"Girls ‘n Boys" - Commentary by Tony Seton

Girls ‘n Boys

The problem we have today is not about Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative but about masculine and feminine. The plain fact is that we are confused about what it means to be a man and a woman in today’s society. This is partly a result of our failure to digest the women’s liberation movement properly, and our eternally being confused about sex.

This latter confusion is in large measure due to the fact that our gender identities have been befuddled by our confusion over rights and roles. In our rush to make everyone equal, we failed to distinguish between equal and same, and therein lies the crux of our problem. For equal and same are not the same. The two genders can have equal rights, but there are significant differences between them nonetheless.

Ken Wilbur wrote of a long-ago culture that thrived on horse-breeding. They discovered after a while that women riding horses wasn’t a good thing when it came to child-bearing -- there were too many miscarriages -- so women stopped riding. It didn’t mean that they were less important -- they remained equals with the men -- but it meant that these people had the smarts to realize that if they wanted to continue their society, men and women had to contribute in different capacities.

We don’t seem to have learned that today. We seem to believe that all men and all women should be allowed to do anything, regardless of the particular talents and abilities that accrue to the different genders, and that goes against the natural grain. Our response has been to lower standards of performance, in some cases, providing cosmetic non-solutions.

The reason why problems have cropped up is that when we said women were equal to men, we didn’t change the society in which the two genders would function. It was always a male bastion, with male rules and traditions born of maleness, but instead of figuring out how to make the society also-female, we tried to simply insert women into the men’s system. No wonder we’ve had conflict.

The point is that we need to adjust our thinking about both the home and the workplace to better conform with our new attitudes about gender equality, to have men and women contribute their best selves to work and family life, with less focus on rules and more on the individuals.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.