And among the differences that are the most under threat of criticism today are the differences between the sexes. We are told, in no uncertain terms, on daily basis that there are no real differences between them, that they are of equal value, possess the same innate characteristics, and that any differences between them are illusory. Any differences in outcomes between them are unjust and artificifial. We receive major doses of counter-programming designed to invert and subvert our assumptions about the sexes, to help correct these dangerous prejudices. And where disparate impacts and diverging outcomes remain, they must be denied, condemned, or corrected.

And the question we must ask is, what’s so scary about differences between the sexes? We’ve lived through the entirety of history (and prehistory) with that being one of the most basic assumptions of every human. And far from it being a cause for terror and distress, it was so casually assumed as to be almost inconsequential, like the difference between night and day, or the need for food and water. So why, at this late date, are we suddenly so scared of it? Why be afraid of our differences?

There are, of course, many historical and social and psychological reasons for both sexes to fear one another. And everyone has their own reasons for why they feel the way they do. In practice we might have good reason to fear anyone. But to fear difference itself, on principle, is another matter. Why is the mere principle that there might be real differences between the sexes so dangerous and frightening?

The answer is, for the same reason that differences between cultures and countries are frightening. Because if there are real differences between the sexes, then there there might be a value hierarchy. If there is a value hierarchy, then men might be better.

Or at least, if you admit that real differences are possible then someone might draw that conclusion and act on it, regardless of whether it was true or not. Disarming the conviction of their own distinctness and value and need to compete and prove and assert it seems like the only way to render men less dangerous. Like dangerous nation states, if they have no concept of the borders between themselves and other adjoining peoples, they cannot develop the need to fight or dominate them.

If differences are real, then hierarchies might also be real, and men might take them over. Women think this, even if they won’t say it, and it scares them. And some men might think it and fear it in themselves or in other men. It’s not like the only losers in a competitive hierarchy are going to be women. In fact the sorest losers have always been other men, who have often been imprisoned, killed, or otherwise completely defeated and reduced, while the winners seek the favor of women with gifts of the rewards of their victory.

Women, however, seem to be more biologically and psychologically predisposed to worry about this potential imbalance between the sexes. Partly because they’re physically weaker and easier to damage, partly because they are higher in neuroticism and more sensitive to emotional and social distress, and partly because they’re more agreeable (pro-social) and so in a way more vulnerable to domination and exploitation in general. And that plays out in their higher levels of anxiety and depression, which are the innate dangers of these psychological features.

And these features aren’t bad, they’re just particular. But it means that women have a lot of (reasonable) anxiety about men. In the past, these anxieties may have been mostly confined to certain specific men. Bad men, strangers, the men of other rival tribes and nations, socially unacceptable or dangerous men, criminal men who sought success outside the bounds of moral and social codes, the lower end of the male hierarchy and the top of other competing tribes’ hierarchies. The ones, to summarize, that their own men were set in opposition to and competed with and protected them from.

But for women in a society with few good men, or where relations between the sexes have degenerated such that one can no longer rely on the good men to be present to balance out and hold back the bad, all men, with their adaptations for competition and violence and aggression and strength and ambition and dominance, become a kind of threat. So they become a universal concern and source of perpetual anxiety, and a factor in society that must be addressed and suppressed as a whole. Differences must be abolished, lest someone sieze advantage.

Men, on the other hand, take the same experiential data and run a different way with it. They also notice that there appear to be real differences. And if there are real differences, then there might be a hierarchy. And so they want to compete in it. They want to win. They want to test and be tested, to battle and show their mettle. To die, even, to win status and approval, if necessary, and to protect their people. And to kill, if need be, to preserve their place and to purge what is dangerous and undesirable from the world.

And if you abolish differences, if you abolish their hierarchy, they become listless and selfish and unmotivated. They collapse in on themselves and turn to drink and distraction and meaningless diversions, to suicide and crime and addiction and petty indulgences and childish dependency. Men, like males of many species, are strange creatures. Compelled to fight and compete, to pursue and to dominate, to test and be tested, to kill and to die. Because if you can’t get to the top of some hierarchy, if you can’t engage in that process of struggle and selection and proving yourself, then you aren’t worth anything, and life is a pointless farce.

The answer of the Christian faith isn’t to endorse either of these approaches, and it also isn’t to disagree with them. According the Christianity, there are real differences between the sexes. But there isn’t a value hierarchy between them. Both ways of being, different as they are, are good and useful and exist for our benefit. We can’t afford to lose or ignore or undervalue either of them. But there is an internal value hierarchy to each of them. There are ways each can go wrong or go right and become better or worse versions of themselves. And because the two are meant to be complementary, making up together one whole species, each can seriously affect the other.

In fact, the same features that empower female anxiety pathologies are also the core of feminine strength and competence, just as male aggression is the source of their endemic pathologies and accomplishments. You don’t get a specialized strength without it creating commensurate vulnerabilities.

If you’re going to be particularly good at any kind of thing, that particularity will also disadvantage you in other ways. Humans are very flexible and adaptable, moreso than any other creature, but we still have particular nature’s, and we still have and make use of sexual dimorphism specifically. Our natures are more complex than those of other animals, but we still have the same sexual differentiation, and it’s one of the more obvious and useful things about us.

By dividing half the species into one specialization and half into the other, you can cover a lot of bases that a single spec couldn’t, so long as the two halves remain fundamentally united to take advantage of one another’s strengths and protect one another’s vulnerabilities. And within those specializations there is still an enormous amount of variability and overlap, so how that collaboration comes together and what it looks like can have an enormous amount of individual variety, and there is a pool of flexibility to cover contingencies that might come up.

