Well, this evening, our our topic is on men and women, their differences, and, their complementarity.
And of course, this is a very controversial hot topic in many ways in our society today.
So with some trepidation, I, I approach it and will present it.
There's an old saying, at least we knew it in our department at NYU, that where angels fear to tread, psychologists rush in.
And so I'm doing that.
And I want to make a few, preliminary remarks before we get to our actual topic.
First, I want I want to say there are only three possible models of men and women and their differences.
One model is that there are no important differences.
There, you know, maybe men more likely have a beard and there are other trivial differences, let's say.
But the no difference model is one model that's possible.
The other model is that there are differences and one sex is superior.
Historically, that might have been, and as it was more commonly, the macho model.
Recently, there's something, sort of the opposite of it, which I call the FEMO model.
But in either case, you can have differences with one, with one sex being superior.
And the third model is that there are, differences, but they are, men and women are of equal, dignity and moral significance.
And indeed, and here I want to emphasize, indeed not only are there differences, but the differences in so many cases are complementary.
And by complementary, I mean that when they work best, they create a synergy.
A synergy that makes for something more than either men or women by themselves could provide.
An analogy might be if a man had 10 units of goodness and a woman had 10 units of goodness, by themselves, they each give you a total of 20 units of goodness.
But if you put them together in a synergetic way, they produce they multiply.
They give you a 100 units of goodness.
And of course, they might literally multiply, right?
The commonest expression of synergy being, the presence of children, which is a, and it's the result of a complimentary, relationship.
The problem with the first model of there being no significant differences is it flies in the face of an enormous amount of reality.
And, it's not only the tradition of, of differences, every culture that the, that, anthropologists have ever looked at had a binary distinction between men and women, and there were reliable differences that were found in all cultures between men and women in terms of what they were doing in the culture, their activities.
So, it's not only that there's this historical notion of men and women as being different.
It's not only that, of course, in our faith, we have a significant understanding of it from Genesis.
God created us male and female.
But in the last, twenty or thirty years, there's particularly the last fifteen or so years, there's been an enormous growth in the, research on men and women and their differences in psychology and in neuroscience.
And there are now all kinds of books.
I counted, at least 12 major books that have come out, in the last twenty years on the, scientific evidence for reliable differences between men and women.
So the no difference model just it's running on empty in the presence of in our present culture.
And the difference is, but one is superior.
Well, we've had an awful lot of the war between the sexes.
It probably began with Adam and Eve, but anyway, and it will never be completely gone.
No, no doubt.
But it, it's a model that means perpetual conflict.
It's a model that means always a kind of war.
So, one rejects the truth.
The other one gives us ongoing warfare and conflict.
So, hey, come on.
Neither one is satisfactory.
And we have available now a very satisfactory model and that's the model of complementarity.
And, what's interesting to me is that this model is primarily developed within the context of, Christian scripture and primarily, I believe, to the best of my knowledge, mostly by Catholic theologians.
And, it comes out of basically being based in the first, two, three chapters of Genesis.
And the people who've made major contributions to it are, of course, John Paul the second with his theology of the body, but two women have also, Catholic women, have also made major contributions.
One is Saint Edith Stein, whose writings about women, before she was eventually martyred, of course, she was a very fine philosopher, were influential, in terms of their impact on John Paul the second, who was quite interested in her writings.
And another woman, I I think you should know about is Sister Mary Prudence Allen.
Many of you may not know her, but she's now an elderly nun, with the from she's in the order of what we call the Alma Michigan sisters, if you know who they are.
Anyway, she's a very, distinguished, philosopher, theologian, has written three books, published three books on the history of the concept of woman in, I think primarily in the West, but starting in the ancient world.
Very scholarly woman, and she's part of the, Vatican's Theological, committee or I I forget all those technical names, but, that's where she is at present and is more or less retired otherwise.
The reason I bring her up is that, well, first, we we will be talking about this complementary model, and it's not just that we have important differences and we have equal dignity, that men and women, but if you look at the front page at the bottom, you should put complementarity also right after equal dignity, which is another way of saying we are synergistic at our best, men and women, when we're working together.
And this model, does require something from people.
It does require thought and reflection that you begin to see this and understand it in your own life and in the, in the cultures that you're dealing with.
