If women ruled the world...

If women ruled the world, the saying goes, there would be no war; only peace, love, compassion.

Women are hardwired nurturers. Their biological gift of carrying and delivering the next wave of human kind has them programmed to care for one another, to support, to enrich, to love each and every soul.

The woman who called me a bitch in the checkout aisle for accidentally bumping into her would beg to differ.

Women on their own would form a community of goddesses, a collective of sorts. There would be no jealousy, no hate, no hurt....

The girls who relentlessly bullied me in junior high, and the...well all the female soldiers fighting for my country, would beg to differ.

Women have no greed, women seek to give unto others. Ergo, women make the greatest wives and stay at home mothers.

The single, childless, happy ladies of the world out there bringing in bacon, would beg to differ.

Women are the key to solving the world's problems...

I'm guessing you've surmised by this line of thinking that men ruined the world. Men are evil, selfish, out to harm, out to take, out to walk all over you, out to abuse...

Yikes. I know what you're thinking - I'm glad I'm not a dude!

Maybe it's time for a quick history lesson. Maybe before we start allocating blame and finding cures, let us take a step back in time to before the rise of agriculture and the industrial revolution, back before land was owned, back before things (and people) became property, back before the power hierarchy was built around gender and used as proof that some people were simply lower class, back before gender characteristics were exclusively the property of one sex or the other. Back before men "ruined it" and women were stripped of any responsibility (and credit) for anything outside the home, including and not limited to power, pain, and progress...

Back when people lived in communities, collectives, social groups - when simply surviving was the goal - men and women co-existed. It's true. Women had the babies, sure, and women breastfed and nurtured them (to a degree), but once they were old enough, those babies became just as important as the rest of the collective. The father was thought to be any one of the men, or multiple men, in the collective, and thus the children were everyone's responsibility. Men would hunt large prey, sure, however given that large prey were often a seasonal affair, women's hunting of smaller prey, and gathering of nuts, seeds, plants, and even dead carcasses, would be the nutrition that the collective subsisted on. It was for the greater good if everyone worked together. It wasn't a matter of who was capable, braver, stronger, or more nurturing by nature - it came down to the body; if you were bigger, could run faster, had more lean muscle mass then you hunted the larger prey. If you had a baby or were close to delivering the child, you focused on that event until you were well enough to get back out there (For some women, that meant having the baby while in the field gathering, swaddling it up, and going about their busy day as if nothing miraculous had just happened).

The notion that men would hunt a large animal and drag it home single handedly to their partner who was presumably bored, at home decorating their cave, while children ran about, is simply not true. Yet it seems to be the ideology that we base a lot of our science and speculation on. It has become our "common knowledge" and thus is believed to be absolute "truth".

In fact, it is the reverse scenario that made this fabrication into fact; we interpreted and wrote a history based on the bias of our current social structures. Our present wasn't so much influenced by our past, as our past was influenced by the discourses of our present. And now it is a self-perpetuating cycle.

Aside from the real frustration I feel every time a Cosmo article seems to justify some obnoxious behavior by saying men are hardwired to be that way or women are programmed to smile and take it, I used to think that celebrating the natural feminine and masculine - the yin and yang - was the key to equality. If only we could simply remember the VALUE of the feminine traits in an increasingly masculinistic society, then all will be restored. But celebrating these characteristics is a misguided battle. Indeed while we SHOULD see the value of "feminine" characteristics in society, problems arise when we see these traits sold as strictly feminine (or female); either way someone is going to get the short end of the stick - whether it's the woman who wants to fight or the man who needs to cry.

So I guess you could say lately I'm left more confused. If there exists a spectrum of genders, there must exist a spectrum of traits. If we celebrate women's natural femininity, we alienate women who don't identify as feminine, and we undermine the men who do. We end up justifying the belief that women are more suited to the home domain than the public domain and we confine men to the public sphere where they are constantly on guard to be rough and tough. We believe that men created our modern society, while women sat idly (and obediently) by.

So....are all of our "truths" about gender simply social constructions? Fabrications and arbitrary allocations of traits, handed out based on what is more valued in society? It seems so.

