(Written June 1, 2015, edited October 18, 2015)
for The Bold Pursuit
So much has been said and written
about gender (in)equality that the literature is a maze of confusion,
distortions, and outright lies. Lucky
you, you have stumbled upon a commentary that sorts it all out for you, neither
deprecating women (or men), nor mythologizing them.
The reality is that while men and
women are clearly not completely interchangeable (the myth), there is a lot more
overlap in our separate skills than one might assume. The error we often make is to look at the
extremes of performance, both the best and the worst, and to ignore the vast
middle ground where most of us live.
For example, on one extreme side, the
National Football League used to have a rule which stated that a football team
consists of eleven “men” on the field.
The National Organization of Women attacked this rule as sexist, since
it prohibited women from participating.
When the NOW threatened action, and demanded the rule be changed, some
of us expected the NFL to put up a fight on several obvious grounds. Instead, the NFL immediately gave in,
changing the rule to indicate “persons.”
Thus the NOW gained an important victory for women who wish to play
football in the NFL as an equal of men.
Sarcasm mode, of course, since in the years after that change, not one
woman has played in any regular season NFL game. They can’t get through training camp.
The NOW’s error here of course, was
to look for equality at the extreme of performance. The natural physical differences between
ordinary men and ordinary women in general may be arguably small, but at the
upper levels of brawn and brute strength, men occupy more than ninety-nine
percent of the population. Nature is not
concerned with fairness or ideology.
What is often ignored is the lower
extreme. Here, women rule supreme. For starters, men are hugely more likely to
be imprisoned than are women, and are much more likely to commit suicide. Boys perform much more poorly than girls in
the early years of school, cannot read as well, and drop out at a higher rate. The resulting lack of life skills among lower
class males has devastating consequences, for themselves and for society.
It is here that all the
quick-and-easy explanations vanish. We
can understand that women’s bones are more fragile than those of a comparably
heavy man’s, making football into a deadly sport for any woman at the highest
level. So what? Few of us play professional football. We live in the real world of jobs, business
and school.
The
explanations for male inferiority at the everyday level of work and family,
however, involve a universe of factors, each of which multiplies the others,
until the maze becomes too difficult to navigate, even for the so-called
experts.
One
of the first factors to consider is technology.
Gone are the days when many jobs required brute strength. Lifting fifty-pound loads repeatedly for
hours on end is now done by machines. So
has digging ditches, and likewise, many other jobs that women could not do as
well as men. Had they been able to, the “greedy”
entrepreneurs would have hired them at lower wages, and fired the men.
Women
can, however, operate heavy construction equipment, effectively enabling one
woman to do the work previously requiring a hundred men.
Another
factor is economic. Women can now out-earn
their husbands, and in so doing, need not accept their former role as household
servants. If the man threatens to walk
out, and to leave the woman without support, the woman might very well pack up
and leave first, support herself, and find better circumstances in the process.
Yet
another vital factor is that society itself has undergone swift and radical
changes, even going so far as to decrease that one previously indisputable area
of difference between men and women— reproduction. Contraception and abortion have enabled women
to unshackle themselves from the inconvenience of unwanted pregnancy.
This
new found freedom has, however, also shackled women as much as it has liberated
them, and done more harm than good for them.
With contraception came an increased tolerance for premarital sexual
activity. That, in turn, increased
tolerance for out-of-wedlock pregnancy, the very thing that contraception had
promised to reduce, but counter-intuitively increased.
The
result of this has been an outrageous statistic of fatherless children, which
in turn increases poverty. Fatherless
children tend (but certainly not in all cases) to behave more criminally and
more promiscuously, not only perpetuating these social ills, but accelerating
them.
It
is a shame, then, that gender inequality has been subject to so much
disinformation. Movies like GI Jane are taken by many young people
to be reflections of reality, so much so that when reality bites, the
inequality is blamed on the unfairness of a male dominated society. Women like Hillary Clinton scorn the practice
of paying women less than men, and yet Clinton herself follows this practice with
her employees. When liberal professor
Lawrence Summers dared to explain some gender differences in employment as
being inherent in the desires of women to pursue different careers than men, he
was booted out of his job. Liberal
tolerance has its limits, and the limit is essentially zero.
Gender
equality should be about rights, dignity and respect, not about quotas in elite
Army combat units. To achieve true
equality, we must first recognize the natural differences— the good and natural
differences— between men and women, even between boys and girls. We must reconsider some of our politically
correct taboos, for example, the one that forbids educating young boys in
classes separate from young girls.
That
is no easy task. The progressive left
will oppose progress of any kind, by every means available. To them, equality means hammering down every
nail that rises above the others. In
order to lift society above its perverse definition of equality, men and women
must work together, as equal partners, and we must do so in the real world.
Addendum
Two women recently passed the rigorous US Army's Ranger School training course, and were awarded the prestigious Ranger shoulder patch, along with all the benefits and duties which are attached to Ranger status. In order to help them pass the course, the women were given special exemptions to compensate for perceived past unfairness, without which they would not have passed. While supporters of the women contend that these exemptions only leveled the playing field, past history has shown that such accommodations for women tend to become permanent, disguised by lowering the standards for both men and women.
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