Honestly, I think the gender wars are a sign of progress. See, all but the very, very worst fringe sexists have had to accept that women are not going back in the kitchen. The economy has adjusted to the notion of two breadwinners per household, for one thing, so even independent of any notion of natural roles, it's just not practical to go back to the pre-WWII era where women were simply not considered fit for any role other than housewifery.

So what are we arguing about now? Pretty progressive things, actually. The people who would really like to be arguing that women are the inferior sex altogether and that God ordained that a wife shall obey her husband, are instead arguing about how many women are sexually assaulted. 50 years ago, they'd have denied that there is such a thing as rape. "A woman with her skirts up runs faster than a man with his pants down," and all. But that's no longer socially acceptable unless you're a Republican elected official, so we debate the one-in-four statistic. It's no longer acceptable to say women can't provide for a family, so we debate whether or not a female provider owes a stay-at-home dad alimony if they split.

Basically, we're a gregarious, violent primate species with a uniquely inconvenient method of reproduction. We take care of our young for nearly two decades, and they're not remotely independent for half a decade. They need constant attention and parental investment, preferably both maternal and paternal, for an enormous chunk of the parent's adult life. Because the reproductive process takes so much risk and investment for humans, we are always going to fight about things related to sex and gender. It is terrifying for a woman to think of having reproduction forced on her. I am not a man, but I imagine there are things about sex and reproduction that are equally disquieting. Men also have the added discomfort of knowing that they are physically capable of forcing themselves on women. Even the nicest guys seem to find that disturbing, and the not-nice ones just find it irritating that society can't forgive them if they do it just once or twice in their lifetimes.

Sex and gender are fuckin' complicated. And that's just talking about two genders, cisgender people, and heterosexuality. In the wild, the spectrum is much broader than that, and every additional layer creates complications, bitterness, and anger. Fortunately, there's also beauty and rightness to all of it, but you can't have the spark without friction. There will always be some level of friction.

So, as to leading to something? Sure. Most of the younger participants will grow up and their worst fears about the opposite sex won't come true. The men won't be rape-accused or daddy-trapped. The women likely will be creeped on and many will be sexually assaulted, but they will recover, fall in love, have children on their own timetable, and nobody will hold them down and force them to have their rapist's baby. As they get older and look back on happy lives and successful childrearing, they will not care so very much about the difference between the sexes. As formerly misogynist men raise daughters, they'll realize just how awful it is to see a man look at their little girl as a prize, and, by extension, they'll see adult women as someone's daughters, too. (No, that's not perfect--women are more than their fathers--but it's the start of empathy.) As women raise sons, they'll look at their boys and understand what a weight society places on their little shoulders at a young age, and how confusing it is to be a young man in a world where there is no longer any defined courtship ritual. And some of these men and women will think they're raising a daughter and find out they're raising a son, and vice-versa, and they will learn new things about the differences between sex and gender, and they will learn, if they are basically decent people, that what really matters is carving out a happy life.

The older people who have had those chances to learn, rejected them, and simply become bitter? Well, they'll die, like everyone does. They will probably have passed on their anger, but some of their kids will be better than they were. The friction will slow a little bit as people who remember when women were second-class citizens die off, and kids who grew up seeing their parents as equal partners become the dominant generation.

I'm basically an optimist, as you can see here, and a big fan of Comte. I don't believe that "All things decay and sons are worse than their fathers." Quite the opposite. I think human beings have an ingenious capacity, over time, for escaping the fallacies of the past. The theory that some races are "natural-born slaves" has died out almost entirely in just a few generations. What other animal extinguishes such a huge swathe of their behavior simply because they have come to believe differently? We are strange and flawed creatures as individuals, but on the whole I think the species is predisposed to gradual moral progress.