Men and Marriage

The reason for reading if you're a columnist or blogger is to get new ideas on things.  Now I don't really think there are many new ideas out there, they've all been said before, but I guess by reading I might learn something new.

I'm reading Men and Marriage by George Gilder and I have to say there's a lot of interesting information in there.  The book started off a little in the I'm making this shit up direction, but it's since moved into the there's some reason and research to back this shit up lane.

His basic premise is that men and women are different.  Got that, next.  He then tries to make the case that women are sexually superior to men.  The point he's making is that being a woman (and I think that's what he's really talking about when he refers to sex) is a passive action.  The very definition of woman doesn't require her to do anything.  In addition, her role as woman is defined by nature and the superiority in her sex that he's referring to is derived from the richness of her experience as a woman (i.e. child bearing and rearing).  Men from a sexual standpoint only have one function, the act of sex.  Beyond that their sexual identity is non-existent and what it means to be a man is undefined.

The essential question he's answering is the essence of the sexes, what it means to be a man or woman.  His point is that for women the definition is well defined and clear but not so for men.  What it means to be a man in modern society is defined by society and largely by women.  Without that definition, men and their need to define themselves as men takes other, possibly more destructive forms.

It's an interesting theory and one that I'm enjoying reading about.