McGuire presents case after case in which the lie that there’s no significant difference between the sexes is embarrassingly exposed. A noncompliant natural order reasserts itself, despite all our attempts to resist it. Unfortunately, in the single-minded pursuit of ideology, the rebuffs of nature are answered with redoubled efforts to erase sexual difference, accompanied by recriminations blaming an unenlightened society for the (natural) failure to realize the vision.

In Sex Scandal: The Drive to Abolish Male and Female, journalist Ashley McGuire articulates the crisis of sexual identity facing the contemporary West, all in a punchy and accessible style.

McGuire explores numerous fronts of the current assault on the reality of sexual difference: children’s toys and education, cultural discourse around the terms “sex” and “gender,” colleges and their sexual culture, the military, emergency services, the entertainment industry, legal developments, social norms, and the gender identity movement. Each front is presented through a litany of journalistic anecdotes and symptomatic causes célèbres. Together they reveal a society fraught with conflict over one of the most basic human realities—the difference between men and women.

Throughout her treatment, McGuire goes against society’s blindness to the reality of significant and unavoidable difference between men and women. Nature, of course, won’t readily function as the docile handmaid of our ideological fancies. McGuire presents case after case in which the lie that there’s no significant difference between the sexes is embarrassingly exposed. A noncompliant natural order reasserts itself, despite all our attempts to resist it. Unfortunately, in the single-minded pursuit of ideology, the rebuffs of nature are answered with redoubled efforts to erase sexual difference, accompanied by recriminations blaming an unenlightened society for the (natural) failure to realize the vision.

Beauty of Difference

The ideological fear of sexual difference, however, isn’t well grounded: were we to welcome and attend to the differences between the sexes, our respective dignity would be heightened, not diminished. To live as equals, McGuire contends, we must rediscover and appreciate our differences, no longer being “scared of our own selves” as sexed persons:

Sex doesn’t need to be a fault line in a battle, or a source of national scandal. The difference between the two sexes should be the starting point for a more authentic equality. This does not mean a return to the times when women were denied basic goods like an education or the vote. Those times suffered under an equally problematic misunderstanding of the difference between the sexes, one that denied where the sexes truly are the same, namely in their intellectual capacity and their contributions to civic life. But it is also an affront to equality to say men and women are identical, and to deny that a civilized society requires certain corrections to accommodate the unique needs of the female sex. (192)

McGuire affords us glimpses of a more positive vision, one in which our differences can be celebrated as distinctive gifts, in which men and women are not competitors but companions and collaborators, admiring and respecting each other’s unique strengths. She laments the demise of chivalry, for instance, reminding her readers that “it is sexual difference that activates chivalry, and women are its primary beneficiaries.”

Women on Their Own Terms

McGuire’s interest is primarily focused on the damaging effects that denying sexual difference has on women. A gender-neutralized society, she argues, decreases women’s happiness and well-being, alienating them from their very bodies and selves, in order that they might more effectively function in masculine roles.

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