Sexual Differences Quotes

“Milk-substitute manufacturers have worked very hard for almost a century to convince women that they are not mammals and have no business breast-feeding.”
― Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

“We all value social relationships, but are there differences in what each sex values about other people? Women tend to value the development of altruistic, reciprocal relationships. Such relationships require good empathizing skills. In contrast, men tend to value power, politics, and competition. This pattern is found across widely different cultures and historical periods, and is even found among chimpanzees.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism

“In one unusual study, people were asked to classify over a hundred examples of local specimens into related species. The people who took part in this experiment were the Aguaruna, a tribal people living in the forest in northern Peru. The following results were found: men’s classification systems had more sub-categories (in other words, they introduced greater differentiation) and more consistency. More striking, the criteria that the Aguaruna men used to decide which animals belonged together more closely resembled the taxonomic criteria used by Western (mostly male) biologists.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism

“The animal world provides many examples of female dominance as well as male. As far as I can tell, the human past contains some arguable examples of female social dominance or intergender equality and cooperation, but it has been marked for the last few thousand years by patriarchal social structure. Theories differ on this but one has it that dimorphism is central. Sexual dimorphism refers to inequality in physical size, and human males are on average bigger and stronger than females. In challenging adaptive environments with small populations, females would have to devote more time to breastfeeding, childrearing, protection of the young, and domestic tasks, while males hunted and performed other physical tasks. With the advent of agriculture and the invention of the plough, muscle power was crucial. Given our frequently violent past, males would probably have engaged more often in physical conflict and warfare. It has also been suggested that females would probably have selected stronger males for protection. All of this is contentious enough, but modern feminists argue that primitive circumstances no longer pertain and that most tasks can now be performed by either gender, thus rendering dimorphically contingent historical and prehistorical differences defunct. However, dimorphism persists and underpins violence. Men commit the vast majority of violent crimes. Perhaps out of sheer self-interest, tradition and habit, males also retain most social power. Male attitudes may be challenged, but, allowing that we may generalize, men remain relatively less emotionally invested, less communicative, and more competitive than women.”
― Colin Feltham, Keeping Ourselves in the Dark