Differences make Differences

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? No… wait… that’s not the one. Oh, I remember, “Nature or Nurture?” Well, in the case of the chicken and the egg, it was obviously the chicken, not the primordial slime. But in the case of nature v nurture… both.

I love doing letter exchanges, and once in a while I run up against someone… or run across their writing anyway… with whom I would love to do a letter exchange. I doubt I will ever get to, so the next best thing for me is to write a post referencing a post of theirs as if it was a letter exchange. So, giving due notice that I doubt this author has ever heard of me, here goes:

When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

GK Chesterton

Nurture

(Interestingly, they found that boys’ aspirations and beliefs about gender roles were not predicted by parents’ beliefs or behaviors, perhaps because, the researchers surmised, girls are more attuned than boys to social information and are more likely to internalize cues about social norms.)

Melinda Moyer

The article that this quote comes from is a screed (a nice, well written, kind of sad, screed) against ‘domestic inequality’. That is to say ‘Girls do more work around the house than boys. They learn it from their parents.’ And by ‘girls’ the author means little girls (even babies, she says, and I would be interested in reading that research.), adolescents, and full-grown women in ‘partnerships’. (Ughh. That term!)

Now as a dyed-in-the-wool patriarch, I cannot but cheer this conclusion on her part. And to cheer her one small note that (at least part of) this difference is innate. ‘Girls,’ she tells us, ‘are more attuned than boys to social information’ and thus ‘are more likely to internalise cues about social norms’. Now, if I had a dime for every time some pre-post-modern writer mentioned, in one way or another, that girls, meaning females of all sorts, are more attuned than boys, meaning males of all ages and conditions, I could buy the  Taj Mahal and retire in it.

Now, the interesting thing about her statement is how she pushes the issue one step further back than those pre-post-modern writers. Whereas Chesterton or Lewis might have mentioned how girls are more attuned and then attributed this directly to any of thousands of differences between girl and boy behaviour, this author seems to wish to make ‘nature’ a subset of ‘nurture’. She seems to be saying that girls are more easily socialized than boys, and thus will more easily pick up social norms.

Nature

If I were having a letter exchange with her (Note: which I would love to do, feel free to suggest in the comments) then I would be very tempted to ask her if, having conceded that boys and girls are built differently, at least in this one area, she doesn’t think it might make sense that not only are they built differently in other areas (vive la difference and all that), but that even this difference might make a bit of difference.

Let me suggest an experiment. Let us suppose that a boy and a girl were both given the exact same social pressure to do something around the house. Perhaps direct pressure in the form of a parental command, indirect pressure in the form of a frown or negative comment, or even wider social pressure from others in the community. That the floor should be clean, or the dishes washed, or the flies swatted.

Given her admission that girls bend more easily to social pressure (girls are more attuned than boys to social information) could it not be that, even without a whisper of a hint of ‘gender inequality’, girls might actually… clean the floor, wash the dishes, or swat the flies? That the boy, reading his book, may not have noticed the social pressure, or, if he did, not cared? He would rather read his book, she would rather recieve social approval… so they both act, naturally, in a way that gets them what they want.

Time

She writes:

The researchers also found… that girls felt more time pressure — meaning that they often felt they had more things to do than what they had time for and wished for more hours in a day.

I have not read this research, so I cannot be sure, but I would wonder if they asked the right question. The girls might have wanted more time in the day to clean the house and swat the flies… but did the boys want more time in the day to read their book or ride their bike?

It will seem highly unreasonable to the modern, or the post-modern, or whatever age we are in now… but could it be that boys are wired to do their jobs and girls are wired to do theirs? That the boy who is riding his bike or reading his book may look like they are just ‘having fun’ (and, indeed, I have no doubt they are having fun) but could that ‘fun’ actually be (as we know that play is in general) practice for the kind of skills that boys throughout the ages have been called upon to perform for their daily living? The boys running through the woods with sticks might have, in an earlier age, grown up to be hunters or soldiers. The girl, cleaning the house or baking the bread, might have grown up to… clean the house and bake the bread. The girl watching her younger siblings would have grown up to watch her own children, and the boy reading his book might grow up to be a professor or scientist.

Some impatient trader, some superficial missionary, walks across an island and sees the squaw digging in the fields while the man is playing a flute; and immediately says that the man is a mere lord of creation and the woman a mere serf. He does not remember that he might see the same thing in half the back gardens in Brixton, merely because women are at once more conscientious and more impatient, while men are at once more quiescent and more greedy for pleasure. It may often be in Hawaii simply as it is in Hoxton. That is, the woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn’t obeyed.

GK Chesterton

Red Queen Theology

You have to feel for these post-moderns. They fight so hard, and yet it is a losing battle. Gender inequality in housework and the workplace will never go away, because gender inequality in creation will never go away. There are literally thousands of physical and psychological differences between men and women. It is irrational (read: post-modern) to try to imagine that those differences won’t… make differences.

I am a man, and was once a nurse. My textbooks spoke of ‘the nurse she…” and yet I remained male. And once in the workplace… I remained male. When CPR needed to be done on the 450 pound patient in room 12, the 100 pound 5’1” nurse… didn’t cut it. Been there, seen that, wrote the report: “No effective CPR was being performed…”

Wishful thinking will not wish away height, weight, upper body strength and… as our author so helpfully points out… psychological differences. A bachelor pad and a bachelorette pad will not, all things being equal and on average, look the same.

To conclude with my point from the patriarchy letter exchange… differences make differences. Because men and women are different, men and women will act differently.

Ending with Equality

Now in the end, the ultimate end, we really are all equal. Not here on Earth, not in thousands of different ways, but in the end. When faced with God. He isn’t going to send boys to one heaven, girls to another, and everyone else to hell. He is going to judge all of us, male or female, by whether or not we have bowed the knee to His son.

Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name:

That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

Philippians 2:9-11

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Thank you for reading Von’s Substack. I would love it if you commented! I love hearing from readers, especially critical comments. I would love to start more letter exchanges, so if there’s a subject you’re interested in, get writing and tag me!

Being ‘restacked’ and mentioned in ‘notes’ is very important for lesser-known stacks so… feel free! I’m semi-retired and write as a ministry (and for fun) so you don’t need to feel guilty you aren’t paying for anything, but if you enjoy my writing (even if you dramatically disagree with it), then restack, please! Or mention me in one of your own posts.

If I don’t write you back it is almost certain that I didn’t see it, so please feel free to comment and link to your post. Or if you just think I would be interested in your post!

Thanks again, God Bless, Soli Deo gloria,

Von

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Links

Domestic Inequality Starts in Childhood