with them. In short, with the exception of the reproductive roles, sex roles and the roles of sex are what we choose to make them. And what we need to do in the socialization of the young is to humanize those roles to function in loving relationships with others, rather than in tyranny and exploitation of one sex by another, and of children by parents (however well meaning). And this, I believe, each of us can at least approximate, if we would but make the effort.
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I thoroughly agree with Carolyn Heilbrun who, in her book Toward a Recognition ofAndrogyny,
5 has pointed out the dangers of an ideal of masculinity that emphasizes the characteristics of competitiveness, aggressiveness, and defensiveness. By placing such men in positions of power, we have greatly endangered our survival and ensured such tragedies as Vietnam and will continue in the brutalizing environment of the manmade world.
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The traits that men have called femininegentleness, tenderness, loving kindnessare human traits, and they are the very traits that males need to be conditioned in and develop if they are ever to be returned to a semblance of humanity.
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The important thing for men to understand is why it is desirable to be kind and cooperative. The brief answer to that ''why," which has been set out at greater length in the preceding pages and elsewhere, is that it is to the advantage of everyone to be so. To be cooperative means not only to confer survival benefits upon the cooperators but also to enlarge their capacity for living; it means the production of harmony, health, wealth, and happiness; it means to restore to human beings their ability to love, to work, to play, and to thinktheir mental health; and it means an end to conflict on the interpersonal plane and on the international plane, by being conciliatory, nonconfrontational. Someone has defined civilization as the process of learning to be kind. That is precisely what we need to doto become more civilized, to learn to be kind; and that kind of civilization is a race between a loving education and catastrophe.
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It is not sufficient for men to be kind to their children, which as yet they are from being: They must be kind to their wives also, to all women. Men need to understand that the principle of cooperation, like charity, begins at home, and that the best place to begin anew with the development of their own characters and their children's is in their relationships with their wives.
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