My sophomore year in high school, I was smart enough to be granted admission to the revered "honors" English class, taught by Allen L'Etoile. I'll never forget the one class where he explained what the difference is between men and women.
To lay aside the Rifkinian physical assessment of the situation for a moment, he explained that when men complain about something, they're looking for someone to tell them how to fix it, whereas when women complain about something, they're generally looking to seek empathy and understanding, as well as advice, more so than men. Men get frustrated with women constantly griping but not taking their advice, and women get frustrated with men constantly telling them what to do when they don't fully understand the situation.
At any time of day, I or my two roommates can walk next door and find a woman who is really eager to discuss and complain, etc., but will not take advice. At any time of day, the three women who live next door can come into our apartment and find us pretty much not discussing anything involving emotion, sentiment, or feelings of any kind. Our conversation usually centers around cheese and crackers, whiskey, Fresh Samantha's, music, Entenmann's coffee cake, Pepperidge Farm cookies, new toys, candles, or how long it's been since one of us cleaned the kitchen. The only reason we need to discuss the kitchen is because without a clean kitchen, we have nothing to hold our whiskey, cheese and crackers, etc. It's very very simple.
It's not difficult to see why at times, they will go running from our apartment, or vice versa, not understanding exactly what is going on around us. If one of the three of us has a problem, we discuss is quickly, weigh all options, and arrive at the solution. If one of them has a problem, they discuss it into the ground, make numerous statements which to the untrained ear sound almost exactly like what was discussed 5 minutes previous, and often wind up making the same decision that was recommended 2 hours earlier. The other day I voiced my belief that the fundamental problem between men and women was that women drastically, astronomically overestimate how complicated men are, and all agreed that that may well be true.
During the winter I visited an off-campus house for a birthday party, and as the night wore on, with refreshments being consumed by all, the room segregated itself without anyone noticing. The men were sitting around on the couches just absolutely blithering about anything and everything, telling jokes etc., and the women were on the other side of the room, sitting on the floor, in a circle no less, and doing I expect much the same thing. It wasn't as though we had planned it that way, but that was what happened, and it struck me as totally bizarre. I had the acute feeling that I was at a high school party. It was a small group, we were drinking as though we had just found our parents' liquor cabinet, there were empty beer cans all over the room, and everyone was utterly blissful about sitting around listening to, yes, Doggystyle by Snoop. The segregation didn't last for very long, but it was long enough to notice it and remark how odd that was.
During the winter I also wrote a column blasting George Bush, and as one of my ingenious tactics I proved that he could not be a good President because his wife is ugly. The next day, I was stopped by a dean who said essentially that she refused to believe I could be that nearsighted, and did I really believe an unattractive woman was unfit to be a life partner? For a second I had to stop and ask myself if that was what I had in fact been conditioned to think because of all the Baywatch, etc. that young men tend to drool over, but in the end I concluded that I really just don't like George Bush and was being deliberately mean, and that there was no second or third level to what I was thinking.
Women I know constantly make a point of saying that science has proven that women mature at a much faster rate than men. Men I know constantly make a point of saying that science has proven that men are at their sexual peak at some point around their college years. Shall we instead say that men are capable of being as mature as women, but their hormones, etc. get in the way quite a bit during their young adulthood?
Of course, drinking doesn't exactly help anyone scale the refined, collected, and mature ladder, either, so shall we say that men and women use alcohol as a social lubricant during these years so that women can be less mature, and men can use all their immature and hormone driven skills to well, to do whatever the hell it is that we do in order to make women like us? Yet at that party, that was exactly the reverse of what happened. None of the men were interested in impressing any of the women, and the women didn't really care what the men were doing. It was refreshingly civilized and everybody got what they needed out of it, just by allowing things to go the way they seemed naturally to do.
