Before I address the question let's do some background and talk about instinct by way of the birds and the bees. Every Fall, in the northern hemisphere the birds fly south; down there it's Spring. When it's Spring up here (and Fall down there) they fly back up here. Then they mate, make a nest, the female lays the eggs, they incubate the eggs, and feed the baby birds when they hatch. There's no school for birds to learn how to do this; it's instinct. With the bees they know how to make honeycomb, beehives, collect necter and put it in the honeycomb and make honey, feed the baby bees, do their dance back at the hive when they find a new source of nectar, and so on. Again, no school for this; it's instinct. This knowledge that's in the brains of the birds and the bees is put there because of their genes.

With humans we don't think of ourselves as having instincts because the stuff we know is learned. The feminists use that argument to claim that men's and women's brains are the same at birth and the differences that develop in our behaviour, attitudes, etc. are all learned, from upbringing, school, TV, advertising, etc.

But I claim that we do have instincts but that they're more subtle because they're preferences. In all cases instincts are a product of evolution; they make the species better able to survive, or more accurately better able for their offspring to survive since it's the offspring that will carry on their genes.

One of the things that's important to realize about human instincts, these pre-programmed preferences, is that because they're formed inside our brains with no learning, they have a much higher level of "truthfulness" than things that are learned. Things that are learned we can question, analyze, and discard. These instinctive preferences are much harder to change because our brains tell us that they're utterly true. We grow into them and aren't aware that they've become a part of our thinking. Another thing about them is that since they're part of our genes, they're a part of our species, we all agree that they're true, and they become a part of our culture. Since they're a part of our culture and appear in advertising, movies, etc. that makes it easy for the feminists to blame the environment for the gender differences in thinking. And because they're things that have grown into our thinking as we grow up it's hard to identify them. One way to identify instinctive preferences is if you know something is true and one big reason you know it's true is "because everyone knows that".

Here are a few examples I can think of. Have you ever smelled rotting meat? It's incredibly horrible smelling; you want to get away and not have to smell it as fast as possible. The same thing, although not as strong, is smelling feces/poop. Another one is drinking water. We all want our drinking water to be cold. Drinking warm water (or a Coke, etc.) is distasteful. Those two are gender neutral. For a gender specific example consider how men find young women more sexually attractive than older women. In all of these cases it's not hard to think of biological reasons why evolution favored these preferences.

Back to my original question of how do we define a successful person, I think this is another instinct and a gender specific one. For us men it's simple; having a job and making money. More generally, being a good provider. The more money you make the more successful you're thought to be.

For women it's not about making money, and even more interesting is that it's not quantitative and it's sort of inverse from ours. For women they feel like they've missed out and not had a full life if they've never had any kids. They don't need to have many kids; having only one is sufficient. (Even if they have a job they feel compelled to have kids.)

I thought I'd post this after having read that thread, "how come guys always have to work on themselves". One of the responses sort of tangentially touched on my thesis so I thought I'd bounce my idea off you guys.