Sexuality: a search for perspective; 5; The Other American Dilemma: Sexual Apartheid-Women -- Violette S. Lindbeck, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Souther Connecticut State College.

We face the problem today of how men and women are to confront and relate to one another in ways that are constructive in keeping with our new knowledge of human development our professed social ideas and values and the change says the old coat condition of our contemporary and Michigan State University radio presents sexuality. A search for perspective a series of recorded lectures from an interdisciplinary colloquy on human sexuality held on the campus of Michigan State University. The purpose of this series is to provide a comprehensive discussion of human sexuality in its broadest possible perspective. And yet deal with this important and timely topic in an organized informed and rational manner. The lecturer today will be Violet as Lynne Beck assistant professor of philosophy at Southern Connecticut State College. This is Lynn back as a writer and lecturer and has done extensive research in all parts of the world in the fields of theology and philosophy.

She's been asked to sit on the World Council of Churches. Her topic today will be the other American dilemma of sexual apartheid women separate but not so equal. Now Violet has Lynn back in the living memory of some of those who are here this evening. There are Kurds in this country and other countries a phenomenon which was called Woman Suffrage. Women were spat upon stoned jeered jailed. They demonstrated before civil authorities they would denounce by cultural leaders powerful business interests were arrayed against them and that just walk. I'm terrible. Forty eight years ago claiming their right to vote.

And that seems long ago and far away to even my generation I can imagine how long ago far away it seems to yours. These weren't blacks in the American sixties. These were women in the American 20s. And the mythology this hysteria of that period rivals and vitriol the most virulent racist diatribes of today. Let me read you something from the elevated Saturday Review. Suffrage is man's last stand against subversion of his right to be by a tyranny which will prove to be at once humiliating and dangerous humiliating because it is the submission of the superior to the inferior sex. Dangerous because if pushed beyond a certain point it will be overthrown by an appeal to physical force. Man will resort to the weapons which nature has furnished him and that the argument of the black gone

awry. While it may disfigure temporarily the daughters of EU will be the only means of recovering the lost rights of man. August 28 1920. Read black. For a woman white for men. And the tone and the taunts and the threats of violence would please the most ardent backlashing stalwart against the negro civil rights movements of today. It was going to emerge all book. The American dilemma written in the 40s which drew my attention and perhaps first public attention to the similarities between racial and sexual prejudice. Since then it has become a common place in all the literature dealing with the status and role of women in Western culture in general and American culture in particular. And it's not a surprising comparison. Prejudice is everywhere the same

in the group individual and social. Whether it be yellow vs. brown black vs. white or man versus woman the only difference that merge all saw between racial and sexual prejudice was that women had been its victims for some thousands of years and that they constituted a minority group of half the human race. And then too he said in the nature of the case no other victims of prejudice had had to live in such continuously intimate terms with their oppressors. Now I trust that this comparison will break down in at least one very important respect. After a while the hysteria and portends of doom that accompanied the movement for the emancipation of women. And after all the hope and the promise afforded by the granting of the vote by the removal of many of the civil and legal disabilities that they suffered

from by the entrance into higher education and their wider participation in the cultural life of America. Beginning in the 40s and extending into today a muted but at times outspoken and con feminist sentiment has pervaded American mind in the future such that in some ways the position of women has regressed in American culture since that earlier period and certainly the advance to full social cultural and economic equality was halted. Now it's true racial prejudice exists around the world. I was vividly reminded of that in Southeast Asia where the pattern of yellow vs. brown prejudice is paralleled in almost every respect. A white vs. black here in our own country and it is true that personal and institutionalized prejudice against women has been

almost universal in the past. I came again from a part of the world where virgin girls up can be contracted into marriage by their guardians without their consent. Where women can be unilaterally a divorce. Although they are completely blameless by one single word of repudiation where women redeem themselves out of unbearable marriages by payments of money to their husband. So it is true one can look elsewhere. And find cause for rejoicing in American achievements and efforts in regard to racial minorities and in regard to the position of women but also just as one can find other societies in which racial prejudice is less vehement less costly in terms of human dignity and development and social cohesiveness. One can also find other parts of the world in which women are committed and are achieving a new self-image broader

