Taking Sex Differences Seriously
by Steven E. Rhoads
(Encounter Books, 374 pages, $27.95)
IN AN EXPERIMENT DONE in the mid-1990s, a researcher asked fifty
sexually active college students to react to the statement: “Even
if I think I don’t want to be emotionally involved with a person,
if I have sex with her/him a few times, I begin to feel vulnerable
and would at least like to know she/he cares about me.” Fifty
percent of the males disagreed with that, but only 4 percent of the
females did.
Asked whether such a result — obtained, to repeat, not in the
1950s but in the 1990s — reflects an innate difference between
males and females, many feminists will deny it and say social
conditioning creates the difference. Such feminists adhere to what
Steven Rhoads calls the “androgynous world” ideology — a highly
influential ideology claiming that males and females are innately
exactly the same, and the best and truest world will be one in
which their personalities and roles are identical.
Well, how about this: a study of fourth and sixth graders found
that during playtime boys competed with each other 50 percent of
the time, while girls competed with each other 1 percent of the
time. Or, studies done from the 1920s to the 1990s found that
preschool girls are more interested in dance, preschool boys more
interested in balls and rough-and-tumble play.
Nope, feminists will say. Those grade-school kids, those
preschool kids, have had plenty of time to be molded by a
patriarchal order that teaches males to be strong and assertive,
females to be weak and docile.
O.K., how about this:
“[An] experiment exposed day-old infants to a battery of sounds
including wild animal calls, computer-generated language and the
unhappy cries of other infants. All the babies cried the most when
they heard the sounds of other crying infants, but the female
babies cried longer.”
That’s the nitty-gritty-sex differences at one day old, when
even the grimmest feminists can’t claim the patriarchy has had a
hand in it —and there’s a lot more nitty-gritty in this
outstanding book. (Another example: three-day-old girls will
maintain eye contact with a silent adult for twice as long as boys
will.) Rhoads, who teaches public policy at the University of
Virginia, worked on the book for ten years while reviewing hundreds
of studies. He summarizes the evolutionary and biological
literature in a way that overwhelmingly establishes the case for
nature — that is, for natural sex differences.
SOME OF THE MOST striking findings involve females with high levels
of testosterone, the “male” hormone (actually, both sexes have
testosterone, but men typically have ten times more of it). Such
females have been extensively researched, and it’s been found that,
as girls, they tend to prefer boys’ toys, to like rough-and-tumble
play, to be more competitive than other girls; as women, to be more
career-oriented, more ambivalent about having children, more
interested in casual sex — and the list goes on. Not surprisingly,
low-testosterone women show opposite, more “traditionally” feminine
tendencies.
Back in the sixties, though, when less was known scientifically
about sex differences — though it’s doubtful such knowledge would
have helped — the sexual revolution “liberated” both sexes to
enjoy recreational sex apart from marriage and children. The
closely related ideology of feminism proclaimed that women were the
same as men and should have the same goals and values. By 1999, 29
percent of American women aged 35-44 were unmarried (in 1960, it
was 13 percent). Since 1970, women have been twice as likely as men
to be depressed. Indeed, many women blame men for their plight;
studies report sharply higher levels of resentment and even rage
against men for not taking relationships seriously. Other women
direct the blame elsewhere; a childless Australian newswoman
reaching her forties writes that she’s “angry that I was foolish
enough to take the word of my feminist mothers as gospel. Angry
that I was daft enough to believe female fulfillment came with a
leather briefcase.”
As Rhoads sums it up: “Since the 1970s … women have made
dramatic strides in their access to and advancement in well-paid
and traditionally male occupations. But in their intimate world,
their desire for sex with emotional involvement and leading to
permanence is much more difficult to achieve than it used to
be.”
He then has the courage to say: “It is unclear that the career
gains have compensated for the losses in intimacy and emotional
security.” In my experience, even a tentative statement like that
one is socially risky.
WOMEN, OF COURSE, ARE NOT the only ones to suffer losses under the
new androgyny. Although many men find the sexual freedom much more
to their liking, studies find that men, too, benefit from marriage
and are much more prone to depression, addiction, crime, and many
other ills in the unmarried state. But perhaps the biggest losers
are children. If born at all, since the 1970s their chances of
being raised by both biological parents have declined greatly — in
America and throughout the Western world. On the other hand, their
chances of spending much of their early lives in daycare or with
other nonmaternal care are much higher. The problem is that all
those things — nonintact families, daycare, nonmaternal care —
correlate highly with physical and mental liabilities.
Yet society continues as if the androgynous-world ideology is a
religion etched in stone. A study of social science textbooks found
that they never portray motherhood “as a rich and meaningful way of
life” and never show “any woman or girl with a positive
relationship to a baby or young child” (!). In 1975, the California
Department of Education rejected all reading textbooks “with any
portrayal of women in a household role.” And Rhoads devotes an
incisive chapter to Title IX, a law that was intended to get more
girls and women involved in sports but has ended up dismantling
popular men’s teams in colleges while inducing women to do sports
like crew just to meet numerical quotas.
Can we get out of the mess that decades of “revolution” have
left? Rhoads makes few policy prescriptions, and is not so
simplistic as to claim that women would or should want to give up
the broader opportunities they’ve gained. But he reiterates at
several points that taking sex differences seriously, instead of
dismissing them as an illusion or a tool of male oppression, is the
key. That would mean, for instance, recognizing that men and women
need each other, but in different ways; and that children need
mothers and fathers, but need different things from them. It would
mean regaining the ability to talk intelligently about what girls
and boys, men and women, are like and what they seek in life. This
book is a major contribution toward enabling us to do that.
