[RightlySo]

Hmmm... this article is not persuasive, a vague analysis of surface arguments, and entirely ineffectual IMHO. Roles are changing in our society, true enough. But aside from a lightweight op-ed piece from the vaguely left-center crowd, where's the beef?

:)

[farmfriend]

I recommend everyone read:

The Myth of Male Power,

If men are the powerful sex....

• Why are they the suicide sex? (Why are we unaware that our grandfathers are 1350 percent more likely to commit suicide than our grandmothers?)
• Why did men live one year less than women in 1920 but live seven years less than women in 1990?
• Why are our dads about a likely to die of prostate cancer as our mothers are of breast cancer while greast cancer receives 660 percent more funding?
• Why do men make more oney but have lower net worths?

As the only man ever elected three times to the Board of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in New York City, Dr. Farrell has been listening to both sexes for a quarter of a century and is uniquely able to write in a way that both articulates men's feelings and women feel more love for themen in their lives.

[Kermit]

In that same past, men ruled the workplace. Every workplace. Without exception."

Really? Nursing and teaching grammar school have been women dominated for a century.

[Snuffington]

The "erroneous fallacy" positions offered here are set up as easy enough straw men, I'm a bit surprised to find the author struggling and failing to dispose of them. Yet despite the failed attempt to find a "third way" between two hateful extremes (extremes which I don't know anyone advocating, yet presented here as somehow encompassing a pressing current debate), this article does get around to presenting something of a coherent thesis of its own. It is here:

Reality is extremely simple: people should, as individuals, pursue the career-and-family paths in life that they are, as individuals, good at. The sole qualifier upon such a pursuit is that no one else's equal rights, especially the rights to have and protect life, should be abrogated on the basis of gestational age, developmental stage, biological sex, race, or ethnicity in the course of that pursuit.

The underlying confusion of this piece appears even here. The author describes an opinion he is advocating as "reality." Unfortunately, in its details this opinion flies in the face of reality, as well as freedom.

Rather than pick apart the many and varied failures of this confused piece, I'll cut to the heart of the matter.

Mr. Flair ignores the fact that men and women are different. I don't mean different in terms that one is oppressed, or that one is better. I mean simply different. They have different capabilities, and they make different choices. Reality reflects this truth. Some fields are dominated by one sex rather than the other due to dissimilar average ability between the sexes. Other fields are dominated by one sex rather than the other not because of physical disparity, but because one sex prefers that field more than the other. Given the undeniable fact of difference between the sexes this is a normal outcome, not a problem to be resolved by social engineering.

Flair displays an ideological fetish for a form of absolute equality divorced from reality. An ideology that treats men and women as indistinguishable and interchangable, and castigates those who disagree, is at war with human nature itself.