I was having a discussion with my friend who's always been a good source of skepticism about my thinking - as I am to her's. The debate focuses on whether we need more feminine traits in society and also what exactly those would be.
From my point of view, generalizations about gender roles aren't very useful because there are many shades of gray between genders - it's not a dichotomy as anyone from the LGBT community would tell you. At the same time, those who say "there are only societal differences between men and women" are living in an idyllic fantasy. There are of course gender-linked (though again not dichotomous) traits in the way everyone develops physically and mentally, and of course these traits express themselves in society in productive and unproductive ways. The true question is what those ways are and which should be use / encouraged.
My friend encourages a revival of femininity because the balance has been in the men's favor since the dawn of civilization - though there is much evidence that women were far more equal in many paleolithic cultures. The question is what caused this bias, what has it done, and should/can it be reconciled.
In my friend's view, men are more left-brained (logical, etc.) than women, and the dominance of men has made this way of thinking dominant in society. The left/right brain theory is largely consider discredited - even so women would be more correlated to left-brainedness due to their better developed verbal skills (a strong left-linked activity). Let's instead call this
"men's thinking" logical instead of "left-brained".
I would argue though that the causality of this phenomenon is actually the reverse. Once civilization was established, logical thinking dominated because of its clear advantage to organizing and maintaining power in a complex civilization. Therefore men tipped the scales in their favor using a type of thinking they gained due to their neolithic role in coordinated hunting. Hence, men dominated early because their knowledge of coordination gave them an advantage to leading organized society - not to mention control over the major food source. Perhaps you could call this coordination logical or "masculine" thinking - though I'd say that's an oversimplification.
However, this balance currently looks to be tipping in the other direction. If we look at what Richard Florida called the "Rise of the Creative Class", we see that purely logical thinking is becoming a commodity and creative thinking is becoming the competitive advantage. Therefore, by the same logic, those (whatever gender) who possess creative abilities will become the dominate ones. In fact, it appears this is fast becoming the norm. Could the recently flourishing of various gender & sexuality-linked movements actually be the result of creativity becoming the driving competitive advantage within society? I can only speculate that creativity could be a factor.
Let me conclude by saying that creativity is not limited to things like art, writing, etc., but in fact it's more related to the concept of synthesis - taking current knowledge and creating novel implementations to solve a problem. This is the type of thinking that is fast becoming the dominant competitive advantage. All flavors of gender have these abilities, perhaps in different expressions, and this leads me to believe that the scale of gender equality will tilt more towards the center as the initial conditions that created the imbalance have largely passed in their influence.
Thoughts?
