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Women Priests

Women in Islam

Persecuting Minorities

Freedom is Bad for Your Health

Sex Education

War: What is it Good For?

Slavery: Not a Black and White Issue

There are fundamental differences between men and women that cannot be denied. Does minimizing these or saying that they should not be important do any favours to our society?

The current situation is a complete farce. Women have been granted equal pay with men but they do not receive it. They do not receive it because women do not do the same work as men. Traditionally male jobs are better paid than traditional female jobs. When women enter a profession for the first time the men can look forward to a lower standard of remuneration. The simple explanation for this is that women do not need the same pay as men and do not demand it. Of course they want it and are prepared to complain about it but they do not demand it in the real sense, the economic sense of the word.

Single men and single women do not have the same requirements for income. Single women often joke about how men have one track minds. Both sexes are dominated by sex, everything we do is driven, at one or two removes, by the sex drive. Women do not have interests other than chocolate and sex. Usually that interest is disguised from themselves and their egos by a screen. They see themselves as being fun loving and fashionable, wanting to out and have a good time. The reality is that they are competing one with another to be seen as attractive partners and want to find a suitable partner. To admit that to themselves or the world is impossible, it is in all senses of the word a negation of their selves to allow that analysis to stand. They will feel deeply offended by it. Maybe even enough to make a feeble reply to this page. (Yes, that's me macho willy waving before you point it out).

If you doubt the idea that women are obsessed with sex and competition just look through the magazines that are aimed at women. Sports coverage is confined to who is going with out with who, which sportsman has the best bum and which activity burns up the most calories and tones your thighs. How to manage your relationship, how to have better sex, how to make yourself more attractive, check out these women who are having more success than you: can you learn anything? Everything connects very closely with sex and nest-building. Magazines for women in the twenty to thirty year age group hardly touch on any “boring” issues, the subjects that become somehow interesting again to women after the maelstrom of hormones has declined in middle age and later years. If I am wrong please show me the magazine that has a huge mass readership of twenty year old women interested in fishing, macramé, medieval history, motorcycle maintenance, etc. No, these subjects are “boring”, twenty something women will tell you to get a life, meaning be obsessed with the mindless trivia of mating rituals that they are obsessed by instead, the fascinating subjects that somehow seem strangely superficial to women who are in their fifties.

A sixteen year old girl taken on by McDonalds will be paid the same as a boy of the same age. If they went on a date the girl would probably never put her hand in her pocket once until the boy's pocket was empty, he had got his shag or she had blown him out. All her money would be spent on herself alone. That traditional model is likely to persist indefinitely. It is not a social thing, it is not cultural, it is based on the fundamental asymmetry that starts with the definition of sex. The female is the type that has the larger gamete. The female is left to feed the baby or see it starve. That fundamental difference shapes everything and will continue to shape it. There is billions of years of the interaction of the sexes behind it.

The female is optimized for survival and bringing up the young, optimized to secure the best possible genes for her offspring and the best possible material advantages in terms of food, shelter and support from a partner, not necessarily the same as the genetic father of her children. The male strategy is to maximize rather than optimize. To compete against other males to be seen to be a better mate and to take advantage of every conceivable opportunity. Pun intended.

These fundamental differences are not going to be wiped away in order to suit the temporary requirements of some career women to increase their economic standing.

If you believe there is a glass ceiling somewhere I suggest you go and stand on a railway station from 5:30 am through until 9:30, just watch as the ratio of males to females changes remarkably. It is the men who are getting into the office earlier regularly. It is the men who need the promotions. Naturally the women want them too, but it is the men who, on the average, need them, demand them and get them. That is not institutionalized sexism, it is a reflection of the fundamental difference between the sexes*.

If you graph how many women apply for a job against the number of vacancies available you will see what really motivates women. The oversubscribed vacancies are not for the high paid jobs, they are for the glamorous jobs. Women do not work for money. Neither do men, at least money is not the only factor. With women this pattern is much stronger. Women want to be seen doing glamorous jobs because women want glamour and women want to be seen. When women need money they can act as rational maximizers of their own welfare and they will leave one badly paid job for another slightly less badly paid one, but when the pressure of survival is relaxed they will gravitate towards the jobs with glamour.

Ask a group of students in drama school what motivates them; I bet you will find that the women answer money and fame while the men say they want to be the best. Men and women are fundamentally different. They seek different things, is it any surprise that they achieve different aims?

Feminists never seem to demand that 50% of sewage workers or 50% of window cleaners or carpet fitters are female. All the effort is aimed at the glamorous jobs of engineer, manager, director, doctor, parliamentarian. Those jobs must be made available for women, as a point of ideology, whether they want them or not and women must do half of them no matter how many men want to do them.

It never seems to occur to women that many jobs that men do are simply not attractive to women and they are relatively well paid compared to the jobs that women want to do precisely because they are not glamorous jobs, if men didn't want to do them because of the money the jobs would not be filled. Feminists demand that other women take up certain jobs to strike a blow for their sex. Why? A woman's duty is not to her sex* at the expense of her own satisfaction and her own interests. If there is a barrier preventing women from achieving goals they set themselves then it should be removed, but not if that barrier is her own free choice, her lack of desire and motivation. Women and men are different, have different strengths and weaknesses and they have different motivations, if they do not want the same things then giving them the same things is going to be iniquitous. Aiming for equality of outcome is going to be unfair, especially if it is aiming for 50% female penetration in only those careers feminists have decided are important and glamorous enough to be bothered with.

* Words have gender, people have sex.

© 1999 - 2010 by Martin Willett.

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