You are going to need a lot of luck.

I've just read a paper on "The Maternal Metaphor in Feminist Scholarship," Author(s): Mary Caputi Source: Political Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 2, Special Issue: Political Theory and Political Psychology (Jun., 1993), pp. 309-329 Published by: International Society of Political Psychology

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Sixteen years on, and it seems terribly out of date in terms of capacity for addressing the latest viral adaptations of sexism.

Margaret Mahler's writing is interesting, but she wrote in 1975, and this was for a different world than we have now. The idea that somehow the character structure that women are publically deemed to have is actually the one that they do have seems naive in 2009. It's not their actual character structure that now needs explaining, but rather, why it is that women are deemed to have a particular character structure that they actually do not have.

What we have now is the disappearance of the idea of agents capable of acting meaningfully in the world on the basis of their character set. Instead, we find that the identities tend to be constructed primarily in a retroactive way, not on the basis of a person's character set (this is no mere reconstruction of the drama as occurs in a detective mystery). Our reference to who somebody is and why they did anything has been superceded by an extremely lazy and simplistic view of reality that is furnished by a sick man's idea of "common sense".

In terms of this way of understanding any human behaviour, any action or behaviour that stems from a male automatically has the traditional "masculine" attributes appended to their meaning.
If a man, for instance, fails to meet his obligations, that is very transcendent and masculine reasons for failing to do so. However, if a woman does not meet her social obligations, that is necessarily due to traditional feminine characteristics (but never masculine ones -- since to consider that she has non-feminine reasons for doing or not doing something wouldn't be "common sense"!)

The fact that we, as humans, find it difficult to determine somebody's true character, or even simply their true motivations, has opened the door for a lot of vile sexism. Since nobody can immediately prove their motivations for anything, it is a simple matter to assess that anything that women do or think has somehow emanated from their "feminine" character structure (and that it therefore only has meaning in these terms). Anything that males do, of course, stems from the notion that men -- any men; all men; men at all times -- are brave and true.

This is how it is -- and really, my best wishes for good luck to anybody who inherits this world.

You're gonna need it.