Gender Issues: Mars and Venus.

The mid-1980s was the peak of my social life. For someone like me to holiday with a group of other adult men was very unusual. I have always preferred lone backpacking trips. Being alone, there's was hardly any situations that brought disagreement. But when you have close friends, all of them single, who have much in common, these short breaks as a group were exhilarating. These holidays included long-distance cycling, which was the main activity we shared between us, both at home and abroad. Racing each other was never on the agenda, but there was at least one incident when one of our chaps purposely overtook me as I led the group, and then glanced behind with a smirk, as if to say, There, I can beat you!

Four of the five on one of our cycling trips, 1986.

Competition is never deeply buried, as my psychological makeup to compete was immediately surfacing. As I pulled out of the line, I pushed hard to accelerate my pedalling, and glided past him as I overtook to retake the lead. Then, as I was still pulling away, I heard him say words to the effect, There goes the Chairman of the Triathlon Committee!

Who knows, being the only active triathlete among players of a football team, perhaps I deserved the title, having successfully introduced the sport to our locality. Those were the days of peak fitness, taking in swimming, cycling and running, then stringing all three together to form one race against the clock - back then, a novelty sport affectionately known as the Sporting Trinity.

I recall with nostalgia that particular cycling jaunt. It was a circuit out of our hometown of Bracknell, onto country roads that took us over the Chiltern Hills, and it included an overnight stop at Streatley YHA, a picturesque village along the banks of the River Thames. Unlike other trips we did together, this group included the then-girlfriend of the guy who "stole" my lead. There were five of us altogether, four guys and one female.

We arrived at the foot of the Chiltern Hills ridge. I was leading as we all puffed our way uphill. When I reached the summit, I thought it was a good idea to halt, so that others can catch up and rest a little. As soon as I stopped, almost immediately, the young woman arrived. During the climb, she was right behind me but ahead of the other three fellows, including her boyfriend (who is now not only her husband but has recently become grandparents.)

Although all three men took in the situation quite well, since then, I have wondered what they might have felt being beaten on an uphill cycle ride by a woman. At about that time, we once partook in an all-male Tug O' War fun contest against another team, if I recall, we called ourselves The Ascot Heavyweights. The title says it all. There seems to be that inner desire for masculine strength, the need for competition, to prove ourselves among rivalry of the same gender.

I would have felt a sense of embarrassment in front of my mates as a triathlete had the young lass overtook me on her pedal cycle whilst climbing that hill. Am I being sexist? Prejudiced? A male chauvinist? Old school? Here, I let the reader decide. I must be honest with myself - even if I lose a large number of regular readers - I cannot stomach watching woman's football, rugby, or boxing. The latter is the worst. As far as I recall, boxing had always been exclusively male, at least my father loved watching boxing on TV whilst Mum had no interest in the sport whatever. Such stars of the day included Cassius Clay, Brian London, Joe Bugner, Sonny Liston, Henry Cooper, Vicente Saldivar, and many others. Checking over a list of all 665 professional world boxers from the 1960s, the list indicates that all of them were male.

For since I can remember, rugby was referred to as "the real he-man's game", and in comics, in particular, rugby players were drawn as in a scrum consisting of huge, broad-shouldered muscular men grimacing at each other. And in cricket, a Daily Mail sports journalist compared unfavourably the women's cricket to that of the men's game, focusing on the sheer force of the bowler when he aims the ball at the wicket, thus sending both stumps and bails cartwheeling across the pitch.

I grew up with the subconscious idea that Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, and a book of that title was published in 1992.* Two different planets. All the sports mentioned above - football (Association), rugby, boxing, cricket - were all Martian games. On the other hand, games such as netball and hockey were Venusian games, at least during my schooldays. In turn, I have also seen track-and-field athletics, including swimming, having both Martian and Venusian participants, although motor racing, as with horse racing, has always been primarily Martian.

Men are from Mars...

Last year (2021) I was taking my beloved wife to North Wales for a week's holiday. Since our train was due to depart from London Euston quite early the following morning, we decided to arrive in London on the previous evening and spend the night at a hotel just across the road from Euston Station. Since she was in a wheelchair and we had plenty of time on our hands, we decided to walk across London rather than use public transport with all the inconveniences a wheelchair would ensue.

It was the same day when England was to play Italy in the European Cup Final held at Wembley. There were massive crowds of England fans, especially around the Strand, Trafalgar Square, Charing Cross Road, and Leicester Square. Fortunately, as we progressed along Charing Cross Road towards Tottenham Court tube station, the crowds thinned out and we arrived at our hotel safely. But even from our room, we could hear continuous chanting from fans at a nearby pub.

