Ask not what the essential differences are between men and women. Ask why American culture focuses on what small differences there are and imposes the view that the male form is the standard and the female is other and inferior (androcentrism). And why it divides up virtually every object and variety of experience into masculine and feminine (gender polarization).
Society does this so early and so thoroughly by constructing whole social institutions around it--say, a workplace that has no equal coverage for female medical conditions--that we mistake female disadvantage for neutrality and assume it is the way things must be. We fail to notice, says Cornell University psychologist Sandra Bem, Ph.D., that we're looking through a lens, hidden but distorting, long ago implanted in our individual psyches.
The gendered classification of social reality is all-pervasive but at its most profound in dictating how we experience sexual desire. In her book, The Lenses of Gender (Yale University Press), Bem argues that polarization mistakenly lumps all men together and all women together, obliterating the true diversity of impulses that "naturally exists within each sex and the overlap that naturally exists between the two sexes." Among them: erotic interest in people of both sexes, the wish to don vibrant colors and silky textures, feelings of nurturance toward a child.
