They are indeed. The evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of your observations and your anecdotal evidence. You need only look in the prison systems or murder figures to see that men are more capable of violence than women.
This tends to be at the statistical extremes though – and that is the bit that is harder to grasp for a lot of people who wade into the gender war. If you pick a random human off the planet and work out from their behaviour what sex they are, it’s quite difficult. Your early years life story side by side with mine makes it difficult to determine what sex either of us is. There’s a lot of overlap.
It would be a fair assumption to suggest that you are more violent than me (also not a dig) – Given my background in social care, years of teaching experience it may also be argued that I am more nurturing than you (also not a dig) – if I’m a man, as you insist I am, how does this make sense given what we know about men and women.
The stats show there’s mostly overlap between men and women with some huge differences at the edges. Males are interested in things more than people, females are interested in people more than things. In the middle of the bell curve you get total overlap but some men are VERY interested in things -so they are over represented in engineering and construction . That doesn’t mean women aren’t, it means the people who want to do those jobs 24/7 are predominantly men. The reverse is true for jobs involving small children. Men are perfectly capable of being primary school teachers, but most aren’t.
But the same thing that makes a lack of primary school teachers also puts more men in prison. Agreeableness (the personality trait) means that men are more likely to solve a problem without recourse to other people’s feelings. Kid is being loud, quick whack round the head. Someone cut you up at a junction? Baseball bat to the face.
Not all men do this, but the vast majority of people who do this are men. The statistical difference in that statement is important.
When society makes judgments on the statistical edges to infer about the whole we create problems. I remember my father saying any man who wanted to work with kids must be a paedophile as though this was self evident – and wondered how many male children felt this way and were turned off social care and teaching.
I remember one of the first cases in social care where I worked – the single old lady from church who fostered children. Her name was Eunice Spry, a name etched into my brain. The damage she did was immeasurable and she did so because nobody was watching.
To summarise. You’re absolutely right and you taught your kids a wise strategy – but in most cases they’d find a good human of either sex. Middle grounders. They might find a wrong un and if they do – that wrong un is more likely to be a man than a woman…. but occasionally women with children turn out to be Eunice Spry and men without children turn out to be Nicholas Winton. Society should get better at interpreting individuals.
Always a fun chat. :o)
