

Together we can awaken the world.

May 10, 2017

The Gender Expression in Tango


In chacarera, for example, the man deliberately demonstrates his masculinity, as saying to the woman, "Look how strong I am!" And the woman deliberately displays her femininity, as saying to the man, "Am I beautiful enough for you?"

Such unconcealed gender expression is evident in their tango also.

For Argentinians, male strength and female beauty are positive traits that the opposite sexes use to allure each other. Masculinity and femininity are characteristics resulted from millions of years of natural selection that allows the human species to sustain and flourish. Opposite, interdependent and complementary, men and women are created for each other. From their union comes children, family, society, and moral principles that hold the society together, such as love, fraternity, teamwork, role play, agreeableness and cooperation. The sustenance, harmony and stability of the human society would not be possible if the two sexes were not attracting each other and loving each other. Therefore, gender expression is not a sexist display or sign of inequality, as feminists claimed. Rather, it is a binding force that strengthens the society.

Feminists only think of men and women as independent individuals with conflicting self-interests, but fail to see them as a team in which the two sexes need, depend on and complement each other. The feminist proposition that "the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man towards woman" is a rabid and untruthful statement. Human history is not a history of gender animosity. All men are sons of their mothers and brothers of their sisters, and all women are daughters of their fathers and sisters of their brothers, and they love each other by nature. In fact, for a period much longer than the recorded history the human society is matriarchal, and the love between men and women has been documented throughout the recorded history as well. While inequality is a fact of life, it is more a common social issue than women's issue, and the solution to that is not to repudiate gender differences, gender roles and gender expression, or to incite hatred and antagonism, masculinize women, imitate men, reverse gender roles, assert women's independence, women's emancipation from family and women's self-reliance - even in their sex life, and promote lesbianism and same-sex marriage, etc. The attempt to uproot and reconstruct the world according to radical ideas never has made the world better, as attested by the disastrous consequences we are facing now, because such wishful thinking is anti-nature and anti-human. (See Tango and the Relationship of the Opposite Sexes.)


True solution lies in embracing gender differences, gender roles, gender expression, love and cooperation, which are nature's way to achieve unity and harmony in contradistinction to the arbitrary culture of individualism, feminism, animosity, hatred and power politics. (See The World Needs a Different Philosophy.) Thanks to tango we have a living testimony of how that works. "Tango is based on the ideas that men and women are interdependent rather than independent, that masculinity and femininity complement rather than un-equalize the opposite sexes, that being a masculine male and a feminine female is attractive, beneficial and desirable, that the harmony of the two genders is arrived at through mutual submission and cooperation rather than confrontation and power struggle, and that love triumphs over hostility. While individualism and feminism focus on the individuality and independence of the individual, tango focuses on the partnership and oneness of the union. It asks us to be friendly, submissive, humble, adaptive, cooperative, agreeable and yielding. Tango proves that the two sexes can form a harmonious relationship by conforming to these values. Despite the challenges that tango faces in the West, it continues to exert positive influences on our societies, I believe, because unless we adopt its values, we are unable to fully enjoy the dance and the relationship with the opposite sex." (Femininity and Feminism in Tango (II))


