Women are NOT equal to Men

An excerpt from the book - "The Moral Animal" by - Robert Wright.
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There is a difference of opinion over how much "respect" women get in the modern moral climate. 

Respect is an ambiguous word. Maybe men who consider woman well "respected" mean that women have been accepted at work as worthy colleagues. And maybe women are indeed getting more of this kind of respect. But if by "respect" you mean what the Victorians meant when they urged respect for women - not treating them as objects of sexual conquest - then respect has probably dropped since 1970. Women would certainly like to have more of the second kind of respect.

There is no clear reason for sharp trade-off between the two; no reason that feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in insisting on the first kind of respect, had to undermine the second. But, as things happened, they did! They did undermine the second form of respect over the first, going in the name of male - female equality.

They preached innate symmetry of the sexes in all major arenas, including sex. Many young women took the doctrine of symmetry to mean they could follow their sexual attractions and disregard any vague visceral wariness: sleep with any man they liked, without fear that his sexual interest did not signify comparable affection, without fear that sex might be more emotionally entangling for her than for him. (Some feminists practiced casual sex almost out of a sense of ideological commitment.)

Men, for their part, used the doctrine of symmetry to ease themselves off the moral hook. Now they could sleep around without worrying about emotional fallout; women were just like them, so no special consideration was necessary. In this they were and are, aided by women who actively resist special moral consideration as patronizing (which it sometimes is, and certainly in Victorian England).

Lawmakers, meanwhile, took sexual symmetry to mean that women needed not special legal protection. In many states, the 1970 brought "no-fault" divorce and the automatically equal division of a couple's assets - even if one spouse, usually the wife, hasn't been on a career track and thus faces bleaker prospects. The lifelong alimony that a divorced woman could once expect may now be replaced by a few years of "rehabilitative maintenance" payments, which are supposed to give her time to launch her career recovery - a recovery that, in face, will extend beyond a few years if she has a few children to tend. In trying to get a more equitable deal, it wont help to point out that cause of breakup was her husband's rampant philandering, or his sudden, brutal intolerance. These things, after all, are nobody's fault. The "no-fault" philosophy is one reason divorce is literally a profitable enterprise for men. (The other reason is lax enforcement of the man's financial obligations.) The height of no-fault vogue has now passed, and state legislatures have undone some of the damage, but not all.

The feminist doctrine of innate sexual symmetry wasn't the only culprit, or even, initially, the main one. Sexual and marital norms had been changing for a long time, for many reasons, ranging from contraceptive technology, from residential patterns to recreational trends. So why dwell on feminism? Party because of the sheer irony that attempts to stop one kind of exploitation of women aided another kind. Partly too, because though feminists did not single-handedly create the problem, some of them have helped sustain it. Until very recently, fear of feminist backlash was far and away the main obstacle to an honest discussion of difference between the sexes. Feminists have written articles and books denouncing "biological determination" without bothering to understand biology or determinism. And the increasing, if belated, feminist discussion of sex differences is sometimes vague and disingenuous; there is a tendency to describe differences that are plausible explicable in Darwinian terms while dodging the question of whether they are innate.