Did Abstinence-Only Ideology Create a Bully Generation?

Joneen - if your program teaches that there's One Right Way for all boys to behave and that boys who do not behave that way are inferior and deserve to be excluded and shamed, if your program teaches that there's One Right Way for all girls to behave and that girls who do not behave that way are inferior and deserve to be excluded and shamed, then you are teaching social conformity and your enforcement mechanism is shunning and shaming and harassing people to 'get back in line', and those are the foundation upon which bullying rests.

Abstinence Only programs based on rejecting biological realities as 'sinful' (even if they inaccurately use the phrase psychological harm instead) , on promoting stereotypical gender roles based in myth, on inculcating superstitions about the 'spiritual' value of 'purity', are not effective at their stated goals of delaying sexual activity, by discouraging condom use actually make the problems of STD's and unwanted pregnancy worse, and do not include the specific information which parents want taught to their middle school and high school children.

You can trot out all the jargon you want about "robust and plentiful data" but anyone who has investigated these programs is well aware that the evidence from studies shows they contain massive inaccuracies and fail at their stated purpose of delaying sex.  Must say, really admire your ability to make lemonade -- your statement "the other examples listed in your article no longer exist because of medical accuracy reviews and updates of curricula that are aligned with science" is the rosiest possible way to say 'we have to keep changing things because the complaints keep pouring in about medically inaccurate and unscientific statements'.

It may be true that your program attempts to imprint a world view congruent with your beliefs, but that isn't the reality most people live in, and in the present economy, with most families requiring a second paycheck to keep afloat, parents are no longer quite so eager to sacrifice their daughters' mind in order to uphold the patriarchy.  While girls still are interested in love and romance and marriage and babies, they no longer are content to be restricted merely to serving men as servants and breeding stock and unpaid caretakers.

Look, WAIT Training is a program that empowers all students: male, female, gay straight, young, old, black, white to learn the skills necessary to develop healthy relationships

I know we can't have the actual curriculum to look through for ourselves, so I have some questions about the content that I hope you'll answer. Can you please explain the ways that the program addresses the needs and concerns of LGBTQ students? What I've see of the WAIT program prioritizes marriage, which is indeed exclusionary considering that same sex marriage is illegal in most states. I also visited your website and noticed that all of the pictures feature heterosexual couples. This may seem minor to you, but it isn't to young people and adults who are looking for information that applies to what they can actually attain in a relationship. If you truly seek inclusivity, I suggest a review by an LGBTQ advocacy group of all of your materials to inform revisions.

I saw this in the SEICUS review:

Messages of shame are effectively dramatized in an exercise called “Spit in a Cup.”  The teacher asks seven volunteers to line up side-by-side at the front of the class.  Each volunteer is holding a sign with an STD written on it (HPV, Chlamydia, Herpes, HIV/AIDS, Gonorrhea, Syphilis), except the last person in line who holds a sign reading “Virgin.”  The teacher then gives a cup to the first person in line and asks them to spit in it and pass it down for the next person to spit in it.  When the cup gets to the person with the “Virgin” sign the teacher is supposed to tell that person to drink it, but stop them if they actually try to.  The teacher concludes the activity by saying “Now isn’t he smart?  This is like what you put into your body when you have sex with someone whose sexual history is unknown to you,” (WAIT Training 80/20 Manual, p. 86).  This lesson is at the end of the Contraception unit even though it focuses on STDs.  And while it’s important to encourage students to communicate with their partners about their sexual history, this lesson takes the inappropriate step of comparing sexual activity to drinking a cup full of spit.

Can you explain your perspective of how the program avoids shaming sexually active students in the program? The script, "Isn't he smart?" implies that students who do engage in sexual activity are stupid. And of course, the activity itself implies that they're dirty.

