This is such a classic undead sexist cliche I’m astonished that while I wrote about it in my book, I’ve never posted about it here.
You’ve probably all heard this one at least once, more likely multiple times, though possibly phrased another way (e.g., men are from Mars, women are from Venus): no matter how much feminists want men and women to be equal, they can’t be. They’re fundamentally and innately different and everyone, throughout all history, knew this until the woke mind virus took over modern civilization.
Obviously we can’t deny the accumulated wisdom of generations of our ancestors: if they accepted this as fact, it must be true. What looks like sexism is simply men and women embracing their natural roles. Feminism will inevitably fail because what it wants runs completely against nature. It’s a variation on the “I’m logical so you must be wrong” argument.
One of the many flaws in this reasoning is that “everyone always knew” is not proof of anything. Prior to 1776, “everyone knew” that kings were God’s anointed representatives on Earth. Guess what, they were wrong. In the case of “men and women are different,” they’re even more wrong. True, European people have believed for centuries that there were fundamental, innate differences, but they didn’t agree with modern sexists about what the differences were.
I was reminded of this by reading historian Eleanor Janega’s THE ONCE AND FUTURE SEX: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society. In tracing how beliefs about women’s inferiority traveled from ancient Greece and Rome into Christian Europe and then onward (though with constantly changing explanations why, another thing I touch on in my book) she shows how the medieval concept of women diverged from what modern-day complementarians and misogynists think.
Today the standard take is that men want sex, women want cuddling and love; the medieval world saw women as randy goats eager to couple with any man they could drag into bed (unlike men, they didn’t have the intelligence and mental control to rein in their libidos). Rather than being confined to caring for kids, most women worked. Peasant women worked on farms, weavers worked in textile mills, nuns worked, rich women engaged in diplomacy and other activities and some women belonged to medieval craft guilds (I had no idea of that last one). Contrary to men craving an hourglass figure, medieval beauties had small pot-bellies. And while she doesn’t bring it up, medieval romances included women warriors (not many) long before modern feminism (Bradamante, a knight of Charlemagne, is the mother of Valda, the fictional woman on the Ernie Colon cover above).
There are lots of other ways history proves everybody does not know the same things. In some eras, men wearing makeup and showing fine attention to fashion was unremarkable; today for a lot of people it reads effeminate. When I was a kid, I read that men were the gender that formed deep, lasting same-sex friendships — women were too bitchy and competitive to do that, especially as they were constantly fighting over men. Today that script has largely flipped. I’ve read multiple arguments over the years that women are innately incapable of X, X being variously liking science fiction (they want to read about stuff important to them, like love, marriage and family!), writing hardboiled mystery stories (lots of women have done it), serving in combat, etc., etc.
Also implicit in this argument is the assumption gender trumps everything. Social background, education, race, life experience, individual personality — all of them get flattened down by gender into a homoginous mass. And if they don’t? Well they’re doing gender wrong so society’s entitled to make them fit!
I’m not pretending there are no differences. I’ve never worried about rape when I left work late at night by myself. I don’t deal with male coworkers who talk over me constantly as some of my female friends vent about. A man who takes time off for his kid’s special event may get applause; women know they’re more likely to get criticized. Ultimately we’re far more alike than we are different: nothing on Earth resembles a human male as much as a human female, and vice versa.
There’s more on this in my book. Janega’s also got a lot more to say, and she says it well.
Undead Sexist Cliches cover by Kemp Ward. All rights to images remain with current holders.
