notasheep: I started writing a response, but it sort of spiralled into a thread of its own, over here: http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/coffeeroom/topic/oh-they-just-wanna-be-like-men-1
One thing, though: you say:
Sensitivity is part of being a mother – which normal woman can ignore the sound of her child (or any child) in pain, for instance?
Now, what exactly does this have to do with women? To my mind, it is an essential human quality to respond to another human’s pain–maybe not with sobbing and glomping, and even if it is not apparent. To appropriate the essential capacity of empathy as the right of one gender over another makes no sense to me (and scares me more than a little). And really–to what end must we apportion with such exactitude the natural qualities that we all posses?