Reasons for Denying Difference Number Seven: the Fear of the Unknown

The most basic reason of all for denying the differences between women and men is the fear of the unknown.

A man can never fully understand how a woman feels. Nor can a woman completely understand a man's feelings.

When a woman and a man fall in love, each is confronted with the mystery of the other.  The only realistic way to deal with this mystery is to accept it and love despite the mystery or even (if only partly) because of the mystery.

To admit that we cannot fully know a person we love requires humility. To go on loving despite uncertainty takes bravery.  The constant effort to understand, to meet halfway, can be trying.

I'm not saying that women are completely ignorant of the way men feel, or vice versa. We know enough to recognize difference. We can even see (if never determine scientifically) some of the more basic ways we are different. After all, defending this knowledge of difference is the point of this blog.

But in the end what women and men know of each other creates far more mystery than it resolves.  As when an astronomer discovers a galaxy, we get far more questions than answers. We learn mainly how little we can ever truly know.

The myth that women and men feel basically the same offers an easy way to avoid confronting this often troubling mystery, namely by helping us to pretend that the mystery does not exist, or at least by reducing it to the mystery of difference between individuals, regardless of their sex.

(This insistence that the only difference is between individuals is a common way of denying the differences between women and men. I will write about it in future posts.) 

Denying difference means denying the mystery that lies between women and men. It requires a man to pretend to know what he cannot know about a woman. It forces a woman to pretend to know what she can never know about a man. In the end it leads both to assume he or she, being basically the same,  must feel the same, when he or she is not the same, and feels quite differently.

Of course men and women have been pretending to understand each other for a long, long time. It is a natural thing to do, and the hurt and disappointments it leads to are a part of life, of growing up.

But today, as more and more people are denying the differences between women and men,  and denying too the mysteries created by these differences, this kind of pretending has become more than a common mistake. It has become standard (and increasingly obligatory) behavior. Where there were once a normal disappointments of life, there is now widespread disillusionment that makes all but the most casual relationships between women and men impossible, and eventually leads to hatred.