Monday, January 10, 2005

Women learn to be women/And men learn to be men/And I don't blame it all on you/But I don't want to be your friend

I knew I wouldn't be the only person who was puzzled by Will Wilkinson's assertion that
men need women to be women and women need men to be men. And if you don't know what that means, or know and object to it, then life among the humans may turn out to be tough for you.
Julian Sanchez is also unsure. Is the point that men require women to conform to whatever their cultural standard of femininity may be, even if that's not constant from culture to culture? Whither attraction toward the androgynous? Why does every culture need a binary division to which we must conform? What is going on here?

But yes, life is difficult if you lack an easily followed map to obtaining culturally important goals in life that pertain to relations between the sexes or if you reject those goals outright.

UPDATE: Will Wilkinson backtracks a bit here. Matthew Yglesias (on his shiny new site - pretty!) says we shouldn't let that get in the way of a good fight. I agree!
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