gender and balance

I’ve been noticing something. Two things. Two trends in society.

The first is that gender doesn’t matter. Gender doesn’t matter in sexuality (it’s who you love, not what genetalia you have), it doesn’t matter in careers (women should be able to fight in the military as much as men) and it doesn’t matter in pursuits (women journalists in male locker rooms and even the fight for girls on mostly boy teams to use the same locker room).

Yet at the same time, there is an opposite trend, a kind of hyper-gender trend. For example, have you tried to find a unisex bicycle? Most toys, as a matter of fact, seem to fall squarely in a boy or girl category. Even Lego has now become genderized (I know, I know, my spell check didn’t like that one, either). Clothing has generally always been decidedly feminine or masculine, but in the last few years even that has gone extreme, with women’s clothing being extremely sexual, and from earlier and earlier ages.

So on one hand, society is pushing a message that gender is insignificant, on the other it is pushing the message that gender is THE unit of identity.

I wonder if it’s a question of balance. We have mistaken God’s notion of gender, one of balance, where male and female were both created in the image of God and together represent him best. Gender is significant, but it is not all important. As soon as society distorts that balance, it seems that in other ways they have to distort it as much in the other direction to maintain the equilibrium.