then and only then will women have achieved a position of social equality. At that time they will be able to train and use their own personal talents and abilities in whatever way is most satisfying to them. Equality does not mean identity. Males (men) and females (women) will, by the nature of things, never be identical but they can be extended the same opportunities in which to express their own abilities and talents.
When such a condition of similar opportunities, expectations and rewards becomes the birthright of every female as it is of every male, the division of experience, expression and expectations between males and females which we today know as gender will cease. As I have often said, when masculinity and femininity (the two genders) come to- gether in the middle we will no longer designate either one but rather will all of us be able to express a new common dimension
our human- ity. In that day, cross dressing as a means of gender expression, that is, of being able to experience and express that part of our total human selves which is now prohibited to men and permitted to women, will cease to be necessary. When all human beings can dress, act, perform, and contribute, as their own abilities and interests dictate what will there be for a male (like you) to envy and to seek to emulate? When women wore hoop skirts and bustles it is quite possible that some of them at least envied the simpler article of men's attire pants. Today what woman envies or secretly wishes to emulate men by wearing pants? Obviously none of them because now they all do wear pants and no one thinks anything of it. Won't the same thing be true when men take to skirts? Does any young man of today (except those in the military or a specially restrictive business) envy girls their long hair? Certainly not because if he wants long hair all he has to do is grow it
COLLA
or buy a wig which many of them do. In short when you can have something openly you do not seek it covertly. (If you are over 25 or are involved in a business where long hair is verboten, you will still be envious, of course.)
Today we FPs do seek to express our other human side our femin- inity covertly because we can't do so openly. But "the times they are a-changing" as the song says. Women aren't fighting for our rights to the other half of our humanity, they are fighting for the other half of their own. But the opposition, that which makes the fight necessary for each group, is the same male superiority and the need to maintain that position. Men need to be "liberated" from the shackles of the need to maintain this figment of historical imagination, their super- iority. When men are liberated, women will be liberated in the same
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