Not the Same Thing at All

Dear Dawson,

I am glad that I appear to be getting at the crux of your questions. What I want to do in this letter is discuss equity and equality, and how we are to understand those words when it comes to life between the sexes.

Egalitarianism has been a true intellectual corruption, and it is the kind of corruption that has gotten into everything. It worked it way into our collective heart in the form of envy, and worked it way out in our collective mind in the form of what is called “equality.” It has even crept (largely unnoticed) into the assumptions of many conservative believers. So we have to be careful working through this. There are layers.

Biblical equity means that that we are to apply the same standard to all, whether Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. At this first layer, we do this because we want to get the same equitable result. When someone is charged with a crime, for example, we require two or three witnesses for a conviction. We do this because if someone is charged with shoplifting, say, whether it is a man or a woman, we want the same rules applied and we want the same results as a consequence of applying those same rules. We want the guilty man (or woman) to be convicted, and we want the innocent man (or woman) to be acquitted. We want the same rules so that we can get the same results. We want equity in the application of the rules and we want equity in the results. That is the first layer, and is pretty straightforward. That would be equity.

But the next layer is a bit different. Here we want the same rules for all, knowing that it will wind up with completely different results. This is equity also, but the result in inequality of result. But even though there is inequality of result, there is no inequity.

If we were to have a foot race, and we included men and women both, and we applied the same standards to all, the consequence would be that the men would win a disproportionate number of the races. This, even though they all had the same starting line, the same starting pistol, the same stop watch, and the same finish line. If you treat them all the same in this scenario, the results will be completely different. Inequality, but no inequity.

Because of the obvious physiological differences between men and women, this is why, up until ten minutes ago, we had men competing against men in their own divisions and women competing against women. This is why we (rightly) had men’s sports and women’s sports, and why the tranny thing is so screaming ridiculous. It is ridiculous because we are applying level one standards to a level two situation.

But the necessity-of-inequality principle still stands, even within those different divisions. Equality of opportunity here results in disparate outcomes—not everyone gets the gold medal. Only one woman wins that medal, and in his division, only one man. Not everyone establishes a world record. Not everyone runs the same speed. There is inequality in the outcome, but no inequity in the rules of the competition.

But please note. These will be different outcomes when you apply equitable rules to men and women, when those men and women are all doing the same thing, laboring to achieve the same goal—which is getting to the finish line first.

But sex is completely different. Men and women are both sexual beings, but their sexuality is completely different. A man and a woman running the 100 yard dash, running shoulder to shoulder, are doing the same thing differently. But when it comes to a man and a woman in an erotic relationship, face to face, they are doing completely different things. He is making love to a woman, and she is not. She is making love to a man, and he is not. They are both making love, but as individuals they are not doing the same thing at all.

And the difference is not to be found in the fact that they are giving one another pleasure, unlike a foot race. If they were to exchange foot rubs, or scratch an itch between one another’s shoulder blades, they would be giving the same pleasure to one another because in those respects their bodies are very much alike. Sore feet are sore feet. But with regard to sex, their bodies are completely different.

So sex is therefore in a different category entirely. The same thing, a lovemaking session, is the result of two different people, with different bodies, with different desires, different motives, different emotions, and different purposes, doing very different things. He receives by giving, and she gives by receiving—and yet they both give and both receive. But differently.

I once wrote something on this topic that caused a great deal of outrage and consternation, but I will go ahead and say it again. It caused that outrage because egalitarianism is such a capricious goddess, and is very easily displeased. But sex is not an egalitarian pleasuring party. Sex is nothing like a foot rub.

And this is where the egalitarianism has crept into many of our assumptions, even among conservatives. We have been repeatedly told that women are as interested in sex as men are, and the problem is that this is almost completely false. Notice that I say almost. It is not as though he is playing chess, and she is in another room playing Scrabble. Of course in one sense they are doing the same thing, and both are interested in the same thing, but that is not what we really need to be reminded of. A woman can be as interested in sex as a man, but the nature of her interest is completely different.