cultural participation and a wider gamut of socially approved roles. It's evident at least to me that just as racial prejudice because of the very nature of our country's heritage because of our professed Democratic ideology remains peculiarly an American dilemma. But so also the position of women remains the other American dilemma because we have failed to match other nations in freeing women from both the effects of sexual prejudice and the accompanying social apartheid which is usually the product of prejudice. Now it can be argued that it is the overall in heart social political economic conservatism that marks the American way of life from the 60s. Calling it causing it to fall behind other advanced nations and providing general public services for all of its people.

That is the factor or important factor in our seeming inability to undertake the radical social surgery needed to cure the ills of a Myatt are minority and marginal groups in relation to the social attitudes of other nations advanced and advancing this same general conservatism may be a factor in our failure to grant to women rights benefits opportunities which have been bestowed elsewhere. Everything from family allowances guaranteed maternity leaves childcare facilities community housekeeping services legalized abortions wider acceptance in the professions to more opportunities in business and in government. One has to look elsewhere to find women serving as prime ministers of their nation as foreign secretaries as ministers of religious affairs as deans of law school women in the Med. And in the science in equal proportions to

men and sitting now at the peace conference in Geneva to settle an issue of momentous concern for the whole world. Women on both sides of the Vietnamese delegation know it would take a really vivid imagination to invision women being appointed or accepted in any of these roles in the America of today where the mass media continue to debate ad nauseum. The place of woman in the proper areas of feminine fulfillment. So behind and beneath the general conservatism of America in failing to ground its minorities and to women they are American and human birthright lies the still powerful and pervasive fact of continued racial and sexual prejudice. But just as it's on realistic to talk about a black problem in the United States and for anything it's a white problem

a white problem in origin and a white problem in resolution in large measure. So it is really impossible despite all I've said thus far to talk about a woman's problem in the United States. I know what will be argued is that racial like racial prejudice in some sense but even more so sexual prejudice has worked both ways. In America we face the problem today of how men and women are to look at them sounds confronting and relate to one another in ways that are constructive in keeping with our new knowledge of human development our profession social ideals and values and the change socio cultural conditions of our contemporary existence. What is clear today is what many of us have intuitively been feeling for a number of years is that if women are suffering from something called The Feminine Mystique men

also are suffering from something like a masculinity trap. Both men and women have been victimized by an idiology of masculinity and femininity that has defined them over against one another. So both are caught in this transitional period in the clash between old stereotyped ways of identifying themselves as men and women and outmoded social role expectations and the changed circumstances which make irrelevant distorting or harmful. These stereotypes recently have come books. Which do for the plight of men in American society what earlier books in the last 10 years have done for women put in sharp focus on the basis of the scattered writings of the various psychologists and sociologists. The crises of identity the role conflicts that American men are experiencing in many ways the male role in contemporary American society is much more lethal

is much more incapacitating than the feminine role for reasons which go into a little bit this evening. Now in general we in American culture like most European nations are the heirs of a tradition of Western patriarchal ism and Ando centrism man centeredness which was institutionalized sanctioned by religion and philosophy and celebrated in most of our literary classics. But this heritage was more recently read the following for us and more rigidly in-call created in the Victorian period. It was then that masculinity and femininity were polarized in almost complete union fashion traits of male and female personality structure intellectual and moral potential proper interests fears of influence areas of achievement all were defined over against one another