But the result of it is that men and women can each be, if you will, happy and joyful for the qualities that the other sex has, which is, you know, that's what we would want.
Right?
And, I can't imagine that in our faith that, that our lady and Joseph didn't see this in a positive way, that certainly the relationship between Mary and Jesus would have been, a complimentary one.
There are many great saints, male and female saints in the church, some of whom were actually sort of paired in a complimentary way.
Like, what was it?
Francis of Assisi and, who is it?
Clare.
Clare, Saint Clare, and the look, the, and her order.
Alright?
Alright.
So that's one thing, I want to preface my remarks about to begin with.
Second, when I'm talking about differences here, please remember it's always averages.
Just like height and weight, men are taller and heavier than women, but there's, there's a lot of overlap.
There might be a whole standard deviation of overlap.
So that means that always we're talking about a population difference, not that there aren't many, exceptions.
There are there are tall women and short men.
Although, even that tends to be based somewhat on ethnic groups.
The Swede Swedish women are pretty tall.
The Swedish men are taller.
And, Filipino men are not too tall compared to Swedish women, but they're usually taller than Filipino women.
But in in any case, we know about the overlap.
Okay?
And I think it's time that we begin in our culture to we've been overly concerned with small minorities and not enough concerned with the support for the majority and the typical, and the result has been that because of our emphasis always on the exceptions, many of the ordinary people are feeling confused about things.
So it's time to recover sort of the, the average, if you will, characteristics of people and in this case of, of, the men and women.
One other thing, besides the literature, I've had some practical experience.
My wife has often, shall we say, shown certain corrective tendencies to me.
She's a professor also, by the way, a professor of French literature, but anyway.
And she's now up at NYU still and and so she goes up there commutes and she's up there today, so she's not here tonight.
Just as well.
And I have six children and three of those are daughters, three are sons, and I have a lot of grandchildren and, actually, more than half of those are granddaughters.
So, it isn't as though I've lived in some sort of, male man cave by myself.
That doesn't mean I might not have missed something.
So, I'm fair game.
So, we're talking about differences on average.
And the way to begin the differences, I believe, is to look at infants and young children, because there you can see if there are differences, things that are really pretty removed from, culture or whatever learning experiences you might say, could have affected things.
And they know, from the beginning that little boys are different from little girls in significant ways.
For example, little girls respond to the face, particularly the mother's face, sooner.
They smile sooner and attend to the the mother's face more.
Little boys respond later, don't smile quite as much or attend as much, and they they've already seen with little boys, that if they if you show them videos of cars and trucks and show them moving objects that make noise, they attend more to them than, than little girls when they're paired with looking at a face.
So already, there's a difference between, the, the greater interpersonal interest and involvement of girls, as compared to the involvement in sort of external world of objects, with boys.
There have been many studies that have shown starting, I think about age one or two and going up through five, six or seven, that girls are more empathic than boys.
One study that showed this was, they, they had a tape recording of the crying of a baby.
And the baby was different from either of the two, from the boy, the baby boy and the baby girl in the experiment.
And how long did they, both of them would show a disturbance at hearing the the strange baby crying, but the boy, stopped being disturbed sooner, significantly sooner than the girl.
The girl was more empathic and was continued to remain concerned with the cry of, of this, diff strange baby.
So, the empathy shows up very early.
Boys also will look at, physical moving objects more I've mentioned, but things like, not just trucks and movies of cars, but, rotating physical objects they'll appear to look at longer, than girls.
But here are some of the other, and a lot of this is related to the, effects of testosterone on boys, testosterone on boys, and estrogen on girls, and they even find that with, girls who have higher testosterone than ordinary girls, they show, more risk taking behavior than the average girl, and, they show better spatial relations than the average girl.
And, so these effects seem to be capable of, you know, being artificially or accidentally, precipitated to some degree by, character by environment in which these two basic hormones are are to some extent exchanged in terms of where they're normally found.
Girl, twin girl a girl who's a twin with a boy will tend to show because of the biochemical environment male hormones, will show higher on a number of typically male activities, and vice versa.
There's a particular kind of of of of, genetic anomaly more common in that is a female genetic account, issue, anomaly.
But when it happens with a male child, they tend to show, more female characteristics in their, you know, they show less spatial issue and more involvement and more empathy.
Here are some of the other things.
