Kevin: Not only that, but it's been found that if you simply give a person a shot of testosterone they become better at abstract reasoning.

Gil: Can I just add to that bit? Carol Giligan has done some studies on this notion of abstract reasoning. She describes men as looking at things through terms of justice and women as looking at things through terms as caring. And she uses a really nice illustration. I don't know if anyone's seen those ambiguous drawings, where you've got either a fish and a rabbit, or the vase and the two faces. She says that at only one time can you see the vase - if you're looking directly at the white - or you can look at the faces. And she says that if you take looking at the faces as being what men do, and looking at the vase as what women are doing . . . okay, one might see one of them better than the other. So men may be able to see the black faces better than women, but who says that this type of reasoning and this type of judgment has to be better?

Kevin: Most of our listeners will probably know the illustration you're talking about - the vase and the two faces. So if we say women are looking at the vase, and men are seeing the two faces - this is just like I was saying before: women value feeling, men value permanence and control. So which of these two is better? And I'm putting it to our listeners, and to you in the studio, that if we want Truth, the only thing which is truly permanent, then what men are seeing is infinitely more valuable than what women are seeing! This is because women are only experiencing feelings - the same as what cows experience. All animals have intuitions and feelings.

Gil: Because we have valued reason in the past, we find better answers in reason now; but if we explore emotions we might find that eventually it will give us better answers.

Kevin: "Might"!

Gil: But reason hasn't made it better anyway, so I mean--

Kevin: Well, there's not many very rational men in the world today. But those men who are extremely rational - and again I'm thinking of people like the Buddha and Nietzsche and so on - have achieved an awful lot! What do you think, Sue?

Sue: Yes, this is it. We're talking here about this difference, and it strikes me as very important that women speak of wanting "equality", but they want equality with difference. And I tell you that you've got to have a standard. A standard has to be set. I'm all for women becoming liberated. I think I'm the only female, as was said earlier, who wants this. But what this means is that women have to become more masculine; they have to become men. Why, you may ask? Why should women change this pleasurable life they have, and have to struggle and strive and work hard and become self-reliant just for, let's say, the survival of the planet would be a good example; why should women change from their nice, happy, one-dimensional life, into this multi-structured, complex, striving human being? Well, if we don't have a whole--

Kevin: Consciousness.

Sue: Yes, consciousness, then you're not considering the consequences of your actions. If you're not conscious, you don't consider the consequences, and I tell you that women aren't conscious. They do not consider the consequences of any of their actions. Whereas men are conscious creatures, and therefore they can consider the consequences; then they can make changes. They can actually reason out what's necessary and what's to be done. They are self-reliant in the sense that they don't depend on everybody else to keep them bouyant - they'll go and do things by themselves. They'll have an ideal, they'll have a goal, they'll change the world, and they'll give their whole life over to it. And, as I say, men do this. Women can't do this. It's not in them to do it. I always say this: there's only one woman, and she's just got many faces. Because, as I've said before, she's not conscious, she's one dimensional, and her whole life is just this one-dimensional sort of "same thing" . . .

Kevin: Camille Paglia says that if women were running the world, we'd still be living in caves. What do you think of this idea? Do you think it's good to live in caves, or what?

Patricia: Actually, Camille Paglia . . . she's an interesting case.

Kevin: She is that!

Patricia: There have been a lot of things said, but one major thing which was pointed out a bit earlier was that women are feeling oriented, supposedly, and men are rational - they're more drawn to reason, to logic, and so on. I think what you were really saying about women is not so much that they're drawn to feelings, but that they're - at least what I'd hope to think you were saying - was more that they're negotiators or communicators. In the playground, little girls will become upset, not so much if their little friends aren't following the rules, but because they're not liked, or they're thrown out of the sand-pit. They need to be liked. They're told that they have to be liked, because otherwise they're not okay. So they tend to be communicators. They grow up communicating. On the other hand, boys, in the playground, learn to wipe their tears away, and keep a stiff upper lip, but they will also become aggressive if their other male friends don't follow the rules. Now if you consider the political arena . . . I mean, if we're trying to work out how we ought to live, not so much what the truth is; whether women are feeling oriented, and men are reason and logic oriented, not so much where the truth really sits - but how we ought to live. I mean, can you imagine what our political situation would be like, our global political situation, perhaps, if the parliamentary representation of women changed? I mean, if more women entered politics? I doubt very much that there'd be the screaming matches, the pathetic jokes about Paul Keating's bald patch, and so on. Women would take their communication skills into that context and I think a lot of wonderful things could come of that. I don't see that women should become men, whatever that means, and according to your definition it means becoming logical. I don't see not being able to communicate, and being aggressive and confrontational, as logical. They are two different things.