The Peripatetic Philosopher says, "Give it a rest!"

 RELAX! Sex Role Identity is not what you think!

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© February 3, 2017

My graduate education in social, industrial and organization psychology failed to inform me much beyond what I had experienced in the field on four continents, but I thought it was very perceptive when it declared that sex roles were learned behavior, not biological but cultural and psychological.

We are born physiologically a male or a female, but that does not mean our minds will necessarily wrap around this biology as definitively what we are as an individual. 

People are sending me excerpts from books written by people in my field claiming there is an assault on masculinity by the feminine movement and political correctness.  RELAX!  It – or they – change nothing!

My mother had more masculine courage – meaning moral or psychological courage than my da had.  My da had the worn out masculine courage of not being afraid of any other man.  He died a courageous death with that masculine form of physical courage at three days past his fiftieth birthday from a terrible disease, multiple myeloma, the same disease that killed Sam Walton the founder of Walmart.   

We have gone from brawn to brains and brains have much more to do with moral courage than physical courage.  It is the psychological courage that held our family together; the psychological courage that my mother stood up to my da stating that “Jimmy is going to go to college and make something of himself.” 

It was the moral courage of my mother – not my da – answering the phone and talking to the bill collectors when they threatened to sue.  I laugh about the latter as we had nothing if they did so.

It is the moral courage that finds a mother standing up to authority and not backing down when they threatened to take our modest home away from us, while my da stood behind smoking furtively asking, “What did they say?”

We kept our home, we stayed together, and I went on to college and have had the career that allowed me to write missives such as this in my dotage.

By coincidence, I will soon be publishing – what I think is my best writing – a nonfiction book on this very subject, THE VELVET GLOVE & IRON FIST” (Kindle Library, Amazon.com).

The “Iron Fist” is the masculine approach to the problem solving; the approach that threatens and boast, swears and accuses; and sometimes becomes violent, thinking that such action demonstrates courage when it demonstrates just the opposite. 

It isn’t political correctness that hyper sensitive males are seeing, but the VELVET GLOVE unclenching the IRON FIST so it can slide into the glove and act sensibly.  Saber rattling may be construed as masculine but diplomacy and civility now save the day.   

In this most confusing, demanding, ambivalent and ambiguous time, is it any wonder that the gender assigned at birth flies out the window when a person’s social identity and his or her relationships to others confronts the reality of experience?  Remember, we all come from women, and most of our nurturing is likely with women, and therefore why the surprise when the physiological male has attributes and behavioral aspects more associated with women?

My advice is to ignore these academic experts and give sex role identity a rest.  We have too many real problems that can no longer be ignored, including the most important of growing up.