Men are men. Women are women. Or maybe not so much.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Jane Austin, Pride and Prejudice, 1813
"Women's liberation" was a movement of the 1960s. It kept on, and some people haven't kept up.
I learned something new and unexpected about dating practices at a local university. Guys, I was told, don't ask women out on dates in the way I remember from 50 and 60 years ago. In those days guys telephoned a girl; asked her if the two of them could go somewhere; if she agreed he would go to her place at the appointed time; meet her; and then they would go together to some movie or food or event. He would pay for it. Then he would take her back home. That was a date.
"Peter, that isn't how it works now," I was told by a female college freshman at the Southern Oregon University Honors College, the one studying Computer Science I wrote about two weeks ago. She was the one who told me something obvious to her, that the "apps" on my phone weren't just spying on me, they were also sharing what they learned with each other. What happens on Google Maps or Facebook doesn't stay at Google Maps or Facebook. Oh.
"Now the girl can ask the guy, and it is just about being together, and the girl usually pays for herself. People don't 'date' the way you did back then." Oh.
Gender roles are changing. "Women's liberation" in the 1960s and today addresses some of the most fundamental elements of human life. Of course there is backlash and resistance.
Trump's projects old-fashioned masculinity, a throwback to the "great again" pre-women's lib era of Hugh Hefner. Trump is the playboy with financial resources to attract beautiful women--Melania the current proof. He is aggressive, cruel, and belligerent. Trump's "grab pussies" videotape was shocking when it emerged, but perhaps more for the brutal honesty and crude language than for content. "When you are a star, they let you do it," he said, and no doubt some do. The videotape apparently didn't change many votes.
Hillary Clinton was the archetype "woman's libber," the upstart speaker at college graduation, the partner in a law firm, and the breadwinner in her Arkansas home. She had a big career--senator then Secretary of State. Her polling negatives were sky high.
There is a divide in America on traditional binary gender roles. Pew polling shows that 64% of women say gender equality has not gone far enough, compared with 49% of men who say this. The much larger divide is between Democrats and Republicans. Gender equality isn't a woman's idea so much as a modern idea, a Democratic idea, pushing against traditional culture and maybe biology.
Progressive messaging on gender has contained political landmines for Democrats, easy to exploit by cultural conservatives. Trans women in women's bathrooms! Faux-women ruining girls' high school sports! Most Democrats on the national stage have accepted as orthodox thinking that men and women are equal--that is for certain--but also that maleness and femaleness are much less binary and biologically determined than had been understood traditionally. For Democrats on the cultural vanguard, gender is a personal choice, complicated by culture and biology, and fluid.
Increasingly Democrats feel it appropriate to report their preferred pronouns when introducing themselves. We are not to take for granted that a person who "presents as a woman" with hips, breasts, and beardless face, wants to be understood to be a woman. Worse, making an assumption is not harmless; it is rude, an insulting micro-aggression.
In the modern economy, male upper body strength matters little, and testosterone-generated aggression and risk-taking may be a net negative. Democrats planted their flag. They are the party of women's equality.
Gender equality may become the default culture in America, but we are not there yet. Old ideas and assumptions persist. Republicans have done better than Democrats in exploiting this mismatch of old and new. Traditionally, men provide resources; women provide domestic nurturing. Men lead; women support.
Who believes that outdated old-fashioned stuff? A great many people, including women who are in the workforce and voting booth. There may be some built-in differences between male and female humans that aren't just a matter of culture. It might be biology.