Day 64 ~ Gender

Are women different that men? A friend brought up the eternal debate to our house party today. I have never experienced discrimination directly. My dad was always supportive of me. Not long ago he said: "I could not think any other way, how could I? I had you," which was a beautiful thing to say. My mom raised me to not serve men and to always be independent. I chose to study the hardest major at the hardest college of my country alongside a third of other women. Differences were not an issue for me, but I wasn't blind to the modus operandi of the world around me: both growing up and now as an adult living on the other side of the globe I keep seeing households where women cook and clean while men sit down to relax after work, and many of those times women had returned from an equally busy work day. And I can't come to terms with it being genetic. It is simply not. And as long as we teach our sons to be tough and strong and have good jobs while we raise our daughters to be submissive and clean and pretty, we'll keep hearing men complain about women not taking the initiative and just wanting men to maintain them, and we'll keep hearing women complain about men that are insensitive and don't provide for them emotionally. And we'll all regret hearing stories of gender abuse at school: "girls are mean to other girls" ... "boys get physical" ... Blame it on the genes!