I'm not a sexist, I'm a realist.

Rationalization is the denaturalization (read: castration) of society. Humanity was giving the gift of sentience yet we are the most destructive force on the planet, unable to live at one with nature. This is the embodiment of the constant struggle of our minds versus nature. I'm going to attempt to explain how this dichotomy affects Gender Roles in our modern society. To understand the nature of genders, let's look at the basic biological factors that comprise the base of our raison d'etre.

Men have unlimited quantities of sperm, their survival is inherently dependent on spreading the seed as far and as wide as possible to ensure the permanence of their genetic material. This is maximized by increasing the frequency of copulation and the number of unique sexual partners. Standards of beauty are nature's indication of health. Long hair, clear skin, well proportioned face, and hourglass hips are all ways of ensuring that your mate is healthy and will produce healthy offspring. Women have a limited amount of eggs (genetic material) released in a ~30 year window that are fertile in very small windows. Their survival is dependent on maximizing the survival of each of her eggs by providing not only a healthy injection of genetic material from a mate but by ensuring that the child can survive to reach sexual maturity for further reproduction. This is maximized by nesting, or creating a stable environment. It is here that nature gives us needs of protection, provision and nurturing.

So man want to have multiple partners and women want to maximize their offspring's survival by choosing the best mate and keeping him. How does this compromise work without denying our nature? Man has chosen to stabilize their monogamous relationships in rudimentary society by capitalizing on the fact that monogamous relationships are the most efficient way to raise a child and the most focused way to provide protection, provision and nurturing for his offspring because of the likelihood that their are indeed his genetic material.  All the while, maintaining their basic needs for confidence and decisiveness by seeing and directing the use of their resources.

Neither form of community is wrong. The first is allows a whole community to provide and care for everyone in it because you don't know who could be your child so you are forced to pool your resources together, useful in a communal society system. The second is a nuclear family which has a higher stability and more focused resource that excels in our capitalist society.

Yet somewhere along the way, we have lost touch with nature and have used rationality to fight against it instead of coexisting with it. By nature, men are stable providers, confident hunters, decision-makers, etc. In contrast, women are nurturing, relational, optimizers, etc. It's not about who is better or more well treated than the other, it's about compromise and working together without denying our basic instincts. Compromise isn't about dominance it's about making decisions that are mutually beneficial to the parties involved. Relationships that are one-sided tend to yield instability between the Giver and the Taker. In less psychological terms, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Men need to ensure that their needs are met just as well as women. A Man is not a Man without being a provider because his resources are not being utilized, and a Women is insecure and afraid when she doesn't have stability. Confidence and high self-esteem become the rules of the relationship road and not sensitivity and self-denial. In the end, relationships are about meeting the most basic needs, society has just decided to make it seem more complicated by adding criteria.

Men should never deny their manhood of what makes them who they are, confident and stable. Women should embrace stability as a basic tenet of their survival instincts and should receive provision and protection from their male counterparts in turn by offering their strengths: beauty, relationship, comfort, sexual fulfillment, etc. You may ask why this post is primarily directed towards men, it may well be that I feel much pity for my fellow man, but it's also physiological. Men and women both produce testosterone in their bodies, but only women produce estrogen. It has been shown that men act more manly with more testosterone and the same with women, whereas women can naturally express their estrogen but men can only repress testosterone levels not produce estrogen. The call is for men to embrace their testosterone and learn to utilize the benefits and for women to embrace their feminine side. Women have had to express their testosterone levels because men have repressed theirs; all a result of the miseducation of society's overemphasis on liberation and individuality.

This miseducation about individualism, selfishness and liberation of conservative ideals has served to unbalance the equation so that compromise is a fortuitous occurrence and not the rule. Eventually we will need to reach a point where unity and individuality can coexist in a post modern society where men can be men and women can be women.

Eric Zuniga