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DAVID YOUNT: Destructive gender roles

(December 3, 1999 5:07 p.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com)

The most damaging legacy of the waning 20th century is likely to be the disintegration of the family.

Bearing the burden of their own parents' divorces, young adults are marrying later than ever, if at all. Single parenthood has dropped generations of young women into poverty. Schools are hard-pressed to redeem children of absentee mothers and fathers. And worse is to come: When single parents grow old, who will be there to care for them?

In a new book, "The Sex Change Society," English commentator Melanie Phillips argues that her own sex is largely to blame for the collapse in moral values that has undermined the family and victimized women and their children. She concludes that the change in women's sexual attitudes and behavior since the 1960s has backfired, reducing sexual freedom to bondage.

Traditionally, women controlled sexual relationships. Men competed for their favors, and women made their selection at the appropriate time. Social and religious norms, linked with the fear of pregnancy, required women to confine sexual activity within marriage. But with sex and marriage detached from each other, women increasingly reduced relationships to sexual gratification in the name of equality.

Until fairly recently, adultery was subject to social disapproval and legal sanctions, because it was recognized as destructive to marriage. Phillips concedes that "sanctions were more severe for women who committed adultery than for men," but argues that "this was principally to safeguard the integrity of genetic inheritance. A mother knows beyond doubt that her baby is hers; a man does not know beyond doubt that it is his."

Phillips believes that men who leave their wives are rightly condemned, but disagrees that women who leave their husbands are any less destructive. Recent feminist best-sellers argue that men fail to offer commitment because they are confused about their roles. Phillips insists that women have caused that confusion.

Promiscuous by nature, men in the past constrained themselves because women demanded it. Still, "this suited men, because it brought together their two powerful instincts: to have sex and to make permanent attachments and raise their own children."

It is women's misconception of sexual equality, Phillips concludes, that has made them unwitting victims, driving men away. Violence is also a factor.

"As women have become independent of men," she notes, "they have also become more violent toward them - because men have become dispensable."

Women are popularly assumed to be the sole victims of domestic violence. But in two national surveys, American social scientists revealed that husbands and wives attack each other physically at equal rates. Psychologist John Archer notes that women are more likely to provoke men because they sense that men can defend themselves and are programmed to restrain themselves.

During the civil-rights movement, it was the churches that preached non-violence. In the new millennium, they may have to bring the same lesson to the sexes in hopes of rebuilding marriage.

David Yount's latest book is "Ten Thoughts to Take into Eternity: Living Wisely in Light of the Afterlife" (Simon & Schuster). Write him c/o P.O. Box 2758, Woodbridge, VA 22193 or visit his Web site at www.erols.com/dyount.

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