new church life: september / october 2013
education, clothes designing and cosmetology. More men than women go into
computer technology, service trades and transportation. Firemen, policemen,
truck drivers, electricians, plumbers and automobile mechanics are mostly
men. Realty agents, clerks, secretaries, receptionists and house cleaners are
mostly women. We encounter more waitresses than waiters. And so on.
One could argue that cultural factors are at work here rather than innate
predilections. But more than 40 years of social pressure to encourage women
to enter occupations traditionally male, and to remove any stigma to men
entering traditionally female occupations, have not changed the fact that there
are still a number of careers in which either one sex or the other typically
predominates.
The mental and emotional difference between men and women is now the
testimony of numerous psychological experiments as well, formally carried
out and based on clinically charted empirical evidence. These studies show
that women on the whole are more affectional and nurturing, while men on
the whole are more analytical and inventive.
The Testimony of Common Experience
As for common experience, what adolescent male does not sooner or later
find himself strangely attracted to one or more of the fair sex, in a way not
experienced with any of his own sex? And conversely, what adolescent maiden
does not sooner or later find herself strangely attracted to one or more of these
same youths, in a way not experienced with any of her own sex? It is their very
contrast that leads to the attraction.
Neo-Darwinists ascribe this attraction to an innate need of the organism
to reproduce itself and continue the species. But really, is that what a young
man is thinking when he takes his girlfriend out to dinner? And is that what
she is thinking when she is baking him his favorite cake?
The Neo-Darwinists’ explanation is also insufficient to explain the
continuing bond between married couples who love each other long past
child-bearing age, even into old age and eventually death.
The sexual attraction and bond are one whose causes rise above the
merely physical into the realm of the mind, in which the two sexes are, as
they say, made for each other. As the sexes are complementary counterparts
bodily, they are also complementary counterparts mentally and emotionally –
even more so mentally and emotionally – as evidenced in the case of happily
married lovers everywhere.
How the Sexes Are Alike
As we have noted, psychological studies have shown women to be on the
whole more affectional and nurturing, while men are on the whole more
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