The harmonious interaction of two cosmic energies - Yin, Yang - represented the ancient Chinese understanding of how things work. In Lao Tze's The Tao , Yin is attributed to dark, passive, downward, cold, contracting, and weak, in short, female element and yang to bright, active, upward, hot, expanding, and strong, in short, male element.

Tee Lin Dee would now blame Lao Tze for being sexist ('Down with sexual stereotypes', Dec 20). She would also blame most religious teachings that portray God as a male and not a female!

The system of attitudes, expectations and customs that distinguishes men from women, masculinity from femininity is central to how we understand life. Of course it is and must be based on deeply rooted social and 'sexual stereotypes'.

It is these sexual stereotypes that universally forge ties among a man, a woman, and their children. Stability of relationship, and harmony, the reliable functioning of the family system are based on this generally settled division of responsibility and roles between the sexes.

More specifically, the majority of societies have been patriarchal, with men mainly responsible for public concerns and women for domestic matters and the care of small children. Always and everywhere men, while exercising no general right of domination, have predominated in positions of formal authority.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Nahar in India, Minangkabau in Indonesia, Polynesians and various African tribes, are isolated enclaves of matrilineal or matriarchal societies. The overarching defining principles of conduct in matriarchal family, clan, and village life centre around men and women connected through females to a common ancestress. Wealth is inherited through females and their political activities are grounded in women's ceremonies.

But remember: even in matriarchal society, men have played the dominant role in economic and other social activities while women take care of domesticity and children.

The universality of these distinctions between males and females shows them to be rooted in biology buttressed by social conditioning. The settled role distinctions contribute to stable and functional families.

Patriarchal or matriarchal, settled role distinctions obliterate tensions and conflicts and minimise gender conflict for the well-being of family and children.

Feminism of the brand fervently propagated by the writer (a generation after its emergence in western societies) is the primary cause of their family system being dysfunctional to the detriment of gender relations and children's welfare.

A system as complex and subtle as human life cannot be simply reconfigured in a fundamental and radical way by merely making women equal to men in every possible way without considering biological and reproductive differences and social upheaval and problems following the wake of attempting to obliterate these distinctions, as the experience of the West testifies.

The writer's brand of feminism is as radical as communism or the Taliban's fundamentalism in that it seeks to destroy all sex-role differentiation under the pejorative labelling of "sexists" and to create a new character of human beings in a new structure of society in which the relations among men, women and children that have always existed are to be dissolved and new ones based on sameness or interchangeability of sex roles be constituted instead in accordance with the abstract ideological demands for "gender equality".

A woman who fervently wants to discard her role to assume the man's garb is one who indulge in self-hatred, selfish in her relentless goal of redefining her status, unable to accept both good and bad of her socially defined role, has no in-depth understanding of sociology or anthropology much less complexities of Life, and just looking for some ideological cause to fight in distraction of inner complexes and insecurities.

Our sophisticated politicians understand all these very well and they humour the women with all the cant of gender equality to manipulate for women votes in sure knowledge that ideology cannot change reality.