A Man Doesn't Make a Very Good Woman, and A Woman Doesn't Make a Very Good Man
This isn’t really about what you might think from the title - although I will talk about the trans thingamajig too, at least in passing.
First off, though, can I just remind everyone of those important qualifiers “NOT ALL” - because I’m going to be talking trends and averages and I really don’t want to have to try and qualify every single statement I write.
So the statement “Men are stronger than Women” may not be always true in any given specific example, but it is true as a statement about a class.
Let’s give an example. I used to enjoy watching boxing back in the day. This kind of fizzled out when I first saw Mike Tyson. There was a kind of elemental fury about him and I genuinely thought he was going to end up killing someone in the ring.
Now, there are going to be some women MMA fighters who are superbly trained great athletes and fearsome fighters. They would, as the saying goes, almost certainly be able to beat the crap out of the average bloke. Would they have stood a chance against a Tyson in his prime? Very, very unlikely1.
I’m not even sure they’d stand a chance against Tyson right now, let alone when he was in his prime. Here he is at 57
There do still seem to be a few people who ascribe this difference to ‘social conditioning’.
It’s a weird idea from the extreme side of feminism.
Although I can’t remember the exact details, I’ve seen a clip of John McEnroe being asked how many games a female tennis player (Venus Williams?) would have won from him in his prime. He replied along the lines of “Games? She’d have been lucky to win a point”.
It would be hard to argue that the Williams sisters were victims of patriarchal social conditioning that resulted in their poorer performance against the best men.
It seems weird to have to point this out, but here we are in the bizarre world of 2025 and it is necessary to do so, women and men are different.
This difference does not stop at physical capability - there are differences in attitudes and behaviours too. Even in the physical a man is generally able to bring a great deal more aggression and fury to bear - because that’s how he’s been wired. When he’s riled up he can tap into that reservoir.
A lot of feminism seems to me to have been an exercise in railing against these differences.
There have been quite a few articles in my Substack feed over the last couple of months that have popped up discussing these sorts of issues. As usual, I forgot to bookmark or take a note of any of them and so I can’t find them now.
There are 2 kinds of articles at the ‘extremes’. One slags off men, and the other slags off women. Some women seem to view men as a kind of deficient woman - men just need to get more in touch with their emotions etc etc. Some men seem to view women as irretrievably broken and manipulative.
Personally, I hate this attempt at class warfare. There exist crappy people of both sexes. There exist wonderful people of both sexes. Welcome to humanity. Trying to turn this into some class warfare, on either side, is damaging us.
But we do need to try to be honest about the differences. We also need to stop trying to turn it all into some kind of competition, or seek to blame an entire class.
Stereotypes exist for a reason, and they can be a lot of fun. A lot of stand-up routines exploit stereotypes, for example. They also contain a fair amount of truth in many cases. They are an expression of those averages, those trends. The thorny question, much-debated, is in the origin of those stereotypes and whether they are amenable to change. Are these things innate or forced upon us by the Gods of social conditioning?
The answer to this is, of course, yes. And no. And maybe. And all of the above.
There are two extreme positions, either of which you’d have to be dumber than a box of rocks to subscribe to, and these are (a) we’re all just programmed by evolution and (b) we’re all just programmed by social conditioning.
Both evolution and social conditioning play a role - and neither are their respective roles ‘static’. There’s going to be an interplay, a feedback, between the evolutionary drivers and the drivers of social conditioning. The exact details of that, how it works, and how it applies in any specific example are going to be far too complex to determine. But we can be pretty certain that both factors play a role and that such an interplay between these factors exists.
As I’ve said before, an evolutionary ‘environment’ is anything and everything that affects reproductive success. This ‘success’ includes things like ability to evade predators, ability to procreate, ability to ensure survival of offspring and so on. If a group of early humans develop a kind of ‘society’ then that society itself becomes part of the evolutionary landscape.
Homo Sapiens is said to have arrived on the scene some 300,000 years ago, but early humans are thought to have been around for considerably longer (up to 6 million years).
