"The differences between the sexes are the single most important fact of human society"
About this Quote
A sentence like this is designed to sound like anthropology when it’s really a manifesto. George Gilder isn’t offering a neutral observation; he’s staking a claim in a long-running culture war about gender roles, family structure, and what counts as “natural” social order. The absolutism does the heavy lifting. “Single most important” isn’t a conclusion reached after weighing variables like class, race, technology, or institutions. It’s a rhetorical power move: take sex difference off the table of debate by declaring it the foundation everything else must rest on.
The subtext is a defense of hierarchy disguised as realism. “Differences” reads scientific, but it’s elastic enough to smuggle in expectations about work, parenting, sexuality, and authority. The phrase “human society” widens the frame to imply universality, inviting the reader to see dissent as naive or ideological. That’s a familiar conservative technique: make contested norms feel like bedrock.
Context matters. Gilder emerged as a prominent voice in late-20th-century American conservatism, often arguing that stable families and distinct gender roles underwrite economic and social health. In that landscape, the line functions as a rebuttal to feminism’s push for parity and to more recent ideas of gender as fluid or socially constructed. It’s also a preemptive answer to modern data showing that many “differences” shrink or flip depending on policy, culture, and opportunity. The quote works by flattening complexity into certainty, then asking the reader to mistake certainty for truth.
The subtext is a defense of hierarchy disguised as realism. “Differences” reads scientific, but it’s elastic enough to smuggle in expectations about work, parenting, sexuality, and authority. The phrase “human society” widens the frame to imply universality, inviting the reader to see dissent as naive or ideological. That’s a familiar conservative technique: make contested norms feel like bedrock.
Context matters. Gilder emerged as a prominent voice in late-20th-century American conservatism, often arguing that stable families and distinct gender roles underwrite economic and social health. In that landscape, the line functions as a rebuttal to feminism’s push for parity and to more recent ideas of gender as fluid or socially constructed. It’s also a preemptive answer to modern data showing that many “differences” shrink or flip depending on policy, culture, and opportunity. The quote works by flattening complexity into certainty, then asking the reader to mistake certainty for truth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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