As a society, I think we should focus on teaching people how to be good, interesting, useful, and passionate instead of forcing them into gender roles that, quite frankly, stymie our ability to grow as people. To put it another way, whether or not you fit a mold of masculinity or femininity isn’t terribly useful when it comes to say: learning how to cook, being interested in fashion, being able to cry when shit hits the fan, having an actually substantial political philosophy, and wanting to be something (whatever that something is). Of course, the terms “good,” “interesting,” and “useful,” require definition, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that those definitions are not going to be homogeneous among all groups or peoples. Such conversations are for another place and time. However, I think it would be wise to at least make sure the focus is on achieving goodness, intrigue, usefulness, and a life of passion, and doing so without being encumbered by notions of what it means to be a “man” or a “woman.” Moreover, such retrograde notions shouldn’t affect us during the definition creation stage, the application of those definitions to our daily lives, nor any subsequent re-evaluations of the aforementioned definitions. In short: in a better world, people would focus on being good people, instead of giving a rat’s ass about how to be the prototypical “man” or “woman.”
