We're All From Fucking Earth

There’s an ongoing thread of conversation in various media about the differences between men and women. Men think this way; women think that way. Men are from Mars; women are from Venus. 10 Things Your Boyfriend Wished You Knew About Sex. Etc.

I bring it up, now, because I’ve bumped into that conversation a couple times, lately:

Here, in this cracked article.

Louis C.K.’s standup: Oh My God

This episode of the Nerdist Writer’s Panel.

An article in the Atlantic that is satirized here.

A caveat I often see in these arguments is the “I’ve never been that other gender” statement. In the cracked article, David Wong says, “I don't know what it's like to be a woman. I haven't been one in a long time. So as a result, it's not easy for me to describe what it's like to be a man, because I don't know what you're using for context.”

The thing that’s most often left out of this conversation is something that I think is major part of the human experience. I have never been and never will be any other person. I will never be outside my skin. I will never know what it is like to think and live as another person. Wong says he doesn’t know what women are using for contex? David Wong doesn’t know what any other man uses for context.

The fallacy that I see most often in the men v. women conversation is not that men and women are different – they might inherently be. The fallacy is that whoever’s talking knows what it’s like to be anybody else, much less half the world’s population.

Because I never get to be outside of my own head is my single greatest motivation to be moral, and it’s the number one reason I seek out complex communication and expression like art. It’s part of the reason that other people are so valuable to me. And the fact that the men v. women conversation gets that wrong makes it almost always a waste of my time.