either in terms of a theologically conceived order of creation or romantic philosophy of thesis antithesis or a mostly for idea and constructed physiological and psychological determinism. Well while theology and philosophy no longer speak which method of therapy today. Friday in Islam and I say Islam because I'm not blaming it on Prophet himself. Victorian that he was Friday an ism which gave pseudo scientific sanction to the same kind of ideology has been more influential in American culture than in any other western nation penetrating even to the grass roots through its vulgar as ations in the mass media. Now it is this Victorian heritage which endures in the play at present and which has molded so much our self-images and our social expectation. It is this Miss ology of masculinity and femininity and here I use mythology in the fairy tale sense and not in the other sense in which is being used in literature and

theology in the fairy tale sense it is this mythology of masculinity and femininity which is shattering onto the impact of our changed social values. Our new economic system the effects of education and the transformed pattern of family living. New demands now placed upon men and women are blurring the lines which formally defined their relationship. But where the old notions have not been easily surrendered the result has been personal conflict social confusion wastage of lives. These new these old stereotypes which were given me a new face and a new stamp of approval in the recent past in America. I will argue continue to truncate the personality of both men and women hinder effective communication between them because a sense of alienation from self and other interfere with the

potential social contribution of men and women. And in doing so reinforce this sexual apartheid which is so much a part of all aspects of American life that will be argued then is if men and women are suffering from very crises of identity the fault lies here not with a personal neurosis but with cultural neurosis with a society which is making claims upon them demanding multiple role playing of them which lacks the necessary social support or compensations for the difficulty in countering the playing in the meeting of such rules. Above all a society which has not reached a new and relevant consensus. I want it means to be a man or woman in the latter third of the 20th century. So seen rightly then the other American dilemma is not

just a woman problem but the problem of what constitutes in the last third of the 20th century a proper understanding of masculine and feminine being and ruled. I've been asked in this lecture to concentrate on the question of the status and roles of women which I shall do. But it's impossible for me to do so without continual reference to the status and roles of men for as women and men have been defined over against one another. Limitations and inhibitions forced upon the one segment alike but polar boxing in of the full realization of personhood and the free choice of life pattern of the other. Both are victims and victimizers of sexual prejudice and social apartheid. For as many men nag their wives to keep in their place and to be like their mothers and grandmothers. There are women who nag to force their men to somehow.

Be able to take the same patriarchal position in the family as their own fathers and grandfathers have done the marital discord which comes with each projecting the stereotype upon the other. I'm sure affects men and women equally. Now I have to give some other course in merry notes. It's the strains and stresses in middle class American life which will chiefly be considered recognizing that America is not a homogeneous society especially with regard to the status and roles of women. The differences in the various ethnic and religious and racial groups are great. In the blue collar section of our nation there is a tendency to hold on to the more traditional patterns of understanding the the life and

the work of the woman and the man. But warrant for this emphasis in the middle class lies in the fact that is here the restlessness and dissatisfaction is being felt and articulated more and since it is the middle class which sets the tone of American society and its way of life that which is celebrated in the mass media. Whatever changes are taking place will be felt here first and whatever new values are emerging here will gradually penetrate the rest of the society. And secondly while the insights of the various social scientists and social historians and what have you are the basis for a disk kind of STATE OF THE NATION report I can claim only the credentials of the consecrated generalists although one trained in ethics and theology. So what are the pieces that I tried to pull together to make one coherent

picture for this pick your eye. I have to claim only my own authority. Now lastly and this is very important as I've gone around and talked about these matters in an area like this which is a matter of our own self-image and here are stories I have to talk to the generation up from the student generation who are present. This is an area in which we've already made our decisions about what it means to be a man and a woman and an area which deeply affects the ingrained habits of feeling and and saw such that in the public discussion of the matter there's been no little emotional fireworks. I add a little bit of my own. I have to admit as Pogo put it in this area we have met the enemy on the field of battle and they is up.

