Do You Want Us to Admit Men and Women are Different, or Not?

Yes, men and women are different on average--in some ways you might not like.

Photo by Julee Juu on Unsplash

(For the purpose of keeping this article at least somewhat coherent and simple, I’m speaking of straight cisgender men and women. Bear with me.)

In 2014, I came across a radical feminist Tumblr blogger who repeatedly attempted to die on the hill that aside from genitalia, there weren’t any biological physical differences between cisgender men and women, let alone behavioral differences. When presented with evidence that men are, on average, obviously larger than women, she earnestly suggested that parents selectively malnourished their daughters to stunt their growth.

I’ve considered that this person was an elaborate troll account, but I think extremely wacky positions like this somehow got confused with mainstream beliefs about gender—that every difference between men and women was socially constructed, and if in a vacuum, men and women would behave exactly the same way. And it’s easy to see how this mistake could be made, because it wasn’t far from what was happening in the mainstream. A coworker of mine refused to let her daughter play with dolls because she thought any affinity toward nurturing or caretaking was patriarchal conditioning, never innate. When I worked in tech, it was assumed that women preferring humanities and men preferring STEM was a matter of sexist social conditioning, and that it was extremely important to have more women in STEM—with nobody bothering to ask your average woman if she actually wanted to go into STEM. In fact, I worked at a company that forced all the women in the office to travel over a weekend to a “women in tech” empowerment conference, ultimately punishing me when I said it was ridiculous that men weren’t being forced to leave their families for a weekend.

The one area where almost everyone agrees men and women are biologically different is physical strength, but some folks still feel icky admitting it. This topic came up recently when the military physical test was changed to “gender-agnostic,” which requires women in combat roles to pass the same physical test as male soldiers. That seems fine to me, assuming those standards are necessary for good performance in those roles. Lowering standards to ensure the military has more female combat soldiers doesn’t make much sense, anymore than it would make sense to allow male interior decorators to be unable to distinguish between lime green and chartreuse.

Most 2025 “heterodox” thinkers, especially men, will agree with my line of thinking. They will readily admit that men and women are different on average, that jobs should be based on merit alone, and that standards shouldn’t be changed to force more of any particular gender into any role. But what’s interesting is that they like to ignore another way that men and women are obviously very different—something that simply cannot be explained away as the shaming of feminist harridans: Men are, on average, far more aggressive and prone to predatory sexual behavior than women. If we can all admit that women aren’t as physically strong as men, we should also be able to admit that men on average (in part because of this strength) are just more physically dangerous than women, without accusations of “policing.”