The Inequality Taboo Squared

Until the perfect society is developed, social axioms will inevitably contain their own contradictions. Taboos are one of the most effective mechanisms our imperfect societies can deploy to suppress these contradictions.

Gender equality is a recent social axiom. As technological developments improved capital rewards, reduced the need for domestic labour and reduced the physical demands of productive labour the communities that successfully deployed capital and technology and successfully redeployed women grew wealthier. The most convenient social mantra that supported this change succeeded by success (to paraphrase the evolutionary process). Feminism and its instinctively more attractive partner, gender equality, were part of this. Becoming wealthier and stronger, the successful communities had a disproportionately influential effect on culture-wide communication channels. Other communities could not avoid the impact. They either changed or suffered crippling defections, wealth imbalances and in some cases defeat. This is far from the first time such shifts have occurred, of course. To survive, human communities have to be adept at adopting new axioms, new paradigms. But they have to do it quickly and without too much dissent. That means running roughshod over conservative resistence. That's an instinct in many, too.

However, as with all imperfect social axioms, gender equality does not conform to real life, to nature as opposed to dogma, even though the technological changes are real - if not all equally sustainable. Wherever natural reality butts up against idealised social construction the contradictions stand out. The sexes are different, less so now in production but still as different in reproduction and instinct as ever. Different isn't equal. It might be possible to concoct a notion of equality that only refers to social constructions and to make the sexes equal in these respects, but no-one is likely to be much interested because these aspects cannot include the real-world sex differences that make our lives so interesting; reproduction and all its ramifications being at the core of nearly everything worthwhile in most of our lives.

And so along with every imperfect axiom comes its taboo. The facts and evidence that contradict the axiom. The facts that demonstrate the reality, the sexes are different.