Chicken!

When I saw Will Wilkinson assert that "men need women to be women and women need men to be men. And if you don't know what that means, or know and object to it, then life among the humans may turn out to be tough for you," I started waiting for the sparks to fly. How indefensible! Just to state the obvious, what about gay men? But I didn't want to get the ball rolling. Anyways, Julian and Amber gave Will the what-for, but then instead of issuing another controversial reply he chose to adopt a defiant tone and retreat:

Perhaps the claim is less mysterious if more specific. I'm saying that, in general, men prefer women who are more typically feminine and women prefer men who are more typically masculine. Yes. Wow.

Now that's a defensible -- indeed, true, indeed, rather banally true -- position. It's also, to my eye, non-trivially different from the original claim and, tragically, leaves us with nothing left to argue about except whether Will's first point really meant the same thing as his second post. But maybe someone wants to help get a rollicking debate going by adopting a strawman position on the other side of the debate, now that Will's abandonned the strawman version of his side. I see two main possibilities:

• You could deny that "In general, men prefer women who are more typically feminine and women prefer men who are more typically masculine."
• Alternatively, you could concede that this is true and yet deny that the observed regularity has any genetic basis whatsoever.

Any takers? I often here rumors of blank slaters who will be willing to take up option two, but I've never actually located any. The closest I've come are people who point out the impossibility of devising a method of unambiguously sorting each and every individual into the "male" and "female" categories (there are these rare cases of tri-chromosomal people and some people are born in varying stages of intersexedness) and then try to leverage this into a denial that "man" and "woman" are meaningful concepts. That's a kind of misunderstanding of the semantics of vagueness, however, and not a real denial of the underlying reality of the observed regularity and the fact that it has some (repeat: some) genetic basis.

A more promising approach than simply denying the claim might be to note that it has an air of tautology about it. Generally speaking, men value "femininity," but what is femininity but that which men find desirable. And vice-versa for masculinity. And of course men will try to cluster their behavior around patterns that they believe women will find attractive, turning that behavior into typical male behavior and therefore constitutive of masculinity. And vice-versa for femininity. So maybe there's something there. Personally, I'm just upset that Will doesn't have the balls to defend the original, stronger version of his claim: All men need women to be effeminate and all women need men to be macho. That's a bold, gutsy, aggressive claim and the ladies would love it. . . .