Equal But Opposite

The topic of gender has become an extremely controversial topic in recent years. It seems like no one can talk about it civilly anymore which I find worrisome. How can we function effectively as a society if we can’t even properly agree to disagree? Why does someone always have to be right and someone always have to be wrong? Can’t there be some truth to both sides?

What is truth anyway? Truth is that which is in accordance with fact or reality. Truth exists even if no one believes it. The thing with truth though, is we have to be careful with what we perceive as truth. We live in an age with information right at our fingertips, but does that mean the information we consume is always the truth? I’m sorry to say that it does not. Our job as consumers and seekers of truth is to know where to find good and accurate information, and how to understand and discern that information.

What I want to focus on today is the topic of gender roles within the family unit and the truth that I have discovered about these roles. A number of studies have been done on specific characteristics of males and females that show that men and women are more different than people like to think. In general, females have better relational recall while men have better spatial orientation. This means that women are better at seeing the connections between people and places while men are better at knowing where they are in relation to their surrounding environment. Have you ever noticed that while men and women are driving, typically women recall landmarks better than men do but men are typically better at reading maps and knowing where they are and where they need to go? Scientists attribute this to how the limbic systems in males and females function. In the male brain there is considerably more grey matter while females have more white matter. White matter is connective tissue which connects neurons to different parts of the brain. Because females generally have more of this white matter, they can link ideas quicker than men. It’s also why, in my case anyway, I can never get my brain to shut up, so I can sleep, because my thoughts are constantly jumping from one thing to the next.

Now I’m not saying that every male has better spatial orientation than every female and every female has better relational recall. It’s just a generalization of what researchers have found. There are always exceptions to every rule and we expect exceptions. Exceptions are good. And this is just one example of how men and women are different. But the important thing to know it that they are different. One thing we’ve talked about in many of my classes is that men and women should be equal but opposite. But don’t mistake my use of the world equal to mean the word same. Because in this context these words are not synonymous. Because of the differences in male and female brain body function, we aren’t supposed to be the same. Wouldn’t the world be incredibly dull if men and women were the same? How much work would you get done if men and women thought exactly the same? You cover more ground, you generate more ideas when you have two people who process information differently. Differences between males and females compliment each other. And the beauty of these differences is that we get to teach each other these differences. We get to help each other see beyond what we can see. We can learn to borrow the best of both sides – male and female.