THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Elizabeth replied to my article about how girls and boys are different by agreeing with me, which is always nice. But she added a more important point: that when women get into a fight, there is no quarter, no rules of engagement, no Geneva Convention.

H.S. agreed with her, as Elizabeth ended, "Gentlemen, just stay out of these battles."

Feminists love to quote things like the old Roman Law. They point out that, according to those laws, women were reduced to cowering, helpless slaves.

But if you read real history, you see the usual proportion of Roman men, those all-powerful paterfamiliae, who were terrified of their wives.

As usual, I look for the simple explanation of this.

Here it is:

Men are physically stronger than women. As a result, women developed a form of defense that men have only gotten a name for in the last century.

It is called psychological warfare.

My brother is the father of three girls. Once when one of them was about three, she came up to him, cuddled up in his lap and said, "Daddy, I love you."

She then went into the next room.

My brother was charmed.

A minute later he heard her five-year-old sister in the other room whisper to that little girl, "Yes, that's how you do it." My brother is a pediatrician, so this did not surprise him in the least.

While men are learning to be men and warriors and writing great sagas about themselves, women are also learning how to be women. I have this paranoid feeling that if anyone wrote a history of THAT, the Sisterhood would kill them.