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Feminist calls for gender equality notwithstanding, in the sense that nature has made male and female humans different, it does not follow that they are equal. If anything, females are superior to males. With only the prerequisite of male seminal fluid, women's bodies grow and replicate the humans we need to continue the species. Men don't even have to be present. (My dad once joked that if women could find a way to have children without us men, they'd kill us all.)

Women are also on average healthier and have a higher life expectancy than men. They have a higher status in law when it comes to deciding child custody cases. Also, abortion rights advocates insist that women continue have the final say when it comes to ending a pregnancy. That insistence relegates men to a very "unequal" status in their parenting role.

Men, of course, have had the historical upper hand in our largely paternalistic societies throughout the centuries. In the supposedly enlightened and liberal democracy of the United States, women didn't even have the right to vote in national elections until 1920. That's less than one hundred years. It took two world wars and a shortage of male factory workers to convince us men that women could don coveralls and use a rivet gun just like any man. After the wars, however, we men sent the women back to the secretarial pool, and it took another 40 years for women to bump up against that "glass ceiling" in American business and industry.

But men stepped aside and gave in. Women are now politically equal. In the job market, however, women still lag. According to a recent Reuters article, women still earn only 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man (http://www.reuters.com/articl e/pressRelease/idUS142815+02-J an-2008+PRN20080102). That, however, may be more a function of the fact that many women "drop out" of the work force to have babies, which affects seniority and promotions. The fact that the growth of a fetus inside a working woman's womb is not a matter of "gender equality," so much as a biological difference between men and women that nature, and not men, imposed on women.

Other differences like body mass, strength and stature affect physical performance on the job. Women, on average, do not possesses the upper body strength to perform well in jobs like fire fighting or warehouse work. Even the most avid 250-pound male feminist would admit that he'd rather have the help of a six-foot, burly fireman down the ladder on the front of a burning building. Again, it is not a matter of gender equality; it is a matter of physical difference.

The foregoing, of course, does not take into consideration modern "feminist thought," which purports that gender roles are nothing more than misogynistic contrivances (stuff women hating males made up to keep the gals in their place). The very idea of gender and gender roles, feminist thought purports, are the basis of all our troubles. Even the word "woman" needs to be changed to "womyn" so that the "man" part can be disassociated from the word. Just about everything - our concepts of family, socialization and language - needs to be swept away in a massive "reeducation" effort in order to achieve true equality. Small wonder that feminist studies departments in many of our institutions of higher learning have been considered one of the last bastions of Marxism.

Returning to the real world, however, going by the standard definition of the word equality ("the state of being equal, especially in status, rights and opportunities"), women are equal. Whether or not their desire to be equal to men is really a lowering of their own standards would depend on one's point of view.

Learn more about this author, Jerry Curtis.
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