Gender Roles And Responsibilities

[Ahab]

This thread was inspired by a couple of threads we've discussed lately and my desire to go deeper into the issues involved in those threads.

As has been noticed lately, some men have "gay" tendencies and some are what we call straight, with women generally wanting to have it both ways too. In other words, some people are attracted to men, and some are attracted to women, and that tendency is there regardless of whether a person is a male or a female.

I'm now going to assert, while putting it up for debate, that the crux of that issue is about more than just sexual attraction, as if it's only about a desire to have sexual relations with someone of the same sex, because it also has something to do with gender roles and responsibilies.

Now what does that have to do with the Church, or the gospel, you might wonder?

Well, what do you have when people are all over the map on these issues? Where you can't take it as a given that all men are sexually attracted to women because some men are sexual attracted to men, and vice versa, and some are attracted to both sexes?

Or what do you have where the role and responsibilities of women aren't clearly understood, because some men think they should have the roles and responibilities of women and some women think they should have the roles and responsibilities of men?

Who can make sense out of all this? Isn't there or shouldn't there be some standard measure of how men and women should be? Or do we instead have a condition where there is no standard, where men and women can be exactly the same in every particular other than having different sexual organs and skin texture? And shouidn't this standard go across the whole spectrum of our race, whether we're in or out of the Church?

You'd think this was a complicated issue that is hard to address, if you believed what some people say, but I maintain that there are standards for how men and women should be and that we should accept our gender roles and responsibilities as distinguishing features of our gender.

I know in some ways we can and should be very much alike, but we should also have some big differences, and all of this doesn't negate the fact that we are all created equal, as far as being equally important and vital to each other in our gender defined roles and responsibilities.

At one time, as a child, I thought all of this stuff should be clearly understood and accepted by all of us, both men and women, but now I see that there are and always will be people who want something other than the way things should be and aren't shy when it comes to speaking up about what they think.

So let's talk about it. Please share what you think on these issues. Who knows, maybe we'll hear an idea about something that none of us had ever thought of before.

No sex threads and no sexist threads allowed.