I know; a white straight man dishing out lectures on gender equality. Ouch. It might make you wince, scoff, or perhaps start drafting your next sassy tweet. But hold off. Roll your eyes back to their forward facing position and give me a chance, because although the details are extraordinarily complicated, the top line principles I think are perfectly simple – and both sides are getting it wrong. This isn’t about you versus me. It isn’t about lifting one side up, by pulling the other one down. And it isn’t about women manacled by an eternal oppressor class of men. To grown ups, the world is just not that exciting. And I think after half a century of warfare, there’s room for new ideas. Yes. I think we are all tired, bored, betrayed and confused by the endless yells, cries, and explosions from the gender war ringing out high above us. We’re crying out for a set of ideas that doesn’t paint in black and white. Low resolution world views, where ‘men’ are the wholesale problem of everything, and women are the outright victim all the time, and in every single way. Such a binary idea is perhaps suitable for cartoons and fairy tales, but not in real life. So keep your ghouls and bogeymen. Enough with your mental gymnastics and word play. Stop stoking fear, causing division, and moral panic. We live in 2023, and we are adults, and this is not a game, movie, or fable. We have access to the burgeoning and modern fields of; psychology, anthropology, economics, neuroscience, criminology, sociology and many more. Each area taking a lifetime to master, and none promising of simple answers. We need to put down the tools of warfare, and pick up the academic and scientific instruments of understanding. And if you cannot engage on these terms, with good will, grace, diligence, and dispassion, then maybe you should go back to the children’s table and let the rest of us have a go? So let’s get to work. How do we build a more equal and understanding world? ~ Images by Gradienta, Kiwi Hug, Maksy Mvlasenko, Carlos Magno, Mandim Bogulov. [1]

2023-10-03