In the last seven posts I have written about various reasons why so many people today are denying the differences between women and men. Today I will focus on the reason that has caused all the others to come together with a kind of snowball effect.
We live in a culture obsessed with an ideal of equality. This is a good thing. The goal of equality has led to fairer treatment of minorities, women, the disabled, the old, and the young.
But as the idea of equality has become increasingly accepted, it has also been simplified. This simplification has resulted in, among other things, a mistaken assumption that for people to be equal, they must be the same.
As so often happens when defending difference, I must point out the obvious: sameness is not the same thing as equality.
Children are different than adults. The old really do know some things that younger generations don't. Vietnamese culture is different from Cuban culture. A Muslim sees the world in a very different light than a Buddhist. We recognize that these and many other groups are different. We want to preserve this difference while striving for equality.
Difference is what makes the goal of equality difficult. It would be easy, if we were all exactly the same.
But there is an ever growing number of people who want to take the easy way out. They insist on sameness even when difference is blatant. This is especially true when it comes to the differences between women and men.
It's easy to see how the problem began. To achieve economic equality, it is necessary for women to receive the same pay as men for doing the same amount of work. We want roughly the same number of women as men in all the different levels of most professions. For political equality, we need roughly the same number of women as men in congress.
We achieve equality by striving for the same numbers, so it's easy to jump to the conclusion that sameness always results in equality.
When we move into the social sphere, equality becomes more difficult. There is no equivalent here to the neat systems of measurements supplied by numbers, whether in dollar amounts or politicians. Women's and men's roles in friendship, in family, in courtship, and in marriage are all different. Women see the world differently, and are seen differently, than men. These differences give women certain powers that men don't have, and vice versa. There are many inequalities as a result. There are many abuses of power.
Women have a sexual power that men simply do not. A woman can use this sexual power to emotionally manipulate a man in a serious way. When one does, we have an inequality and an abuse of power.
What do we do about it?
Likewise a man may suggest he is willing to commit to a serious relationship with a woman in hopes of persuading her to have sex with him. His potential to become a steady boyfriend or husband gives him power that she doesn't have. When he uses this woman and leaves her, he abuses this power.
Once again, what do we do about it?
I will go back to such questions in future posts. For now I will say only this: the first step to addressing such inequalities is admitting that they exist. To do that, we must accept difference.
But many people do just the opposite. They try to avoid the difficulty of difference by pretending that women and men are the same. We are told that men have the same sexual power that women do when men do not. We're told that men want love and commitment in the same way women do, when men often do not. We are told many other lies.
As long as so many go on insisting that women and men are the same, the many differences of power, along with the abuses of this power, will go unacknowledged.
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