[Mark Allinson]

That should quieten things down.

Yes, I know what you mean, Mike.

Any un-PC reference to NATURE having anything to do with our lives and minds is usually met with shrieking, white-knuckled rage.

But Camille knows:

"Women have conceptualized less in history not because men have kept them from doing so but because women do not need to conceptualize to live ... Conceptualization and sexual mania may issue from the same part of the male brain [yes, sorry ladies, as science is now proving, male and female brains are different from the womb, and not as a result of social conditioning]. Fetishism, for instance, a practice which like most sex perversions is confined to men, is clearly a conceptualizing or symbol-making activity ... Projection is a male curse: forever to need someone or something to make oneself complete. This is one of the sources of art and the secret of its domination by males. The artist is the closest man has come to imitating woman's superb self-containment." Sexual Personae, pp 20-28.

These are the forces from Nature which lead to the imbalance in the figures for poetry.

[A. E. Stallings]

I think exasperation more than rage, Mark. Sure, there are statistically significant differences of female and male brains overall in Nature--but there are also individual differences that are larger on a case by case basis than these generalizations. Poets are individuals, not just a random statistical sample of the general population. There are men not driven to "create" anything, and women whose creative urge is towards art as much as/more than bearing children... Surely this is obvious.