Ok, so this post started out with a simply, somewhat wry question with a patented figleaf twist on standard conservative tropes. I’ll get to that in a second but I wanted to mention the results of a couple of searches I did trying to find a story link from a month or so ago. The story was that in certain, mostly urban/near-suburban areas of the U.S. younger women tend to have higher incomes than their male counterparts.

The specific story I was looking for was some sort of whine about how men, and for that matter women, where having a pretty hard time with the issue that it’s somehow emasculating for women to buy dinner if/when they have higher incomes than the men they’re dating. (If you’ve got a link to one of those stories I’ll update the post and, naturally, give you attribution.)

Anyway, my intended joke was to the effect that if something as trivially inessential as earning less than one’s partner, or, even more trivially, having her buy you dinner is enough to render you unable to reproduce (or at least go through the motions of reproduction) then… isn’t that just survival of the fittest in action?

There are other outfalls, of course. One being that when we have real gender equity then on any given day when heterosexuals meet for a date then, ceteris paribus, about half the time the woman’s income will be equal to or greater than the mans. And, of course, vice versa.

The problem with ceteris paribus, though, is that everything else really does have to be equal. And, as with issues of partner selection and height where relative heights in heterosexual couples is greater than it would be if men and women were genuinely paired at random, we can see cultural bias in both lower-income men and higher-income women. In other words we’re not going to have social parity until both men’s and women’s expectations shift.

Another outfall, by the way, is that if it really was emasculating for men to have their dinners paid for, enough to make them allegedly lose ambition, enthusiasm, and libido, then it follows that it must be equally “emasculating” for women to be paid for. If that were so then one might predict that if, say, women’s dinners were traditionally paid for then they’d manifest below-baseline interest in sex with those partners…. oh wait!

Sigh.

I think the problem boils down to our general failure to distinguish masculinity from manliness, in the same way that women’s studies suggests we fail to distinguish being feminine from being a woman. And since some people are probably saying “huh,” check out the “opinion” of University of Texas student Ryan Haecker, Who wears the pants?.

Dresses epitomize womanhood in the Western world. Such has been the case since the western man adopted pants to replace the tunic in the sixth century (an aspect of the West’s Germanic barbarian heritage). Dresses allow us to differentiate between the silhouettes of men and women on restroom signs. Dresses are the indelible image of womanhood because of the symbolic nature of pants and dresses. If all fashions are symbolic, dresses in particular symbolize womanhood by more fully embodying the ideal of a true lady, the objective understanding of what men find attractive in the fairer sex: passivity, domesticity, childrearing, coital love, piety and fertility. These defining aspects of womanhood are immutable. We all tacitly reaffirm these attributes in our attempts to find a partner. Flirtation and courtship are reaffirmations of what it means to be masculine and feminine because it is only by fulfilling the obligation of our form that we can attract the opposite sex.

If that’s not enough you can read the rest here.

Got that? Women who wear pants aren’t feminine. In this case dresses signify femininity to such an extend that women can’t be feminine without them. In this same sense (and only in that sense) simply by buying them dinners men can be emasculated of their, erm, masculinity. Presumably by women in pants.

Which is, again, insane. Almost exactly half of my partners over the years have had and/or earned more money than I did. All of them have worn pants at least some of the time. Many of them have bought dinner for me. (I particularly remember a Friday night pizza-and-pitcher tradition/ritual that made all the difference in the world to me, and to us when we were almost literally starving students in college together. She could afford the $10 to cover both of us. I could usually afford only rice and beans, and towards the end of the quarter sometimes only rice.) But here’s the thing!

1: Only an idiot could fail to recognize the difference between fully dressed men and women.
2: And I do mean a target=”_blank” href=“http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idiot”>idiot, particularly in the archaic sense of lacking the mental development of a four-year-old and from the Greek derivation of one who “has no professional knowledge, layman” and “unpracticed, unskilled.” Because, y’know, in addition to non-masculine/non-feminine-dependent visual and behavioral cues there’s also this thing called words that come out of these things called mouths that express these things called “preferences,” and “expressions of interest” such that even when visual and behavioral cues are ambiguous one can always ask and/or receive answers.
3: Pants come off just like dresses do.
4: When they do, underneath our pants men and women are profoundly different.
5: For healthy, lusty, untraumatized heterosexuals, those profound differences are, well… profound! (And of course for health, lusty, untraumatized non-heterosexuals the similarities are no less profoundly profound.)

Therefore: Requesting or requiring affectations of “masculinity” or “femininity” for the benefit of those who are so enfeebled, inflexible, or easily confused that they can’t otherwise tell men and women apart paints conservatives and traditionalists not as strong or moral but anchorless and weak.