Are men and women really opposite? For a long time, thinkers have been describing males and females as opposite entities not only because they look different but also when it comes to behavior they respond to the same situation in entirely opposite ways. Women have been equated to everything gentle and men represented everything tough. Kind of beauty and the beast situation. No doubt that there are opposing differences between men and women in terms of how they think, their problem solving ability and expression of different emotions, what amuses me is the strange fact that they seem to love these differences and tend to get attracted to one another because of these differences. Hence, the notion, “opposites attract”. I believe it has been borrowed from the physical world where one sees opposite magnetic poles attracting each other and positively and negatively charged particles attracting each other. However, poets and literateurs have missed the fact that two different objects can also attract each other owing to the gravitational force working on them which is a function of their mass not their polarity. What I want to indicate here is that in order to attract, two objects not necessarily have to be opposite in properties. Thus men and women do not have to be opposite in order to attract each other.
It is probably more rational to accept that they are just different. Although, I accept that “women are from Venus and men are from Mars” (contrary to the title of this article), biologically, men and women belong to the same species and they have a lot more in common than they are different. Genetically, they both have 22 pairs of somatic chromosomes called autosomes and one pair of “sex” (read gender) chromosome. In this sex chromosome pair, women have XX and men have XY. It is due to this Y chromosome that males are males and females are not. If you have read until this, keep reading.
I will try to look at this aspect at a more higher resolution which will reveal that they are not that different at all.
SRY, a master regulator gene of sex determination is situated on the Y chromosome and its expression during embryonic stages determines the gender of the individual. It regulates a bunch of genes those are mostly transcription factors and induces expression of a variety of hormones and signaling molecules leading to the development of male gonads. Most important among these hormones is testosterone which not only works on the gonads but also on several target tissues including brain. Probably, that could be one reason why men think differently, well if not in an opposite way. However, at this point, if you think that we have singled out the main difference, you are wrong. It is not a difference per se. You will be surprised to know that women also make testosterone. A closer look at the steroidogenic pathways would reveal that they are very similar except that women have Aromatase, an enzyme that uses up testosterone to make Estrogen, one of the major gender determining hormones present in the females. Ideally, this enzyme should not be expressed in males. So, what’s the big deal? Aren’t they different after all? Well, these steroidogenic pathways operate on a tight balance where every biochemical step is regulated by feedbacks and dynamic chemical equilibriums. It is very likely that this balance could be slightly tripped on one or the other side depending on some environmental cues. In fact, recent findings suggest that males do make Estrogens albeit at a very very low level compared to females and females don’t
really exhaust all the testosterone to make estrogen. Actually, in addition to testosterone presence of traces of other androgens, metabolites that are intermediates to testosterone are also found in the females. Previously, it was thought that these hormones could not cross the blood-brain barrier. It is now well established that these steroid hormones have receptors in brain and definitely influence the way impulse is transmitted there. Traces of androgens are not just excess they are really required for normal health in a female. Not sure if the same thing is true with Estrogens in males. That’s why I believe that every woman has a man within her as every man has a woman in him. Honestly, don't you feel it that way?
Additionally, environmental pollutants that mimic hormones can also trip the balance of this 'gender authenticity' and may produce phenotypes which could be intermediates between two extremes eg. ideal male and ideal female. So we will have a whole bunch of different mentalities (if not physicalities) ranging from female-ish male to male-ish female and we cannot tell one as the opposite of the other. This is definitely a gift of industrialization and that is what we are really finding around us in our time in the world we live in. This may also explain the gay and lesbian tendencies in human population and also in other animal species like primates.