The degree of personal and public defensiveness and sense of Ness which has marked the discussion thus far in the generation from the student generation has threatened to turn it into yet another skirmish in the proverbial battle of the sexes. But this will not do. It is a genuinely new situation we face today. Not just a part of some eternal rhythm of up and down and therefore our response to it must be a genuinely new one despite the advances made by women in the early part of the century Calcott park Parsons the eminent sociologist could write in the 40s now that women in America have only three socially approved roles that of domestic

blam a girl and a companion or adjunct to man. Now each of these role has been expanded in modern times especially the companion role but they are still recognizably the traditional one. Now in the 1960s the overall picture is not changed that much. Cracks in the portrait are now evident as more and more women are beginning to call into question the effects of the neo anti feminism of the 40s and 50s. And as governmental and cultural and educational agencies. Have become concerned about the effects of this re intrenchment of women in the back to hearth and and home movement of that period but still today the role of the millions of single women by Troy's on necessity remains an anomaly in a society which gives

women primarily status and wives and mothers. There is no place in our homes there is no place in our social arrangements there is no place in our lives for the millions of women who are single. So also the lower or middle class whites who must work out of economic necessity for must it is the head of the household are my share of the economic burden of the family find her position in adequately supported by the society in terms of adequate trial care facilities maternity leave part time job or deductible childcare expenditures. It is estimated there are some 6 million preschool children of working mothers in both private and public facilities there's room in this country for only four hundred fifty five dollars. What happens to the graft and most of these women work to be economic. It took an amendment to the civil rights legislation passed for the benefit of the

blacks to put on official record to claim a women for equal pay for equal work and the abolishment of job discrimination based upon sex. The middle class woman who does work out of choice. Combining marriage and career still lacks full male and social approbation for her role and she risks social resistance inadequate social support and at times personal crises of identity when he tries to break through the traditional role assignment that some women do this with some success and with little personal cost. Managed to break through cannot be denied. But so do some negroes who are more fortunately placed or more favorably Indah would manage to withstand the effects of personal and social prejudice. Both groups of the monarchy.

Both of you approved the rule. The social reaction to both of them is similar. Like Samuel Johnson's reaction to a woman preacher he said she was like a dog walking on its hind legs it doesn't do it very well but you're surprised to find it doing it at all. And so the mass media play up the baby off. There's the lady judges the lady scientist and the negro senators and the negro doctors and the Negro business man both groups play the role of the talented minority representation in the majority world who are trotted out to show that opportunity does exist and justice prevail. Now seemingly Our society has gone about during the sex differences don't we dress boys and girls more alike. Don't we have co-education from elementary school along in most cases. Don't we push

them into had a record of sexual contact earlier than do most other nations. But contrarily starting in early and from say our rearing of boys and girls imposes the sense of apartheid of separateness upon them through the different toys the different play we encourage the different emotional response we give to eat and the training we allow early we permit and encourage more aggressiveness. Nor do you miss independent in boys and early we encourage girls to be good which means quiet and passive and pliable you see my mother had trouble with me you can tell that now. While permitting them a greater emotional expressiveness now when she has written that article 5 being hard become more tolerant of pom boyishness and girls but still the worst

epithets that can be hurled against a boy are sissy growers and the deepest fear we instill in men is any behavior or attitude in which Hansack winter has made it so that schoolboy up through adolescence will have more guy look cool about a band than Girl you. It is boys who are more anxious about feeling this narrow little. Masculinity. Girl by what all the male and women's magazines have been saying and read and the result is that a cult of male separateness is posted early.

Nor is it Little wonder that during the so-called Feminine within him the man comes to disdain the feminine side of him and seeks to keep women at a distance when he's eight or he's 48. There's been lots of speculation a number of books written about the manned flight from woman in the past I think it could be argued that early in Western civilization one man took upon himself to proclaim himself the recipient of the divine gift to reason and will be continued insistent surfacing of his sexuality made him uneasy and he projected this on me is this sense of not being complete master of himself of having a dependency upon another not having this factor of irrationality can to contend with which was his sexuality projected this upon woman and so made her into a very sexual being.

