Another male bashing article...we are simple, they are complex...that explains much of history.
They invent and we do...wait males invent and do…

Women talk...and are irratic. Being irratic does not make one complex.

No, but being able to spell “erratic” does make us more complex, I guess

Good opening shots fired across the bow, and I might add, across the curtsy.  The terra incognita you’d like to explore could manifest itself as a management manual. How do men and women managers differ in professional life?  How do the sexes differ in decision making, in hiring and firing, in dealing with external internal competition, in resorting to innuendo and gossip to level the internal competition, in the use of cruelty and castration as management tools, in strategic thinking (or lack thereof), etc.  But just to bring up any innate differences between the sexes, despite just about everyone’s experiences that the differences are unmistakable in the office, and despite the oft-repeated phrase by many women, “I would never work for another woman,” that is, bringing up any such difference would call forth the wrath of Venus from her Politically Correct pedestal upon us mere mortals.

well, the play of this idea has made a lot of dough for Bob Becker....it is called “Defending the Caveman.”

But the *book* that covers this is rather arid, and it is called “The Female Brain.”

Hope your mash-up of the two makes you a gazillion dollars, but I’d check them out first to make sure you avoid already covered territory.

Well, you could simply break things down into IQ and EI.  Men, on average, have a higher IQ than women.  Women, on average, have a higher EI than men.

I enjoyed reading “Taking Sex Differences Seriously”, by Steven Rhoads(2004).

Always a stimulating topic, especially in these times when the battle between the sexes isn’t much fun at all.

“one of the girls” good one!

John only you can do this book justice.  I implore you to write this book.  You are the only one with both the talent and experience.  My suggestion for you next book after Bottle rockets is one on how to protect your child from the public schools.

One of the girls:
I think he really means “irratic” (as in irrational).

“The male mind really is like a small, solid-fuel incendiary with no moving parts.”

With all due respect to Mr. Zmirak, whose work I enjoy & gift of humor I admire ... well, while the first respondent was as careless in his manners as he was in his spelling, he does have a point. 

Is the bottle-rocket metaphor all that apt for describing the psyches of Shakespeare, Claus von Stauffenberg, St. Thomas Aquinas, or Albert Einstein? 

Simple minds bereft of emotional complexity, which may be appropriately modeled upon Snow White’s dwarves?

Or perhaps the aforementioned are not “real men”? 

The trend in our popular culture is to identify Al Bundy & Tim Allen as the Platonic forms of manhood, and any sophistication as a sign of effeminacy—I don’t think said trend needs any encouragement.

Well said, Salver!

Women create babies. Men create everything else.

Nuanced enough?

Any time women think they have men figured out, just mention the enduring popularity of “The Three Stooges”.  They think it’s for stupid simpletons, but we men know better, don’t we?

“Conversely, the female body and mind is gloriously Baroque, like the exquisite timepieces painstakingly made by craftsmen for royal courts. They have gears and flywheels and pulleys, chains and ratchets and dials. They register fine distinctions, and react to slight changes of pressure. Sensitive instruments always, they can find in a simple male grunt all the subtleties of a chess problem. When we sneeze, they can read our minds. On the other, if we get everything perfect, if we study the mechanism and handle it with gentleness and precision, they’ll respond to us as the Watchmaker meant them to.”

Very perceptive Mr. Z! :o)

teachem2think...What and where
would you be without your mother?

The vocation of wife and mother
is a legitmate calling by our Lord
and Savior.

P.S. Women don’t “create” babies
alone!

OY!!!

All one needs to know about the purported complexity of sexual relations can be summed up in a little encounter of yesterday, as the local deer population is found in peak rut. To wit:

An obviously alarmed and dishabille Doe scampers out of the hedgerow beside the road and darts across between me and a dump truck a hundred yards ahead. Her slim legs splayed and alarmed, she looks furtively backwards but then rockets ahead with determination.

