Correcting The Gender Misdirection

Men are different from women.

That sentence sounds far more radical than it should, largely because the word equality has come to bear undue meaning.

Men and women are undeniably equal in moral worth. They should stand equally before the law, and neither is more valuable than the other. But second and third-wave feminism transformed these ideals into a broader cultural demand: that men and women should want the same things, pursue the same lives, value the same accomplishments, assume the same responsibilities, and ultimately become the very same thing.

Pure egalitarianism has had devastating consequences: marriage has weakened, fertility has fallen, loneliness has deepened, and men and women are increasingly dissatisfied with one another and the lives meant to make them free.

The great failure of modern feminism was not in teaching us that women deserved equal dignity. It was in convincing us that equal dignity required men and women to live the same lives.

We are not the same. We are a sexually dimorphic species forged by millions of years of distinct evolutionary pressures. To suggest, as modern egalitarianism does, that these pressures built vastly different bodies while leaving behind identical minds is absurd on its face; men and women differ in interests, temperament, risk-tolerance, sexual preferences, social orientation, and countless smaller tendencies that influence the lives we choose.

A

2009 meta-analysis

of more than half a million people, for example, found substantial differences in vocational psychology between the sexes: men were disproportionately interested in working with things, women with people.

There are no doubt individual exceptions to this rule, but the existence of exceptions does not challenge the underlying pattern. Anyone who has spent time around children has seen some version of this long before professional expectations entered the picture. Boys tend to gravitate toward building, physical competition, machines, and spatial play; girls toward people, caregiving, dolls, pretend families, and relational play.

The same differences emerge in relationships. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss’s

work

found persistent differences in the qualities men and women value in partners: women place greater weight on ambition, resources, and competence, while men on youth and physical attractiveness. The conclusion is self-evident; men and women do not simply look different. They want differently, fear differently, compete differently, and love differently.

For most of human history, society took that fact for granted; men and women faced different constraints, so families organised themselves accordingly.

One sex was more physically bound to pregnancy, infants, and the home; the other could direct more of its effort outward toward provision, protection, and physical labor.

The resulting arrangements were never universally “equal,” but they were certainly not arbitrary. They arose from the simple recognition that different biological realities dictate different roles in society.

First-wave feminism, emerging in the late 1840s, was a necessary correction. Women should not have been denied property rights, access to education, or participation in public life simply because they were women. But second-wave feminism went much further. It did not merely argue that women should be free to enter institutions historically dominated by men; it challenged the underlying distinctions between male and female roles themselves.

It was no longer enough to grant women access to historically male institutions; the institutions themselves were mutilated until any hint of unequal outcomes was tamped down.

From this new world order came a universal script for adulthood: go to college, establish a career, become economically independent, climb professionally, delay marriage, and have children only after “building a life” is complete.

The problem is that this approach cannot be gender-neutral because it was modeled on the life of someone whose reproductive role does not include pregnancy, nursing, or a compressed timeline for biological fertility.

The resulting value system is readily apparent in the most mundane question we ask one another: “what do you do?”

A woman can spend decades becoming a partner at a law firm, and we all instantly respect her achievement. She can spend those same years raising incredible children, caring for ageing parents, building a home, supporting a husband, organising a family, and creating traditions, and our vocabulary turns diminutive; we say she “stayed home.”

Stayed home.

That phrase deeply trivializes what should be taken as a life of immense consequence.

One woman built a career while the other, apparently, remained stationary. Modern egalitarians believe that feminism elevated women. The opposite is true: we elevated the male conception of achievement and then told women they were finally free because they too could compete for it. We did not take motherhood, homemaking, caregiving, and the cultivation of family life and place them alongside professional status as equally valuable forms of achievement but instead left the ladder exactly where it always was and merely encouraged women to climb it.

So a girl grows up being told that she should be ambitious, independent, educated, financially self-sufficient, professionally accomplished, and never in need of a man. Marriage is something that may eventually complement this life. Children are something, often a burden, to consider once everything else is established.

Sacrificing professional advancement for family requires explanation, while the reverse does not. Motherhood remains admirable in greeting cards and political speeches, but in the prestige hierarchy of life, it is vilified by those who have been turned against its importance.

The problems begin when this approach collides with basic biology.

A man and woman can spend the first decade of adulthood living almost identical lives, attending the same universities, entering the same professions, working the same hours, and pursuing the same promotions. Then they want a child and the symmetry disappears. Only one becomes pregnant. Only one gives birth. Only one undergoes postpartum recovery. Only one can breastfeed. The illusion of sameness is shattered with the introduction of children, and rather than acknowledge this reality, we try to engineer harder. We offer childcare, workplace accommodation, and fertility treatments. We develop elaborate systems to allow the architecture of professional life to remain untouched while the family contorts around it. And the burden of this perverse set of priorities falls most heavily on women, who must force the biological realities of motherhood into a worldview shaped from childhood that demonizes them.