I also noticed in the review that the program implies that marriage is somehow protective against domestic violence (among other claims). This is a potentially dangerous claim to make. Telling young people that they can avoid domestic and dating violence by getting married ignores the fact that 1 in 5 high school girls who date experience physical or sexual violence before they graduate. That statistic has nothing to do with engaging in consensual sex, but with dating, which your program doesn't discourage. To students who have already been victimized, this seems like a very problematic message to send. Furthermore, to your knowledge, how have students whose parents are married and one is abusive responded to that statement? Were domestic violence experts involved in the creation of the curriculum? I know they have been involved in some of them, and I'm curious if the WAIT program was one.

And on that note, I'm glad that the program covers healthy relationships and dating. Can you explain some of the main points in those lessons, and how they're presented?

In response to Joneen, bullying, stereotyping, and hateful behaviors (misogyny, homophobia, transphobia) are all intermingled.  When a school endorses a program that marginalizes LGBT teens by saying that all sexual behavior should take place only within a marriage, that school is sending subtle messages to parents, teachers, students, and everyone else in the community.

Among these messages:

* it is good to discourage perfectly normal expressions of gender and sex, and good to misinform youth about birth control and other reproductive health topics

* it is acceptable to teach female-bodied people that they must be constantly on guard against randy male-bodied people because otherwise they might get raped

* boys are aggressive and girls are passive.

Look closely at any of these and you will find misogyny, homophobia, and rampant stereotyping.  Sex and gender are broad and touchy topics to many communities, and reifying the middle-class gender roles of 1955 as the gold standard of relationships is deleterious to students.

I'm against (not scared or upset with) abstinence-only and other misinformational sex education because it skips important facts.  Risk avoidance isn't good enough on its own, even for folks who want to get married before they have sex -- not everyone who puts a penis and a vagina together wants a fetus to happen right then.  I know folks who talk about sex like to get into metaphors, so consider driver's ed.  They don't teach you to "say no to car".  You learn about safety belts, following at safe distances, how to steer when you've lost control of your car, and countless other tidbits of extremely useful information.  Risk reduction education is fact-based education, and it is not scary.

"It still focuses exclusively on marriage, alienates sexually active and LGBTQ students, and relies on fear and shame."

Also has connections to homophobic "Focus On The Family" RW fundamentalists.  

describing should be coming from the home. The mother AND the father. Children learn what they live and their parents are their MAIN teachers. Children will do as their parents did whether they want to or not you know monkey see monkey do?

What really is needed is some sort of mandatory parenting classes in middle and high schools because they are not getting it from home. Maybe if these greedy corporations had not taken over people could have had stay at home moms who wanted to stay at home, like me but could not, simply because my ex's salary was not enough!

Then there needs to be a change in the way major religious institutions teach. The world right now is one sided patriarchal. Where does that leave the rest of us? Shaming and blaming does not work. The more you stuff one in a closet the more rebellious they become.

There is no one program that will stop bullying until humans learn to respect one another starting in the home!

I'm sorry but you are very unrealistic.  Teens have sex.  I graduated in 2003 and most teens have had sex before we graduated.  I'm 26 now and I know no one who has remained a virgin until they got married.  It is a fantasy your type tries to brainwash teens into.  The best sex is protected and consentual sex.  Waiting is fine but in no way realistic.  Teens need all the information.  Adults need to realize that teens have a normal biological drive to have sex and make a program that goes with that.  WAIT is a dream and will destroy more lives than save them.  They should be teaching that having sex is not a bad thing and can be great.  Marriage is no gurantee of a healthy sex life.  Knowledge of one's body and emotions is the best way to gurantee a healthy sex, not promoting an idealistic and outdated lifestyle of virginity until marriage.

Also, from the CDC,
"By the time young people graduate from high school, almost two thirds have had sex."

When you consider the actual FACTS that fewer people are getting married and 95% of Americans have premarital sex, your program loses. People should be educated for the real world, not your fantasy one.

