Is the theory of evolution true? /Apologeticshtml/Darwins God Review.htm
Why does God Allow
Evil? Click here: /Apologeticshtml/Why Does God Allow Evil
0908.htm
May Christians work on
Saturdays? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Protestant
Rhetoric vs Sabbath Refuted.htm
Should
Christians obey the Old Testament law? /doctrinalhtml/Does
the New Covenant Abolish the OT Law.htm
Do
you have an immortal soul? Click
here: /doctrinalhtml/Here
and Hereafter.htm
Is
pride a sin? Click here: /Sermonettesdoc/Why
Pride Is a Sin sermonette 102602.doc
Should
Christians marry non-Christians? /Sermonetteshtml/Unevenly
Yoked sermonette 090603.htm
THE INNATE PERSONALITY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN: PROOF AND APPLICATION
Eric
V. Snow, 3-10-01, Speech for Cabela’s
Years ago, the government sued Sears Roebuck for not hiring enough women for certain direct sales jobs. Interestingly, Sears didn’t roll over and play dead. They argued that women simply didn’t like high pressure direct sales jobs, and wouldn’t apply for them much. In order to prove their point in court, they brought in a feminist scholar who argued that because women have a different personality from men that they wouldn’t like these kinds of jobs since they required aggression. She was a “difference” feminist, a group of feminists who believe women and men have fundamental differences in how they act, think, and look at the world.
So
then, do men and women have innately different personalities? Do boys and girls behave differently only
because they are raised differently by their parents and taught differently by
teachers? Or are they different because
they have inherited from their parents’ genes different ways of thinking and
acting? Are men and women only
different because of how people in society deal with each other? Or are their personality differences rooted
in hormones and other chemicals in the body that are fundamentally
unchangeable?
The
great error of feminists is that they are fighting biology. The normal type of feminist says men and
women are completely equal and completely the same by nature. They say the differences between men and
women are purely the result of how society deals with men differently from
women when they’re younger.
S.P.S. Today, I shall argue that we can know that
men and women have innately different personalities based upon scientific knowledge. Since this is true, boys should be raised
one way, and girls another. We should
recognize in ourselves, and be self-conscious, about how being a man will make
us look at the world differently from women.
First,
let’s consider the evidence for innate differences between men and women. One approach is to consider what goes on in
various primitive tribes in such places as New Guinea, Africa, and the Amazon
jungle in Brazil. Anthropologists, who
are the scientists who investigate how primitive tribes live and think, have
studied into the sex roles of primitive people. If there were an equal number of primitive tribes in which women
were dominant over the men, and men over the women, then that would be good
evidence the differences in personality weren’t inherited. By random chance, then, we in America merely
ended up part of a society in which men dominated over women traditionally.
Main
basic difference: Men aggressive, women
passive, by personality, although both equally intelligent.
But
in fact men dominate, that is, they hold most of the leadership positions in
every single society and tribe ever studied.
Steven Goldberg, The Inevitability of Patriarchy, systematically
looked at every report of matriarchy (when women are the bosses, not men) among
various peoples and tribes. He couldn’t
find one case in which women held political power. Even the famous female anthropologist Margaret Mead conceded in a
book review that Goldberg presented his information faultlessly. No real life “Amazons.”
George
Murdock: Compared some 500 cultures,
found in ALL of them that fighting and leadership were associated with men.
B.
Whiting: Studied sex separate
cultures: One each in India, Okinawa,
the Philippines, Mexico, Kenya, and New England. He found that boys were more aggressive and violent in all of
them, and girls were more nurturing and responsible with younger children.
Famous
misused study: Margaret Mead’s three
South Pacific tribes. In one tribe
(Arapesh), both sexes wanted to care for the children all day long. Lack of food problem resulted. Men kind, gentle, cooperative, but not
successful vs. environment. In another
(Mundugumor), women were very assertive, indifferent to children, men even more
aggressive, spent time headhunting, etc.
Women found most of the food, were indifferent to the mother-child
tie. They were rude towards children,
society characterized by hostility, ruthlessness, and brutality. In yet another
tribe (Tchambuli), the men spent the day in non-productive artistic and
ritualistic activities, left it to women to raise children and get food. All were failures, in decline, even headed
for extinction, due to sex role violations in marriage and society. Men need a role in society that makes them
feel special, valued that women aren’t in, or else they become non-productive,
even dangerous. In none of them were the women actually dominant.
Body
chemicals and their effects. Even at
age six, the average boy has about 7% more vital energy than girls the same
age. Around age 13 or 14, the boys have
35% more, when puberty and the teen years begin. This comes from the sexual hormones starting to flood a boy’s
body, and making him more different from girls than he was before.
The
main male hormone is testosterone, while the main female ones are estrogen and
progesterone. As the flow of
testosterone increases in a boy in his teen years, he will start taking on the
personality and physique of a man.
Likewise, a girl becomes a women in her teen years while under the
influence of estrogen and progesterone.
Prisoner
example: Violent inmate who would tear
up his cell, ruin chairs, fight with guards and other prisoners. Dr. Dunn injected him with estrogen in order
reduce his aggressiveness. It worked. He became gentle, cooperative, stopped
fighting, stopped tearing up his cell.
Boy
fetus vs. girl babies before birth:
Girl ones have two X chromosomes, while boy ones have one X and one
Y. If testosterone is present during
the seventh week after conception, the brain of the developing baby (embryo)
will be stamped with the male pattern.
Otherwise, it will remain feminine, thus more passive in personality,
for the rest of its life.
Found
that if testosterone blocked from male fetus’s brain at that time, the boy
later in life will be effeminate and passive.
Even when trained to be masculine by role and given injections of
testosterone, will still lack normal male aggressiveness.
