Recent Trends Toward Unisex: A Panel*

There is a trend in our times in which the two exclusive and excluding sexually polarized organizations of life are merging into one, opening the resources and advantages of each to one another, presumably allowing for their own choices according to their own inclinations.

Women's and men's hair styles are approximating each other's. Men are perfumed, nail-polished, and frilly; women are shifting to sporty, open-collared, tailored shirts and plainness. Men are wearing pantihose, women are wearing pants suits. One magazine recently reported on a men's boutique where pants would be found perfectly fitted for either men or women. Designers and salons are serving both. A rock group concert given by the Grateful Dead, which sixteen thousand young people attended, was described as “wall-to-wall denim.”

Men are beginning to ask for benefits previously open only to widows, and women are claiming the right to work when pregnant. Women are seeking executive positions, and, while some men are developing nurturing and domestic skills, others are seeking the proliferating number of positions in which decisions and responsibility can be passed on, up, down, or around. Men are losing their clubs and women are likely to lose their exclusive colleges. A gym teacher in New Jersey is suing because of discrimination; he found he was being paid less than the women gym teachers doing the same work. Televised science fiction, while still showing remnants of the past and present, nonetheless presents an anticipated future in which the ruthless rulers can be either male or female, as can the good ones, who are, interestingly enough, dressed in togas. In Alan Friedman's novel Hermaphrodeity, published in 1972,¹ the hermaphroditic protagonist