Her unfree bound to the body irrational because of his own because sexuality didn't fit in with his notion of him himself. As And the recipient of a rational soul and as having complete voluntary control over himself. But today. Can we not say that it is this a disparate rearing of boys and girls this fostering of a sense or even a cult of separateness which continues man's flight from women because later in life the boy and girl have this sense of separateness reinforced as interest are channeled in the schools along sex line and as they witness the bifurcation of much of American life and to separate men's and women's groups in which it is merely assume that the very conversation and concerns of men and women must be entirely different. A bifurcation that occurs in church civil political and

vocational organizations as well as in informal social gatherings and then go to that side of the room. The women go to that side there. Even in university communities. In marriage often this separation becomes ratified. As the disparity in life patterns of the stay at home wife and the man on the job ads are further psychological distance to the geographic separation of home and work. Failure in communication may widen and just at a time in our society in which your premium is put upon companion it marriage as the goal of courtship. Blessed but very tenuous So the ties that bind. And when women when children have flown the nest the hollowness of marital togetherness often becomes first and bleakly up with them while they are the children acted as a common center of concern and conversation. And also as the buffer between direct encounter between husband and wife and when

gone it may be two relative strangers who face each other across the breakfast table. The Divergent reran giving given to boys and girls and the social apartheid practice so much in our culture. Are you training for marriage in the nuclear family in which with the high degree of social and geographic mobility necessitated by our system a man and a woman may have the only opportunity for a lasting bond of affection support and friendship. The only schoolhouse for a growth in human sensitivities and mutuality forced as they have been to separate from their families of birth and from their childhood friends. Now such an isolated and exclusiveness bond. Requires a greater emotional maturity and flexibility a greater sharing of common values and interests. A higher level of communication

if it's to work. We put all our emotional legs in that one marital basket so that husband and wife have to function as parent and father confessor induct Jungleland and everything else to one another. But that masculine and feminine separateness and psychological distance hinders their ability to function in these roles for one another and inhibits their genuine self disclosure is something very well known to the marriage counsellor again concentrating on his economic role now. As defining his masculinity. The man cannot be expected to welcome women heartily into this domain except again as adjuncts auxiliary helpmate office wives. Hence the armies of men with women colleagues women superiors especially and also the tendency to seek to sexualize encounter with women fellow

workers. A man just doesn't know how to treat a woman who is not his in the traditional role of adjunct sexual partner or mother. And we have office mothers as well as office wives. Again middle class women who became restless with enforced idleness in the home and restriction to the Hawks were unable to find a wider social role for themselves only in areas in which they were not in direct economic competition with men in the arts. In literature in all kinds of social welfare agencies and cultural organisations in which they took the initiative or soon became the most numerous unpaid volunteer workers negroes also had to begin to come into prominence in American culture through the back door to sports and entertainment. Again where they're not directly in immediate economic competition with their predominant masculine interests of the society.

American culture has been rocked by this very strange division of labor in which men and women alike were allowed to think of a milieu of good community welfare work and cultural pursuits as women's work. It is said today that among the last liberal arts college is concerned about culture and art and literature left in the country a women's college is no vocational orientation there. But this division of labor meant that these two were also considered these areas of life were also considered the province of amateurs and peripheral to the main economic interests of the society not necessity and therefore to be less economically supported and rewarded having in like manner sex type the care of the sick and small children and school teaching and nursing became feminine domains. They found in professional status and an

economic reward. Now it can be argued that this strange division of labor not only for the separated the life patterns and available experiences of men and women if women can share in their husband's work experiences they could share in the woman's community. But also it contributed to our nation's failure to give adequate attention and financial support to these areas of our common life. Until recently we could laugh at Our Lady Bountiful with their Thanksgiving baskets social welfare work and our garden club beautiful fires and Our Lady culture vultures alaw Helen hokum from cartoons a broad back middle aged women meeting to support every worthy cause when there's a parent time or dragging board in resisting husbands to concerts galleries and community project meetings. But now we are aware to our sorrow. Of public ugliness and public property and public cultural deprivation grown to

