An anonymous commenter observes at Steve Sailer’s site:
I make up a lot of music playlists on Youtube, and my stats say men are about twice as interested in music than women, no matter what type of music it is. Even when the musician is gay, more men are still willing to listen to him than women. On average, men are more fanatical about their hobbies than women, and they like to delve more deeply.
Someone once said that this trait comes from the male sense of hierarchy, and that when a man walks into a room, he’ll rank all women by looks and all the men by pecking order, and this is an instinctive reflex. If he’s an artist himself, he immediately asks, ‘Is this guy better than me or is he worse?’ If he doesn’t create himself but is still interested in music, he immediately starts scanning the entire field and ranking all the talent. If he likes literature, he has to rank all the writers by importance, and this is one reason why women complain that all the literary critics are male.
Men are such compulsive rankers than of course they have to lay down the law about why certain books are more important than others. It practically kills them not to. They’ll thrash around like dying fish if you tell them everything is only subjective opinion. They think it’s an outrage if you don’t clearly establish who is great and why. Men think society doesn’t work right unless you establish clear hierarchies of brains and talent, and thus indicate what you need to pay attention to and what deserves to be ignored, and I can’t quarrel with that. It’s plain to me that the trait has both a genetic basis and a Darwinian advantage, because it helped primitive human society advance into the modern era and pass on the gains of each new generation, building on top of the previous one.