Remember back to collective societies, men needed to work together, men needed to care for one another and nurture, men shared their resources when others were in need. Men held equal respect, admiration, and confidence in the women of the tribe as they did their fellow men. Women were tough right alongside being compassionate. Women were competitive and aggressive when another tribe invaded their territory. Women were capable. Women contributed equally.

It seems to me that it wasn't that biology dictated to us our "natural place" in society, so much as women and men stopped accessing the full spectrum of their traits over time. Not because it was natural, and not because we evolved to no longer have those traits, but more because a culture developed to deny men and women their full expression. These days,  men are seen as cold, unemotional, efficient, pragmatic, rational. Women are quiet, fickle, emotional, supportive, giving, and generally less capable. Women are weak. Men are strong. And we have created a litany of reasons to justify why this divide exists.

So what becomes of the emotional, caring, nurturing, quiet, expressive man? He's labelled a "pussy" or a "fag".  Associations with the "feminine" are seen as weaker, less useful, shameful. And the strong willed woman who's vocal, doesn't want your number after sex, doesn't want kids, has no desire to find the perfect matching curtains and pillow shams for her new domestic palace? We'll she's a bitch. A ball buster. A man eater. Even if a woman has the valued societal traits of cold, logical, strength, she is bullied away from expressing them (and presumably accessing a social power that she does not "biologically" deserve). It's probably not so much that men want or need all the power, it's more that society has made them too afraid to step aside and share it lest they be associated with the horribly mistreated feminine class. It's a very illogical mess, actually.

Clearly there is no place in our society to see that men and women can carry the same qualities despite what is nestled between their legs. With this system, pretty much everyone suffers. Everyone will be trying so hard to color within the lines, that no one will be able to actualize and express their true inner selves. Men are shamed into being tough, and women are shamed into being weak, and we swallow these "truths" and continue to perpetuate them by calling people out when they so much as tip toe over their allotted line. No one wins. Confusion and resentment breeds.

The second issue I see here, however, is that along with socially bound characteristics, only certain of theses characteristics are "useful" in today's increasingly individualistic, capitalist, materialistic, self-centric society. Those being, of course, the masculine traits. Now, whether they were "masculine" traits to begin with is debatable - remember the words "masculine" and "feminine" were simply labels that we used when creating our groupings; the traits became "masculine" when men rose to power and it was decided these traits were what enabled or facilitated that power. The leftover traits were given to women and a persona of womanhood was built out of them.

When these personae were sufficiently established, we went back in time and tried to write our history in a way that complimented these myths. But like it or not, billions of people everyday are busting out of these binary constraints. The truth is, these gender dichotomies simply don't fit. Social constructions be dammed - some of us are going to always be the exception to the completely made up rule.

So the question then becomes, if women ruled the world, would there be no war? Well...unlikely. Women have now increasingly been raised in a society that values war, greed, and selfish pursuits to "rise to the top'. It is, in many places in the Western world, the only way to really survive. So we are back to our basic survival instinct - except being nurturing, compassionate and sharing are no longer the prescriptions to survival. Greed and aggression have taken their place. Women are increasingly adopting these "masculine" traits (which, by the way, aren't even flattering traits anymore! Far from being glorified, masculinity is facing a pretty grim and depressing description) in order to survive. Let's be really obvious here; if a trait can be "adopted" as an evolutionary necessity, what does that even say about the whole "biologically determinate" argument?

It no longer becomes a question of women or men ruling the world. It doesn't even become about "masculine" or "feminine" traits ruling the world. It simply becomes about human traits. Can we, as humans, dig deep and find the courage, strength, kindness, and compassion required to live in a world without war, a world that benefits us as a whole, a world where we are no longer so selfish that we will make billions while others die in the streets, a world that truly is a collective of beings, working together, so that each and everyone one, regardless of gender, can experience their true purpose in life: seeking happiness and meaning.

I think, just a little bit, that as humans we are starting to get so caught up in our selves, our personal survival and progress, that we are missing the point...

E