When we need to survive, when the world is demanding a lot of us and its hard to figure out how to handle it, we’ve got a built-in role specialization to fall back on that grants us enormous power and capability. And fortunately you don’t have to spend your short and dangerous and difficult lifetime figuring this divided strategy out for yourself as a novel invention; it’s so useful that it’s been pre-baked into the general structure of the species.

We are, to some degree, pre-prepared biologically to fall into and figure out our own specific version of those roles. Society and tradition don’t define or produce that capacity, but they do help develop and interpret it for the specific conditions that our society faces, the sorts of adaptations it has had to apply those basic capacities to to survive in the time and place it exists, to best exploit the available resources and manage the dominant threats. It’s a mix of nature and nurture, as with all human development.

Now, there is a confining and restrictive element to these biological and social specializations. But there is also a powerful and beautiful aspect to them. Specific features in any animal, not least of all humans, are best thought of as tools. They’re adapted to give specific advantages. But they always come with a specific cost. The more like a hammer a tool gets, the less good it is at being a saw. The more like a saw a tool gets, the less good it is at being a hammer. And the cost to make a tool be everything at once, apart from the extreme difficulty of trying to make such a thing, is that it’s quite likely to not be that great at any of its specific uses, and will likely combine the disadvantages of all of them. And the more complex and difficult the task is, the more you need tools that are well suited to the specific tasks, if you want to get it done in any reasonable amount of time.

I once watched two lines for breakfast at two different restaurants in an airport. The lines were of similar size, but I very quickly perceived that one was moving at about triple the rate of the other. In the one moving slowly, employees were wandering back and forth, taking orders, getting drinks, getting items from the kitchen, assembling orders, calling out names, each person wandering from task to task, moving from front to back and from side to side, shuffling around one another. At the other restaurant, they had the whole process specialized and coordinated. One person took orders, one got drinks, one put the orders together, one called out names and delivered the orders. It was a clockwork of specialization, each person doing their task as fast and continuously as possible. That is the power of complex, interdependent societies. The second restaurant didn’t seem to have more workers or a less complex menu, but they could fill orders at a far greater rate.

How reasonable this kind of role specialization seems largely depends on how complex the task you’re managing is. In a small company that isn’t handling a ton of work, everyone has to be more of a generalist. Even in very small companies there is some specialization and distinct roles based on competencies, but there isn’t a highly developed of defined separation between employees. In a large, complex company doing millions of dollars in business and managing a large body of complex work, you see all kinds of specialization. Each role is so demanding that just to do one of them well strains the capacity of an individual human.

I think the thing to realize about gender roles is that they’re a kind of negotiation with the challenges of life, not just some arbitrary invention created in a vacuum of endless ease and opportunity. By simply existing, they create an opportunity, a means, a mechanism. They provide a basic pattern and structure that has a pretty good chance to do a lot of good and accomplish a lot for most people. It also means that if you take them away or weaken them significantly, that you’ll lose a lot of those benefits. You’ll lose a strategy that could have done a lot for a lot of people.

We have innate and biological as well as articulated and cultural incentives to move into these sexual roles. If we don’t inhabit them to at least the very smallest minimum, the species (or at least that branch of it) ends with the current generation. And yes, the demands of the roles are pretty specific. Even if we’re only talking about married, heterosexual sex, if you don’t do it the right way, with the woman exposing and penetrated and the male exposed and penetrating, giving and receiving (usually on a repeated basis across time, since humans have concealed ovulation) it won’t work and won’t create new life, a family, and the continuance of the species.

A woman can strap on and penetrate her presenting husband all she likes, but it won’t further the species. Masturbation and oral sex and other iterations on the principal sexual experience may help maintain a bond between partners. They have some supplemental value. But if people don’t do sex this one specific way that results in a man penetrating and orgasming inside the woman, their situation will remain static and their love will not bear fruit and multiply. Unity will not be achieved and the most basic function of sexual specialization will not come to fruition.

Even in the most basic of sexual roles, there’s a lot of room for freedom and exploration and individual expression. Every couple develops a unique sexual relationship, given time, that integrates and caters to and reflects their unique capacities. But there is still the confinement of the role too. Unless you play out the roles in this one specific way, you’ll never fully consummate your sexual identity to its fullest potential (and primary intention).

There is a 100% failure of pregnancy for every type of sexual encounter other than standard penetrative sex. The tally of worldwide humans produced by it and by its alternatives is (an estimated) 107 billion to 0. It doesn’t share the field with any competitors. It’s the only game in town that actually brings sexual dimorphism to its ultimate conclusion of reuniting the gametes of the divided species into a complete whole. So that’s a pretty restrictive and specific gender role that nature and conception demands of you (or else face extinction). Just that one thing, that one posture, that one same performance. Or nonexistence.

Having said that, the union of the sexes is astoundingly powerful and wonderful. It’s the engine that drives and maintains our whole species. It literally creates new life and new combinations of beings. It’s a truly creative act. It breaks the rules of conventional experience. In the sexual union, one plus one doesn’t equal two, it equals three. Or maybe four or five, or ten, if you have time! And as it trickles down generations, maybe dozens or even hundreds. That’s insane.

For all that our differences cost us, we also owe them everything. Before we consign them to the past, it’s worth recognizing what power they have, and what we might lose by surrendering them. I certainly won’t deny that men and women have suffered a great deal as sexes. But when the alternative is oblivion and the deconstruction of our most basic innate capacities and identity, perhaps it’s worth trying to understand them better.

Any power can be abused. But that doesn’t mean that our choice is between the evil of power or the good of its abolition. Perhaps the real choice is, and always has been, a choice within, a hierarchy internal to our roles and differences, not between them. Whether to wield the power we possess well, for the good of ourselves, the other sex, our children, and the whole of humanity, or not. Whether we live as good men, as good women, or as bad.