Battle of the sexes

Men love battles and competition, and this basic trait of their innards had relegated the supposedly more feminine approach of empathy to a less regaled status, until the feminists woke up to take up the cudgel, trumpet the battlecry and shove all empathy down the drain (well, nearly!). Thereafter the phrase 'battle of the sexes' became so popular.

Now the battle has taken up a new phase; it is fashionable to be 'metrosexuall', which is supposed to imply that men from metros have suddenly woken up to their softer side and are not ashamed to display it. I am not sure if men from the smaller towns are not supposed to possess these attributes, and in case they do should they be forced to relocate to the cosmopolitan environment so that they find peace and togetherness in the fraternity that exists there.

And of course the never ending debate of the inherent equality of the intellectual and other capabilities of the sexes keeps on getting new fodder for the media to feed on: some academician makes some comments regarding the relative lack of participation of women in scientific research (especially maths and physics) and the media goes agog reacting to some phrases in the speech and taking matters out of context, or some columnist decides to generate some controversy (to improve his readership rating, obviously) by stating that career women make inferior wives and the piece has the desired effect, or some biologists claims some difference in the structure in the brain the male and the female samples of homo sapiens (to ensure proper media coverage to further the research grant, I suppose), or....etc. etc....

This topic used to be extremely interesting point of debate during the teenage years when raising such an issue in a public place (like the canteen) was a sure shot mode of getting attention from the fairer sex (yep, I liked that term in those days only to realize later that it was a misnomer, girls ain't fairer, it took a few years to learn the truth!). But it seems the media has taken cue of the advertising world and targets the younger population to sell their stuff, or may be they don't want people to grow beyond the teenage, because selling stupid stuff to a matured mind is far more difficult requiring matured strategy and approach. So in the guise of intellectual journalism it just feeds on juvenile stuff, leaving serious discussion to blokes like me whose blogs no one reads!!

So let me get a little serious and finish today's piece by an observation. Our neighbour's daughter (we stay in an apartment), about a couple of years older than my 2 year old son, one day met my son (they were both accompanied by their mothers) downstairs at the vegetable sellers shop. My son, like the usual male, was busy playing around, while the girl was trying her level best to introduce him to her mom. My son's expression was like 'why involve parents in the fun we are having?' and the girl was emphatic about her mom's approval of her friends. The next day we spotted that the girl was cajoling our male offspring to guide him to her home and he was very reluctant about it preferring to play outside, although he relented in the end, but didn't stay indoors for long. Now this behavioural attitude may be typecast as typical inherent characteristics of male and female, but my hunch is that even at this stage, it is the difference in the treatment meted out to the girl and the boy that has a more pronounced effect on their behaviour. We don't put much restriction on the movement of our boy, while the mother of the girl tries her best to keep her daughter indoors and encourages her to bring her friends home (a typical scenario in the Indian household), and although they are only 2 & 4 years old, their psychological set up is getting shaped irreversibly and is reflected in their behaviours. Now, the debating point is whether the difference in the mothers' attitudes towards their male and female offsprings is due to any inherent difference of the genetic/physiological difference or simply due to cultural conditioning. The question is somewhat like the chicken and egg problem, cultural conditioning supports a certain type of genetic manifestation or the inherent genetic difference causes the cultural evolution? I am still searching for an answer!