believe that women and men are different.  By this I do not mean that there are intellectual inequalities between women and men.  It is far too obvious that there are men who have turned stupidity into an art form and that there are women who, in the midst of merely being funny, can display more intellectual creativity than many a man could ever hope to display.  At a physical and emotional level, however, I maintain that there are important differences between women and men that should be embraced and sanctified. 

I believe in moral and social equality between women and men.  I do not believe that either form of equality requires that women and men be identical in all respects.  And, of course, it is obvious in the end that most others do not either, given the heterosexual orientation that most people not only have but fully embrace. 

In conversing with a 22-year old student yesterday whose biological father was absent, he spoke about how he wished that his father had been there.  Naturally, I asked him why.  His response was that he would like to have gone fishing with his father and to have wrestled with his father and to have talked about “manly things” with his father.  The presupposition of that response is that the male-female difference in fact makes a difference.  He understood that his mother could learn how to fish.  The point, though, was that fishing with his mom would not have been the same as fishing with his father.  As for wrestling with his mother?  Not happening ! ! !

The very idea of a son’s respect, love, and appreciation for his mother seems to have built into it that there are things that one does not want to do with or talk about with one’s mother.  If one is a male, then talking about appreciating women with one’s mom just has to have a different character to it than talking about appreciation women with one’s father.  Of course, the same points holds with regard to a daughter talking about appreciation men with her father. 

No woman, no matter how informed she might be can talk about manhood from a first-hand experience as a man.  Likewise, no man can talk about womanhood from a first-hand experience as a woman.  It strikes me as no accident that in many cases women prefer female physicians for certain things.  There is, after all, no amount of book knowledge that could be tantamount to experiencing the body of a female or male, if one is not, respectively, a female or a male. 

And part of parenting is about is bringing precisely that sort of experience to bear in interactions with one’s children.  Sometimes that knowledge is brought to bear through very explicit conversations.  Sometimes that knowledge is brought to bear through social modeling.  We forget just how much is learnt though ne’er a parental directive was issued saying “Learn this” and “Learn that”.  A very wonderful and quite neutral example is the native accent with which we speak.  No child is told: “Be sure to speak with a French accent or an English accent or a German accent or an American accent”.  And so on.  Yet, with exceedingly rare exception every child raised in the appropriate country will acquire precisely that accent.  Such is the power of modeling.  Such is the significance of witnessing the behavior of others.

When a mother in the home acts in the ways that a good mother should, then both the son and the daughter in the home learn a most valuable set of moral lessons about what good female behavior should be like that no lesson in the classroom could ever teach as effectively.

Likewise, when a father in the in the home acts in the way that a good father should, then both the daughter and the son in the home learn a most valuable set of moral lessons about what good female behavior should be like that no lesson in the classroom could ever teach as effectively.

To be sure, life goes on in the absence of one or the other.  But that truth does not detract one iota from the truth that when both mother and father are present, then the children learn invaluable lessons about womanhood in one case and manhood in the other.  Wrapped in parental love, this is the moral gift that parents give to their children.  There is, to be sure, society in general, but the interactive experience that comes by way of parental love on the part of the mother and the father has no equal in terms of both its richness and magnificence.

The behavior of women and men will never be completely identical; and there is no amount of social posturing or theorizing that will make it so.  Not even the idea of transgendered folks.  It may very well be true that the sexual identity of some cannot be tied to one sex or the other.  Just so, that identity is not at all independent of what counts as female behavior and what counts as male behavior.  After all, the transgendered do not in their goings about display the behavior of a non-human species.  To say that one’s behavior does not fit neatly into the female-male divide is not to say one’s behavior is not at all informed by both sides of that divide.

I do not hold that every biological urge must be given full expression.  Perhaps aggression has a biological basis; yet, it is arguable, surely, that we should do our best to rein in aggression.

However, there are fundamental differences between women and men that are inescapably tied to differences in anatomical structure.  Owing to the possibility of pregnancy: women are typically vulnerable in a way that no man can possibly be vulnerable.  Even a lesbian can be raped and become pregnant as a result of that horrendous moral wrong.  And it is not at all obvious that we can socialize away the significance of this anatomical difference—at least not without removing the possibility of pregnancy on the part of women as in the novel Brave New World. 

In my feminism class this semester, I noted that in the throes of sexual intimacy women typically trust men in a way that men do not trust women.  For it is the case that, with respect to bodily size, the man is stronger and larger than the woman, at least typically.  So even if we took away the possibility of pregnancy on the part of women there would still be a fundamental significance between women and men that remains.  

This last point perhaps brings us full circle.  At the level of bearing witness to life and to life’s experiences: There are things that children learn from their mother that they cannot learn from their father; likewise, there are things that children learn from their father than they cannot learn from their mother.  Sometimes through explicit directives; sometimes through mere modeling.  Significantly, this point holds regardless of sexual orientation. 

This, in turn, points to a most sublime conclusion: Our moral knowledge of humanity will not be complete unless we have knowledge of one another as females, in one case, and as males, in the other.  And no amount of theorizing or socializing will contravene this truth. 

And this truth, in turn, supports the view that what we want is equality between women and men rather than identical behavior between women and men.  We as human beings are diminished by imposing identical behavior between women and men rather than enriched by it.  Indeed, the result is a form of psychological and moral disfigurement that makes us all worse off.  And it is just so much cacophony that blinds us to this biological, psychological, and moral reality.