Gender Wars: How Do We Stop Fighting Each Other?

There are issues between the sexes just like there are issues between races, political parties, and our economic classes.  We get it-at this point, we all know.

We know what men say about women and what women say about men.  And usually, it isn't positive. 

The gender wars have been raging forever.

When my kids fight each other, I call for this to stop. The fighting must end so we can get back to working together because we love each other.  We cannot function as a human race until men and women stop the incessant fighting.

And I can’t be the only person tired of it.

At a time when some adults don’t even know how to define what a woman or man is, we have individuals that have built careers, brands, and platforms on disparaging one another.

The fighting is affecting us in ways that are going to be hard to reverse soon.

“The average birth rate in the U.S. may be falling, but when broken down along ethnic and economic lines, a different picture is painted: Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander women saw the highest birth rate in 2020 among all ethnicities, and Asian women and white women both saw the lowest birth rate.” U.S. birth rate 2021 | Statista

The dehumanizing way we speak to each other is not good.  I could spend all this time with you talking about the reasons why but there are other posts for that.

What I am addressing here is the need for us to lay down our weapons and unite.

Enough with the incessant podcasts, the books, and the movies.  We need each other and we need to end the gender wars to build together again.

We can spend all day pointing our fingers at each other like the Spiderman meme, but what does that accomplish?

Nothing.

Here are four things that might help us move forward:

1. Everyone is not like someone you know: Grouping men and women into stereotypes you know is wrong. You don’t know everyone, and you don’t know their upbringing and environment. Your story can be 100% true, for you. But that has nothing to do with what everyone else goes through and feels. That doesn’t give you a right to blast an entire gender for YOUR pain, your past, and your experiences. Validating your truth is something you must do, the rest of us, not so much.

2. People are individuals: At the end of the day, we are unquestionably different and unique. Who you know might be emblematic of your experience, but you can’t talk about women and say that I fit that label any more than I can make you accept responsibility for what my exes have done to me. We love to label each other and waste time that could be better spent on learning the individual in front of us.

3. Be Solutions oriented: Okay, women get on your nerves. What is the solution? Living in isolation will continue to drop our childbirth rate. Men have hurt you. I got it. But how do we fix it? We start at home with solutions that foster a healthy self-image, and self-esteem to better contribute to building up children who turn into better adults for the world we see. We look for ways to help us bond. We look for common ground. We celebrate our uniqueness and cultivate same-sex spaces that empower us. We get back to the love and respect for our gender first, so the opposite gender doesn’t have to carry us.

4. We forgive: We can't spend an eternity listing all the negative things wrong in our world. That would give us power. But what if we forgive each other for our past grievances and build something new? What if we started over to love one another and to build with someone we found just for us?

One thing I learned from war, is that it will continue to go on as long as one side never rests its fight.  Our men and women who, through voluntary association, want to build must put down this fight.

We can win if we choose to be good and see the positives in each other.  We must be the adults in the room, to say enough with the fighting, let us do something more.

At the end of the day, men and women work best together when we forgive and build one brick at a time.  

And there is some good news here, despite what some of the powers that be tell you.

For the 1st time since the data in the 1980s, Black households are headed by married couples at 39%. (Facts About the U.S. Black Population | Pew Research Center)

Excitingly, we can now see traces of hope for the end of these gender wars.

Correlations do not equal causation, but this is something hopeful to ponder.  If we put down our weapons and see that our unity as men and women are key to success, we can have more peace than ever before.

Being allies rather than enemies sounds like a better future to me. 

Nicole Pinkston is the CEO of Iconic Media, a marriage empowerment organization. As a U.S. Army veteran, wife, and mother, she is an author, marriage coach, and podcaster.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.