The Other McCain

Science keeps proving what I’ve been saying for years: Men and women are different. People with common sense may wonder why we need science to tell us this, but feminism — an ideology which attempts to impose a regime of pseudo-androgyny — must be disproven, and therein lies the importance of science:

According to this hypothesis, domestic violence varies with women’s reproductive value or expected future reproduction, declining steeply as women age.” That hypothesis was tested against data taken from nearly 4,000 New York City domestic-abuse cases, and the view was largely borne out: Domestic violence is strongly correlated with women’s age, which is a proxy for fertility.
Fertility and violence interact in complicated ways: Men are more likely to be violent toward fertile women, and fertile women select men who are more likely to be violent. A study of women’s sexual preferences conducted at St. Andrew’s University (and since replicated) found that in most cases women preferred photos of men whose faces had been digitally altered to make them more feminine — but during ovulation, they reversed their preferences and chose photos of men whose faces had been digitally altered to make them more masculine: “A growing literature has shown that women in the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle demonstrate stronger preferences for men with masculine traits than they do when in the non-fertile phases of the cycle,” the study says. It is well established that high levels of testosterone in men are associated with a number of personality traits: aggression, assertiveness, territoriality — and violence.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Studies like this merely demonstrate a general tendency and there is, of course, wide variation among individuals in the extent to which the demonstrable tendency is exhibited. Some women may have no such tendency at all.

Nevertheless, in general — that is to say, when speaking of women as a group, as a category — we see evidence of a personality trait that quite likely represents a hard-wired biological difference, uniquely related to women’s role in the reproductive process.

Kevin Williamson examines this “Chicks Dig Jerks” factor in a very narrow context, namely situations like the Chris Brown-Rhianna domestic-violence case. But I would beg you to consider the possibility that this scientific tidbit has wide applicability, because if we accept as demonstrably true that women (in general) have personality traits that are biologically hard-wired, making them different from men in important ways — well, this is one of those Ideas Have Consequences moments.

How do these differences impact the workplace, where the law requires that men and women be treated equally — as though they are the same — even though they are demonstrably different? Williamson touches upon an obvious consequence of this idea:

[E]ven in the 21st century, testosterone levels correlate with status in organizations such as the U.S. Army. (But not in the U.S. job force: High levels of testosterone correlate negatively with career success in the United States. Corporate America really is full of girly-men. But you knew that.)

Bingo, Kev: The “gender-neutral” workplace disadvantages masculinity, as does our education system. The legal regime of “equal opportunity” actually has highly unequal effects, one of which is the declining career prospects for young men and (an inevitable correlation) the declining marital prospects for young women.

If women prefer more masculine men — as science would seem to indicate — and if such men are disadvantaged in terms of education and employment, then the men who are most desireable as mates increasingly lack the kind of economic wherewithal to fulfill the breadwinner role of husband and father.

Many young women complain that they find themselves working in offices surrounded by “girly-men” and are perplexed by the apparent shortage of marriageable men. Meanwhile, the lower rungs of the socio-economic scale are increasingly crowded by unmarried mothers and fatherless children. And amid all this misery, we are not permitted to wonder aloud whether these problems are side-effects of a regime of “equality” which in fact has drastically unequal consequences.