I have that a table out there on differences that it summarizes some of it.
The male brain is more lateralized even in as a a boy, and the female brain is less lateralized.
Well, as you know, we have two hemispheres, a left and right hemisphere, and what it means is that the male brain is more found is more active in one hemisphere or the other, and the female brain is, less lateralized, which means it moves back and forth across both hemispheres, more easily.
And that's where a lot of the and we'll look at this later.
That's a very interesting finding because it shows up clearly in adults.
The boy's brain mass is about 10% larger than the girl's, that's true all throughout life for men and women.
The the two hemispheres are connected by a cable, if you will, called the corpus callosum, And that allows moving back and forth between the two, hemispheres.
The corpus callosum for girls and women is larger than for boys and for men.
So that also means that moving back and forth between the two hemispheres is easier, for, females.
The boy gazes at the mother half as long as the girl does.
The boy's motor activity and their physical activity even in the womb is more active.
At four months of age, the boy cannot distinguish faces of known people in a photo, but at four months of age, a girl can.
Speaks words later than girls, Girls develop their vocabulary earlier.
Boys seem to be less able to multitask, and girls, better able to multitask, and that seems to be related also in women Boys are better at general math and three d reasoning, girls read earlier, Boys are more able to separate emotion from reason.
Girls have better verbal ability.
Boys are more likely to ignore voices, even their parents.
Girls are less likely to ignore someone's voice, parents or somebody that they knew.
And these differences go on up into later life for boys and girls, and that's we're now talking about them not as young, but, let's talk about high school.
Boys are more likely in high school to be involved in criminal behavior than girls.
Very much more commonly involved in an active criminal, you know, juvenile delinquents type of thing.
Girls, however, are more likely to be depressed.
We're talking about in high school and adolescence.
Girls are more depressed, boys are more criminally based.
There's a certain general tendency, I don't know how strong it is or how widespread, but it's as though, men's pathologies are more expressed in the external world, often in antisocial behavior, and girls' boys' pathologies more expressed internally in, in sense of depression, and, maybe a certain kinds of obsession, etcetera.
It's as though boys wanna punish other people, and girls wanna punish themselves.
I don't say it's that's overstating it, I'm sure, but, and by the way, one of the ways in which differences, we've just got to cope with differences for forgetting all of this research, one of the ways you're gonna run into it on a daily basis is in the DSM.
The DSM is filled with, you know, categories of mental pathology, and almost half of them are more common with men or more common with women.
And they even argue in many of them that, for example, schizophrenia is about equal in men and women, that nevertheless, the way in which the mental pathology expresses itself is different.
And so they have the the APA, American Psychological Association, has developed a, a special program for female psychology, particularly as it deals with, mental pathology because it looked like male models were sort of the initial first models of mental, disturbance, and they wanted to make clear that they were there were differences.
And I think most of us know that autism is more common in boys and, anorexia more common in girls.
And so the mental pathology world is also split on, which is more common for one's maybe more common for women and one more common for men.
Even when when it's the same illness, they may express it differently.
So, the notion of differences between men and women is embedded in the APA DSM and has been pioneered in many respects by, female psychologists and psychiatrists.
Okay.
One of the, interesting authors summarizing differences between men and women is a, she's a, an, an, an MD, sort of psychiatrist, sort of, neurologically oriented.
Her name is Lou Anne Brizantine.
She's published a book called The Female Brain and another one called The Male Brain.
And here's her description of the teenage, female brain.
So, some of you can only remember it, others of you may be with children experiencing it in your household, but here's her description of the, alright.
The girl at puberty, her pituitary gland has sprung into life as the chemical breaks are taken off her pulsating hypothalamic thalamic cells.
This cellular release sparks the hypothalamic pituitary ovarian system into action.
It is the first time since infantile puberty that the girl's brain cell will be marinated in high levels of estrogen.
In fact, it is the first time that her brain will experience estrogen progesterone surges that come repeatedly in monthly waves from her ovaries.
The rising tide of estrogen, starts to fuel many circuits in the teen girl's brain that were laid down in fetal life.
These new hormonal surges assure that all of her female specific brain circuits will become more sensitive to emotional nuance, such as approval and disapproval, acceptance and rejection.
Girls begin at this age to react more to relationship stresses than boys who react to challenges to their authority.