We need to be reminded of how different it is for both because we have been subjected to unrelenting propaganda that stoutly maintains that apart from the minor concave/convex part, men and women approach sex in the same way. This is simply a lie. Furthermore it is the lie that undergirds the whole transexual debacle. The undeniable physiological difference between men and women is, for dogmatic reasons, regarded as a detail, addressable via surgery, and all that is needed is for a person to decide what sex they are going to be. Like deciding what you are going to major in at college. But it is nothing like that at all.

Now I know that I am describing a man and woman in a sexual relationship, which is not your situation right now. But you would certainly like it to be your situation, and what I am saying here is going to be relevant to how you might be enabled to get to that point, so please bear with me.

The interest that men have in sex and the interest that women have in sex are interests that bear very little resemblance to one another. It is true that we could say that the phrase “water flowing” is a descriptive phrase, but keep in mind that this could include a narrow waterfall crashing onto rocks a thousand feet below, and it would also apply to the Mississippi River, a mile wide, rolling on to the sea. In both cases, water is flowing but the differences are more obvious than the similarities.

A man’s sexual cycle runs from arousal to climax. A woman’s sexual cycle runs from arousal to when the kid graduates from college. He is the narrow waterfall, and she is the Mississippi. A man’s sexual interest is very intense while it lasts, and very much on the surface. A woman’s sexual interest is broad and deep. A man’s sexual focus is largely limited to one part of his body, and is almost incidental to him. A woman sexual focus involves almost her whole body. And to come to the most crucial point, the sex act is an act of biological reproduction, and the woman is the one who gets pregnant.

This is the key to understanding everything, and it is why our current elites are so bent on persuading us—contrary to creation, reason, good order, common sense, and holy Scripture—that men can get pregnant too. And all of this together means that while the man and the woman have a point of connection in “having had sex together,” their experience of the whole thing remains very different. Their attitudes toward toward the whole enterprise are not the same. Moreover, they cannot be the same.

All this is another way of saying that when it comes to the experience of sex, men and women do not share the same worldview. Of course, if they are both Christians they can take a step back and share the same biblical worldview about sex, knowing what Scripture teaches about sex roles and so on. But with regard to the experience of sex, men don’t understand women and women don’t understand men. This is not a flaw in the design—it is a feature, not a bug. We are not supposed to understand each other.

The reason men and women feel so differently about it is because it is different. Remember what I said in the previous letter about this being designed. It is not a flaw. It is not a blind evolutionary adaptation. It is a creation feature, marred by sin, which we will get to in a minute.

Both men and women have testosterone in their bodies, and testosterone is a major factor when it comes to their libido, for men and women both. A woman’s ovaries make testosterone and a man’s testes make testosterone. So everything is the same, right? The difference is that an average man has about 15 to 20 times the amount of testosterone sloshing around in his body as an average woman does. This, um, has an impact on things, on how the world appears to each of them. It means that his outlook is very different than her outlook.

Okay, so how is all this relevant? And what difference does it make to you?

According to a cluster of old myths, the seer Tiresias once displeased Hera, and was turned into a woman for seven years as a consequence. Later on he was struck blind by her because Zeus and Hera were having an argument about whether men or women enjoyed sex more. Since Tiresias had been both a man and a woman, he was called upon to settle the question. He said that “of ten parts man enjoys one only.” This was not the right answer according to Hera, and so she blinded him. Now this story really doesn’t illuminate anything, except to underscore the fact that one half of the human race has no conception of what it is like to be the other half. There is a chasm of ignorance here.

And that chasm of ignorance is not bridged when a man goes under the knife. He does not now know what it is like to be a woman. Rather, he knows what it is like to be a eunuch, and he also knows what it is like to be flattered and lied to by idiots, but he is not an inch closer to knowing what it is like to be a woman.

Now all of this affects everything. When you meet a young woman at church, and you are chatting with her, and wondering if you should ask her out, all of these things that I am talking about are running in the background. They are running in the background in your mind and they are running in the background in her mind. And remember—they are running in the background differently.