WAIT leaves out the LGBT that can not marry in most states.  Also it leaves out the teens that do want to marry at all.  Monogamy and marriage is not a guarantee of a happy or healthy life.  Most marriages end up in divorce anyways.  The best thing we can do is teach our kids is accurate knowledge on how their body works and different contraceptive methods to protect themselves.  WAIT ignores the fact most people have pre-martial sex and 99% of women use a form of birth control in their lives.  Sex education needs to accept the reality that most people do not live this fantasy of no sex before marriage or exclusive monogamy.

That means half of those teens are having sex.  They need accurate medical knowledge.  Not some ideology that has no basis in reality.  Teens need to learn to respect themselves and others.  They can love within a relationship without being married or monogamous.  Also WAIT leaves out the LGBT that can not legally marry.  So what happens to them?  Do they have to pray away the gay?

Your assumption that "how to love" includes virginity till marriage and sex only in marriage is a religious tenet, not a psychlological truth.

Your assumption that "loved well" requires virginity till marriage and sex only in marriage is a religious tenet, not a psychological truth.

What you are missing here is that promoting these religious tenets through WAIT training also promotes the corollaries to these ideas, that any student who has already had a romantic relationship couldn't have bene in an authentic *love* relationship because they contaminated it with nasty dirty lust that ruined everything,  and that all those who have had sex (or been sexually abused or raped) cannot ever in future "be loved well" because they won't be virgins when they marry and are unrecoverably damaged, so that your training stigmitizes that 46% of high school seniors as having missed the "how to live and be loved well" boat before the WAIT trainer ever walked in the door.

I obviously was questioning whether the training program being discussed teaches the value of committed partnerships or only marriage.

Your belief that there can be 'one right answer' to any of those questions speaks volumes about where you're coming from. 

People are not stereotypes.  There is no one correct answer to 'what is boy?'  It might be possible to answer 'what is 11-year old Robert Xavier Smith who lives in California and likes to surf and is good at math and whose favorite color is purple?'  There is no one correct answer to 'what is girl?'  It might be possible to answer 'what is 14-year old Betsy Sue Shoemaker who lives in Iowa and is good at carpentry and likes to dance and whose favorite color is red?'

Since people are not interchangeable stereotypes, there cannot be one correct answer to 'How are we to treat persons of the opposite sex?' or to 'What is a males response to a female and vice-versa?'  Different persons react differently and need to be treated differently in an infinite number of possible combinations.

If you wish to label her "ideologies ... of a "modernistic" view of male/female relations" an "epic fail", it might further the discussion if you were to outline what in your opinion is the "traditional view of male/female relations".  Which are you referring to?  'Woman as breeding stock', 'woman as free household servant', or 'woman as sex toy'?

You think we have need of a term such as "slut"? Hell no.

And for that you have earned a rant from me. Actually, here are some bits and pieces from an essay I wrote on the subject:

There is no such thing as a slut.

Think about it. Everyone's definition varies on what specific qualifiers amount to "sluttiness." Some people think you're a slut if you have sex with more than one person. Others think that you're a slut if you have sex with several or many people. But is there a magic number? A magic line? If 1 or 2 is acceptable, then what makes 9 or 10 suddenly unacceptable? And still more people think that you're a slut if you have sex with anyone before marriage. Or if you've ever been pregnant outside of marriage or had an abortion or had an STD. Or even if you dress or act in a certain manner (too provocative, too loud, too sexually knowledgable.) By that standard, even a so-called "virgin" can be a "slut." So, if everyone's definition varies, does that make all women sluts?

          No, more than likely, the simplest answer is that there is no such thing as a "slut." After all, there is no equivalent insult for men. In fact, we have a societal double-standard: male promiscuity is seen as brag-worthy, whereas female promiscuity is seen as shameful. Worse yet, not only is female promiscuity shameful, but even female sexuality itself is considered shameful or embarrassing to most people, unless it is a controlled performance for male viewing and pleasure. Female sexuality for your own self and your own sake -- without the male gaze or objectification -- is seen as shameful. This is where the word "slut" comes from: to try and put women in their "place" when they learn that they can own their sexuality without needing to be seen as coy or submissive, when women realize that sexuality is much more than a performance for male approval, when women are not afraid to adopt the socially-male role as the pursuers within relationships.

