Do Men and Women Live in Separate Worlds?
We’re not that different — but how we experience the world sure is…
I’ve often been told by a boyfriend that, as a woman, I’m a completely different species. Or at the very least, I live in a different world. The purpose of comments like these was to illustrate the alleged impossibility of him being able to understand me in any way, and as such, there was no point in trying.
It sounded like a viable perspective at the time. It certainly wasn’t something I hadn’t heard many times before. I was born to parents who had come of age in a world where men weren’t even allowed in the delivery room — nor did they want to be.
Men were no longer retiring to the sitting room after dinner to smoke and drink hard liquor, but I knew I was supposed to clean up the dinner mess so the menfolk could play video games or watch porn. Garages were “their” territory and guest rooms were reclaimed as man caves. And don’t even try to have an intellectual conversation with a man, I often heard — there would be no way a woman could keep up.
So I didn’t question the notion that men and women lived in different worlds.
As I crept toward middle age, however, I became increasingly convinced that it was absolutely true. But not for the reasons I’d been told…