What can we reasonably infer? Well, I think we can be pretty certain they weren’t all farting about obsessing over their “gender identities”. Ugg was most definitely not sat scratching at his balls and thinking he was ‘really’ born as an Uggina.
Similarly, it is probably fairly certain that Uggina wasn’t thinking about how to smash the patriarchy.
We can imagine different ‘proto-societies’ in disparate locations. A slightly different set of environmental conditions might have resulted in a slight difference in those societies. This difference then gets worked upon, perhaps amplified, because the conditions for reproductive success are slightly different in each society. This is how, I think, we see the emergence of different societal structures in humans - all driven by the same evolutionary ‘programming’ that drives things towards reproductive success, but leading to different outcomes.
A very loose analogy might be how a differential equation has different solutions based upon different initial conditions. The same equation governs things, but the outcomes can be different depending on the starting conditions.
In my view a lot of the emergent issues we’re seeing today arise from a kind of decoupling of humans from evolutionary pressures - or at least those evolutionary pressures that were pertinent some tens of millennia ago. We’re optimised to work in an environment that no longer exists, and we haven’t caught up.
This works right across the board from the food we eat and the kind of day to day physical activity we engage in, to the ‘emotional’ and societal environment we find ourselves in. We’re simply not properly optimised for it.
When evolution gifted us with brains capable of conscious thought and reasoning, the downside was the vulnerability of our offspring who required a much longer developmental time - not to mention the bigger head being a bit awkward to push through a birth canal2.
Of course ‘evolution’ had to work in solutions for that too. Questions like “who’s going to stay home and look after the little bugger?” became important, not in any airy-fairy social justice sense, but because said little bugger might well have died had everyone gone off on the hunt.
And so differences in the behaviours of men and women developed. As a necessity.
By and large women took the nurturing role3 whilst men took the provider and protector role. Because that’s what worked to guarantee the best chance of reproductive success and gave the offspring the best chance of survival and optimal development.
Our underlying evolutionary ‘programming’ designed around that framework is still there. It hasn’t been ‘evolved’ away. All of those same drivers and influences are still there. The problem is that the environment they were once optimised for is no longer in existence.
And this mismatch is causing us no end of grief today.
I’m not arguing here that we’re just programmed machines. We are clearly not. But we must also recognize that there are ‘pushes’ and ‘influences’ that act upon us that stem from our deep evolutionary past. We are able to consciously moderate those impulses - and that’s a blessed thing in many cases.
If we couldn’t moderate those impulses we’d be banging over 500 men and filming it, or we’d be one of those over 500 men indulging in a bit of consensual gang rape4.
Oh, hang on . . .
Those differences between men and women are what ensured our success and survival. We should be thankful for them. What we shouldn’t be doing is trying to turn one into the other.
Having a Bit of Fun with the Stereotypes
I’m going to finish off with a bit of a light-hearted riff on those differences, those stereotypes. Hopefully I’ll be terribly sexist and more than a little misogynistic and misandrist. That’s kind of the point.
The serious question is whether we can, once again, come to celebrate and appreciate some of those differences in a way that is fair and just to both sexes.
Look, I’m not going to deny that men can be gross. We sit there farting and belching and picking at the hairs in our noses and ears. Put a skirt on a lampstand and we’d try to shag it. If you’re lucky you’ll have some kind of Greek statue body (although one we hope with slightly larger equipment) in your younger days, but by the time you hit 40 in all likelihood you’ll look like a sack of potatoes and smell like one that’s gone off.
On the plus side we don’t try to put scatter cushions everywhere5, or obsess about almost invisible micro-variations of paint shade, or stick some wooden things in some sickly floral oily gloop (usually as an attempt to combat the smell of potatoes gone off, it has to be said). And why in the ever-loving fuck would we want to iron our underpants?
Life is simpler as a bloke. Keks, shirt, belt, shoes - done. Out we go.
On the other hand . . .