Opposite
case: Girl fetuses doused accidentally
with testosterone in that crucial seventh week will be much more aggressive,
assertive, and dominant than average girls.
Miscarriage
drug progestin: Has testosterone in it,
when the mother would take it, it was supposed to prevent her from losing her
baby. However, it would make a girl
born to such a mother who took it much more aggressive than average girls. In one study, Ehrhardt and Baker found that
these girls would prefer to play with boys, not girls; they wanted to play sports
and rough-and-tumble play; they didn’t like playing with dolls, but preferred
the boys’ toys, such as trucks, cars, blocks, etc. When interviewed by the researchers, these girls had little
interest in being mothers, but thought much more about future jobs and careers.
Relatives described them as being much more aggressive and assertive than
normal girls their same age.
Too
much testosterone not good: One study
found that married men with above-average testosterone levels are 43 percent
more likely to divorce, 38 percent more likely to be frequently committing
adultery, and 12 percent more likely to abuse their wives.
Famous
sex change operation failure, study often cited to justify belief differences
between boys and girls not from birth.
Was cited to prove babies born neutral, could be trained to be anything
parents and teachers wanted: One day in
1963, one boy, born with a twin for a brother, was a victim of a ghastly
circumcision that cut off way too much.
The parents and doctors decided, seeing the physical damage, to turn the
boy into a girl surgically by going the rest of the way. The boy now would be raised as a girl. This flopped: From the very beginning, the boy, named “Joan,” resisted his sex
role training. Even as a toddler, his
would rib off frilly dresses his mother put him in. He preferred to play with boys and stereotypical boys’ toys. One time he was sent into a store to buy an
umbrella, but emerged with a toy machine gun.
By second grade, he started to suspect he was a boy. But doctors told him even then that his
feelings were normal, that he was just a tomboy. (The parents and adults conspired to keep him in the dark and
ignorant of what had happened to him just after birth). He said, “I thought I was a freak or
something.” Other kids teased him for
his tomboyish looks and behavior.
Remarkably, in public restrooms, he would insist on urinating standing
up, thus creating a mess usually.
In junior high school, the girls would refuse to let him in their
bathrooms since he created such a mess usually. The doctors and psychiatrists kept pushing him to act feminine at
that time, despite he felt he was pretty sure he was a boy. In 1977, at 14, “Joan” felt she either had
to live life as a male or commit suicide.
In a tearful showdown, the father admitted what had been done to him at
birth (the surgery removing his sexual organs). He then, after two more sex change operations and some initial
teasing was accepted as a boy far more than ever had been as a girl by others
at school. Today he is married and has
three adopted children.
Consequently,
due to having different body chemicals, women innately more gentle, tender, and
nurturing than men. Men naturally tend
to be aggressive, assertive, violent, hard-driving, and violent. They naturally end up being the leaders by
personality alone, not just brute strength.
Differences not mainly due to education or training by parents or
teachers, but due to biology.
The
implications of male personality, and why it is valuable to society.
Women
by nature more complete, content as they are, more passive. Men by nature look outside themselves, are
more obsessive about things, want to change things, are restless.
Camille
Paglia, feminist writer: “Estrogen
tranquilizes, but androgen agitates.
Men are in a constant state of sexual anxiety, living on the pins and
needles of their hormones. In sex as in
life they are driven beyond—beyond the self, beyond the body. . . . Men
know they are sexual exiles. They
wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content.”
A
man as a boy utlimately has to seek an identity separate from his mother and
his family’s. Paglia: “She does not have to become, but only to
be. Her centrality is a great obstacle
to man, whose quest for identity she blocks.
He must transform himself into an independent being, that is, a being
free of her. If he does not, he will
simply fall back into her.”
Consequently,
society’s main innovations, inventions, and discoveries have come from men, not
women. Tim Allen’s satires of this on
Home Improvement: tree in garbage
disposal, rocket-powered lawn mower, etc.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” really a female philosophy. Consider men vs. women on cars,
computers: Men concerned with power,
speed, size; women want something that’s reliable, that takes them from point A
to point B predictably.
Camille
Paglia, Sexual Personae: “If civilization had been left in female hands,
we would still be living in grass
huts.” “Male domination of art,
science, and politics, [is] an indisputable fact of history.” Great innovations in culture from men being
forced to think outside themselves (conceptualization) in order to pursue the
opposite sex and to establish an identity separate from women and family.
Men
more objective since look outside themselves and immediate relationships in
order to satisfy their desire for meaning in life. They are much more apt to feel a sense of alienation. They naturally feel rootless, disconnected
from others, especially their mothers, as they get into their teen years and
older. Dr. Laura (both) and Ayn Rand
(first part only): said men’s
self-esteem from work, job, women’s from their relationships with others.
Compartamentalization
issue: Men better specialists since
don’t think about what their children are doing at school or day care when at
work so much, unlike equally well-educated women.
Men
more self-sacrificing towards society, as soldiers, revolutionists,
freedom-fighters; women more self-sacrificing towards family, children. C.S. Lewis’s insight about conflicts between
children from different families:
rather deal with father than mother since women’s natural sense of
family patriotism interferes more with the objective truth of the situation.
The
cat/dog analogy: Men like cats, women
like the friendly family canine: Men
will take off when don’t get a good deal, like cats, can’t be abused
easily. Women naturally more
codependent when being abused, more loyal by nature, just as dogs are even when
mistreated.
Click here to access essays
that defend Christianity's truth
Links
to elsewhere on this Web site: /apologetics.html /book.html /doctrinal.html /essays.html /links.html
/sermonettes.html /webmaster.html
For the home page, click here: /index.html