              Why is it insulting to be called a slut? Because the word "slut" de-personalizes the woman; it ignores every other aspect or achievement as a person and it turns her into a sex object. Once you decide to have sex in any socially "unacceptable" manner (whatever that may be, see paragraph 1 for all variations), people think that it is okay to refer to you as though you are a masturbatory object that has been "used" by men. It is unthinkable for people to see you as an autonomous agent, a person who has chosen, wanted, and pursued sex. And on top of that, there are all kinds of other assumptions associated with the slut -- all of the whys: because she has "low self-esteem," because she has "poor self-control," because she makes "bad lifestyle choices" or because she is "too easy." Once again, it is unthinkable for people to see you as an autonomous person, an emotionally well-adjusted individual who enjoys a healthy sex life, and makes mutually beneficial, well-informed choices within her relationship as a mature adult.

              This is why I do not call anyone a "slut," even if I do not agree with their private sexual choices. Calling someone a slut is anti-sex and anti-woman, and even other women are guilty of reinforcing the old virgin/whore paradigm by shaming and trash-talking girls that do not live up to a certain socially acceptable "standard." Bottom line: It is not my place or your place to degrade another person's sexuality, as long as everything is consensual and mutually beneficial.

It is time that people stop associating sexuality with morality/personal character - they have absolutely nothing to do with each other, and the only reason people today still associate sexuality with morality is because of historically misogynistic Abrahamic religious beliefs. There is no way for you to discern why somebody has sex and there is no reason why you should care, even if you assume they are for the wrong reasons like "poor self-control." Sex and sexual expression are normal parts of human biology and sociology, and everyone has different preferences.  

                  Most importantly of all, when we return to the realization that there is no such thing as a slut, then there is no such thing as a virgin. And if you think about it, you come to realize that it's true. There is no medical or scientific definition for virginity. None. It is nothing but a social construct. And how do you define a "virgin"? Some people think that a virgin is somebody who has never had penis-in-vagina (PIV) intercourse. In that case, does the concept of virginity only apply to heterosexuals? Does that mean that sexually-active gay men and women are still "virgins"? Does that mean that you can still be a virgin if you have oral, manual, and/or anal sex (but never PIV sex) with one or more people? All of these rhetorical questions are meant to illustrate the abstract, made-up qualities of "virginity" and "sluttiness." Both words are rooted in the ancient obsession with the purity of the female as vessel/object and the fear of female sexual power.

                A woman is so much more than her sexual history/sexual expression. Abstinence and virginity fetishists often refer to your "virginity" as the "greatest gift you can give to your spouse." They directly imply that your entire worth as a person and as a partner is measured by whether or not you have had sex. Your achievements and skills and personality don't matter, because apparently all of that can be sullied and dirtied by PIV sex. It is time to reject this virgin/whore paradigm once and for all. It is time to call on all women and men to end "slut-shaming" and educate each other about healthy sexuality and the importance of mutual consent. This will make the world a safer and healthier place for all women, regardless of how they act or dress or how many people they've slept with. This would create a world in which the violent crime of rape is taken seriously every single time, and a woman's outfit or sexual history is deemed irrelevant. Women and girls should be judged for who they are as people and as human beings, not for how many people they have or have not slept with, not for their sexual anatomy or gender expression.

____

And if you are truly curious about the biology behind "what is a girl?" and "what is a boy?" -- it's not nearly as neat and color-coded as you have been led to believe by our culture. For more on this subject, I would highly recommend Sexing The Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality by Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling. Much heavier on science than the title implies, and highly informative.

There is no such thing as "promiscuity".

The way that I understand promiscuity is that it means that one has multiple sexual partners, not "too many" sexual partners, as I do not think that there is such a thing as having "too many" partners because that is highly subjective/personal and varies strongly from individual to individual. To me personally, it does not have a negative connotation for a person to have multiple sexual partners or be promiscuous. The only reason people derive a negative connotation from the idea of someone - specifically a woman - having multiple sexual partners is because you wish to push your personal, subjective definition of "too many/too much" on to other people's sexual activity, even though it does not effect or concern you.

