Doing the research and writing the article on the Metrosexual Male really stimulated my thinking about my own stereotypes and expectations of what it means to be male or female—what it means to be human, actually. I’m reading a book, The Blank Slate, in which the author, MIT psychology professor Steven Pinker, argues that we are born with a tremendous amount of predetermined genetic tendencies. This idea in contrast to one of a human being born with little or no human nature; a human who is completely malleable, completely free to be or do anything.

Clearly there is an inter-play between genetic tendencies and environmental factors. But I have wanted to believe that with the “correct”, healthy social influences any of us can become whatever, whoever, we want. What if that is not fully true? What if we each are different—men from women, for example? I’ve recently realized why that has been a distasteful idea to me: differences have not been honored, but used to classify and discriminate and limit.

Pinker declares that “men and women have all the same genes except for a handful on the Y chromosome, and their brains are so similar that it takes an eagle-eyed neuroanatomist to find the small differences between them.” 344 Yet these do seem to translate, on average, into important behavioral differences. Certainly societies throughout history and all over the world have created rigid roles for men and women based on these largely hormonal variations. And all the people who fit poorly into the cultural norms were ostracized, tormented, belittled and even destroyed.

True change will be acceptance of each human being as a unique, complex manifestation of the Great Mystery of existence. A real paradigm shift will occur not because we attempt to make everyone equal to or the same as everyone else, but when we value the various talents any individual brings to the work of the society, without caring if that person is any particular gender, color or size.