The girls' brain circuits are arranged and fueled by estrogen to respond to stress and to nurture activities.
Connecting through talking activates the pleasure centers in a girl's brain.
Sharing secrets that have romantic and erotic implications activates those centers even more.
Brissendine comments further.
At mid cycle, during peak estrogen production, the girl's dopamine and oxytocin level is likely at its highest also.
Not only her verbal output is at its maximum, but her urge for intimacy is also peaking.
Intimacy releases more oxytocin, which reinforces the desire to connect, and the connecting then brings a sense of pleasure and well-being.
Now, of course, this difference is even more highlighted when a baby arrives because that's when a lot of oxytocin, the bonding chemical, gets released.
And this, I was always amazed as a father at how much time my wife would spend with our children when they were young.
Babies are really time consuming.
Nothing new about that.
They're time consuming, and what was the reward?
The baby didn't give you money, the baby didn't feed you, The baby didn't even normally say things like, oh, you're just wonderful mother.
What was the reward?
Well, they're so cute and so cuddly and they smile.
That's a reward?
Yes.
Because it triggers a lot of this oxytocin and other, other chemicals.
And it has to do with, women's very much greater involvement in relationship and in intimacy as important.
Now, let's get to some, some of the others.
To summarize it, for women, I would say women seek companionship and intimacy, their lovers, their children, their friends are central to their sense of well-being.
It is then not surprising that women find social exclusion more painful than men.
Studies have shown that.
Men find, not social exclusion not so painful, but they find anything, buddy, anything that disses them as having any significance, any power or meaning or anything that, that's one of the greatest, insults that a man can get.
A woman's greatest insult is to be rejected and excluded from people or a person she really wants to be connected to.
Men in prisons are almost always there because somebody dissed them and they they struck back.
And it was clear that what starting with boys, if the if compared to girls, if girls have disputes, they try to talk them out and work them out.
Boys will engage in physical violence to settle it, in quotes, much more often, so not surprising.
Okay.
You can now turn to, in the outline to the fact that men's and women's, these are adult brains, are different in terms of how the typical internal pattern takes place.
It's in your handout.
And these studies of brain activity were done on large numbers of normal men and normal women.
And they found that for men, the brain activity was commonly more in one hemisphere than the other and that it was front to back.
And, and for women, it was commonly across in both hemispheres going back and forth across the corpus callosum.
And that means they're being connected.
One of the things about the corpus callosum is it connects to the amygdala and other areas and amount it means that women are more connected to emotions.
Areas and amount and means that women are more connected to emotions.
That means they're more emotional, and so most of us would on on average, of course, and men, because of their distancing in the other parts of the cortex and the smaller corpus callosum to connect, are more able to separate reason from emotion.
But women are very much more emotional and they're much more empathic.
But, of course, sometimes their emotion makes them cry when they they're really angry that they do that.
You know, you're in talking to the chairman of the department and all of a sudden you start to cry.
You know, you you don't want that to happen, but it does because they're more emotional.
Period.
And men can, it's easier for men to avoid emotionality, probably even because of the brain structures, because one of the things about moving from, across laterally is, now this this is a Vitzian hypothesis now.
I think that's related, other people have suggested this too, women can multitask and what more easily than men, and that's because men seem to get involved that not only do they spend their time maybe in one half of the brain, one cortex, but they their men's brains seem to be more modular.
They have areas of local focus that a whole task is oriented to, and to get out of that, to they get really deeply involved in something very, specifically, and they don't multitask and they find that I'm convinced that that crabby old men, I know one, that one of the reason they're that way is it's a longer neurological distance to travel when you're interrupted, particularly when you're interrupted by something that has nothing to do with what you're focused on, which means it's a child.
You know, you're focused on solving this problem that you're working on in the shop, or you're focused on how to putt, you know, or you're focused on a problem, you're reading something, you know, and then there comes this interruption.
But so that if you can move back and forth across the corpus callosum, which I think many women can do, I'm always amazed that when I ask, she's not here, so she won't be embarrassed, but there's a wonderful secretary we have on the 5th Floor, and I have all kinds of things where I I I I'm not high-tech enough to know what to do with this thing on the email or what have you.
And I go over and ask her for help, and she always knows what the almost every time she knows how to fix it, but she's, yes, I'll be right, you know, she's right away, I've inter she's sitting there listening to something on earphones and typing away, but my interruption doesn't bother her, which is amazing.
