The Battle of the Sexes

The Battle of the Sexes

I was eleven years old in 1973 when the whole nation watched "The Battle of the Sexes" play out on television. Never mind that a movie was made of the subject in 2017.  The original competition between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King was touted as the battle to end all battles. But the hype was far more interesting than the tennis match.

And years later, we are left with all of the hype and very little substance.  The battle of the sexes has played out on many levels in US culture and society.Women's liberation continues to fight for equal rights and against the male-dominated establishment, when, in fact, the male-dominated establishment retired decades ago.  Unfortunately, the gender wars have raged on. We have women in the C Suite, Women in Congress and in the Senate. Still, the equal rights amendment hasn't been passed, and some women are sincerely P-O'ed and feel victimized by a society that seemingly fails to recognize Women as equals.

I disagree.  I think that women have had a far better outcome due to the unsettled nature of the battle of the sexes.  Moreover, I believe that feminists would rather not talk about the changing roles of men and women in society.  Women have enjoyed a thoroughly free ride in the past five decades.

While American Society has evolved to the point where it is nearly impossible for a family to survive on a single income, many women still hold on to the fantasy that they can aspire to be housewives, sitting at home eating cherry Bon-Bons a la Kate Bundy, while their husbands toil away frantically trying to make ends meet, pay the bills and save some money so that the family can enjoy just one annual vacation each year -- or perhaps every other year, and so that the children might go to college one day and become self-sufficient. No thought or dollar is invested in the thought that the bread-winner himself might actually retire from work at least a few years before he's 6 feet under!

What does this all mean?  I have uncovered a blockbuster finding:  Despite all of the pomp and circumstance surrounding the infamous "Battle of the Sexes".  Nothing at all was settled.  The fact of the matter is that our nation has never had a candid dialogue pertaining to gender roles in the age that followed the battle of the sexes.  Absent that we have fumbled along quite clumsily attempting to achieve some semblance of balance in an otherwise unbalanced world.

The end result is that we have a tenuous battle for a woman's right to choose versus a fetus' right to survive.

We also have an ongoing war of words between feminists who have utterly failed to engage in a long overdue dialogue as to what gender roles look like after the equal rights amendment and after the famed battle of the sexes is finally settled.  Surprisingly, the alleged male-dominated establishment does not especially embrace the concept of Women's liberation as defined by the National Organization for Women or embraced by more militant feminist factions.  But it all comes down to the failure of the Women's Rights movement to engage in a constructive dialogue about how society functions after the battle of the sexes -- as if it were the duty of men to sit them down and ask if they might condescend to even entertain such a dialogue.

I don't pretend to know what the solution is exactly, but it won't get solved until the dialogue is happening in earnest.