by Matthew Nicholas

Created on: March 01, 2010

Men and women are by nature different.  It should come as no surprise, therefore, that these differences which exist by nature shine through societal mores generally.  Thus, gender roles exist, and there are certain practices, habits, and activities that preclude one of the two genders entirely.  Contemporarily, feminists seem to strive for what has been called gender-neutrality.  To pursue this agenda, feminists seek to eradicate all vestiges of gender roles from society.  As such, the modern feminist movement thrives upon a fallacious conflation of equality and gender roles.  For feminists, upholding the practice of a specific gender role is tantamount to rendering one sex (generally women) unequal to the other (generally men).  However, this kind of attitude is not only ill-founded but dangerous.  By trying to compel people to live in conflict with their natural gender inclinations, feminists force people to live contrary to their natures.  In effect, the beauty, harmony, and balance resultant of the interaction between the genders is lost.  Feminists, therefore, have gone too far in their pursuit; their agenda is absurd.

To buttress this contention, I will first discuss the nature of Valentine’s Day.  Valentine’s Day is a holiday in which gender roles come to the fore in an astonishingly apparent manner.  On Valentine’s Day, men are expected to fulfill certain obligations, the minimum being the provision of roses and chocolates.  And if men want to get laid, they better make dinner reservations and fandango movie tickets to the newest chick-flick at the cinema as well.  Men have a duty on Valentine’s Day; women do not.  Women are the recipients of all of this romance.  Valentine’s Day ensures that women get to experience love at least once per year by providing men with a certain framework for romance.  Men, after all, do not understand the concept of romance.  Men know that it involves flowers and chocolates with a nice dinner in low lighting, but men have no insight upon what romance is intrinsically.  Women on the other hand seem to require romance.

Who could dare make the argument that Valentine’s Day exists as it does to make men happy?  Or even more absurdly, who could contend that the genders roles could be rationally reversed on Valentine’s Day?  In what world do men want to receive flowers?  In

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