But, so you could test this hypothesis by seeing whether the neural distance to go to the place where the child is asking you about something from where you were is longer, but the average woman can go across the corpus callosum faster.
And look how functional this is, if you're a mother or if you're just dealing with people a lot, not just children, but you know, if you're in a clinic and dealing with people there and dealing with, people coming in and so on, You have to be ready to get interrupted and address what, you know, people, they don't, they don't pay attention to what you're focused on.
They interrupt when something's on their mind, they go right at you.
Children, two or three at the same time will do it.
And that is, and so if you got as crabby as an old man, every time you got interrupted, that mother would be functionally, creating anxiety and bad attachment and stuff like that in the children.
On the other hand, the man can get so deeply involved in something that he's not, he can't handle interruption, but boy, serious long term problem solving about this finally can come up maybe with something really interesting.
So this shows the tendency for women to brains to be moving back and forth and men's brains to be normally on one side back and front.
Now, one of the things about physical activity for men is it involves coordination between, the occipital lobe, particularly occipital lobe, which is visual in the back lobe of the brain, and frontal areas for coordination, for, you know, quick action, for all sorts of sports involved, a lot of movement back and forth, I'm sure, probably in the right hemisphere.
It may be that if you're an intellectual and you're trying to solve a problem in math, you go back and forth between images in the the occipital lobe and, prefrontal frontal cortex.
Okay.
Now, but you can see how they're complementary.
And here what I want to mention is that one of the ways in which this complementarity has been researched, there are two ways outside of regular ordinary psychological research.
One is the neuroscience.
I've talked about some of that.
But the other big way they're looking at differences and complementarity, although they don't talk about complementarity and they need to be, shaped up on that issue, is in evolutionary psychology, where they talk about, male and female roles for the family and how the specialization for men in certain kinds of roles and women for others increased the efficiency of, of child rearing and rearing so that we survived.
So that there was a kind of specialization.
Women with nursing and supporting and children knowing interpersonal relationships, being able to address when someone was unhappy and to deal with it.
The man was more more often outside.
He would be hunting.
He was protecting.
He was bringing back resources, if he was a decent father.
He was bringing back resources to the, family.
And it looks like this is one of the things that's involved in typical mating behavior.
One of the things, the, the major psychologist here is, is David Buss, b u s s, he's an evolutionary theorist.
There's several others, Geary, so on.
In which, women in particularly when they're looking for a husband are looking they meant the normal woman on average, we're talking about an average, marries a man who is taller, older, and will have good resources to bring to support the children, often richer.
Okay?
But not necessarily richer, but he's got the potential to bring the stuff in because he's too young to be rich.
Although, I was hoping to find one who wasn't.
But anyway, and men, there it's, a lot of the cues to physical beauty are also simultaneously cues to, fertility in women.
So beauty and fertility are are related.
You know, you're more fertile when you're young, and the curves make a difference in terms of, you know, I I you know you know the the drill.
Okay?
And you know, even though some women are really quite different in terms of they they'd have made, I wanna read you a little bit about I hope I don't I don't date myself too much, but, I assume you all know who Margaret Thatcher was.
If you don't, find out.
Margaret Thatcher was the first woman prime minister of England.
Alright?
She was back there in the eighties, roughly, seventies, eighties.
Alright?
And her nickname was the Iron Lady.
Okay?
But she was a a lady.
This didn't mean she was mad, you know, that they she was tough, but she was always a woman, always a lady.
She was high in certain typical male attributes such as assertiveness, political leadership, and scientific ability.
She was trained as a chemist and later as a lawyer, but she was nevertheless always and visibly a woman.
She was a wife, a mother, she had a female figure, she dressed rather well, she had a womb and breasts.
Margaret and her husband, Dennis, he was older, taller and quite wealthy, were supportive of each other very much and biographers say their marriage was strong.
Lady Thatcher herself acknowledged the debt she owed her husband, I could never have been Prime Minister for more than eleven years without Denis by my side.
He was a fund, a fund of shrewd advice and penetrating comment, and he very sensibly saved these comments for me rather than the outside world.
But, she had, two children, So, you know, she was a woman.
