Egalitarianism and Gender Differences

By the standard of the strict gender egalitarian, most people - both women and men - have some beliefs that they would regard as being chauvinistic. However there are miles to go between someone who thinks that there are positive, life-affirming, differences between men and women, and a real misogynist who thinks that women are evil and wants a woman for his punching bag. It is important to draw the distinction between the two, or else find oneself falling into the error of hating everyone except for a small subculture, driving away potential allies, and becoming totally ineffective on the political stage.

My stance on this matter is not a usual one, but one that most people (except for committed misogynists and committed misandrists) should find reasonable. Men and women possess the mind and the will, in which they are similar; and they also possess a sexual and emotional nature in which they differ. The logical outcome of this is that in matters involving the mind and the will - matters such as business, work, politics, science, media, education, law, medicine and the military - women should rise to have full equality with men. And the other side is that in matters pertaining to the emotional and sexual nature, the heterosexual men and women should form fulfilling relationships to fulfill that nature and to produce and sustain new life (the homosexuals should be able to have similarly fulfilling relationships with each other).

Denying either nature leads to the woman having a semi-life; and a full life will see her actualizing both natures.

So you're a man, what do you know about such things? For that matter Thomas Jefferson was an aristocrat, yet he worked for a society that would work for peasants and pioneers even though he had no personal experience being either of these things. Yes I am a man; however I've also known a lot of women and been a friend, a confidant or a romantic partner to a number of them. None of these women were stupid, and all were strong and articulate people. And the message I got from all of them was: They are against political correctness but in favor of women's rights. They want to be feminine; they also want to be treated right while at it.

And that to me comes across as a totally reasonable thing to want.

With feminism itself, we see all sorts of directions, some of them better than others. Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine McKinnon were both feminists; however their messages were totally different from one another's. One celebrated love, and the other told women to avoid man-woman relationships. It is the message of Mary Wollstonecraft that carries the greatest benefit even now, two centuries after the fact.

Yes, there will be female tomboys; yes, there will be effeminate men. However most men will want to be masculine, and most women will want to be feminine. That doesn't mean that one should be the master and that the other should be the slave. It means that there are genetic real-world differences in men and women, and these differences are life-affirming.

Political correctness does women a grave disservice by denying them the right to their femininity. A genuine feminist will seek to better women's lot both at work and at home, not hound women out of their sexual and emotional natures out of a mistaken belief that equality is the same thing as sameness and that anything that is not sameness with men is a patriarchal construct designed to make women into slaves. The differences between XX chromosomes and XY chromosomes are real, biological, and, for the most part, beneficial. They are essential to perpetuation of human life; they are essential to all higher life as such.

What this means is that the gender sameness ideal is not reflective of reality. Positive treatment is a right thing to want; assimilation is not. Instead of hounding women out of their sexual and emotional nature, the person who actually wants to improve women's lot will work instead toward improving the climate for actualization of both the intellectual-volitional and the emotional-sexual natures: Toward making both life at home and life outside the home a positive experience for the woman.

And then women will be able to have better lives for real.