Slowing and scanning, we spy the expected companion and this time, given the season, it’s not another Doe or a trailing yearling but a big lumber truck Buck with his head hung low over massive shoulders, swinging it back and forth while his tongue hangs out like a giant over-ripe Mexican Red Pepper. He shambles across the road with a crazed and drunken look on his face, sporting a nice 4 (western methods, eastern pencilnecks claim a 4 point is an 8 point just like they call their timorous little hills “mountains” and their counterfeit currency “money") point rack and a powerful build.

His quarry is now about 75 yards ahead of him in a sloping meadow and straining hard for a grove of woods. The big Rutter seems nonchalant yet on the case and continues his ambling pursuit and one imagines that he’s like a combination between Christopher Walken’s “The Continental” and Barry White on viagra martinis. Listen hard enough , and you can hear him say, in a gravelly Odocileus virginianus baritone: “Come on baby, why the rush, you don’t want to leave so soon, you look wonderful today my dear, would you like some champanya?...Baby but you know what I got...... heeeehhhoooorah bleet bleet bahhh,… come on my sweet, render unto the king what is his, you know you want it, why so coy?.... come on baby, my little petal, the flower of the dell, my queen, I surrender to you, you look so fine..... let us plow the furrows...we enjoy the chase my little sweet but I tire now, and there are apple trees nearby......”

Food , Sex, a good argument once in a while, being left alone without recrimination, honest companionship......actually enjoying one’s company warts and all...in particular, the warts. Freedom from being some work in progress and enjoying the many pleasures of the full spectrum between the fierce female temperament, their alien intelligence and the warm embrace of that vanishing maternal voluptuous security....these things worked for millennia until someone decided it needed improvements involving men becoming more tamed and emotive and woman becoming more like men...except maybe men in a bustier. This has created that bit of buzz saw train wreck noisome grate of Crusading Saint Hillary on the one hand and that pusillanimous consensus-mad, Lieberman forgiving Reid on the other. In other words, the glorification of Sexual Politics is but another of the idle destructive pursuits of the over-thinking, hyper rationalizing Democrats who make a career out of attempting the madcap idiocy of everything being being equal.

40 years of popular media depicting men as feckless boobs or degenerate thugs have coughed up a generation or two of feckless boobs and degenerate thugs while woman get more stridently deranged by the year. Unisex is a Corrosive Myth.

There are differences.... so what but thank heavens.
Battle stations, Crazed Public Tumescence with a 4 Point Rack and a well planned escape route are all one needs to know in this entirely over-analyzed farce known as sexual politics.

You need to get married Mr. Zmirak, to fill you in on the myth that it is fruitful to study the differences between men and woman rather than simply enjoying the hell out of them with all the abandon of that big old Lumber Truck Buck with his Red Hot Chile Pepper Tongue whipping in the fall breeze. Then , there are the children, another over-analyzed yet bittersweet and lovely bit of life.

Well, as a police officer who worked the streets for ten years, working more traffic accidents than I can count, I can safely tell you this.  Women, in general, are worse drivers than men.  you are quite wrong about the way they crash.  The are usually the ones messing with the radio and talking on a cell phone when they crash.  yes they are also indecisive and crash as a result of this as well.  Basically, they just crash alot.  Many times they think traffic starts when it really doesnt so they rear end someone.  Many times they are just not paying attention or singing to the radio......Maybe they are trying to let someone in from an access road when they shouldnt be.

They crash alot for many dumb reasons.  Men are far better drivers, as far as not getting involved in accidents goes.

As a side story, one time me and a buddy were driving across the country, he had his girlfriend in his car, my sister was in mine.  They wanted to help drive, so we let them, within half an hour of the switch they ran into each other.

Another male bashing article...we are simple, they are complex.

Mr. Z. is right in that this would be a great title (and book) because this is precisely what the public wants to hear.

Imagine a funny book that reinforces all of America’s indoctrinated prejudices? It’d be wildly successful and Hollywood would turn in into a movie.