Granted, she had many masculine characteristics, but there was nothing about her that, you know, everybody knew she.
She was the Iron Lady.
And so that's the case when we have overlap between some of the male characteristics or the female characteristics on men.
It's a man or it's a woman.
Every cell in your body is sexed by is male or female.
Every single cell, and every cell in your body is at at, there are a few tiny exceptions, is that sometime in your life, sometimes rather frequently, it's replaced.
You have a new cell, you know, the old one is considered, you know, goes away or they sloughs out or whatever, and you have to have a new cell.
And that new cell has it's actually an amazing process.
That cell is extraordinarily complex.
A single cell is very complex because not only does it have what we would normally think of as the cellular complexities, it has DNA in it and DNA is a very complex molecule.
Very complex.
And that's, you know, replaced, reproduced each time the cell is replaced.
So, anyway, and it's and one of the things that's reproduced when it's replaced is the maleness or femaleness of the person.
Sister Mary Prudence Allen says that one way of understanding this is to say that her approach, which is Christian, is based on gender reality.
And the other approach, which is the radical feminist approach, she calls gender ideology and traces its ideological roots.
Some of it, a good deal of the feminist gender ideology goes back to Marxism.
It's the it's the it's the extension of the class warfare to, you know, where it was between the the capitalists and the and the workers.
That logic has been extended to men and women.
And their and the whole idea of making a new Soviet man, which was very big in the Russian world, most of you don't didn't live through that period, but, you know, the whole idea of making a new Soviet man and creating one completely, unrelated to the family in the usual sense of the term and who would be created out of the communist culture.
Of course, it was a it ended up becoming a total flop, but it was the idea there, and so that was the new feminist woman, and who would be, I suppose, not much like a woman.
But, reality is different, and the complementarity model allows us to accept that reality and to, see it as something that Look, at its best, it creates synergy, it creates something.
It's like a dance.
A man and woman can dance together.
If they each dance separately, it's 10 units for each of them and not the 100 that comes from dancing together.
A family comes from a man and a woman living together, dancing together, etcetera, and that creates not only children, but it also creates generations, And that's the fourth thing that, is sister Agnes, sister mother Mary Prudence Allen.
I was thinking of her friend.
Anyway, Mary Prudence, Allen's sister, she talks about that as the fourth aspect, not just synergy or complementarity, but the generations.
And, you know, generations and the notion of generations is core to the understanding of the faith.
The scriptures are filled with the generational descriptions of of the origin of of of, of Our Lady and the generations behind her, the generations behind Saint Joseph, and of course, elsewhere in the scriptures as well.
So, now I whoops, I'm gonna get well, anyway, I think there are certain kinds of extreme forms of masculinity and extreme forms of femininity.
The most documented extreme form of masculinity has been done by, Baron Cohen, and he thinks the most extreme form of masculine, intellectual life is autistic.
The the autistic Look, four out of five autistic children are male.
And autism is a description of a man who doesn't He he he sort he sort of mind blind and relationship blind.
They're very low in empathy.
Very low.
He even talks about zero empathy at times with autistics, and he thinks that's the extreme form of masculine intellectual life.
Only objects and things, and often these autistic kids are very bright.
Now, I think there's another kind of male extreme.
No one's done anything on this, and I call this the hyper physical male.
This is the man who plays golf all the time or goes fishing all the time.
You've heard of a golf widow, haven't you?
Okay.
That's that's the wife of this guy.
This is the guy who plays basketball all the time, who's always involved camping and always involved, he's a farmer, he's doing, he's he's messing around with machines all the time.
That extreme.
One is left hemisphere extreme, one is right hemisphere extreme, but there's not much documentation on the Right hemisphere, athlete, physical involvement man as a form of extreme, but it'll come.
Now, I'm gonna propose two female extremes, two kinds of women who are out on a out on an extreme.
One, women, as I said, are more emotional than men, and you can have some women who are terribly emotional.
In fact, we have an expression from They're called drama queens.
And, they are so emotional, and not only are they very emotional, they want you to be involved in their emotions.
They want you to respond to them, to understand of them, and and take care of their emotional, needs.
So that's one kind.
The other kind is the as I said, women are so much better at interpersonal and detecting relationships, but they can take that to an extreme.
And this is the woman who has 50 cats and a relationship with everyone.