We direct women to spend the years in which family formation is easiest maximizing independence, and then we ask them to entirely reverse course and build a life based on dependence and sacrifice. This whiplash necessarily produces devastating outcomes; we tell them that their deepest forms of feminine contribution must never become barriers to professional achievement and then wonder why motherhood so often feels like a burden rather than a source of joy.

Women have been freed to pursue masculine success without ever being told that there is anything distinctly feminine worthy of that same pursuit.

All the while, we have done the opposite to men. We have spent decades giving them a pejorative education in what masculinity should not be while offering little on what it should be. The result is a culture more comfortable disavowing “toxic masculinity” than cultivating true masculinity.

We must demand the extraordinary of young men: become strong enough that others can depend on you; learn to work, endure, control yourself, provide, protect, sacrifice, and carry burdens that would be easier to refuse. We must teach young boys that to become a man is to become worthy of responsibility. The last 50 years have done exactly the opposite; in trying to suppress masculinity, we have produced something far closer to the very toxicity we claimed to fear: a generation of anxious, resentful, vengeful, and isolated men unsure where to direct the strength and aggression that society taught them to distrust.

Women are increasingly independent while simultaneously wondering where the dependable men have gone.

Men are increasingly free from obligation while wondering why women do not respect them.

Women are pushed toward professional success but continue to desire men who are at least as competent, ambitious, confident, and capable as they are.

Men are taught that provision and leadership are obsolete while discovering that passivity, weakness, aimlessness, and indecision remain profoundly unattractive.

In short, we have taught women not to need men while failing to insist that those very men become worth needing.

Crucially, we have not eliminated traditional desires.

We have simply eliminated the social structure that once helped satisfy them. Facing record-high unhappiness and skyrocketing suicidal ideation, men and women increasingly turn on one another. Women look at men and see immaturity, weakness, pornographic addiction, aimlessness, and an unwillingness to commit.

Men look at women and see contempt, promiscuity, impossible expectations, and a demand for traditional masculinity without corresponding feminine obligations.

Each sex concludes that the other has become defective. Each finds an online community eager to explain why the opposite sex is selfish, manipulative, useless, and irredeemable. All this despite a culture that has never offered adults more freedom to construct exactly the lives they want.

We are hurtling towards a devastating eventuality; that neither men nor women get to experience the immense joy of meaningful relationships or the fulfillment of bringing life into this world. We were given an extraordinary capacity to become indispensable to one another, yet we have been taught that needing another person is a form of failure.

There is unparalleled virtue in a man looking at his wife and children and feeling that their safety, comfort, and future are his responsibility, and there is power in accepting that burden rather than resenting it.

A man who works harder because people depend on him, who becomes stronger because weakness would impose costs on those he loves, who disciplines himself because his wants are less important than his obligations, is no victim of oppressive gender norms. He has found reason to become more of a man than would have been possible otherwise.

There is equal and irreplaceable beauty in a woman creating the home to which her husband returns and in which her children grow. Raising children, nurturing relationships, transforming a collection of individuals into a family, creating warmth, stability, tradition, continuity, and belonging — these are not lesser achievements because they do not appear on a résumé. They are among the most consequential things a human being can do.

Civilisation can survive without another vice president of marketing. It cannot without women to create and sustain families.

We must say these things without embarrassment.

We must tell young men that masculinity is not a pathology to suppress but a force to discipline toward service. Be strong, because strength allows you to carry others. Compete, and become worthy of winning. Build, provide, protect, lead, marry, have children, and accept that a meaningful life will require you to sacrifice your comfort for those who depend on you.

We must stop teaching young women that femininity is something to overcome on the way to becoming successful adults. Nurture is not weakness. Motherhood is not failed ambition.

Creating a home is not intellectual surrender. Dependence within a healthy marriage is not humiliation. A woman does not become less impressive because her greatest accomplishments cannot be quantified in professional prestige.

Teach men that their strength creates obligations. Teach women that their capacity to nurture creates something civilization desperately needs. Encourage marriage earlier rather than treating it as the reward at the end of prolonged adolescence.

Build economic and social institutions around family formation rather than forcing families to warp themselves around institutions. Give motherhood the prestige we currently reserve for professional ascent. Give fatherhood the seriousness we once attached to adult manhood.

The goal is not to return to a world in which men ruled and women obeyed; it is to recover a world in which men and women understood that they could be different without being lesser, dependent without being enslaved, and complementary without being interchangeable.

The tragedy of modern egalitarianism is that it began with an unalienable truth — that men and women possess equal human worth — and followed it past the point of wisdom. We should have defended that point fiercely.

Instead, we decided equality must continue until difference itself became suspicious and until the qualities that once drew men and women toward one another became impossible to express without apology.

We have spent half a century teaching men and women that they should need each other less, and we are now living with the consequences of their obedience.