Women are from Venus and men are from Mars

I used find this aphorism ridiculous. Perhaps because my generation was gaslit into thinking that men and women are basically the same. Now I think it's one of the most profound aphorisms we have. This is an attempt to explain it in a way that I might of understood without having to rediscover it.

The essential insight it encapsulates is that men and women experience the same world in such different ways that we essentially live on two seperate planets that have been superimposed over one another. Or to be more specific we interpret the exact same events in different ways. Women focus on how events affected their social position and feeling of social safety. While men focus on what happened literally. As a result a couples memories can differ greatly after only a few days. Since the women will remember their emotions and use that to reverse engineer what must of happened while men are more likely to outright forget what happened but what they do remember will tend to be accurate. Of course such things are on spectrums and there is plenty of overlap between the sexes in many cases. In this way the notion that men and women are the same can be correct. The easiest way to tell what end of the spectrum someone is on is to ask them to define words like "listen". Women will tend to associate listening with validation. While men will tend to associate it more with understand. This is why couples will often both think the other doesn't listen to them.

But of course you won't really understand the previous paragraph until you understand the mechanism behind the sex differences. It comes down to differences in the main object instilled by evolution. If you want to go one layer deeper Richard Dawkins the selfish Gene describes how differences in zygote size result in what I'm about to describe. I'll focus on women first:

Prime Objectives

A women's prime objective is to be well liked enough within her tribe to obtain priority access to food and shelter which she will then use to raise her children. There are two popular strategies for achieving this. The lesser used one is the slut strategy. Which aims to be liked a little by many of the men in the tribe. It's a good default strategy when it's hard to determine which men will succeed or when the game they are hunting is very dangerous. Such that the best hunters are more likely to be killed than the lesser hunters. But a far more popular strategy is to pick the best man and employ every trick in the book to bag him. This works particularly well if he has brothers that are also very good since if he dies then they will often take his place to some degree. This strategy is preferable because the man has better genes, and since he knows the baby is his he will happily contribute resources and protection.

But no matter which strategy the women employs with the men in the tribe she will always use the same strategy with the women. Which is to not stand out. To seem like a harmless member of the group that offers no competition for the best men. While of course competing as fiercely as possible when she believes it won't be noticed by the other women. This is why women gas each other up so much. When you gas up another women you are making yourself seem weak, relative to them which makes you seem like less of a competitive threat while simultaneously making your competitor seem like more of a threat to the other girls in the group. It also has the added benefit of not helping the women learn from her mistakes if the matter being discussed is one which she could learn something from. If the women all start to agree upon which women is the strongest amongst them then they will often start to coordinate an attack on her status within the tribe. Warriors and worriers does a good job of describing this dynamic. This dynamic makes it hard for women to move to new cities because any social group they attempt to join will find it relatively easy to coordinate against her. When moving to a new city a women should hide her attractiveness until established.

This dynamic is why woman's most common fantasy scenario is to a mediocre brunet who just happens to become the object of a very high value man for absolutely no reason. As revealed by the popular fictional stories Twilight and it's spin off 50 shades. You might think they made the protagonist mediocre to become more relatable to it's audience and perhaps that helps but I suspect that very attractive women still enjoy that aspect of the fantasy because it makes it less likely they will become the target of jealousy from other women. The fact the men in these fictions become obsessed for no reason s also important because if there was any reason for it then that would become a target for other women to attack. By being a women who's mediocre in every way they get to have their preferred man and feel safe from attack too.

A man's prime objective is impregnate as many women as possible. There are again two popular strategies for this. One is to dominate ones own tribe. For a genetically superior and larger man this can work fairly well because it has a very good chance of success in the short term and that can be enough to father many children. However, it leaves him open to a coordinated attack from the other men in the tribe. It also causes the other men to have relatively low interest in the wellbeing of the tribe since it offers them no prospect of reproduction. Which makes the tribe vulnerable to attack from another tribe in which case all women will be taken from them. So this strategy only works well when the chance of encountering another tribe is very low. When the chance is significant then a better strategy for men to adopt is to work together with the other men in the tribe to form a strong fighting unit and share the women equally. This strategy came to dominate as the population density of humans increased. Similarly the monogamous strategy dominated amongst women as farming made men less prone to hunting accidents and increased the yield of intelligence.

This is why men rib each other rather than gas each other up. The constant ribbing helps men figure out their own weaknesses and improve. And the improvement of one man improves all men's reproductive success rates. Men rarely get jealous of more competent men since their competence helps everyone. His relative competence will enable him to access higher quality women than you when they are acquired. But thanks to him they will be acquired and that aligns with your prime directive.