And that is where "slut" comes into play, from your desire to create an objective definition from the subjective definition of "too many" and apply it to all other human beings who do not conform. It comes from the belief that because other people have sexual preferences unlike yours, then they must be abnormal. It is an abstraction which ascribes a high degree of stigma, shame, and negativity to a woman (and ONLY a woman) for having multiple sexual partners. The mere fact that "slut" is in the dictionary does nothing to reify it.

That reason is because we have created the term to negatively point out--however subjectively--the supposed culturally "un-normal" actions of an individual through which their character is judged.

Here you are making the assumption that for a woman to have more than one sexual partner is "abnormal." Given all that we know about human reproductive biology and normal social interaction, there is nothing abnormal about having more than one sexual partner. Historically, most people were not in lifetime monogamous relationships. I challenge you to find reputable scientific resources which demonstrate that having multiple sexual partners is an abnormal sexual behavior, both from an evo-bio standpoint as well as cultural/psychological standpoint. The only reason that you think it is "un-normal" for a woman to have multiple sexual partners is due to the cultural brainwashing that takes place in historically male-dominated religious institutions.

The nature of the human as male or female (or transgendered) person transcends the sum of their biology and therefore demands--out of necessity--that we collectively arrive at objective behavioural "norms" in order to identify destructive behaviours and move forward in common understanding.

You're not really saying anything here of value. At all. What is the "nature" of the human male or female? As I said before, a person's gender and sexual anatomy aren't as neatly defined as you have been led to believe. That is, just because somebody has a vagina and other working "female" sex organs does not mean that person necessarily identifies as a female or is even a female on a chromosomal level at all. So, given that understanding, why is it necessary for us as a society to have different, special ways of "treating" men and women? Why do you believe that a person must exhibit "certain objective behaviors" based on their sexual anatomy & gender? Why is there a demand for this at all? It's utterly ridiculous. And what behaviors would you consider to be destructive?

There is nothing destructive about sexual relationships which are mutually consensual and beneficial.

In other words, "sluttiness" is understood to be contrary to how the species of human persons normally behaves in order to develop healthy relationships with each other.

Once again, you seem to be lost on what is considered normal sexual behavior for human beings. There is no inherent biological inclination for monogamy in human beings. And excluding pressure from male-dominated religious institutions, there is also no cultural necessity for monogamy (or non-promiscuity) in order to secure positive relationships within society. The number of sexual partners one has is irrelevant when considering 'healthy relationships' in society. When determining what is healthy or what is destructive in social interactions, you need only to consider the matters of mutual consent and mutual benefit. In fact, the number of sexual partners somebody has does not concern you at all, unless YOU ARE one of their sexual partners. Otherwise, it has no effect on you and is none of your business.

That does not mean however that the term was not founded upon the recognition of an "un-normal" behaviour.  You seem to want to qualify the implications of the word as "acceptable" and thus make it "normal" in order to lose to the word "slut" all together. 

The only reason that there is stigma associated with promiscuity is because patriarchal religious institutions are fearful of female sexuality if it exists outside of their accepted framework of the woman-as-vessel/object. This framework is used to oppress women who would otherwise be on equal social standing & accomplishment level with men. When you have women realize that they are worth more than their ability to reproduce or their ability to sexually submit to men, then that can be a very terrifying idea, especially if you are the leader of a male-dominated religious institution and confuse 'equality' with a 'loss of power.'

And, surprise, it is within the normal range of human sexual behavior for a woman to have multiple sexual partners!

Can you explain what you mean here? It seems as through you are upset there is no "official" masculine translation of "slut"... what is your point? regardless of gender, persons should not be degrading other persons; semantics is not the issue--its the behaviour which elicits degradation.

