and expressing their feelings as women are. In one study cited by Moir and Jessel, 81 percent of women say they are the ones who initiate deep conversations in the relationship, trying to get the men to express their feelings. Often unsuccessfully, apparently, as Moir and Jessel report that fully three-fourths of women in long-term relationships have given up trying to improve emotional intimacy.
Meanwhile, the men are expressing their love, but their wives are often not recognizing it. Men, being more action oriented, are far more likely to express love through acts of service — holding doors, fixing what’s broken around the house, shoveling sidewalks, giving gifts.
The same is true in broader relationships. Women tend to respond to another’s distress with empathy— by listening, sympathizing, talking. Men tend to respond by serving — searching for practical solutions and trying to address the cause of the distress.
The differences go on and on. I could write an entire book about it. But since Moir and Jessel already have, I can refer you to them.
I want to be really clear that I write none of this to label either side “bad.” These are merely variations, differences. Of course, each gender’s tendencies lead to different challenges in achieving virtue. But the raw material in itself is just that — raw material, to be channeled in healthy or unhealthy ways. It is the way we were created by the God who clearly knew what he was doing, and they serve us in ways we will explore more in the coming weeks.
But how do we explain it? Is it really our inherent nature?
In a world that wants to minimize the distinction between the sexes, the theory frequently has been that social conditioning is the culprit in the vast differences between men and women. We tell girls to play house, and encourage boys to take advanced math classes. But anyone who has ever tried to induce boys to play with dolls or girls to play with trucks knows that the explanation could not possibly be that simple. And now brain science is catching up with what so many already knew — that these differences are more than accidents of culture.
And that is what we will discuss next time.
Bonacci is a syndicated columnist based in Denver.
