Years ago, I took my five year old son to a playgroup. It was our first time at this particular group, meeting at the hilltop home of the founding member, and we were over an hour late. All the regular members of the group were already there, the moms gathered on the back porch watching their toddlers play in the sand strip that ran along the side of the house.
There were only two kids my son’s age there—the founding member’s son and the girl from next door. The boy and girl, friends since birth, were playing house in a plastic playhouse with pink French windows and a blue shingle roof. After observing them a moment from behind me, my son joined the kids in the playhouse. Five minutes later he and the other boy were in the yard sparring with sticks, then pretending the sticks were guns and shooting at the little girl.
My heart went out to her as she tried in vain to encourage her neighbor to come back into the playhouse and continue their game. And I did intervene several times, reminding my son how it felt to be left out and insisting that he find a game that included her, until finally they all agreed to play with the train set inside and went in.
I stayed out on the porch and had a somewhat stilted conversation with the other moms amid them chiding their children for eating sand, or throwing it, or both. A few minutes passed and the little girl came out of the house crying. The boys were making fun of her for being a girl, taunting her for liking dolls and playing house, claiming that girls and boys couldn’t ever be friends since ‘boys were cool and girls drool,’ so she wasn’t allowed to play with them anymore.
My son’s introduction to the new playgroup wasn’t going well, and I went into the house to confront him. He was happily hiding with the other boy in a tent-like structure they’d built on the living room floor. I called both boys to come out and face me. After my son vehemently insisted that the other boy had said the little girl couldn’t play, I told them both to sit down, hoping to enlighten them.
I again reminded both of them how it feels to be left out. Then I explained that in the grown up world girls and boys play together all the time.
‘In fact, my very best friend is your dad,’ I told my son and his new friend, and the little girl standing beside me. ‘He’s my favorite playmate. We can always find something to do together that both of us like. He’s my BFF for life!’ And since he was a boy and I was a girl, the boys were obviously wrong thinking that girls and boys couldn’t be friends. The two of them sat there thinking about what I’d just said, asked, “Really?” followed by “Wow,” and they finally invited the little girl back in and included her in their game. She got to be Princess Leia.
Listening from the back porch to my exchange with the kids, the women confronted me the moment I took my place on the concrete steps outside. They all wanted to know if I’d lied to the children about my relationship with my husband. Did I really possess the friendship I touted? Was he my first choice to play with, talk to, expose my innermost self to? I insisted he was. My husband was my closest friend, or at the very least it’s what we strove for. Wasn’t marriage about sharing yourselves inside and out?
Their answer turned out to be universally ‘NO.’ Out of the eleven women there, not one said their spouses were among their top three friends. All felt that, especially as they got older, they were drawing away from their husbands and moving towards other women for emotional support. They considered their girl friends their closest friends, those they shared their most intimate thoughts and feelings. All agreed that only women fully understood women, or wanted to, making it natural, normal, even healthy that they gravitated to like kind. Then they used our kid’s interaction earlier as an example of how males and females “naturally segregate” to back up their position.
Nature verses nurture is an ongoing debate over how much stereotypical behavior in boys and girls is genetically instilled or environmentally gleaned. Unarguably, gender has genetic differences in our physicality and our brain function. Boys and girls generally play together without reserve until around the first grade. The sexes begin to separate between 5 and 7 yrs old, around the same time we develop the brain power to assimilate within our environment, and begin to copy behavior of those around us. Eleven out of twelve moms at that playgroup chose to congregate almost exclusively with their own sex, modeling division between men and women to their kids.
Regardless that so many women today think most men are idiots, their utility is not limited to their earning capacity—making 20% more than a woman does—or their reproductive organs. Men are generally more linear, quantitative than qualitative, objectifying than identifying, competitive vs cooperative. While their brute strength is no longer required to bring down the mastodon [since we can all buy better steaks on Amazon], men offer lessons in living a more fulfilling life by being a bit more self-focused instead of solely maternal.
Most of humanity’s existence, men have taken the top tier—been the king of the castle, the final word in the household—because they could. Physical prowess won the battle of the sexes until recently. With the advent of technology, the reign of men is coming to an end.
Surrounding ourselves with like kind—women defaulting to women for a safe harbor—will not level the playing field or bridge the divide between the sexes. Women must learn to step up, stand our ground, not acquiesce to a man’s request simply because he made one. Men must step down from their throne atop the social order, even if they feel no ground, and embrace women’s emotional intelligence, our capacity for caring—for our children, and for them. No longer the sole bread-winner, men must offer more of what women do each other, become more maternal—beyond self—and more emotionally aware and available because with everything given something is owed, regardless of gender.
Our greatest hurtle to the union of humanity is not racial, religious, socioeconomic, cultural or political. The biggest chasm between us is our gender. Before men and women can actualize ourselves as equals, we must see ourselves as one people—the human race—each with our own gifts for the other.
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