A Brit journalist has found a way to prove that men and women really are different–it’s based on what we read.


After works by Dan “Da Vinci” Brown and Patricia Cornwell, the two top sellers in the U. K. are “Love and Devotion,” by Erica James–which sold an astounding 18,188 copies in one week–and “The Increment,” by Chris Ryan, which sold 17,687 the same week.


“The Increment,” by an author who served in the Bravo Two Zero SAS patrol in the Gulf War, is about Matt Browning, a macho soldier who didn’t quite make it into a cold-blooded team of killers called “The Increment.” He runs a bar but is blackmailed into going on “one last mission.”


Women are called “muffins” in “The Increment,” and there are no children, except for a 12-year-old who is tortured for information. By contrast:


“There is *some* violence in ’Love and Devotion’ but not much. Two brothers have a brief fistfight outside a sherry party and a grandad smashes up his own pergola and rose garden with a spade, while having a mental breakdown. But there are no automatic weapons whatsoever.


“Harriet Swift is 32, single, childless, working in IT. When her sister and her husband are killed in a car crash,


“Harriet gives up her job, her flat in Oxford and her dull boyfriend to go back to the family home in Cheshire to look after her orphaned niece and nephew, Carrie and Joel, nine and four.


“Will she find a man to share this challenge with her?” Harriet’s world is “more fleshed out” with attention to the divorces and marriages in her circle.


You’ve got the picture.


Do I need to tell you which book is bought by men and which is bought by women? As David Sexton of the Evening Standard notes:


“They are written for readerships as automatically and emphatically divided by gender as public toilets. Reading them together doesn’t just suggest that men and women are different, it makes it seem extraordinary that the sexes should be able to communicate at all, let alone to the extent of mating successfully. Not that that’s commonly seen, these days, in the longer term.”