Just got through reading this article over at The Frisky, In Defense of Gender Stereotypes. It makes the point that as we as a society strive for gender equality, we’re finding an unhappy medium in which we’re adapting each other’s worst traits, when in fact there are some legitimate differences between men and women that should be respected and preserved.

Women have a capacity for emotional depth that men just don’t have. Sorry, that’s the truth…

Meanwhile, I truly believe with all my heart that one of the defining masculine traits is strength. Not fake, decorative strength…Being a man means shouldering the problems of those you love long enough for them to find their balance.

I, for one, am definitely not against the idea that some men naturally possess qualities that are generally labeled “masculine,” and that some women possess qualities that are generally labeled “feminine.” But the entire problem that manifests itself as “gender stereotypes” comes, in the first place, from talking about gender in a way that lumps all members of one gender into one big group, i.e. men are this, while women are that. We won’t be able to get past stereotypes, to overthrow stereotypes, to have the inevitable backlash in which we revert to old, comfortable stereotypes (a point which this author seems anxious to get to), and to then settle into a new definition of masculine and feminine, and potentially of men and women, until we can recognize that what makes us “a man” or “a woman” actually varies from person to person.

Hopefully, at some point, we’ll allow each person to define gender for themselves, and then we might be beginning to get what it means to really not exist in the confines of “gender stereotypes.”