Ian on Sunday
Stabroek News
August 19, 2001

I have always thought that the good and bad things of life are pretty equally divided between men and women. Women are physically weaker, but men have shorter lives. Men wield power in the Parliaments, but women exercise it in the homes. Men seem to want sex more, but women are more capable or enjoying it. And so it goes on. The Great Arranger of such things seems to have been pretty even-handed, all things considered. Ladies complain bitterly about the curse of women's monthly periods. That truly is a disadvantage not endured by men. But then, to provide some balance, consider the anxiety and annoyance caused by baldness, an affliction very rarely visited on women. No woman could ever have suffered the fate of the Greek dramatist, Aeschylus, in ancient times, who met his death when an eagle mistook his gleaming bald head for a giant egg and dropped a tortoise on it in an attempt to break the shell.

There doesn't seem to be much to choose between their fates. One sure thing is that they will always need each other but will never really understand each other. Karen Blixen, in her book "Winter Tales" summed it up perfectly: "Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other."

In all this, it has always seemed to me that the women's movement for equality and liberation makes sense, even though some of its manifestations are not very sensible. Certainly I have never felt inclined towards thoughts of male supremacy. How could anyone feel so inclined when everyone knows that if one ever thinks about the ten strongest characters, the ten outstanding personalities, one has known in life, six or seven of them are very likely to be women? There is much to be said for how Chaucer put the matter in "The Tale of Melibeus."

"What is better than Wisdom? Woman. And what

is better than a good woman? No-thing."

But of course, any good thing can be taken too far. The absurd machismo of male supremacists is fully matched by the solemn silliness of extreme feminists. Consider a pamphlet published by an ecumenical Church group in England, adapted from a report written for the United Church of Christ in Canada. This silly document advises that instead of "clergyman" we should say "clergy person." It even instructs that God should never be referred to as "He". Words referring to the deity such as "father, king, he or him" must be abandoned and "creator, friend, sustainer, nurturer," and even (can you credit it?) "everlasting arms" substituted for the offending epithets. The pamphlet does have to admit, grudgingly, that Jesus Christ was male but goes on to instruct that "it is important not to emphasise his masculinity." Similarly, in some American academic circles there still is pressure to replace the study of "history" by the more politically correct "herstory" and to reject the use of the word "mankind" to describe the presumably, "huwoman" species. This is the sort of silliness that gives the excellent cause of women's equality a laughable name.

One way or another, I suppose, the relationship between the sexes will always remain endlessly tense and fascinating. Not a day passes without some new insight into the tug-of-war between male and female. Did you know, for instance, that a cost-price can be put on each sex? According to research by Judith Myers of the Institute of Animal Resource Ecology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, the female is the cheaper sex. Myers has shown that animals under stress produce an excess of females. This is because they are cheaper to produce and support in the sense that they make a smaller demand on the mother. This is supported by Dr Eric Charnov, a professor of Biology at the University of Utah, in his book "The Theory of Sex Allocation" in which he shows conclusively that female albino rats, subject to stress conditions during pregnancy, give birth to many more females than males.

This is interesting. Normally a very few more boys than girls are born, a difference attributed to the slightly greater mobility of sperm carrying the male chromosome. But that is in normal times. When the going gets rough it looks as if Nature opts for the cheaper - or, some would say, more resilient and less demanding - sex. With the world rapidly going from very bad to much worse, with stress increasing every day, we can expect to see a lot more women around in the future than we did before.