More Gender Issues

Dale Franks at QandO has an excellent post that basically sums up my position on most of these gender issues.

In truth, human proclivities, for both males and females, exist on a bell curve. There are men who prefer to fight, and men who prefer to care for the wounded. There are women who are perfectly happy as mothers and homemakers and women who are perfectly happy as driven careerists. Nor is there any reason that we should, by law or by custom, restrict anyone from following whatever path they choose for their own happiness.

At the same time, it is foolish to pretend that the male and female bell curves are distributed perfectly. The male bell curve has the big hump nearer to the "fighting" end than the "caring for the wounded" end, just as the female curve is skewed in the opposite direction.

Exactly. Dale goes on to talk about the where the traditional social relationships come from.

For instance the rationale of "keeping women safe" comes from the fact that a woman is capable of bearing ten or perhaps even twenty children in her lifetime. A man unconstrained by monogamy can have hundreds or thousands provided he can attract enough women. So when you look at maintaining the birth rate, women are far more important.

Similarly if there is a feminine trend towards nurturing, you have only to look at the investment the genders must make to have children. For a man it was a matter of economic provision for the children (for a man of good character) and a few minutes of very enjoyable physical labor. For a woman, the physical process of having children is more costly. While carrying the child to term, she is subject to increasing levels of physical discomfort and impairment. The chances of lethal complications are also present and have historically been quite high. So after all this trouble and risk, is it any wonder that women tend to want their kids to turn out well?

Still I think it's important to note that people who insist on certain gender relations are being inflexible. God gave us diversity for a reason. Lets not force and enforce conformity where it is not needed.

Kim and Connie du Toit have both written pieces on this in the past which show similar analyses.