such proportions that we despair of making a dent in it. What a strange division of labor that one. The rate of housewife also fell as it bore no seemingly direct economically productive worth and you had women signing themselves only a housewife. But women in home soon came that became the focus a new focus for commercialism in our society. If not is more appropriate to work. Women as consumer would be glorified home and family became the place where a man displayed in found assurance of his success and his chief masculine role as breadwinner. The billion dollar cosmetic and fashion industry strengthen the women of the image of woman as such she will being now from age 6 to 66.

Women of all ages have had drummed into them the idea of sexual attractiveness at all ages as the bare claim to fame and social approval and as constituting wellnigh a social duty in like manner industries geared to the home have drummed up women's domestic role as father of their family ness with the greater absence of men from the home women have become the chief household spenders and well the advertising industry knows it. I would like to raise the question To what degree this trashcan woman's consumer role has contributed to what Galbraith has called the peculiar American phenomenon of private affluence and public squalor. As women have been convinced that their social role was circumscribed. By personal enhancement in home and family betterment How have they used the new economic power given to them. Have they not contributed to the neglect of public expenditures and the

communal wellbeing. Economic interests then I have argued have in large part influenced the narrowing of man's as well as women's roles and in the process have made the economic role the prime determinant of matter to danity and the glamour girl and domestic role determinant for a woman's sense of identity. We've used sex to sell everything until we've gotten water. Dr. May called today commercial pornography romance is a romantic image of the honeymoon cottage for two is a necessary romantic image. When our economic system needs the high degree of social in geographical mobility to work. I often wonder whether sex and the almighty dollar on not just one face one to face the AP before which Americans bend the name.

What I'm saying is that continued sexual prejudice apartheid which continues to truncate boys and girls and make it difficult for men and women to relate for our marriages to work. Can no longer be live on the present social condition. The cost is being felt by government and educational agencies as they've seen dire shortages occur and even the approved women's occupations teaching nursing much less the shortage is growing in medical and scientific person now. Not only today is there a wider. Gap in the proportion of men and women entering and finishing college. This is true I just found Fortune magazine issue in this month. But in sheer numbers and just raw crude numbers there are less women now getting advanced degrees in our universities than did decades ago. So this not only means a

brain drain on our nation's resources which perhaps we can ill afford but it means that there is less communication between men and women today at the higher cultural echelons of our society than they were decades ago. But the cost is felt elsewhere as well. Never And this is an entirely new situation never have women in the mess had so much to do with the raising of their children in isolation unsupported and without the assistance of other adults in the home. Now this this is talked about but I think it it needs underlining now it is this situation of enforced. Dominance and isolation in the home combined with the propaganda of the feminine mystique that a woman oh I have all her fulfillment and sense of achievement and what have you satisfied in the family context.

Which has made for an unprecedented heightening of emotional involvement with their children who in lieu of other areas of endeavor become too easily the focus of too much of their time and too much of their energies too much of their concern. If Mom ism is an aspect of American life today and I'm afraid from all that I've gathered in reading it is this is at least part of the cause. Women who have tried to live vicariously through their children which is a terrible burden to put on anybody. And children who have become the center of their attention to produce the perfect child who will be they are bad to success then. And in so doing have deprived their children of the needed mature self-reliant and independent women by default. Often with the man's concentration on the vocational sphere it had to be father and mother to their

children and adults often resented this role and their own training as only equipped them to play. Both father and mother. But even with the husband fairly visible in the home his own training in masculinity has quipped him for fatherhood. There's a good deal of considered opinion that the roots of homosexuality lie in just this combination of circumstances. A mother who was too present to possess or. Or to dominating in the home and her husband who was too absent too indifferent or too foreboding to his children. Chemist and study of our. Middle class alienated American youth. You have evidence that this same combination of family circumstances is in part to blame. They mostly come from families where the. Mother is a dominant push for one intrusive presence. And where the father is considered either as a spy for. And I'm just in consequential or ask someone what is