Nearly all the fans were Martians with only a handful of Venusians among them. No wonder. The two teams were all men. This has made me wonder how London would have looked had the game been the Woman's European Cup final. Would the crowd be predominantly women? If so, would they have chanted in the same way as men with equal intensity? I doubt it. And would we had seen far fewer men chanting that evening for an England woman's victory?

Sport is one issue. Lately, I have read reports, seen and heard about this new phenomenon, basically, men who think they're in a "wrong body" and wish to become women (hence the inspiration for this blog). Staying in the realm of sport, there has been a recent report of transgender Emily Bridges, who wanted to partake in a woman's omnium cycling championships here in the UK. However, all the other competitors refused to compete with her, as her extra-strong former male muscles would have given her an unfair advantage. The ICU agreed and banned her from participating.

I find it rather astonishing that over the last few years, there is this growing trend in wanting to change gender - for a man to become a woman and vice-versa. Whether all this is tied to the declining use of the Bible as authority to be replaced by Darwinian evolution as indisputable scientific fact, or something else, I can only speculate. As a Creationist who accepts the truthfulness of the Bible, I can be sure that when in the early chapters of the Old Testament book of Genesis, all of God's creation, including man, is between male and female, then, to tamper with gender is surely very wrong. In truth, I'm not at all convinced that there is anything unsound with the body that was determined by the X or Y chromosome at conception and growing up in that gender thereafter. Rather, it's all to do with a distressed mind.

Whether children question their gender during their younger years, I guess, depends on each individual. There was a time when I, for one, wished that I was a girl. Could this be that I was attracted to them and thus, wanted to be one of them? Quite likely. However, it didn't take too long to appreciate my own gender, and such fetish gradually vanished before I reached my teenage years.

And here is the point: A mental intersection between two lines of thought. One is to accept his gender, nourish it, and set his mental pattern and likes towards masculine activities like I did. Or for a boy to keep on wishing to be female and allow such unfulfilled desires to linger and grow to the point of believing that "I was born in the wrong body" and desire a sex change.

For me, and in God's eyes, a man will always be a man and a woman be a woman.

And what I can see, it does look as if instead of Martians and Venusians both landing on Earth to fulfil their gender roles, Venus had invaded Mars. And not only in sport, but in the business world too. No longer, as a man, do I feel that we can have a man's world for ourselves, whether it's a golf club that used to admit only male members, working men's pubs, public schools, rugby, cricket, or boxing clubs, the cab of a truck, train or even an airline, or in the City - when there was a time all these venues were exclusively male.

No doubt, many may disagree with me, instead, promoting "women's equality" - but step outside. If you see roadworks in operation or a construction site, the underground pit at a coal mine, or the front line of a battlefield, as in the present case in Ukraine, will not the workers and fighters be predominantly male, if not entirely male? And to watch "the fairer sex" snub such rough environments as they advance in education leading to "respectable" high-ranking professions, attending once exclusively male clubs, even taking up trucking and bus driving - once icons of masculine vocations - do we men feel a sense of insecurity, a sense of our world invaded, the loss of fulfilment to think, to plan, to lead, to create, to produce, to provide, to feel worthy of being masculine? Could the invasion of Venus into Mars be one of the main reasons why suicide is the biggest killer of men in this country, due to a lack of self-esteem? That the female gender is perceived as becoming socially greater than the male gender and thus, more intelligent and useful?

Indeed, these are all generalisations. Every individual is unique in himself or herself. Each with his own thoughts, ideas, aspirations, ambitions. Yet, there's one book that gives answers to these issues. Yet, how our modern academics mythicise the Bible to mere fancy stories to their own peril!

...Women are from Venus.

A man and a woman are the two human genders that dominate the rest of all creation. Surely, God must see the man and the woman as the combined crown of beauty. A man and his wife. Each with a different purpose, but neither one greater than the other.

The Bible does teach that the wife should submit to her husband as the church submits to Jesus Christ. In turn, husbands are to love their wives as Christ loves the church. Just as God sees the church as his crowning glory, so the husband should see his wife in the same way. For if the husband loves his wife, he also loves himself. The husband's love for his wife is a far better gem than any ambition fulfilled. In turn, her submission to him as head of the house and main breadwinner will benefit his own well-being as well as that of his family.

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John Gray, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, 1992, Harper Collins publishers.