In praise of men and women

Reason - according to Immanuel Kant it's just our own fault if we don't make use appropriately of this wonderful faculty of ours. But is it? The unfolding of everybody's personal reason is slowed down by several imponderabilities. In the first place, its awakening and kindling has been appointed to public institutions. Not all of them are of high quality. And secondly, most of us have been trained to distrust 'self-declared experts' of all kind; therefore, many reasonable opinions get never heard.
If Kant was right (and I think he was), no one should be discouraged to think about everything in a reasonable way. However, most people seem to prefer to share the opinion of opinion leaders (as I share the opinion of Kant in that question). This would be no problem, if people would have come to their conclusions after thorough deliberation, finding out in the end that they by and large agree with one or the other conspecific with reputation. Unfortunately, however, the opinion of leaders is all too ofter embraced without much deliberation.
Be it as it may. Without fear and favor I continue my investigation into the nearer and farther reaches of my mind, trusting into the power of my own reasonable thoughts. Humans are more than just the sum of billions of individual mammals. They form societies; the degree of complexity of these constructs surmounts the complexity of bee and ant societies by far. Complex aggregates of a high number of interacting partners / competitors follow their own rules, largely beyond the influence of the individual participants.
Nevertheless, looking back to about 5 millenia of written history and much more millenia on the basis of indirect evidence, we may recognize regularities  in human history, reflecting conflicting interests along various axes (see my earlier essays 'On the stability of states', 7/13; and 'Longing for common values', 3/14). A promising strategy to deal with highly complex systems is simplification by reduction of complexity. In this approach, the number of unknown variables is reduced by more or less tentative assumptions.
One assumption that has been common for all societies, as far as we can know for sure, concerns the fact that for biological reasons most humans are - mostly on first glance - identified as male or female (whatever that means in detail). Cues signalling this dichotomy are powerful, practically all members of a human society spontaneously  react to them. On the long term, the result of such a collective reciprocal awareness may be quite variable across societies.
There have been claims that in some remote cultures beauty was attributed to the male half of the tribe, while power and competence to decide on the more important things of life resided with the women (see in Charles King, 2019). It may be that both phenomena are linked: If one half of a human society admires and cherishes the other half, this leads to a higher stability of a principally chaotic system, if the admired and cherished half 'pays the price' and surrenders the practical power to their admirers.
As proposed in one of my earlier essays (temptation, 5/04), deep roots seem to favor the role models we are more familiar with, with admiration attracted by the female and power residing with the male part of society. I dare to predict that any human society will always exploit the evident distiction of humans into men and women to create patterns of social behavior. Sometimes, culture and tradition are more powerful than biology and may turn the polarity into the other direction, but I'm quite sure that no complex human society will ever get along without this evident simplification.
Of course, each sector of a human society (and there are more: the rich and the poor, the old and the young, the locals and the strangers, just to name a few) must be heard and must have a chance to influence the situation. All these labels and tags are precious simplifications and desperately needed to deal with human societies. They are subject to continuous change and drift into this or the other direction. And they alway remain parts of complex equilibria, with every change causing far-reaching consequences.
Women should take home from these considerations: they can't have both sides of the coin. The more power they have, they will progressively lose their attractiveness. That may appear paradox from the actual point of view, but 'beauty' for human eyes is to a great part a social and cultural construct. For the sake of stability, cultural constructs adapt over the decades to changing economic and hierarchic conditions. Which role is the more satisfying and agreeable one?
It is difficult to predict the roles for women and men several generations in the future. But the distinction will persist, and also the need to control and influence social developments will stay pressing, especially in light of inescapably continuing globalization. Clear role models reduce complexity and increase the chances for peace.
6/21 <          MB 7/21          > 4/22
Gender & society
Charles King (2019) Gods of the upper air, Anchor Books, New York