impossible for the form to identify with. Now instead of helping women to sit aloof in the saddle of motherhood to compensate for this in force dominance from the home we proclaimed every day mothers day for women and concentration on the home and family as the sole areas of feminine fulfillment in achievement. We fail to give women a self-image which include other areas of the satisfaction and importance to them as a person. And we've failed on the other side to make whatever adjustments we need to make in our economic system so that men might be more full time fathers to their children or are. Given them a self image which included fatherhood as in our role as important for their self identity. As their economic role. They're really good and train them for specific plea for fatherhood in all its

dimensions including human emotional warm. Tenderness the ability to display openly these human feelings affection and the ability to admit to their sons. I would I doubt there'd be any generation gap if this happened. It Billick me to admit to their sons and their daughters that they make mistakes that they're not always right but that they're not only put in the present. Mission but are afflicted with the same human frailties which has led to the human race since it began. Now the pressure on women in being isolated in the home has been more felt by by educated women who in colleges and universities were trained for other roles. But there are studies that show

that this pressure those isolation is felt by a large group of just working Paul Clement. And it's felt by the group of young women who come from high school or from colleges rushing into marriage. You prepared for this isolation and for the burden of these early years of childcare experience. If more men are helping more men of all classes are now helping in the home and domestic chores such that the traditional division of labor in the home is falling down. It's not because of some conspiracy by American women to over domesticate the American male. It's because that while they might be working a 40 hour week. Not my husband but other men I hear do. They might be working a 40 hour week. Women with several preschoolers are working an 80 to 90 hour week and it's out of crude justice that they help their wives with the children and with

with domestic duties and in the IC's in the the same time they find that there is a kind of enjoyment in sharing their children from infancy on all the whole growing up process that was either prohibited or unthinkable to their own fathers. Sexuality is so badly out of focus today I don't see how your generation my generation can do much about it. Ancients could talk about men who were feeling the passion of love as if they were idiot imbecile's or had gone mad. You know let's get some of lightness back and if we want spontaneity then we don't know what it will do see this. This is the way we have now and feels his relatedness to the cosmic spheres to wit. You know if we want to be able to get it back into a focus again.

This this over sexualization has created fears and hesitations which not only inhibit communication an expression of fellow feeling and affection between man and man between men and women between single and married such that we do all friendships to shallowness or are we may suspect the relation of colleagues and fellow workers. Now secondly we have tended to extend the sex typing a rolls into places it has no business being at all hindering the development of the talents in the Cape the abilities and capacities of men and women. And thirdly we have tended to think of an expression of our sexuality in an before marriage or in motherhood and fatherhood as something which is purely private to stick in in which the society I had thought we ought not to have any concern. Now I just don't see how this is possible. It may be that this so-called sexual

revolution or the increasing eroticism of our society presages a new and healthy a consensus on the meaning and expression of sexual relations. But it also may be one more evidence that our society in general has failed to give enough value and meaning to other aspects of our national life to attract the allegiance and dedication of its citizens. And that instead of pressure doing social health it presages as it has in many other civilizations in the past. Social decline and social collapse as Arabs become in all its forms in the skate mechanism a flight from a depersonalized society but also from public perils and public problems into private reverie private security blankets of the domestic refuge. Now as long as sexuality is out of focus the other American dilemma what I've called it can't be resolved because the private ism of value

orientation of our culture and the increasing eroticism reinforce the image of woman as purely sexual being and keeper of the hearth and home with domestic. Retreat. Even the new public awareness of the traditional that the traditional roles of women are not enough to fill or fulfill their life for all the concern of government over the brain drain and won't be enough. There is need for individual men and women to painfully and engage in more honest self-understanding more candid self disclosure and more genuine communication with one another especially the young to satyr with one another with the poet. I want your warm body to disappear politely and leave me alone in the bath. I want to consider my destiny. And then I would like maybe for us to arise from our baths crying Eureka. You know like the martinis did it. We found it and I think I think the

