I'm not really sure why there is a sense of threat seen within the concept of male/female differences beyond the plumbing.
I distinctly remember grandmothers, aunts, a mother of my own, a wife and daughter of my own and two adult granddaughters of my own. I can't remember, clearly or vaguely, that their mindsets were ever to be confused with the male. They all appeared/appear to me to be distinctly female both in their preferences, in their attitudes to other people and to home life.
That's not to imply they are incapable of looking beyond the kitchen sink. The daughter has a degree and both her daughters have them in spades. My wife was brilliant in maths and science and she coached me through maths exams when I was wrongly employed in engineering. In due course she bore me two children and gave up her laboratory life to look after them and run the family home. She provided the backup without which I could never have run my little photography business. When she felt the children old enough, she went back to studying and took another lab job, just to see if she could still hack it. She could. But the rest of the other parts of life took a hit. A big one. Seeing that she had proven herself to be no more a vegetable post-partum than she had ever been, she retired from that and reverted to what worked to the broader good. Did she suffer? If being able to pick up her friends, go play tennis or go for a swim, come back home in time to have lunch ready for two hungry kids and sometimes me, too, then yes, she suffered greatly. If the value of a safe, secure, happy and spotless home means nothing, then she wasted her time when she could have been gazing through a microscope or mixing chemicals.
Having the intellectual capability of doing something is not, I think, limited by gender reality - pure muscle-power aside - but at the same time, I think females have an added quality that males often lack: they seem to me to have a far more educated grasp of priorities. In other words, the ones I have known are not as likely to get strung out on winning pissing contests as are males. So much less so, in fact, that this male preoccupation appears to have drive most of them right off the face of the LuLa map. Can anyone blame them? Or are we to assume they are not able to maintain an interest in photography? I think the truth may well be that they have realised that photography is but a subtext to life online, with the brandishing of equipment and claims to greater bragging rights the principal raison d'être, a spiritual tragedy in motion they are best advised to avoid.
And if you want to stay in the photographic world, then even there the differences are quite marked when you know who some of the practitioners are and how they have developed their styles through the years. No, that isn't to say one can instantly tell the dfference between a male and female-produced photograph at all, but seen en masse, there is a difference in emphasis (I'm chatting about fashion photographers here) that sort of makes sense.
In conclusion, I see no shame in both accepting that women are not men (and mainly vice versa) nor in believing that it's natural for them to be better at some things than at others. I believe exactly the same about men: we do some things well, yet with others we should just walk away and leave it to those who can do it far better than can we.
How terrible a unisex world would have been.
Rob
