Why Men Don’t Iron: The New Reality of Gender Differences
Why Men Don’t Iron is an eye-opening, mind-blowing book on how the major sex differences in our brains impact on our daily lives and behaviour.Men are not women and yet for the last decade have been told to get in touch with the feminine side of their nature. Men have in fact been told to connect to parts of their brain that do not exist. So what are the essential, unique qualities of men?In a time when the debate on the ‘feminisation of education’ and the nanny state, ‘the feminisation of the state’, is just beginning, this book is timely and highly controversial.
Читать Why Men Don’t Iron: The New Reality of Gender Differences онлайн беплатно
Why Men Don’t Iron
The New Reality of
Gender Differences
ANNE AND BILL MOIR
William Collins
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1998
Copyright © Anne and Bill Moir
The Authors assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
>All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780002570350
Ebook Edition © FREBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007468911 Version: 2015-12-17
To Bernard Cornwell
Contents
CHAPTER ONE: He’s Not Part One, Part Another
CHAPTER SEVEN: Extremes Are Not Rules
This is a book about men.
About what makes them different. So inevitably it is a book about women too.
A small box sits on Anne’s desk. The top reads: ‘All that men know about women’. Open it and there is nothing inside. Funny? Sad? Humbling? An innocent admission that men have tried to follow women’s pattern of thought and failed? Or is it an insult? The box could imply that a man is incapable of understanding a woman because her complexities are beyond his simplicities. That is to define him in her terms. Or perhaps it reflects the traditional male view that she is beyond understanding because she is silly – irrational? Which is to define her in relation to himself. We tend to see in the other sex a lesser version of our own. Yet the manner in which we describe another’s mind shows the limits of our own.
‘Why keep the box?’ asks Bill.
‘To turn it over,’ says Anne. ‘To puzzle out what it means.’
‘Isn’t it insulting?’
‘Didn’t you say that we often hide behind clichés?’
‘Did I?’
‘When you gave me the box.’
It is a cliché that men cannot fathom women. But what of her image of him?
Roseanne Barr, the weighty sitcom actress, summed up her view on men in the television programme Hollywood Men: Boys Will Be Boys: ‘The real Hollywood man,’ she said, ‘is a terrified little boy and wants his mommy.’>1 Hers is the classic female caricature of the male. ‘Yes they can have control, but only in two areas,’ says Barr. ‘Starting barbecues is one; the other is walking around in packs and peeing on things.’>2 Such expertise was rewarded when Barr was appointed editorial adviser to a special issue of the New Yorker devoted to the subject of women.
Men are nothing but overgrown children, really.
They need to be told what to do.
The only difference between men and boys is the price of their toys.
Boys will be boys: they have to watch football.
Wars are little boys fighting.>3
In Alison MacLeod’s postmodern novel The Changeling,>4 the big themes of boys’ history – war, political intrigue and empires – are represented as comic and trivial.
It is common for women to describe men as ‘boys’. To her way of thinking he never grows up, while she does. This attitude is as matronizing as his is patronizing. He puts her down by claiming not to understand her, that she is indeed beyond understanding, and she keeps her self-respect by claiming the opposite. Men and women are seldom more equal than in their lack of understanding of one another. Why else would women enjoin men to ‘get in touch with their feminine side’? But where does he find it? How does he look for it? Does it even exist? Perhaps, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California, ‘there is no there there’. To ask men to improve themselves by relating to their feminine side is to ask them to become like women, but men are distinct: they are possessed of the differences that make for a real difference.
So why, some women ask, must his differences make him so brutally dominant? For too long, she feels, he has forced her into his social frame, into the role of the wife or the little woman
