The Strongest Sex

This year has seen a full-on assault on women and the female gender by men in positions of power or attempting to obtain positions of power. Without pouring over the sordid details, it should be noted that women's health care, contraception, abortion, education, and social standing has been under constant fire with the turning of the year, and misogyny has risen to cast a cloud over our society as never before. This whole movement toward rolling back the status of women to some point in 1950s, on the way to trying to push their rights and privileges back to some point before the 1920s, is unconscionable in the 21st Century. How can we be at this point again?

It boils down to a simple fact: men have dominated human society for millions of years, based solely on the perceived notion that they are the stronger of the binary genders, a notion conceived and reinforced through the application of wholly artificial standards and practices developed to stack the deck in their favor. In the distant mists of the human past, when survival was not assured and no mean feat, men perhaps thought that their hunting and fighting skills made them the natural leaders of humanity. A few million years later, it's easy to see why this idea is wrong...

No Man's Land

To be a man in the modern age of humanity is to be subject to the same impulses, desires, and limitations as even our distant ancestors, save with one clear difference: we have the power to override the vagaries of our hormones and are encouraged to do so. Encouraged, but at the end of the day, sadly lacking in motivation or courage. It takes conviction to decide that the old patriarchal norms are no longer of substantive value, and that we must place our mantle of societal leadership upon the ground and allow all to have the opportunity to partake of it. We act as if it diminishes us somehow, instead of what it actually does, which is marking us as advanced and enlightened beings. To loose our grip on power that has been ours for so long is not a renunciation of all that we have accomplished, but only a broadening of the scope of possibilities that will make humanity stronger.