only thing that we that we can find which will help will be thumb belief in our common humanity. Some belief in our core responsibility for all things human. Now. If we find this then it would mean the man will have to give up the idea of male myth in and of itself as he has used it in the past. A sufficient ground for claiming the respect and deference of his wife or or his children or other women. As the white can no longer hide behind his whiteness as an automatic ego builder you know it means the man won't be able to hide behind his his male name. But is this particular man. You will be judged on his own individual capabilities and his own character. But if he is freed from this masculine straitjacket from the sports fans of all nations on the net but then from the loud emotional

expressiveness and I love the disclosure of his dependency needs and the recognition of his human frailty perhaps the trauma of potency the need to save the unbendable wrong. The stiff upper lip. The master his own fate and kept the numbers alone so this heavy burden of self-sufficiency will be lifted from his shoulders. And we can shout. The king is dead with a capital K. The Long live the king is a small K.. Because as many psychiatrists are saying we are killing off men in our society throughout all theories and heart attacks and strokes and what have you. They have no gift of second life. We're killing them off sooner because the masculine role right now is the lethal role. Now it will also mean for women that they'll have to give up motherhood as their reason for social Ana and their claim for social approval and their excuse for failure to be responsive to and

responsible for the needs of those outside the perimeter of their families but freed from the feminine stereotype. Women will be able to experiment with new life patterns discloser true individuality nurture all their talents invest her life in various ways and encounter men as a whole person into a whole person. And for both it means that there's no human experience which is alien and no human feeling which cannot be expressed. No human problem. But they haven't had a hand in creating by directly or by falter no human solution that they can excuse themselves from seeking now is not this recognition of common humanity of the quality of co-responsibility that answer to both American dilemma. It's not the last word that has to be spoken about human interrelatedness But must it not be the first words C.S. Lewis has written that the

belief in equality is not food but it's medicine for human relations. It's needed to make any human relationship healthy and without it no human alienation can be cured. Now the kind of equalitarian is a in which women are unsure of themselves rising to protest their state had taken over and copied and parodied the stance of the male. Well maybe nobody to you know. Well worth imitating. But the kind of equality I'm talking about is this recognition of a common humanity. You know. The speech if you you know if you stab me will I not believe that wonderful speech in The Merchant of Venice. This claim of call humanity or assume known while the French mystic put it men in injustice must claim first. Their

impersonal humanity the right to be treated as men alongside of other man or woman as long sought of man I mean human beings alongside human beings. Only then can they find genuine self acceptance and the acceptance of others as that unique singular being they are given their natural and dominant in their life history and their unique situation. Now I think I think finally that's the only answer. After all he wrote Freud said at the end of his life you know after 30 years research into the feminine soul I still haven't answered the question What does a woman want. Well I think it's this you know to act to feel to think to be treated as fully human not better not good or not mama knows best. It's not the eternal feminine that leads us upward but not left not body over against brain or emotion

over against reason or consumer over against creator. Women want to be person and not a persona not a mask. Beyond at the behest of the society and if women are allowed to be more fully human perhaps the masquerade of the century will be over and men will also stand stripped of their masks surprised into sharing more fully all the human possibilities. And it won't be easy but it will be very much closer to it. Thank you for being so patient. You have been listening to Violet as Lynda Beck assistant professor of philosophy at Southern Connecticut State College. She spoke on the other American dilemma sexual apartheid women separate but not so equal. This is Ben

sexuality the search for perspective a series of recorded lectures from an interdisciplinary colloquy on human sexuality held on the campus of Michigan State University. Editor for the series is Steve Johnson. This is a Michigan State University radio production. This is the national educational radio network.