Love, Sex War and Male and Female Natures and Relationships

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

Attributed to Gloria Steinem, American feminist.

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.

Timothy Leary, 1920-1996, American writer

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man twice its natural size.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Is there a sex war behind male-female relationships and love - or what was supposed to be love relations?

The oppression of women by men in many past and present societies and some present wars of words seem to confirm it. The mind differences between the two sexes exist and have supported those wars.

And nevertheless, somehow in contradiction, many women deny those differences of nature:

We aren’t born women; we become women
Simone Beauvoir, Second Sex

There is not a female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.

Charlotte. P. Gilman, Women and Economics

The sex war, if we accept these views, would have little sense in present times. The differences between the two sexes would be a cultural issue and would end with the ethical improvement of the human species.

Recent advances seem to show that direction, as we may deduce from Virginia Woolf’s words:

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority. belong to the private–school stage of human existence where there are ‘sides’, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. As people mature they cease to believe in sides or in Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

But the question is much more complex. Great literature and some common sense have always asserted the differences between women’s and men’s minds. And recent scientific developments also state it. There are biological differences between the male and the female human brains, pointed out by modern psychology and biology:

Through-out our evolutionary history, men and women have faced different sexual opportunities and constraints. For a man casual sex with a stranger carried only a small risk – infection, discovery by the wife – and a potentially enormous reward: a cheap addition of an extra child to his genetic legacy. Men who seized such opportunities certainly left behind more descendants than men who did not. Therefore, since we are by definition descended from prolific ancestors rather than barren ones, it is a fair bet that modern men possess a streak of sexual opportunism. Virtually all male mammals and birds do, even those that are mainly monogamous. This is not to say that men are irredeemably promiscuous or that every man is a potential rapist, it is just that men are more likely to be tempted by an opportunity for casual sex than women.
Matt Ridley, Red Queen

That doesn’t mean, of course, that the sex war is unavoidable. Our distinct mind patterns shouldn’t be seen in a deterministic way, guiding us to explosive conflicts. But we also shouldn’t ignore the differences. They exist, encapsulated in our brain’s biology. And they will show themselves in an unpleasant way, if we aren’t informed and aware, and do not exercise our intelligence.

Quotations
The feminine nature: Yes or No?

What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing — the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others. It may be asserted without scruple, that no other class of dependents have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relation with their masters.
John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873, English philosopher and politician, The Subjection of Women

There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.
Margaret Fuller, 1810 - 1850, American writer, Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Each human being, man or woman, brings within himself the more or less sleeping presence of the other sex.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V

Quotations The feminine nature: Yes or No?

Quotations
The feminine nature: Yes or No?