Are men less demanding, more easygoing? Or more self-centred?

Oh God, I thought, am I imagining things? I checked again. I wasn’t imagining it.

Over the past few days I had received WhatsApp messages from five or six males of different ages, fairly evenly split between relatives and friends/acquaintances.

Over the same period, I had also received WhatsApp messages from several female friends/acquaintances of different ages.

Nothing unusual there, and the messages and the senders were unrelated.

But here’s the thing.

I definitely noticed something a bit strange.

The males, all of whom, as it happens, have spouses or partners and/or families, had WhatsApp profile photographs of either just themselves, or of a pet.

At the same time, I realised that each of the six or so female WhatsApp profile pictures, were, without exception, of themselves with a partner/spouse/children or of themselves in a happy family group.

Hang on a second here, I thought. I looked through my WhatsApp contacts list.

Believe it or not, and with no exceptions that I found at the time of looking at least, the male contacts in the database who had posted profile pictures to the platform, had photographs only of themselves or of a pet.

With few exceptions, the female contacts, including myself, had WhatsApp profile pictures of themselves with partners/spouses/children or family.

I consulted a very good friend of mine. He is one of the males in my contacts list with a profile photograph only of himself.

He sighed when he saw me coming. Took off his earphones. Reluctantly put down his power tool.

Nope, he said, he saw nothing unusual in this at all. If it was the man’s WhatsApp he said, naturally a man would post a picture of himself. He was unable to cast any light on the pet-photo issue.

But really, I persisted, why did the vast majority of males in my contacts list seem to have pictures of only themselves or pets, while most of the female WhatsApp profile pictures were photographs of themselves with loved ones?

He sighed. Smirked. “Women are just complicated,” he commented. Clearly satisfied with this explanation, he replaced the earphones, picked up the power tool and returned to work.

The logic of this completely eluded me. Why posting a picture of yourself with your kids on your WhatsApp means you are a more complicated and demanding person than someone who opts for a picture showing only themselves beats me.

But of course men really do love to believe they are more easygoing, less complicated and less demanding beings than women. But that’s not necessarily always the case, and it doesn’t explain the WhatsApp picture thing. 

I felt there had to be more to it.

You can call this confirmation bias if you like, but I found an article in Time magazine about the findings of a study on nearly half a million participants which took place over the course of more than three decades. It found that men consistently scored higher in tests for narcissism – regardless of age – than women. In other words, men are simply much more self-centred than women.

The researchers said this difference in the levels of narcissism between males and females is probably rooted in what they explained was “ingrained societal gender stereotypes”. Basically, women are often severely criticised for being aggressive or authoritative, which as we all know is something that is often lauded in males. This, according to the research, places pressure on women to suppress displays of narcissistic behaviour.

This finding was reflected on an interesting website called XY, which explores issues of gender and sexuality and the daily lives of men and women. 

It too reported that males are hugely overrepresented as narcissists and that a primary reason for this is the way boys are raised.

When it comes to boys, it said, society raises little “me-me-me-machines” who see themselves as masters of all they survey. On top of that we tend to excuse bad behaviour by boys with the cliché that “boys will be boys,” which implies that we should not expect them to be responsible, respectful or conscientious. In other words, we raise boys with the message that the rules don’t apply to them.

We also tend to give them too much authority too early. Although boys are not “little men,” society often uses that term when referring to them.

On top of that if parents split up, a boy who remains in the care of his mother is often told that he is now the “man of the house” which implies that his mother needs him to fulfil the role of the man in her life. Not only is this a ridiculous and deeply unfair expectation to place on a boy, it’s also an excellent way to create a narcissist by giving him an exaggerated sense of his own importance.

There are lots of well-intentioned things we seem to do that tend to make our boys self-centred and narcissistic – for example, parents let sons have their say without interruption more than they do daughters, while studies show that in school teachers make more eye contact with boys than with girls.

So is this WhatsApp photo gender divide thing caused by men being more easy-going, less complicated and less demanding than women, or because they’re simply more self-centred? You decide.