I’m going to be controversial again, remember though, before you might get upset about this post, that I have run this idea past the independent intellect that is my Em. Women are, for the most part, almost completely incapable of entertaining themselves… they need goals. This post is entirely based on my own observations and does not represent any statistical study or scientific postulate. Read on before you jump to comment how wrong I am (you may be a woman and think I am being cruel, you may be a man and want to defend women, I may be wildly incorrect)….
Women are cool, I have no intention of turning this post into some sort of derogatory rant against them. History is replete with impressive females, they are in many ways superior to us guys, and often under these circumstances, as well as historically, they’ve have to work harder to achieve the same status and riches. I have worked with, and for, quite a few women, so I am not unfamiliar with being under the direction of their visions and motivations, and for the most part this has not been problematic. It is true that the style is different, maybe better or worse I don’t know, but it is important to see that for the most part it is different and that’s enough. This part of the blog is truth, it does not simply sit here in an effort to make you think I am not a misogynist or a sexist, I likely am those things a little bit if I am honest, but let’s not focus on it for now. I didn’t want this post to represent a battle of the sexes, we can get into that at another time I’m sure.
No, what I wish to state is this – if there is no goal to achieve, or labour to be done, a woman will struggle to fill the time that they have, and will reach out to something, or someone, to fill it for them, or alternatively they will busy themselves with labour that is home, or family, focussed. Men are different, we can do absolutely nothing and be happy doing absolutely nothing. We can do utterly pointless things, and do them for many many hours, yet feel no absence of achievement. This is an incredible, yet important, defining difference between the two sexes. Women, the ones I have known anyways, just don’t seem to have idling in their DNA. Now I wonder if this is a social trait, i.e. built by the structures we built historically, where women would have a role that required that they are always working, from waking hour to well into the night, making the lives of children and husband richer by constant attention toward them? Could it be evolutionary, based on the animal that a woman is within the species, could the DNA not allow for idleness on the part of the primary human care giver and emotional provider? Those sound the same but they derive from different sources. One is based on our decisions, and the other on our base instincts, so their implications and justifications differ and are arguable.
I could make the claim that leisure time is where the best ideas come from, people are not mentally at their most creative while they are busy with a goal based task that has a deadline. The periods where we are unburdened by a goal are those that are most available for mental creativity, and I could further contend that because of the implications of this postulate, if we accept it, we may be looking at an alternative explanation as to the reason why women tend to be demonstrably less adaptive and innovative than their male counterparts. Please do not take that as a slur against women, an observation is not malice based and cannot contain a prejudice. An alternative to the idea that oppression, by men, alone stands as the reason why men happen to have invented almost everything that drives progress or quickly destroys. I’m not going to put anything behind this speculation because I think oppression, both male and societally structural, has provided much of the weight that props closed the doors to science and invention concerning women, and we need to acknowledge that primarily before being certain that we can make a definitive statement.
To accept any other postulate before solving our inequality of opportunity problems would be to excuse them and to excuse an obvious history of unfairness. We cannot therefore satisfactorily answer, so we must use a smaller measure instead, we must think of the observed phenomenon in a qualitative way rather than quantitatively (you cannot measure a result to prove a single reason while there are competing reasons that have not been accounted for and discarded successfully. First you have to isolate and remove those potential reasons). So in conclusion I have no conclusion, I just have my own observations. I’ll leave it there…
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