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With the notion that “powerful boys are those who have dads who teach them all the boy stuff and moms who teach them it’s OK to cry or to hug...,” the implications are immediately marginalizing. First, it slices in half the prospects for those kids with single moms and dads who, by such reasoning, can only parent according to their chromosomal luck of the draw. In a society where half of all marriages end in divorce, men and women, and society in general, need to recognize that the full range of lessons imparted to children can come from both mother and father. But never mind marital statistics. The premise that we should limit ourselves, much less our children, to a proscribed set of activities and instinctive behaviors according to our sex is archaic.

I was raised on a ranch, where boys milked the cows, mowed lawns and earned summer wages driving grain trucks, while the girls entered pie-baking contests, cleaned house, canned and fed harvest crews in exchange for the promise of a college education — if they didn’t get married first. Aside from the unfairness of the latter part of that bargain (which has since been ushered into obsolescence with the aid of the women’s movement), my five brothers, two sisters and I grew up watching our very masculine father sashay into the kitchen on Saturdays with an “oh, goody” smile and roll up his sleeves to help my very capable mom knead bread dough. He was no stranger to a dishpan, knew exactly how to operate a mop and at 87 still claims his right to be half of the salsa making team. Mind you, this is a man who broke horses as a teenager, could take apart a combine and knew how to stitch up a prolapsed cow at the end of a catastrophic delivery. (I don’t know whether he could have designed the interiors of our home, but I imagine if he’d had a little extra time he’d have had opinions that would have translated nicely.)