Short Response to "The New Girliness"

While reading Susan Douglas's chapter, "The New Girliness," and her critique of books spelling out the theory that men and women are different, I immediately asked myself, "but aren't they?" Books like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus explain the differences between men an women, stating that men "value 'power, competency, efficiency and achievement,'" while women value "'love, communication, beauty and relationships'" (Douglas 105). I read this passage after having heard the experiences of four Colgate womens' sports coaches, who each stated that coaching men and women is completely different. Since men and women are inherently different and do conduct themseves differently, the experience of coaching these opposite sexes has to be different. One coach stated that women value relationships and wish to build strong team bonds in order to achieve an end goal. For men, these relationships are perhaps less important and often they can drop conflicts for the good of the game. Women are good communicators and often need to talk out their problems to reach success. Men, however, can usually work out conflicts physically, rather than through communication. It is true that women are strong like Ann Coulter, the Williams sisters, Condoleeza Rice, my teammates on the cross country team, my mom. However, this does not mean that women will beat each other up to settle their problems or forget about a nasty comment a friend makes before the big game on Friday. Women and men, for the most part, value different things and it seems unrealistic  to say otherwise.

 (http://tinyurl.com/37lumml)