Courtney Martin of TAPPED has an excellent, excellent post up about the pitfall of gender essentialism both outside feminism and (to a lesser extent as its influence wanes) in it.

Bitch Magazine co-founder Lisa Jervis wrote of this tendency in her powerfully original 2005 piece, “If Women Ruled the World, Nothing Would be Different.” She describe a disturbing rise in “femmenism,” in which all women, just by virtue of being female, are to be elevated and glorified. Instead of focusing on gender, as radical feminists should, she argues, feminists have become obsessed with women. This, she writes, “causes sloppy thinking, intellectual dishonesty, and massive strategic errors.”

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There has been a lot of buzz in international development and feminist circles as of late about the rise of girls and women. Last year a video called “The Girl Effect,” produced by the Nike Foundation, went viral faster than a cute-cat clip, solidifying the suspicion that development dollars in the hands of girls and women are more bang for the buck. Microlending, Greg Mortenson’s girls’ schools, and community-education models like Tostan — all of the most beloved trends in the social change of the moment — are fueled by a belief in the goodness of girls and women.

As they should be. I, too, am perched upon “the girl effect” bandwagon, feminist flag flying high, wallet open, and heart happy. But just because we champion the notion that girls and women, when empowered — economically and educationally, have the capacity to change the whole dang world, it doesn’t mean that we have to deny their twin power for destruction. Just as we take female empowerment personally, we must take female cruelty and immorality personally. We must, at the very least, admit that it exists.

She said it here.

Yup. In places where gender equality is horrifically out of balance its tremendously effective to invest things like girl’s schools, women-side microlending, healthcare, legal reform, wage and workplace reform, and the whole power-balancing shebang.

But the reason repairing the imbalance is so effective specifically isn’t because women are somehow magically superior to men but because women aren’t meaningfully different from men. The differences being superficial, it makes no sense to withhold power or resources from women that are available to men.

But! Because the differences aren’t meaningful it also makes no sense to imagine that when women have equal resources and power to men they’ll be any more (or, of course, any less) responsible with their use of them.

The same would be true if the shoe were on the other foot — men kept in subservience would also be seen to have the qualities ascribed to women: wisdom, patience, resourcefulness, compassion. (See the cartoonish treatment of the eponymous character in Rudyard Kipling’s Gunga Din, the waterboy who proves to be “a better man than I am” in the eyes of the Colonial narrator.) But I digress…

Speaking of shoes and other feet, though, a good analogy would be what kind of assumptions one might make about a society which, for whatever mad reason, had shoes only for their left feet. Yes, you’d quickly note that everyone’s right feet were more tender and delicate, more sensitive, more vulnerable, even more tentative when walking or working. And you’d also notice that when violence was perpetrated kicks would inevitably be delivered with the rough, tough, and shoe-wearing left feet. It would be silly, though, to imagine that there were essential differences in the feet themselves rather than the fact that they weren’t treated equally.

It would also be silly to imagine that if the shoes were literally on the other feet that people would be any less inclined to kick their neighbors than before. And it’s just as silly to imagine that women with power and resources equal to men would be any more (or any less) virtuous than men. That’s no reason not to give everyone two shoes, though, any more than it’s a reason for women not to have the same power and resources as men. The benefits in all cases tend to far outweigh the differences.