Men who write books want to sell them and to be a successful salesman it helps to know the audience you want to target.

Werner Hoermann: “Irratic” is not in my Webster’s dictionary--is it in yours?  I believe that “erratic” would would fit the bill for your definition.  Likewise, as un-complex as this is, I tend to believe that if you mean “irrational”, it’s better to just use that word that to make new ones up.  Or maybe that’s the whole “men invent” thing…

“Many times they think traffic starts when it really doesn’t so they rear end someone.”

LOL! I’ve done that TWICE!

Bah, all this endless befuddlement with the opposite sex gets tired.

None of us are really that hard to figure out (I’m from an evenly gender-split family--four boys, four girls), as we really are not that alien, in my observations.

Although I would agree that women tend to overanalyze:
”Sensitive instruments always, they can find in a simple male grunt all the subtleties of a chess problem. When we sneeze, they can read our minds.”
--we like to think we can, anyway. ;)

From what I gather women are better drivers....than Zirm.

Heh

JZ: Looking forward to whenever you get around to writing this book.
One suggestion:  read Susan Pinker’s, Sexual Paradox before you start; she has an interesting and astute thesis.

Also, I pray everyday for your marital bliss.

“Well, you could simply break things down into IQ and EI.  Men, on average, have a higher IQ than women.  Women, on average, have a higher EI than men.”

Please note that there is no statistical difference between these averages, which simply breaks down into:  it doesn’t matter who has a higher IQ or EI.  The results show no equivocal difference.

Frankly, I think this one isn’t even in the “maybe” pile and is a non-starter after the comments here….

The “war between the sexes’ is a dramaturgical dyad that is millennium’s old, like Greek Tragedy and Comedy old.

If there is a theme that modernizes, or explains the war of the sexes in compression, that is somehow going to jar our collective jaded conscience into parting with geld for a belly full of larfs and insight, I think the fact that it has successfully escaped most readers and your core-fan-base here at TakiMag means you can safely confine the outline to the flames.

George Carlin said that men are stupid and women are crazy.  It’s hard to top that for insight.

“Men are more narrow-focused than women, and we seem to them sometimes obsessed. When we want a brown belt, we buy one—then leave the store. We watch a single channel at a time, and our attempts at multitasking end badly.”

I thought that men were the ones who watched each channel for 0.7 seconds before flipping to the next.

My theory is that men who channel-surf are like hunters, scanning the horizon for game.  Now a man trying to win a video game—that’s a single-minded man.

Esmerelda,

Without my mother or my father, I would definitely not be here.
And you are absolutely correct to state that the vocation of wife and mother is a legitimate calling by our Lord and Savior. If only 40 million other women (and men) had been so enlightened over the last 34 years.

Of course, women can’t create babies alone.  Even the deluded lesbians have to use the test tube donations of some fustian and feckless English professors.

Sabin,

You need to start on that Great American Novel before senility or insanity conquers your indomitable spirit.

To Teachem2think…

Women create babies, men create everything else.

Ah, the words of a little man. Great men respect and love and learn from their mothers. The Wright Brothers and Nikola Tesla, among many, inherited their engineering brilliance, their inventiveness, from their mothers and not from their fathers. And these inventors never shied away to recognize the genetic and social contributions of their mothers.

According to Tesla’s autobiography My Inventions, he regarded his mother as a “woman of genius, especially gifted with a sense of intuition”, and credited her with whatever inventiveness and destiny in life he possessed.(http://www.serbnatlfed.org/Archives/Tesla/tesla-mother.htm)

As the daughter of a carriage-maker, she spent a great deal of time in her father’s shop and developed considerable mechanical aptitude. She attended Hartsville College in Indiana where she studied literature and science and was the top mathematician in her class.  As an adult, she frequently built household appliances for herself and toys for her children.  She was the one her boys went to when they needed mechanical advice or assistance.
http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Wright_Bros/wright_family/WR1.htm

These ladies preferred to use their genius for the benefit of their family; they never sought the approval and recognition men seem to crave. How sad: how much further ahead women we would be if such ladies had shared their genius with the rest of us.