Don't feign ignorance. You know exactly what I mean here. The fact that there is a word used to stigmatize sexually active women but NOT sexually active men is an example of a double standard. Why is it "bad" for women to have sex but not men? The fact that this double standard exists is yet more evidence that the word "slut" (along with "virgin") are non-existent concepts that have no use other than to oppress and shame women (and only women) for exhibiting NORMAL sexual behaviors which have been arbitrarily deemed "abnormal behaviors" by patriarchal institutions, in disregard with all scientific evidence to the contrary. 

Serious questions: Ask yourself WHY should a person's sexual behaviors "elicit degradation" from others when such behavior is biologically normal, mutually consensual/beneficial (and therefore does not effect you), and degradation of such behavior only targets ONE gender. Does this not seem suspicious to you at all?

What is it that is negative by being a "slut"? By definition it is promiscuous or questionable activity related to a woman's sexuality (and now more use the term to describe males all the same). 

No, you have it backwards. What is negative about being called a slut is that is sends the message that exhibiting behaviors within the range of normal sexual expression (having multiple sexual partners or promiscuity or non-monogamy, etc) is wrong or dirty or bad, especially if you exhibit these normal behaviors while identifying as a woman in some way, shape, or form.

This is because it is seen as "un-natural" to be promiscuous given the human capacity to understand VALUE in a person.

Here, you are implying that making the conscious choice of having consensual sex with multiple partners is an act which DEVALUES a person. It does not. What devalues and objectifies someone is when you come to the conclusion that ONE aspect of their entire person -- their sexual history/normal sexual behavior -- is enough to earn your scorn and stigmatization. You decide that their private sexual business concerns or effects you and that it is okay to reduce everything else about them into this one insult. By calling somebody a slut, you are you are enforcing oppression against women for exhibiting normal human sexual behaviors. By calling somebody a slut, you are saying that nothing about that person matters to you at all aside from how many people they've had sex with.

This is why promiscuity breeds a utilitarian understanding of woman in society.  Promiscuity primarily utilizes one aspect of the human person.

Promiscuity is not what 'breeds a utilitarian understanding of woman in society.' Rather, it is the massive cultural misunderstanding of what does/does not constitute normal sexual behavior. And I would argue, it is the cultural obsession with one aspect of the human person -- their sexuality -- that breeds objectification ("utilitarian understanding") and oppression of women. If people would 1. mind their own damn business [see above: the number of sexual partners a woman has does not concern/effect you unless you are her sexual partner] and 2. stop obsessing about female sexuality (one aspect of the female as a person), then promiscuity would not have a negative connotation and the word "slut" would not have come into existence at all.

There is far too much evidence out there which overwhelmingly demonstrates that it is not a good thing to act against a human persons wholeness.  The term "slut" is just one obvious example.  

If you truly believed this, then you would understand that we as a society do NOT have need of the word "slut" (or "virgin") after all. You cannot have it both ways by arguing that "slut" is a legitimate, concrete, useful concept... while at the same time acknowledging that it's demeaning and wrong to call someone this because it acts against a human person's wholeness. If a word's only purpose/use is to demean, oppress, stigmatize, shame, and act against a human person's wholeness, then there is no legitimate reason for you to keep it around.

And rape culture is the "corrective" punishment for all females, to attempt to insure that women continue to live in paralyzing fear of rejecting the degraded role of sex toy/free household servant/breeding stock, which the dominant patriarchal paradigm has a HUGE interest in maintaining.  

I must say, what a load of bilge.  All that sexual stereotyping and rigorous enforcement of gender roles ever did for me was to, from my earliest memories, frustrate and anger me, because I knew they were utterly false constructs.  Even as a kindergartener in the 1950s, my entire personal essence as a human individual was constantly offended by gender-based stereotypes.  I knew at 4 that, despite the vigorous sociological imprinting of "what is girl" and "what is boy", I was a square peg in both figurative holes - therefore, I KNEW that these roles were NOT real, they were NOT genetic, and that they existed solely to attempt to impress on females from earliest development that they were Less Than Males.  

