Girls and Boys
One of the improvements of modern life is in the treatment of women. Women now are freer to work at jobs, play sports and socialize generally on an equal basis with men. And yet I am continually reminded of how far we still have to go. A newspaper article reminds me that a double standard continues to apply to schoolgirls and boys and that experiencing this double standard produces discrimination in later years: It teaches the schoolgirls to accept and the schoolboys to expect the discrimination, it implicitly approves the double standard. When I look at the workplaces I visit, I see more or less open discrimination against women, even among women. When I look at parents, I notice that the woman is almost universally expected to subordinate her desires to child-rearing responsibilities, while the man is free to do as he pleases. When I look at couples, the woman somehow winds up with unequal household duties, even when her job and career are as demanding as the man's.
Is it male selfishness or insensitivity, could there be something biological, is it some cultural imperative or what? Certainly there is nothing overt in our legal or political systems which would countenance such behavior. Scholars and politicians who have worked on these issues for a long time are also unable to agree on an answer. My opinion involves all of these possible reasons. Men and boys (for that matter, women and girls) tend to be selfish and insensitive unless trained to be otherwise. Our culture has only recently begun to accept females as equals in various spheres. And there is a biological history of males having relatively greater average physical strength. But there is another possible answer we should think about. Girls are somehow taught to feel themselves weaker, less worthy, more suited to serve males and all of these other answers reinforce that teaching.
If I'm correct, we all bear the responsibility to do a better job of teaching females to be strong and independent, to refuse to be subservient, to refuse to subordinate their desires, to insist on equal treatment. If I'm correct, we must all work harder to nurture young girls, to treat them as equal to young boys, to expect them to act as independent persons; we need to act these thoughts by treating all females in a way which makes equality natural. Then we won't need the laws and I won't have to read articles about double standards. I think I can live to see that day.
11-15-99