The Gillette commercial announces the company’s revised motto: Instead of “The best a man can get” they urge men to be the best they can be. The response from a narrow group of men has been nearly hysterical. They accuse the commercial of everything from unrealistic to emasculating. Most people I know, including men, including men actively hostile to feminism, find the commercial empowering.

One man tweeted in response to a furious “let men be men Let boys be boys” pundit: “It’s about balance. No one is suggesting men can’t be men. It’s about being a good person as a man. Historical behavior is no longer in tune with todays equality. You can be a tough guy, a manly man but still a man with values and appropriate behavior to help guide your kids.”

What we demand from ourselves is dependent on a lot of things, including what we are told about ourselves as men and women.

Girls have been outperforming boys in school for a long time, but this somehow magically swaps around . . . not in gradeschool or high school. Not even in college where women are still doing better. But somehow, in interviews and promotions, despite decades of women outperforming men, men abruptly do better. There are plenty of explanations for this. Nature or nurture? Natural aptitude? Inherent differences? Self-confidence?

I read a historical review that insists women have always outperformed men in school going back over a hundred years. (Anecdotal evidence from my life and my family supports that.) I think we only began to worry about this in the past 30 years because of popular books like John Gray’s Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus and Susan Faludi’s work. The assumption from some studies is that women were not actually smarter but simply socialized to be “nicer” in school, which is not so different from the claim in this article.

My psychiatrist friend says it’s hormones.

The New York Times report points to something simpler. “The study adds to a growing body of research suggesting that boys’ underperformance is not because of anything innate to boys. Instead, it seems, it’s largely because of something external: their school environments and peer influences.”

“Girls are encouraged to be diligent, cooperative and ambitious — all things that serve them well in school. Boys are more sensitive than girls to environmental influences, according to a variety of research, and they feel pressure to be strong, tough and athletic. They get the message that doing well in school is not masculine, social scientists say. Even in peer groups that prize good grades, it’s considered uncool to seem to try hard to earn them.”

The gender gap, with girls performing ahead of their male peers, historically reverses as the children age. After more than a decade of encouraging girls to be perfect students, we discourage girls from being smart. My brother used to talk about the gender gap in math in the US and how in Japan at the time the gap was reversed. It was assumed in the US that girls were “not good at Math” and they fulfilled that expectation. In Japan, Math was assumed to be mechanical and repetitive and exactly what girls were good at, and so the girls did well in Maths. In the 80s I would sub for the Math department and there would be no girls taking higher math classes at all at SHS. It was shocking. The head of the department in those days assured me that girls were naturally weak in abstract thinking. I assured him I had been in the 99%tile when I was tested.

Despite beginning Pre-Algebra when I was 10 and Algebra the following year, no one blinked when I stopped taking math my Sophomore year of high school. I often think how differently my life might have gone if everyone had not assumed I would eventually marry and be supported by a husband.

In my experience, I see how boys and girls receive vastly different treatment and expectations. A colleague with twins treated them differently from the instant they were born, and I was shocked he failed to even notice. The girl, despite being pounds heavier at birth than her brother was handed around like a fragile jewel. The boy, despite being underweight and subjectively fragile was passed about like a sack of flour. This is about more than pink and blue blankets.

We train them young to be what we expect and want them to be. Both boys and girls do their best to satisfy our expectations.

This may be changing.

Personal relationships are indeed personal, but our existence as people, as members of human society, should guarantee a certain level of respect and absolute justice. Not everyone benefits or suffers in identical and visible ways from sexism, but I would hope we all value the right of each individual, regardless of demographics, to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. At least one study of relationships between men and women over the past 50 years suggests that our expectations are changing. The assumption used to be that the man in a heterosexual marriage must have a superior education, but a “key finding is that the relative stability of marriages between educational equals has increased. These results are consistent with a shift away from rigid gender specialization toward more flexible, egalitarian partnerships and provide an important counterpoint to claims that progress toward gender equality in heterosexual relationships has stalled.”

That should mean that we are allowed to find out our personal interests, strengths, and weaknesses instead of having them arbitrarily defined for us.