If they could, men wouldn't have run things unopposed for the last 100,000 years or so. Certainly, if women could fight, they wouldn't be subject to Iran's medieval laws that punish women with death for banging the neighboring goat-herder. It'd be nice if the folks that hate Bush and Christianity so much would take a day to protest Ahmadinejad while he's in New York. He's a real putz.

Honestly, what is this guy's problem with women? Every fourth column is him swearing up and down that the only way women can be happy is to devote their lives to kinder, kuche, and nuturing. I guess he figures if he screams it from the rafters enough (and comes up with a constant stream of biased/ill-researched/generally-lame books and research to prove it), that will make it true. And he never has answered the question of exactly how a family is supposed to realistically support themselves on one salary. I could almost feel sorry for him and fellow "you'll be sorry, you free-thinking jades!" columnist John Tierney--if I wasn't laughing so hard. Or if I wasn't wondering why the Times feels it's neccessary to treat women readers to a double dose of this crap practically every other week.

and all the other "biology is destiny" folks that the biology of a species and of individual members of species is amazingly mutable. It responds quickly to environmental factors, which of course is a good thing for the survival of species. So, while biological imperatives probably did militate in favor of certain sex roles at one time, those factors can change and probably have changed in response to changes in the world in which we live.

To be a bit more specific, there was a time when the survival rate of human infants was much lower than it is now and there were far fewer of us on the planet. So our need to ensure that there were enough females to produce offspring led us to establish roles which protected them and exposed males to greater risk of harm through hunting and defending tribal territory. The high level of testosterone in males and its low level in females corresponded to this survival need and the sex roles that promoted it. (That's just one example of the interaction of biology and social roles.)

To say the least, things are different now. Too few people on this earth is, ahem, not our most pressing problem. So as we create changes in our social and physical environments, we can expect our body chemistries to change to accomodate them.

I read what he writes and I think, what does his idea of me complying with my destiny look like? Do I stop working, exercising, voting? What the hell does he want women to DO? Why is he obsessed with the idea that we don't really want to do waht we do and goddamn it, why does the NYTimes give him the platform to rant on his wierd obsession?