Gender Opinions: Do Men and Women Have Different Moral Obligations?
Men are… Women are… It’s very common to hear statements like this, putting women or men in a box to justify a particular behavior or action. The most common of these is the issue of “all men are naturally unfaithful, or all women are gold diggers.”
As a woman, I know that’s untrue for women because I’ve never witnessed a situation where against my own will, a “magical woman force” pushed me into extorting money from another person.
I grew up with loyal male figures in my life, which made it easy for me to believe otherwise about the issue of unfaithfulness being a natural male thing. Well, because of how common this saying has become, and considering I’m not a man myself, I decided to do some research on where this whole idea came from.
Expert Opinion on Male Promiscuity
According to Zuleyma Tang-Martinez (Professor Emerita of Biology, University of Missouri-St. Louis), this idea is base on anisogamy, which is the difference in size and presumed energy cost of producing sperm versus eggs.
Charles Darwin was the first to mention anisogamy as a possible explanation for male-female differences in sexual behavior. Zuleyma says this brief mention was ultimately expanded by others into the idea that because males produce millions of cheap sperm, they can mate with many different females without incurring a biological cost.
Whereas, females produce relatively few “expensive,” nutrient-containing eggs; they should be highly selective and mate only with one “best male.”
Zuleyma goes on to say in reality it makes little sense to compare the cost of one egg to one sperm, for Don Dewsbury (a comparative psychologist) pointed out a male produces millions of sperm to fertilize even one egg.
The relevant comparison is the cost of millions of sperm versus that of one egg. Also, males produce semen which, in most species, contains critical bioactive compounds that presumably are very expensive to produce.
My Take from Experts
Simply put, the idea of men being naturally unfaithful is base on the fact that they produce a lot of sperm as compared to women producing eggs. So it’s assumed a man should have more than one sex partner, while a woman has only one, considering the sperm-egg proportion.
However, this assumption has been seen as not realistic, because millions of sperms are produced to fertilize just one egg. So, a fair comparison will be the cost of millions of sperm versus that of one egg. Thus men are not naturally or biologically called to be unfaithful as opposed to women.
Life Principles and Gender Opinions
There are physical and biological features that are peculiar to all men or women, but our principles and actions do not depend on gender. Truly our environment and background have a big influence on our values and life choices, however, each day is a new opportunity to make new decisions to yourself for the life you want.
Unfaithfulness, money mindedness… has nothing to do with the gender of a person. It has to do with your values and beliefs. Being a man is not an excuse or permission to be unfaithful or is being a woman reason to be extortive and entitled to a man’s possession. We all have equal moral obligations to one another.
In conclusion, my brothers and sisters, fill your minds with those things that are good and that deserve praise: things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and honorable. (Philippians 4:8)
Falling short of any of these obligations intentionally or not isn’t because of your sex, but by personal influence. So, being either male or female doesn’t make your actions any different. Men are not naturally unfaithful or are women goal diggers. We are who we choose to be, so it’s up to us to decide what is valued in our lives and own up to them.