Adaptative Pathologies

So a women's prime directive is to attract a great man an fit in with everyone else. But because of the way evolution works she must also have some amount of desire to maximise the number of children she produces too. But with the extreme cost that comes with that for humans prior to modern medicine it becomes necessary to suspend self preservation. Prior to modern medicine 1/20 women would die giving birth at some point in their lives and 50% of the children they birthed would die before adulthood so they expected to go through the horror of pregnancy twice for every child. And with at least two survivors required to replace their parents this meant that the human species needed to somehow convince every women to run the gauntlet 4 times just to keep the population from collapsing. There are a bunch of tricks evolution employed to make this happen.

But perhaps the most important trick evolution played on women was to prevent them from thinking too logically. This was important because it prevents them from noticing all the other tricks and fighting against them. Men are endowed with bravery but even the bravest of men wouldn't risk their life as eagerly as women do on the 5th go around. Reducing rationality also makes other tricks easier to implement. Like getting women to deal with incredibly demanding babies who get hungry regardless of the availability of food, so the mother must often go without for her babies sake.

Reduced rationality also reduces the risk of getting kicked out of the tribe for bad behaviour. Which is surprising but it works by causing them to always sincerely believe that they did nothing wrong. So nobody can ever be sure if they did do something wrong and so they won't be punished for it. This is low accountability. And it hugely beneficial for fitting in with a large group of people as evidenced by it's universality amongst politicians. You can't be highly accountable and a politician. You have to pick one. Likewise with women it's absolutely critical to lack accountability given the competitive games they play on each other. They need to be manipulated at least a little to get them to have babies. These manipulations could cause them to do things that would get them cut off from resources but low accountability saves the day at surprisingly little cost. After all I'd say women are considered the morally superior sex today. Every man jokes how their women is always right but nobody generalises that to all women. On close inspection we find any given women to be insane and yet any new woman is presumed sane by all. Humans, are normally prone to prejudice so it's interesting to consider cases such as this.

Men have pathologies too of course, so lets turn to those now. The most fun one is that men tend to think that all women are into them and that they could beat any man in a fight. The former is obviously extremely absurd given the highly selective nature of women. But it persists in the gene pool because even a broken clock is right twice a day and the cost of pregnancy to a man is so small that any chance of being right will keep this pathology in the gene pool. With the later pathology they will be right 50% of the time so they aren't that wrong and you lose every fight you don't participate in so this belief results in more wins than a more realistic assessment of ones fighting abilities would achieve. And in cases where large size differences between men exist they do evaluate the odds slightly more accurately.

The worst pathologies of men though require you to zoom out. The tricks evolution used to get men to work well as a team have very few downsides within the team. But god help anyone on the outside of it. At certain times in history where race was seen as important it resulted in poor race relations. When religion was seen as important it results in religious wars. During the greek golden age cities were people's primary identity and the cities fought amongst themselves. Nationhood was important recently and that didn't go well. You get the idea. Men make great team members but the teams they form don't share the properties of the parts. To some degree the progress of civilisation has been due to finding ways of enlarging the in group size and thereby enabling more and more people within the group to specialise on things other that fighting outsiders.

What to do about it

Obviously we should all transcend out biological drives and do what's best for society. But, not everyone is capable of that and never will be no matter how well educated they are since most humans are fundamentally programmed to copy those around them. That's actually what makes us human. We wouldn't of made it here if that wasn't the case. But unfortunately, independent thought is fundamentally impossible to copy. You either have it or you don't and only around 5% of people have it. And even if you could use gene editing or something to turn that on for everyone it wouldn't be a good idea because you would also need to edit a bunch of other things to make those people capable of enduring the pain incurred delivering on their responsibilities to society while being fully conscious of why they are doing it.

Transcending our biology essentially means becoming conscious of all the hacks evolution threw into our brains to get us to reproduce against our individual interest. Doing so enables you to prevent the downsides of these hacks but also takes away the upsides. There is no simple fix. The solution will involve many things, including artificial wombs, gene editing, and a revamped education system to name a few. It's not going to happen any time soon even with the singularity around the corner.

My solution for now is to lean into it. Accept what people are play the game to the best of your ability.

Some people view polyamory as a solution. I think that's a very nihilistic view to take but it actually has some merit for people that were born with too big of a handicap to ever be the first choice of someone great. It's essentially a modern formulation of the slut strategy for women and the beta strategy for men.

Making monogamy work as a man involves becoming a good provider and appearing to be well liked. Basically, rich and famous. But not necessarily since women use their instincts to judge these things they can be easily fooled. Many women become attracted to serial killers. They think it's because they are hot but actually it's just the fame of the guy that tricks women into thinking he is the leader of the tribe. Likewise, women can be tricked into thinking you're a good provider with superficial signals like jewellery, cars, clothes, instagram holidays, etc.. So for a modern man becoming attractive to women can be fairly easy. If you have great social skills them become a manager in some company and buy nice things for yourself. This ticks both box's for women. You look like the leader of a tribe and a good hunter. If you're an autistic genius then start your own company and hire more people than you really need. No social skills required.

