Battle Of The Sexes

Manojendu Choudhury

14 June 2007, 10:31

Men love battles and competition, and this basic trait of their innards has relegated the supposedly more feminine approach of empathy to a less regal 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 metrosexual, which is supposed to imply that men from the metropolises 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 may 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 of the male and the female samples of homo sapiens (to ensure proper media coverage to further the research grant, I suppose), or….etc. etc….

The media never grows weary of highlighting these issues in a frivolous manner, as if they target only the younger population to sell their stuff. Agreed, this topic used to be an 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 opposite sex, but one needs to grow beyond those years and not sell juvenile stuff in the guise of intellectual journalism.

So let me get a little serious and remark on a small incident that occurred a few months back. Our neighbour’s daughter, about an year older than my son (who was about two and half years old at the time), one day met my son 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 the girl cajoling our male off-spring to guide him to her home and he was very reluctant about it preferring to play outside. 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.

Although they are only a few years old, their psychological set up is getting shaped irreversibly and is reflected in their behaviour. Now, the debating point is whether the difference in the mothers’ attitudes towards their male and female off-springs 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? Do let me know if you come up with an answer!

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