Refusing to be left behind

Subject: Refusing to be left behind.

I see the gender war is still alive and well.
The advertising industry is implementing guide lines to prevent gender stereotyping. The sort of thing where a woman is seen handling the washing whilst the man handles the tv control. Quite right, many of you will exclaim, its wrong that women should be expected to do the housework and change the baby's nappy whilst men swan down to the pub.
Traditional definitions to describe what a man and a woman should do is clearly out of kilter in a world where there is more than one bread winner and the domestic strains of sharing the space of a house and a home have to be born by both sexes. In fact the term sex is loosing relevance as we discover a whole panoply of gender conditions which seem to throw up more and more sexual diversity each generation.
The gender specific role has seen its sell by date and now we don't blink an eye when we see women fighting on the front line whilst men compete to establish their feminine side. The roles which used to identify us as men and women are swept aside in the rush to prove we are all the same.

And yet are we. There is no earthly reason why a woman can't be a plumber and men have been in the kitchen for generations, who are the five star chefs but men. Women are not inclined towards the really dirty work or descend down a coal mine to hack at the coal face for eight hours a day, generally they have more sense and would rather work in an office. Their instincts for child rearing and the pivotal part they play in carrying the unborn child makes their claim to having special privileges in this area generally uncontested but as men are drawn closer into the home and the workings therein then this feminising has to give claim to more rights for the male when it comes to children and the access they have to their sons and daughters.

Of course as we embark on the road of surrogacy and designer babies, as we contemplate the act of conception merely as the fertilisation of an egg and not the result of a relationship between a man and a woman. If conception becomes so deterministic that it becomes a hedonistic lifestyle choice then there is no need to define the gender and gender becomes almost completely interchangeable.
Orwell's fertile brain has spawned a whole new way of considering the future. The interplay of humans on this planet over Millennia will be called into question as women take a chromosome tablet to start the process of cell division and men find ways of replicating the womb so as not to be left behind.