Then once in a relationship it's important to keep levelling up on those two dimensions or least not go backwards. In addition it's important to make sure your women feels like you will protect her. Which is harder than it sounds since women don't judge this the way you might expect them to. You might offer your women some advice on something and think you're improving her safety. For example you might explain to her how to avoid having men approach her in the supermarket after she complains about it happening and if you imply that she is to blame in anyway she will feel a negative emotion. Which won't cause an argument at the time because she knows why she received that criticism. But in a few days time she won't remember why, she will only remember that you offended her and she will imagine the reason which will be something like you criticised her to ruin her self esteem because you're insecure. At which point she is starting to view you as someone who can't be trusted to look after her. She thinks you're weak and will continue to hurt her feelings because of it.

When she came to you and complained about the men approaching her you should of phrased it like yeah men are such idiots, one look and they think you want to talk to them. This way you have conveyed the same information but have targeted the blame away from her. Most men won't phrase it this way because it hides the actionable insight which makes it seem less helpful. But you have to realise that hurting her feelings is like rubbing a tigers balls. The tiger might appreciate what you're trying to do if it trusts you completely, but otherwise it will think you're going for a cheap shot and will bite your hand off.

As a women the way to make a relationship work is to be a hot nympho. Which is easy before kids. A little harder after since your sex drive will fall off a cliff. Testosterone supplements can help which sounded odd to me at first because I didn't know women had that hormone at all. If you do this you shouldn't get cheated on. Men love their women more than they are given credit for. Women think this isn't the case because the tiger balls thing I described is so common. But men are naturally non monogamous so you do have to chose somewhat wisely. Men with few talents beyond people skills will find it hard not to exercise that talent. If you're with such a man then just make sure his ego never gets too low due to career failures and the like.

Summary

To relate all this back the the aphorism I used at the start, we can now say the analogy of living on different planets refers the differences in what each of our minds have been optimised by evolution to do. In the case of women every step evolution took was to enable women to be more likeable while with men every step evolution took was to make them more useful either individually or as a group. And we don't know this about each other so consistently misinterpret each others behaviours as either stupid or malicious when in reality we just have completely different goals while thinking that we have similar ones.

This chart shows where I place certain types of people of each gender on the ego/independence axis.

Why do men an women seem more similar than they actually are. I think it's because the axis they differ on which is independence looks a lot like another axis which they don't differ on. That being ego, or self regard. A high ego women looks independent and she probably thinks of her self as independent but internally she feels a constant need to prove her independence. Which is something men don't experience.

Let's end with some scattered thoughts

Behind every great man is a great Women

When I first heard this I thought of the women as puppet master which seemed false. And many great men had no women behind them. Napoleon's wife famously slept around on him. Caesar's wife was accused of the same, though if she did it was called for. And probably the best counter example is Elon, who has never managed to have a stable long term relationship. Though he seems to be in one now so it will be interesting to see how that affects him. On the other hand guys like Peter the great seems to of drawn a lot of strength from his 2nd wife.

So historical evidence proves this statement isn't true but in the case of Napoleon, and Peter their letters suggest their happiness was significantly impacted by their first wives. And when Peter did find Catherine, the appreciation he showed her indicates she improved his life a lot. Napoleon never got much time with his 2nd wife and he had become fairly misogynistic at that point so we can't know how much difference she could of made to his life.

Overall, while great men don't need great women to function they very rarely stay with bad ones for long. I suspect that's because they feel their energy being drained away from them.

Men forget, but never forgive; women forgive, but never forget

This is due to men's focus on facts and women's focus on emotions. Men will forget about a women's bad behaviours if she demonstrates good behaviour enough times. Though he doesn't actually forget so much as just see that she is improving. He never forgives though because he knows the thing that caused her to behave badly will always be there even if she has learned to manage it.

While a woman forgives when a man causes her to experience enough positive emotions to make her feel safe again. Though she never forgets about the negative emotions she experienced because of you.

The misses is always right

This is strange considering a woman's primary directive is to be liked. Being a know it all usually isn't endearing. Well it turns out that what's really going on isn't so much that she thinks she is right or even particularly cares if she is right, she just really really does not want to be wrong. She dislikes being wrong so much that she can't stand it. Which makes sense evolutionarily since in a resource poor environment a woman that does something wrong might find herself going without. Which might not kill her but might stunt the growth of her children, rendering them undesirable as mates.

So when a woman feels like you think she is wrong she will fight to prove she isn't. Which all men incorrectly interpret as her wanting to be right. The difference is important since it's much easier to resolve the situation when you know you don't have to agree with what she is saying. You just need to make her feel safe and like she did nothing wrong that anyone else might of got right. This is very helpful to know because the things she is saying she is saying from a place of fear, she is fighting for her life, or at least part of her monkey brain thinks she is. So she is probably saying things that are either factually incorrect, or illogical. She will also likely use every dirty arguing trick in the book, of which there are many.

What was once called female hysteria might actually of just been women in a state of constant fear of being excluded from resources. Woman go nuts when they don't feel safe and if they are in a bad environment they are just going to look like they have permanently lost it.