Gender roles in society

One of the things that bugs me the most about the binary sexes in society today is that any deviation from either being female or being male is immediately construed as a movement towards the either. (This is where you guys begin wondering why I'm going to grad school in Neuroscience instead of something like Gender Studies.) Society has a hard time grasping that the recent metrosexual movement in the United States (the fact they attached the suffix "sexual" to that is another thing I'll rant about later), and the 'feminization" of Japanese men in the past 5-10 years should not be regarded as a 'feminization" at all but instead the next step in social evolution.

Equality of the sexes is not a step towards the middle of both of the genders, but instead it is both genders taking a step forward. Seeing a gentler, more emotional side of a man is not a man being feminine, but perhaps a man evolving into more than the hunter/food-bringer than he was evolutionarily trained to be in the past thousands of years.

I'm also very angry when powerful women are seen as being masculine. I fail to see how an independent and confident woman is somehow seen as being more 'butch.' For a woman to rise beyond her traditional role does not mean that she is acting more masculine or that that word should be in any way applied to her; instead it means that she moving in a third course, one away from traditional roles of masculinity and femininity.

These departures are not movements in the traditional two cardinal directions of 'male' and 'female' but in a new direction, the next step in social evolution.

Girls can be independent without being boyish or having to be boys.
Boys can be gentle and emotioal without being girlish or being girls.
Girls don't have be men to be respected.
Boys don't have to be women to be able to cry.