On Familiarity #4

Why do we do this? We torture each other with our respective conventions, reservations, and tendencies. We don't say much about them, because that would only create hassle and because it's always worked this way. Romeo and Juliet did not die because of too much clear communication and an honest expression of feelings. I realize there were other factors that went into their tragedy, but my principle holds true in that Romeo and Juliet did not have a model relationship, and that lack of functionality is engendered from a seemingly inherent and universal conception of how romantic relationships work. It's a common thing to hear men say, that women are complicated, they make no sense, their thoughts and feelings are hard to discern. I, even in the short time that I've lived, would tend to say that's true more often than not. (I don't mean to sound like men are superior to women. In some ways they are, one such thing being physical prowess. Not every man is stronger than every woman, but the strongest man is stronger than the strongest woman. Not every man can run faster than every woman, but the fastest man is faster than the fastest woman, and so on.) 


It's been an odd thing to observe, the psychology of females. Forgive me more my lack of record keeping/note taking, as all of these conjectures are being produced from my own recall.


Gender stereotypes tell us men are brave and emotionless and women are the opposite. Women are to be treated, pampered, protected, and in a way, dominated. Men are to make the decisions, be the authority figure, make the money, pay the bills, sleep closer to the door, etc. Women are supposed to raise the children, cook, clean, and be generally lovely. There is a paradigm that exists between the two sexes. It's pretty easy to see. Some feminists and other people who like to be pissed about things would argue that this is sexist, this is unfair, demeaning, and condescending to women. (I have been planning a feminist post for the future, so I won't start a rant here, I'll just say that feminists irritate me greatly.) I do not believe that men should have a controlling stake in a relationship. I don't think men should subjugate women. Women should, as a general rule for anyone, be respected and appreciated. These stereotypes though, some of which some of us would like to tear down, are not completely false. There are biologically ingrained tendencies for each sex. Men tend to have protective instincts, women have nurturing instincts. Women are, by design, the mothers of our children. It makes sense then, that they tend to be caring and emotionally relatable. Men are our fathers. If a child's emotional needs are more readily met by its mother, it would make sense then that its father would serve in meeting its physical needs such as food, shelter, water, protection from things that want to eat the baby and so on. These same duties and tendencies that are most often performed by or found in their respective sexes affect the relationships between the sexes. 


Women naturally have a larger emotional capacity than that of men, and with that, emotional pathways fire more often in a woman's brain, and because of that, women literally think via emotions. There was a study done in 2008 at the University of California-Berkeley that examined over 1500 men and women, of all ages, demographics, occupations, and IQs. The findings? Men have twice of gray matter that women have. Gray matter is the tissue in your brain that handles raw cognition. Things like math, science, and reason, occur in your gray matter. It's comparable to the processor of a computer. It just processes information and sends it on it's way, it doesn't possess the ability to ask itself how it feels about whatever it is thinking about. The same study found that women possess, on average, upwards of ten times the white matter than that of men. White matter in your brain carries information and transmits information across other parts of the brain. To go back to the computer analogy, it's like the wires hooked up to the processor. It doesn't process information, rather it serves as a pathway for information to travel. It also does not possess the ability to think about what it thinks about whatever it is transmitting, but it does deliver the information to places in the brain that do handle emotion. With all of these pathways that facilitate the transmission of information, and subsequently emotion, well, that explains why women are emotional. As for the gray matter in men, it doesn't say that men are smarter than women. It says that men are limited in their emotional capacity, more than women anyway, and with the limited emotional capacity there exists a broadened capacity for detached reasoning. Basically, the people at the University of California-Berkeley are saying women are irrational and men are rational, and they have the brain scans to prove it. There have been related studies that finds women are capable of experiencing a greater range of emotions in a shorter period of time. The opposite is true for men. The corpus callosum is the nervous bridge of pathways that connect the two different hemispheres of the brain. It is made of white matter, the stuff women have lots of. In women this massive nerve is actually markedly thicker than in men, generally, and this is explained in the myriad of studies done in the last hundred years studying differences between the brains of the two sexes. This also explains why women are more likely to be good at multitasking than men. The corpus callosum facilitates communication between the two hemispheres, and obviously, if you more matter to transmit more information faster, you'll be able to get many things done more efficiently. Men are just the opposite, in that they tend to do best when they do one thing at a time.


What does this mean? It doesn't mean men are better than women, or vice versa. It is massively annoying to me, when women present this facade of coolness and detachment, which is something that I neither enjoy or understand. It doesn't mean that we hate each other, or that we should throw out every sexual convention of our time. It means that men and women are really and truly, wholly and candidly different, and to think that the misunderstandings or fuzzy communication that results from these differences is intentional on behalf of both parties involved is ridiculous.

I'm not done talking about this yet. I'm going places.