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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

A Fisch by any other name
My last name is Fisch. My husband's last name is Flynn. Our son's last name is Flysch. No, it's not a spelling error.
By Audrey Fisch
[01/20/00]

Why should a baby get the father's last name?
Historians, scientists and legal scholars offer some explanation.
By Carol Lloyd
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A new year and a new spouse
Forget losing weight. For 2000, a vast number of British couples resolved to lose something else.
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[01/21/00]

Southern governors declare war on divorce
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By Lisa Moricoli Latham
[01/24/00]

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Talk magazine peddles hardcore porn from the mouths of babes.
By Amy Benfer
[01/25/00]

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To some women, the grim picture of a post-feminist sexual battlefield peopled by uncommitted men and exploited women may ring true, just as feminist claims of ubiquitous patriarchal atrocities will ring true to others. Reality, though, is considerably more complicated. Most men marry in spite of all the free milk, and the singles scene can be cruel to both sexes. Divorce is not primarily a matter of irresponsible men walking out on wives and children; two-thirds of the time, it's women who decide to leave, usually not because of adultery or abuse but because of dissatisfaction with the quality of the marriage.

There may well be important differences between women and men, and it may well be that men are biologically more predisposed to enjoy no-strings sex. But it hardly means that, as Crittenden suggests, men and women differ radically in their need for marriage, children and work.

At the dawn of the millennium, things aren't as bad as either feminists or neo-traditionalists claim. Most women and men try, however imperfectly, to find a balance between the modern and the traditional. Yet we can do better.

Maybe, at least in the context of Western industrial democracies, what we need at this stage is not a women's movement at all but a gender equality movement -- one clearly committed to fairness and equity for individuals regardless of sex, not just to the empowerment or betterment of women. Such a movement -- which would probably be loosely organized and focused on grass-roots cultural change more than top-down policy making -- should not aim for 50-50 parity in every sphere.

While conservatives are prone to exaggerating biological sex differences, it seems likely that all human abilities and preferences are not distributed evenly between the sexes. We may never get to a point where half of all Fortune 500 executives and nuclear physicists are women while half of all nurses and full-time parents are men. Indeed, overly aggressive attempts to achieve such an ideal could result in coercive social engineering schemes (such as the proposed Swedish law that would require fathers as well as mothers to take parental leave). On the other hand, sex differences are a matter of tendencies, not absolutes: Many women can be superb business leaders, many men wonderful nurturers.

The goal should be to ensure that individual opportunities and choices are not limited by gender. A true equality movement would speak up against working-mother-bashing or anti-father bigotry. It would raise its voice when pop culture depicts women as bimbos or men as jerks; when promiscuous women are judged more harshly than promiscuous men or when all sexual miscommunication is blamed on males. It would work to ensure that domestic violence is taken as seriously as any other crime and that violent women are judged by the same standards as violent men. It would understand that women should not be stigmatized any more than men for aggressive or selfish behavior, and that they should be held equally accountable for it.

An equality movement would urge not only men but women to reconsider their chauvinistic attitudes (such as the belief that they have a superior bond with their children) and their non-egalitarian expectations of the other sex. It would respect the choices of men and women who prefer traditional roles but would also convey the message that we cannot have it both ways. And, without pursuing the utopian goal of complete personal harmony between women and men, it would encourage us to understand that sometimes personal conflicts are just personal -- and that, when it comes to inflicting private misery, women and men generally give as good as they get.

Modern technological and social advances have finally made possible a society in which individuals are judged not by the anatomy of their bodies but by the content of their character. The movement toward such a society had to start with an effort to extend to women the fundamental rights of adult citizens. Now, it's the time to stress equal responsibilities as well as equal rights, to take a more nuanced view of sex and power, to resist the forces (traditionalist or feminist) that divide the sexes.

It's time to remember that women have no special entitlement to happiness and that it's not a special outrage when bad things happen to good women -- because women are people, nothing less and nothing more.
salon.com | Jan. 26, 2000

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