I recently listened to a podcast that brings to the forefront the thinking processes of remarkable people and the way they construct their ideas.
The episode explored themes such as masculinity, how a man perceives himself at different stages of life, the feeling of inadequacy, relationship dynamics, what women expect in a relationship, the inner child, the inner adolescent, and the mature man coexisting within the same identity, the need for control, and many other topics.
This conversation prompted a much deeper reflection in me on the subject and on gender identity.
Ever since I became aware of the world around me, I noticed the tensions, power struggles, and conflicts of interest between women and men.
As a child, I perceived them more as unpleasant sensations in my body— a knot in my stomach, a vague tightness, a restlessness or a discomfort difficult to explain.
Later on, I tried to give these sensations cognitive explanations or to filter them through my relational experiences. Yet even today those explanations haven’t provided a fully satisfying conclusion.
Living systems on our planet are deeply interconnected, and mere biological reasoning cannot directly explain the relationships between women and men or complex social phenomena.
Chromosomal XX/XY differences, hormonal variations, or anatomical structures—the result of biological determinism—do not automatically generate interpersonal conflict.
After all, we share the same cellular chemical composition—C, H, O, N, S, P, etc.—the same organelles, the same cellular and biochemical functions, the same basic organs and systems, and 95–99% of our genome is identical.
No other species generates social tensions of such complexity, even though they also have “different hormones.”
Thus, biological explanations satisfy me only partially.
I believe, however, that the true origin of these frictions emerges along the phylogenetic scale, with the evolution of humans and the brain.
Neuronal connections grow increasingly sophisticated, the prefrontal cortex expands, and language becomes more complex, supporting new capacities for symbolization and the creation of internal narratives or collective “realities.”
This impressive mental abstraction gives rise to the social phenomena absent in primitive humans: values, norms, conflicting interests, and power relations.
Thus, what I perceived in childhood as bodily discomfort, generated by intricate neural networks, was not caused by my grandmother or grandfather, by my mother or father, by physical differences between the sexes, by hormones or chromosomes, but by the emergent structures of the human mind—capable of constructing symbolic worlds in which interests, roles, and power intersect and often collide.
The child was living the consequences of these constructed mental worlds, not the direct effects of anatomical or morphological differences.
The opportunities created by advanced biological structures bring challenges in other areas of life.
The fact that we can imagine, project, and value things different from what others imagine, value, and project gives rise to discord, misunderstandings—both personal and communal.
Human tensions came packaged with:
– the ability to anticipate the consequences of our behavior,
– complex decision-making,
– communication through spoken language, writing, and symbols,
– the transmission of knowledge and experience across individuals and generations,
– the capacity to learn from past events,
– the formation of concepts, theories, narratives, and hypothetical scenarios,
– the facilitation of innovation, and the development of art, science, and culture.
And it is still our responsibility—and honor—to bring harmony to these opposites, precisely thanks to the incredible biological endowment of modern Homo sapiens.
Biology sets the stage, but the human mind directs the performance.
The mind is not a thing or an intangible concept.
It is an emergent, embodied, and relational process sustained by the organism’s material structure.
Stephen Grossberg, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Statistics at Boston University, has developed dynamic mathematical models for neural processes using nonlinear differential systems that describe the emergence of adaptive behaviors.
Through these equations, he offered a formal framework for understanding how perception, memory, learning, and attention arise from extremely complex neural interactions, with a high degree of individual specificity.
Today I understand that tensions between the sexes do not derive from fundamental differences in structure or composition, but from the way the human brain, through imagination and abstraction, creates social realities in which culturally reinforced conflicts, learned gender roles, internalized expectations about “how the other should be,” and divergent interests become possible and visible.
The next step in the metabolism of society is not to repeatedly reinstall a logic of opposing camps within this polarity, but to cultivate sustained mental hygiene that facilitates the integration of opposites and the formation of interdependent, flexible, and coherent relationships.
Such an orientation encourages the transformation of polarities into functional complementarities and the conversion of tensions into constructive dialogue.
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