And, or, or the woman who has, who sees relationships everywhere.
Oh, I, you know, I was, I went back and there was Cleopatra, my, who I was before, and now I'm channeling, my spirit in heaven, and I, I'm do, I'm real, I'm finding relationships everywhere.
Seeing relationships where they aren't.
So, all those are four kinds of two and two male and female, shall we say extremes.
And now I wanna end with one last thing.
All of these things, I'm sure, are somewhat controversial.
I haven't spared you for when there isn't a lot of evidence, I just don't mention it because there isn't.
But I don't know about these extreme you know, I think the extreme I mean but why are women so good at relationships?
Well, they are, but that means that if they're gonna be that means, for example, being a psychotherapist ought to be a good job for a woman.
Dealing with young children in school setting should be a good job because they'll be able to I mean, you're supposed to be able to detect.
You're empathic.
Right?
You've had courses in empathy, I expect.
And have you yet?
I don't know the first year students.
I don't know what they've had yet.
Not much, but trouble.
Anyway, so they, you know, but empathy and being able to understand that other person, which is the opposite of the autistic, male.
But it should be a good job, women should be very good at that, and there's a lot of evidence just anecdotal, I guess, that they are, because there are a lot of good female therapists.
But I'm gonna propose on the last page of your handout something else, and here I'm talking about complementarity, and I'm talking about averages again, so I'm saying there are certain masculine traits and feminine traits.
When they're well, when the trait is well is good, they complement each other.
But both male virtues or traits and female virtues and traits can have a downside when they're too extreme.
So, so men, men, males are seen as assertive.
Okay, that can be very helpful.
Very good.
Good.
But it can also lead to anger and dominating anger.
Whoops, that's the downside.
There are a fair number of husbands like that.
Alright?
Or fathers.
Feminine, nurturing, terrific, but sometimes nurturing moves, goes into controlling and smothering.
Risk taking for men, but sometimes risk taking is impetuous and rash.
For women, they're careful and cautious, but sometimes they're, too much so, they're timid or retiring.
Men can be very logical, but then they're sometimes rigid.
Women can be very intuitive, but sometimes they can be just irrationally kooky.
That's not a psychological term, kooky, irrationalism.
Men can be very calm, but they can be machine like.
Women can be emotional, but they can be overly emotional.
Men can be abstract, but, you know, they can be impractical.
This is the abstract philosopher who falls in the ditch.
Boom.
A woman can be concrete and very practical, but sometimes too restrictedly literal.
Man can be objective and problem solving, but he can be cold and heartless.
A woman can be subjective and empathic, but sometimes she's overly identified or even merged.
A man can be systematic in his thinking, but he also can be closed minded.
A woman can be open minded, but sometimes chaotic.
You know, open minded to almost anything.
Men can focus on external things, which can lead, however, and it's negative, to indifference to persons.
Women's focus on persons, but sometimes it means relationships are everything.
Finally, mental toughness, men can have be mental tough, mentally tough, but they can be insensitive and clueless.
Women can be sensitive to others, but they can be easily hurt and cry.
Men can be skeptical and they can be too doubting because of that.
They doubt everything.
There's a joke about two farmers in Vermont.
They were driving down the road together, in a truck, no doubt a pickup truck.
And one of them looked up on the hillside and there was a a bunch of sheep up on the hillside, sort of distributed in various ways.
And and that farmer who saw him, he said, look.
Look at those sheep.
They've been sheared.
And the other farmer who's going down with him says, well, on this side anyway.
Now, that's too skeptical.
There are men who don't believe in things that are important to believe in and they, they suffer from that.
And then there can be women who are trusting, but they can be too trusting.
They can be seduced or become credulous too easily.
So I'm saying that each, but taken by themselves in the positive sense, each of these characteristics complements each other.
Now in a couple, no man will have necessarily all the male characteristics and no women, all the female.
They may, you know, they may have about two thirds of them and the other third, they'll be on the distribution which is more like the opposite sex perhaps.
But I'm suggesting that these together, give us a way of thinking of how men and women complement and help each other on average when they do it, you know, when And this is the synergy of how they bring different ways of looking at the world that complement each other, that help the other from, you know, help the other one.
And, so that's sort of the summary of my hypothetical model of complementarity in terms of personality dimensions, and that sort of brings it to a conclusion, and