@Lou,

I disagree.  Not how sad but how wonderful.  That they gave first to their families rather than some propositional “we women.” It was their families and their children that were important to them and their children in turn gave to the larger community.  They gave only what every parent should give be they man or woman, the single minded devotion to their and God’s creation.

M Nucci

My mother was an extraordinary woman who was far, far more capable than my father. As a matter of fact, if my father had a dime to his name it was because of my mother. She managed and invested «his money» and because of her, he prospered. However, he received the credit and never acknowledged my mother’s hard work and sacrifices.

Suffice to say that comments such as Mr Teachem2think’s, that Women create babies, men create everything else, prove that conservative men - the very ones who claim to RESPECT women and their DIFFERENCES - are in essence a bunch of misogynists. There is very little difference between conservatism and feminism.

Why is a mother only recognized if she possesses extraordinary talents?  False conservatives love women who can bring a baby to the office, shoot moose, govern a state, etc., but don’t see anything special in a mother who stays home, supervises her kids and cooks great meals.

The real problem seems to be that every statement, in every circumstance, needs to be qualified and explained and nuanced.  Being a politically incorrect misogynist with sociopathic tendencies (I mark my real property borders with urine), I have decided to eschew qualifications, explanations, and nuance. 

I also think that those of us who seek truth ought not project our personal, family experiences onto the rest of humanity. One man’s mother may in fact be the saint; another’s will greet you in the ninth circle.

Mr. Zmirak’s knowledge of clockmaking seems a bit dubious; I don’t believe that ornate clocks have flywheels.  And the ones for the good (?) and great are usually not cukoo models.  But his title says it all, and very neatly too.

Until John mentioned it I never consciously realized that I do indeed have some deep, heretofore unexplored feelings about merging in traffic.

To Eva:
Conservatism for women:
Women create babies: men create everything else.
Society must nurture the nature of each sex.

Conservatism for women who can create other things than babies:
Women should not venture out in a man’s world. 
Society must nurture OUT the nature of these women.

Teachem2Think:

“The real problem seems to be that every statement, in every circumstance, needs to be qualified and explained and nuanced.  Being a politically incorrect misogynist with sociopathic tendencies (I mark my real property borders with urine), I have decided to eschew qualifications, explanations, and nuance.”

When one has nothing to say, one drowns his nonsense in words.

Conservative definition of liberalism:
Universalizing what is in fact the particular.

However, according to Teachem2Think:
I also think that those of us who seek truth ought not project our personal, family experiences onto the rest of humanity. One man’s mother may in fact be the saint; another’s will greet you in the ninth circle.

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
John Stuart Mill

I don’t know about you, Eva, but one of the things that is unforgettable about John Stuart Mill is that he was a pompous ass and a humorless stuffed shirt. No wonder liberals and feminists love to quote him.

I’ll take stupid over evil any day! 
Some folks just need to get mugged by reality.  Oddly enough, once this happens, they find relief and can finally lighten up.

Okay, don’t get me wrong, I love men (dad, dad in law, bros, bro in law, uncles, cousins, dear son).

But let me say one thing in utter fury: kitchens.

Every home I’ve lived in, kitchens (not designed or build by MY menfolk) have been the most poorly designed, least effective, and cramped area of the house.

Reason?

*$#@-^$$ MEN!

Okay, that feels better already.

Kudos, Tammy - I heartily second that observation!  My beloved spouse once observed that women are what keep men civilized—and I believe that the space in which we cook has a great part to play in that vocation. Darling spouse also devoutly hopes for the day when his dear wife doesn’t have to somehow prepare a complicated Thanksgiving dinner in a four-by-twelve excuse-for-a-camp-stove “apartment sized” kitchen.