If he is showing romantic interest in her, then one of two things is going on. He is either trying to figure out how to get into bed with her dishonorably, or he is trying to figure out how to do it honorably. Those are your options. Because she knows that something like that is in the cards, and because she is the one who could get pregnant, she is wanting to know what kind of man he is—the dishonorable or the honorable one. He is focused on how attractive she is, and she is focused on how reliable he is.

This is the point where critics will start yelling, as though I just said that a woman doesn’t care about how attractive the man is. No, she absolutely cares about that also. But not the same way.

The woman getting pregnant is a huge factor in all of this, and one of the things that our abortion culture has wanted to do is to erase that as a factor—in order to put women on the same footing as the men. Birth control and abortion were intended to erase the clear and obvious difference I am insisting on recognizing.

But legal abortion does not really do anything of the kind—she is the one who gets the abortion, and has to deal with the aftermath. A man can be the father of an aborted child, and never even find out, in this life at any rate. He will find out at the day of judgment, which will be bad. But still different.

I said earlier that the sexual differences between men and women are creational differences, marred by sin. But to say that they are creational differences is the same thing as saying that God recognizes them as real differences. When men and women sin with those differences, God doesn’t approve of it in either case (because it is sin), but He does recognize the sins as being different sins.

We can see the difference easily out in the world of unbelievers. A man who has been with a hundred women is considered by them as a “player,” while a woman who has been with a hundred men is considered the “club slut.” From a biblical perspective, neither one is virtuous, obviously, but their sins are different.

So we cannot overlook such obvious differences. A man in that position could be the father of one hundred children. A woman could not be the mother of one hundred children. And this is because the roles of father and mother are completely different roles. Biology matters, and the world’s propaganda machine notwithstanding, biology is not optional.

And one of the things that is assigned to us in the creation order is that when it comes to the consequences of the sexual act, women are betting with far more money than the men are. This is because they are the ones who get pregnant. Am I belaboring the obvious? It is because we live in crazy times and the obvious needs some belaboring.

When we are forced to recognize such differences (which we have to, because they are so glaring), we try to defend the egalitarian narrative by attributing the whole thing to society’s “double standards.”

The creation order itself is not egalitarian. Women are far more vulnerable to sexual consequences than men are. In response to this, one of the things that societies have done is to place additional safeguards around the women. This can be despised as establishing “double standards,” and it is certainly true that this protection for the women has been abused in a way that defends a double standard—where women are expected to stay pure, and the men are expected to sow their wild oats.

So I need to be very clear here. It is not a double standard to say that the sexual sins of men and women are obviously different. It is a double standard to say that the sins of the men are not sins. If you count on the boys sowing their wild oats, while at the same time keeping your daughters buttoned up tight, that is the kind of double standard that Scripture condemns. It is a sin to wink at the sin of the boys, and prohibit the girls from sinning.

And recall that time when Judah was going to have his daughter-in-law executed for “playing the harlot,” as evidenced by her pregnancy, when he was in fact the father of the child. So Scripture recognizes the sinfulness of both sexes in sexual sin, and identifies it as sin. But this reality does not require to pretend that the dislocations caused by these sins are the same. If a married man has a one-night-stand with some other woman, the consequences for his marriage are severe. If a married woman has a one-night-stand with some other man, and conceives a child, the consequences are more severe.

The fact that we have judges in our society that require men to pay child support for a child begotten by another man demonstrates how intent we are on trying to erase the differences between the sexes. It cannot work.

So it is not a double standard to recognize that men and women sin differently, and with different consequences. The prodigal son returns home, having been with multiple harlots, and is received with celebration. If it had been the prodigal daughter, with a two-year-old bastard, whose father was still off in a far country, she too would have been received home with gladness. The forgiveness can be the same, but the situations are still completely different, and the forgiveness in the latter circumstance would have to deal with far more.

When it comes to sexual matters, and your understanding of life between the sexes, you need to get every vestige of egalitarianism out of your system. You will be surprised at how it affects your outlook when you approach another woman. Not only will it affect your outlook, it will affect the reception you are likely to get. But more on all that in my next—this has been enough for one letter.

Your uncle,

Douglas