Straddling the sex divide

Men and women aren't so bad as many men and women seem to think.

I’m with Kate Bush:

“If I only could,

I’d make a deal with God

And get him to swap our places.”

"I was trying to say that, really, a man and a woman can't understand each other… if we could actually swap each other's roles, if we could actually be in each other's place for a while, I think we'd both be very surprised.”

If only men and women could do that. Magically download and embody the totality of a life’s experience in the shoes of our opposite sex. Hot words and bitter deductions are not helping anyone much. I believe the growing gap between men and women must come from gaps in our understanding of each other. A comprehension gap. A generosity gap. A love gap.

How could it be anything else? Unless you think each sex gains something from deliberately hurting the other? Really? Why bother? What would be the point?

Many say it’s all a battle for power. But ‘power’ isn’t a satisfactory answer.

First, because men and women are not two separate armies out to kill each other. Men and women don’t exist in single-sex silos; we are all interdependent on our mothers and fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters and lovers.

Second, because power either comes from dominance or prestige. And only psychopaths and narcissists are satisfied with dominance. People who are mere subjects are only gratifying to tyrants. The rest of us, men and women alike, prefer our power in the form of prestige. And prestige is given, not taken, accorded by those from whom we earn it, by those who feel we deserve it. So again, crushing someone doesn’t give you prestige, just dominance and resentment.

So, parking ‘power’ for now, there must be gaps in our understanding, into which pour a world of wrong answers. From these come spiritual withdrawals, contractions and counter-defences, many of which are entirely sensible and necessary. Safety and security matters. But pulling up our drawbridges isn’t a long-term strategy for growth and flourishing. The good stuff in life only comes with expansion, generosity of spirit and reaching across divides.

So can we put some love into that gap, alongside all the rancour? While idealogues froth with hatred and insults fly, is it possible for the rest of us to add a cup or two of understanding, expanding our hearts a little, while still fully allowing and acknowledging all the pain and resentment that exists? Yes, the horrible statistics absolutely cry out for Something To Be Done. But at the same time, is there anything we can learn from each other? Can two things be true at once? I say yes.

Together, good men and women can make a beautiful team. Over the span of deep time, male and female cooperation has got us a very long way indeed, with the basic family unit successfully withholding through countless millennia. But our world keeps changing around us, accelerating all the time. As humanity became more sophisticated, wrinkles crept into our cultural structures, from the first days of farming 10,000 years ago, to religious inputs going back 2,000 years, to societal shifts since the industrial revolution, to the exponential frenzy of our current digital age. Today, so much has changed around the family unit, a lot of things aren’t adding up so well. Our culture can’t keep up.

We need to go back to first principles. Because the underlying motivations of men and women remain the same as they have always been. And those motivations are more benign than many would have us believe. Today, the patterns of life have shifted so far that each sex increasingly presumes the other’s motives through the lens of their own, rather than those of their complementary opposite. Men and women don’t love, desire or hedge their bets in the same way. And that makes us strong and weak, kind and cold, generous and cautious in different ways too. That’s why men and women have the potential to make such a perfect team.

As an upshot of this, women share a powerful knowing that, if men knew what it was really like to experience female life, they’d treat women differently. My sense is that if you take the women of the world and roll them into one, she’s leaning on one hip, arms crossed, with a look of expectation and a one-word question: “Well?”

Women have articulated their experiences very clearly. But men only seem to answer in statistics and rebuttals. Where are the male voices explaining their experiences in the same personal way?

“Well?”

Well… I can’t speak for all men. But I can speak for myself. Maybe other men will feel a resonance. And if just one woman reading this receives something of use, then it will have been worth tossing this wishing coin into the love gap. So here goes.

This series of Substack posts will aim to highlight personal truths about sex and gender, from one heterosexual male’s perspective, in a bold and sometimes squicky attempt to weave together a theory of romantic love, based on the biological and societal systems that nature and nurture have given us. I have a few suggestions too. Watch this space.

I fully recognize the risk of offending everyone in the process and apologise in advance for the wide, sweeping generalisations that will follow. There’s a bell curve to everything in this sphere, so every individual will have differences from the mainstream. But I can only speak in overall generalities that chime with my own experience. I’m writing with love and respect for every reader. The intention here is one of kindness in the pursuit of resonance and shared understanding. So let’s work some things out together. As a heterosexual male, my writing will be limited to men and women who desire each other, with nothing to offer on gay or non-binary perspectives.