Proof that being male is no stroll in the park
AH the happy days of courtship. I remember them well: ambling along, arm in arm, without a care in the world, not knowing where we were going because the destination didn’t matter. What mattered was the dreamy togetherness! Well according to the latest research from the US there’s a deep- rooted biological explanation for all this. When a man is with a woman he fancies he slows down his pace by as much as seven per cent. And this isn’t just because he’s so busy thinking about what they’ll end up doing in the bedroom that he can scarcely walk. It’s a deepseated survival mechanism.
Or so says Dr Cara Wall- Scheffler, a biologist at Seattle Pacific University who led the research. Lovestruck males adjust their walking pace to the woman’s slower one because they subconsciously recognise she needs to be on top breeding form. “Women’s reproductive abilities are more sensitive to changes in their energy burden if you’re walking long distances. So it makes sense for men to take the hit in their energy burden.”
But this apparently chivalrous behaviour only applies to potential sexual partners. If the woman is just a friend or an ordinary office colleague the man doesn’t bother to adjust his pace at all. And if he’s with a fellow male it will spur his in- built competitive instincts and he will actually speed up by as much as four per cent.
Do you find this research oddly reassuring? I do. What it shows is that despite the best efforts of such grisly, meddling, feminist campaigners such as Harriet Harman there are still some areas of male and female behaviour which equality legislation cannot touch.
No doubt it won’t be long before an Equal Walking Speeds Bill is proposed by shadow equalities minister Gloria De Piero to ensure that in future all male and female walkers have their pace strictly regulated by a Ministry of Walks- sanctioned pedometer.
But we’re not the same whatever Harriet Harman and Gloria De Piero and the commissars of the EU might imagine. As the father of both male and female children I can testify to the innumerable areas of life in which women are manifestly superior. They’re better at sly cruelty and devious manipulation; they’re better at getting whatever they want from vulnerable men using methods like delicious cake baking, eyelid batting or tears; they’re better at communicating, multi- tasking, looking adorable, making rooms nice, bossing people about, remembering everyone’s birthdays…
Until quite recently society compensated men for their inferiority by granting them special privileges: being the only sex allowed to fight in combat zones; being last off sinking ships; being louder, more drunken and vulgar; running companies; smoking cigars in men- only clubs; displaying their gentlemanliness by holding doors open for women; carving the Sunday joint; earning more at Wimbledon; not being expected to have skincare regimens.
One by one, though, each of these privileges is being removed by a leftyfeminist culture which insists that the differences between men and women are largely a social construct rather than a biological one. This belief requires quite a stretch of the imagination. For example, it asks you to believe that the reason there aren’t more female MPs or company chairmen or generals is mainly the result of a patriarchal society’s inbuilt sexism and almost nothing to do with the fact that women possess wombs.
THIS is what is so nostalgiainducing about that research on walking speeds. What Dr Wall- Scheffler may unwittingly have stumbled on here is the very last surviving relic of unfettered male behaviour in an otherwise feminised age. What it shows is the male instinctively handicapping himself in order to accommodate the needs of what he perceives as the weaker sex. Her limbs are shorter than his; her pace slower; her muscles weaker. ( Well obviously, she is designed for sitting in the cave, stirring the pot and looking after baby Ugalug, not chasing after wild beasts). So in order to woo her he is demonstrating his caring, nurturing side by bringing himself down to her level. Wow! Just how hideously sexist can you get?
Had this disgraceful behavioural trait been discovered before I’m sure measures would have been taken to deal with it earlier – probably at the nursery stage. “Don’t throw stones Johnny. Don’t jeopardise your health and safety by playing conkers. And don’t slow down when you’re walking with Wendy. It makes Wendy feel patronised, as if you’re suggesting that she is the weaker sex and she’s not. You can walk just as fast as Johnny does, can’t you, Wendy?”
My wife actually walks much, much faster now than we did in our courting days – so fast I can scarcely catch up with her. I wonder: is she trying to tell me something about how she feels being married to a sexist pig?
JOHN INGHAM IS AWAY