Men and Women Are Different

What will it take to drive it home to society that men and women are different, and that these differences cannot be ignored? The rising divorce rates have not done it, the ever more evident cost of delaying the decision to have a family has not done it. The ever more evident cost of day care and latch-key children has not done it. What will?

It will obviously take a significant change in mindset. Women will have to embrace their femininity, it cannot be forced on them. Perhaps, though I pray not, we will see women in combat, as Ms. Martha Kleder fears we are coming ever closer to seeing, with all the added horrors and added risks that will entail.1 I pray it never comes to pass. I fear it is inevitable. I wonder though, will that be sufficient to wake us up? Or will it make things even worse? Will it desensitize us even further to the problems that our refusal to admit reality has brought us to?

Lest you try to deny these problems are very real, the results of a 2002 study of what our "enlightened" views are doing in Africa:2

• One out of every three children is having sex at the age of 10.3
• 17 out of 100 will deliberately spread the virus if they know they are HIV-positive.4
• At 18, two out of every three children had had sex.5
• One in 10 had been raped in the past year.6
• Three out of every 100 pupils thought that girls liked sexually violent boys.7
• One out of every 10 thought that girls who got raped, asked for it.8

At best these data points reflect a failure to educate. More realistically, these are results of our society's propaganda.

Meanwhile, the BBC reports that birth rates are falling world wide. The tone of the article seems to oscillate between sorrow that they are not falling faster and worry that they are falling. How confused a world we live in, when the fact that we can't sustain population levels isn't a cause for concern, a wake-up call that something is wrong with society. Our faith tells us that we are called to "multiply", I do not think God intended that to mean "by fractions". At some point we are going to have to realize that motherhood is important, and that having and raising children is the most important, most meaningful thing that a couple will, or could, ever do. I don't know how to argue this one effectively. I know that it is true, but how to seriously tell a girl that you don't think a career outside the home is the best course she can take, the best she can aspire to? For all its truth, how do you make that truth shine through?