The Endless Argument

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 552, 20 January 1950, Page 4

The Endless Argument

N Australian lecturer was reported recently to have told students at a summer school that man was the weaker sex. Perhaps it is necessary for such truths to be mentioned from time to time. After all, it was customary in less scientific ages for men to assume in their blundering way that brute strength, in which they excelled, was an argument not to be refuted; and old beliefs die slowly. Even though we are now being told that women have greater endurance than men, that they live longer and are less vulnerable to disease, ‘men | still seem to behave as if they lived before the days of statistics. They admit cheerfully enough that the sex which has most to do with the reproduction of the species must obviously be fitted by nature for arduous functions. But this does not make them anxious. Nor are they likely to be deeply moved by the Harley Street specialist who declared that men "throw up the sponge more easily than women, that more men than women commit suicide, that women bear pain better ....and that man is a necessary evil.to protect and provide for the family." Men know quite well that they are necessary members of the human race, and they will remind themselves complacently that a necessity is not likely to be an evil. There are, of coursey some men who find it difficult to admit that they are weaker (even biologically) than women; but in this they are merely proving their masculinity, for the male is aggressive, especially in youth; and it is proper to do a little barnyard strutting in the pride of spring. . Therefore arguments, in which the male — gifted with superior reason-is peculiarly fertile, are produced to show that the feminists are emphasising the wrong things. What is to be gained, they ask, by living to be a hundred? The meaning of life is to be found not in duration, but in value: and men who go out and do |exploits may live more fully,

though their days be few, than the widow who survives her husband for thirty years. Plato, Shakespeare, Dante, Bach, and Newton were. only men; and although the female is actively at work in all the arts and in most of the sciences, she struggles in vain towards the heights. The obvious reply, of course, is that the greatest genius must have a mother. And here the sexes are brought back to common ground. Their relationship is not ideally a conflict (though conflict is in it), but a’‘partnership; and the fact that’one sex is equipped to sustain the biological task, whereas the other is freed by nature for a restless activity which frets the nerves and brain,, is on neither side an indication of superiority. The truth that the sexes are complementary, and therefore equal in value, is often obscured in individual experience by the disturbance wnich comes with the attraction between men and women — the necessary attraction which in most cases is so powerful, and so much a good in itself, that it gives life an infinite capacity for wonder and delight. A perfect relationship is unattainable: the search’ for balance, amid feelings which are as variable as the winds of heaven, is the source of our happiness and misery, and a law by which we live. We do not escape easily from old ways. of thinking. No doubt we shall continue to believe that women are weak and fair; and women, who have 4 vested interest in these matters, will help to preserve the illusion, Of one thing we may be certain: there would be an end of poetry and mystery and delight-and life itself-if we were able to make up our minds about the equality of the sexes. The argument goes on because, in spite of the greyheads who produce scientific reasons for everything, men and women continue to fall in love; and for them the argument is personal, interesting, and quite inconclusive.