Daily Times

The distinction between male and female genders is based less on their physiological traits and more on their respective mindsets. These mindsets, in turn, are a product of social expectations of behaviour in a cultural milieu. Men and boys are expected to behave in a supposedly manly fashion and women are expected to behave in a purportedly feminine manner.

But this emphasis on a binary distinction between genders in a rural-agrarian setting serves a single purpose: the division of functions between men and women, where women are expected to be responsible for housekeeping and nurturing children. Men are given the role of breadwinners. Although this distinction is still exists to some degree in urban and industrialised societies, gender roles are a hypothetical imperative. They are only a means to achieve certain ends.

Moreover, it would be normative to contend that in primitive tribal societies, women had the same social status as men. The nomado-pastoral and agricultural eras were the age of hunting-gathering, farming and strenuous physical labor, and it is a known fact that women are physically a weaker, this why we have separate sports and athletics events for men and women.

Women began to attain equality after the onset of the industrial revolution and the shift to mechanised labor, when the focus shifted from physical labor to intelligence, information and cognitive faculties, women were proven to be just as productive as men, if not more so.

If we study behavioral patterns in the animal kingdom, a tigress is as good of a hunter as a tiger. In fact, the females of most species are generally more violent than their male counterparts. This is because they don’t only fight for food, but also to protect their offspring

Notwithstanding, instead of taking a binary approach to classification of genders, modern feminists now favor to look at the issue from the prism of a whole spectrum of gender identities. The way I see it, it should not be about being manly; rather, it should be about being human, which is the common denominator for the whole spectrum of gender identities.

When we stress upon masculinity, it’s not masculinity per se that we are glorifying, but the presence of feminine attributes in the socially-elevated male gender is something that we, as agents of patriarchal structure, frown upon. But such machismo is not in the natural order of things because the rigid segregation of genders is a product of social constructions that manifest themselves in the artificial cognitive and behavioural engineering of human beings.

In our formative years, such watertight gender identities and their socially-accepted attributes are inculcated in our minds by assigning gender roles, but this whole hetero-normative approach to the issue of gender identity is losing its validity in a post-industrial urban milieu, where gender roles are not as strictly defined as they used to be in medieval agricultural societies.

More to the point, what virtues are deemed valuable in women which are not deemed desirable in men? If meekness, diffidence and complacency are disapproved of in men, then why aren’t they considered negative attributes when it comes to women? Why do we have these double standards? Self-confidence, assertiveness and boldness should be equally encouraged in both genders.

However, the dilemma that we face is that the mindsets of individuals and gender roles are determined by culture, but if society itself is patriarchal and male-dominated, then it tends to marginalise and reduce women to a lower social status. Therefore, a social reform is needed which can redefine ‘virtue’ and the qualities that are deemed valuable in human beings which should be uniform and consistent for both genders.

Regardless, if we study behavioural patterns in the animal kingdom, a tigress is as good of a hunter as a tiger. In fact, the females of most species are generally more violent than their male counterparts. This is because they don’t only fight for food, but also to protect their offspring. But how often do we find violent women in human history and society?

Excluding a handful of femme fatales like Cleopatra, bold women are a rare exception in human history. Thus, by nature, women are just as assertive and violent as men, but patriarchy-inspired nurturing and male-dominated culture have tamed women to an extent that they have lost their innate nature.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this fact: first, that nurture and culture play a more significant role in determining human behaviour in comparison to biology. Secondly, that human nature is quite similar for both genders, it’s only the behavioural process of social construction of gender identity that defines and limits roles which are deemed proper for one gender or the other.

Machismo is not in the natural order of things because the rigid segregation of genders is a product of social constructions that manifest themselves in the artificial cognitive and behavioral engineering of human beings

Additionally, regarding physiological distinction between male and female genders, evolutionary biologists are of the opinion that such differences only have minor importance. Even if we take primary reproductive organs, for instance, the clitoris is regarded as a rudimentary penis in females and male nipples are regarded as rudimentary breasts, a fact which proves beyond a doubt that the specialisation of male and female reproductive organs is merely a mechanism which keeps genetic material unimpaired by meiosis division over repetitive and harmful mitosis reproductive division.

Moreover, it is generally assumed that males are usually more aggressive and competitive than females because of the presence of testosterone. If we assess this contention in the light of global versus local character traits theory, however, testosterone only promotes a specific kind of competition: that is, competition for mating. When it comes to competing for food, however, males and females of all species exhibit similar levels of aggression and competition.

Therefore, it would be reductive to assume that the distinction between male and female attitudes and behaviours is more physiological and hormonal than it is due to the difference of upbringing and separate sets of social expectations of behaviour that are associated with the members of male and female sexes.

Finally, there is no denying the fact that testosterone is primarily responsible for secondary sexual characteristics in the males of all species. Through the process of natural selection, only those males that have succeeded in mating are able to carry their genes forward, which proves that males with higher testosterone levels do have a comparative advantage in competition for mating, but its effect on attitudes and behaviours of animal species, and particularly inhuman beings with their complex social institutions and cultures, is tentative and hypothetical, at best.

The writer is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism

Published in Daily Times, November 2^nd 2017.