Yes, dear, that accessory goes brilliantly with this, the 7th outfit you’ve tried on. Do you think we might get out within the next half hour so that we can, at least, see the last half of the movie?
And don’t get me started on emotional labour. All that emotional labour I spent listening to hours and hours of intense emotional dissection of some total triviality. I will try my best to make vaguely supportive grunts at the appropriate junctures. And why the hell did you just ignore the 27 practical solutions I outlined right at the start? . . .
Is there some secret room in my house that contains a file cabinet full of all my past misdeeds? Do you spend an hour there everyday in intense study so that you have instant recall of every one of them in an argument? Fuck, I can’t even remember which piece of floor I dropped my socks on - or whether they’ve had only 3 or 4 days of wear.
And don’t bother me now, I’ve nearly got to the next level in this game. It’s our 3rd son’s birthday tomorrow? What was his name again?
Yes, I’ve had a bad day at work. No, I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to go and beat the ever-loving fuck out of my punchbag for the next half hour, if that’s OK with you?
Somewhere in the middle of this all this glorious mess of misunderstandings and miscommunications there is a happy medium to be had. The most successful couples find it and work with it - and grow stronger together as a result. They become true partnerships. If you see no need for this, or are unwilling to look for it, then you’ll probably end up apart.
Men and women are different. We tend to process our emotions differently and we tend to get emotional about different things. If you turn all that into an insurmountable problem, or think that because you think or feel or process things that way, this is the way your partner should too, then you’re just setting things up for a fall. This applies to both men and women.
It’s a case where allowing someone to “be their authentic selves” actually makes sense.
I think we could add in around another 20 or so very’s here - at least
Having witnessed one labour which I can only describe as ‘carnage’ - ladies you have my undying respect and admiration. Our 2nd was, thankfully, delivered by Caesarean
Ugg, alas, was not a very good chest feeder
Yes, this happened. I think the final ‘tally’ was 583 men. The behaviour of the men, and the woman, disgusts me, frankly. The whole thing just makes me feel nauseous. Actually, I think this represents a kind of ‘anti-evolution’ because I’m not sure we see anything quite so ‘depraved’ in the animal kingdom (yes, I’m anthropomorphizing a bit).
Have you ever tried to actually sit on one of those things? I suppose sitting on a hedgehog or porcupine would be less comfortable, but not by much I reckon
Your stereotypes made me smile. My husband is an excellent physical specimen for his age, gym goer, runner, 30” waist - but does all the cleaning and spends more on clothes and hair products than I do, when he’s not reading emotional novels or watching cat videos. Meanwhile I continue to drop my clothes on the floor and read gruesome crime novels with one eye on the football and drink in hand. We’re just people.
Mallards can behave that way, just piling on the poor female and screwing her - literally, given how their penis looks - until she drowns. And then screwing the corps.
I suggest we extend rights and privileges to people behaving as mallards, as if those people were mallards. Bring out the punt-guns!
What stereotypes? That's the way it is. I don't need to let every wasp sting me or every adder bite me to know it hurts. We, animals that we are, always revert to(wards) type unless checked by outside forces. Such as the wife or husband.
Have you ever seem normal women, without training or experience as carpenters/any kind of construction work try to build anything at all? Building, constructing, making isn't really part of their optimal skill set as a group, it just isn't.
Or men knitting, darning, weaving, and so on. Wear it until it falls off of your body, is the go-to mindset of men. Sole starting to come loose? Duct-tape and glue. If that fails, more tape and more glue. No inner sole for the shoes? Box cutter and some cardboard will do the trick until you get around to buying soles (i.e. when Leeds wins the FA Cup again - never).
Or giving directions... my gawds... "It's over there" she says, from a different room while pointing somewhere. "Dear, I can't see you. Please use units and reference points." I say with that special married man-patience voice. "Over there, where I'm pointing. By the trees."
Inner groan. "Honey, we live in a forest. What trees? Which ones? North, South where!?"
Annoyed wife: "Well why don't you come here and look instead of being difficult!"
At least she's not obsessing about the good china with the blue periwinkles.