Those like you, who demand a gender-based road map as a prerequisite for attempting to "respond with respect and appreciation" to an individual, are simply intellectual weaklings who do NOT respect women at all, and therefore require the use of illegitimate gender role filters to continue to bolster the putative legitimacy of the lack of respect which the patriarchy is accountable for inflicting upon females.  

You cannot fully do that by ignoring "what is girl" and "what is boy".

It seems to me that  the problem isn't ignoring such questions.  The problem is what happens when the Catholic heirarchy and/or evo-psy pseudo psychologists or some other preening fool  start describing "how the female brain is wired"  and then insist that we all live down to whatever fantasy y'all come up with. I've never read a thing that someone claiming to understand "how the female brain is wired" without feeling diminished and limited. And, of course, when the Catholic heirarchy are doing the describing the insults just never stop.

Simple observation should inform any reasonable person that there are more differences within the genders than between the genders. I would hold that this is particularly true of women.

You seem to be confusing "boy" and "girl" with "person".

You seem to be unable to accept that both boys and girls ARE persons, and that they are persons first and have gender secondarily.

Of course stereotypes exist about boys and girls and practically every other thing we can think of… but we are not interested in stereotypes.

If you're not interested in stereotypes, then you'll abandon the cultural assumptions that 'boy' and 'girl' are 'complementary', that is, occupying opposite and exclusionary ends of a behavior scale so that each is the negation of the other.

"11-year old Robert Xavier Smith who lives in California and likes to surf and is good at math and whose favorite color is purple" describes a person.  This person is a boy. 

"14-year old Betsy Sue Shoemaker who lives in Iowa and is good at carpentry and likes to dance and whose favorite color is red" describes a person.  This person is a girl. 

"This person is a boy" tells you ZERO about what Robert is like unless you are assuming he has the qualities of a stereotype.  "This person is a girl" tells you ZERO about what Betsy is like unless you are assuming she has the qualities of a stereotype. 

From here, we can say that a male is fundamentally different from a female and as such, they both must respond to each other in accordance with their differences.  For instance, a male will speak to a female--based on gender alone--differently then he would a male.  Why? Because their is a recognition of a difference in her being as female.  This is not a "right or wrong" notion; it's just reality.

Yes, yes, a male does speak to a female differently.  As a general rule he takes it for granted she is less intelligent, treats her like a subordinate without regard to their relative status, interrupts what she says, patronizes her even if her education and professional qualifications are superior to his own, and becomes enraged if she contradicts him.  It is indeed reality, and it is called 'sexism', and it is indeed wrong, and we would all get along a great deal better with less of it.

Through evolutionary processes and necessity

Personally, I think evo-psych is lousy science, based not in objective knowledge but instead cherrypicking data to prop up religious and gender prejudices, and the evidence that I am correct is abundant.  If men and women did indeed each have a 'natural skill set', then all men and all women would just naturally act that way, like birds, who don't need to be taught how to build a nest or to sing.   It would not be necessary to put the social investment we see around us into constructing and maintaining multiple cultural institutions that teach rigid gender norms and reinforce rigid gender norms and punish deviance from rigid gender norms because natural behavior is what people just naturally do.  To no one's surprise, cultural institutions, including religion, actually spend most of their time trying to prevent people from acting naturally, and complaining about how people who act naturally are corrupt and debased and degenerate, blah blah blah, and need more religion/social pressure to make them act in the unnatural ways the ruling classes find convenient to make it easier to exploit them.

I don't ignore what is boy or what is girl, I just don't think that's the most interesting and important thing about other people because I am interested in whether both men and women have the ability to learn quickly, acquire and retain knowledge, display creativity or develop talents, all things that can be harnessed to the process of building, maintaining and improving civilization, while you apparently regard humans agriculturally, and are willing to lose possible products of their brains to maximize their breeding.  It's an irresolveable conflict; I value quality minds, your focus is physicality and fertility.