ALL MEN ARE LIARS

"For the hand that rocks the cradle, is the hand that rules the world,'' wrote William Ross Wallace in his poem of the same name almost 150 years ago.

It's a celebration of mothers' influence on our lives, but many men might disagree with the sentiment, considering it's blokes who largely occupy the planet's thrones of power.

Yet, if you pause to ponder the point of Wallace's much-dissected verse, it's hard to deny the majority of people - dictators, doctors and derelicts alike - are as their mothers made them.

Our most powerful desires are given shape at our mother's breast, as are our earliest and most earth-shattering disappointments.

It's a strong thread in modern psychology that this is also the crucible of misogyny ''because woman was first experienced as the ultimate power … man needs to subjugate her. What is essentially the human condition, comes to be seen as the fault (and danger) of women,'' writes Janice Port Clump in The Psychology of Women Quarterly.

It's not surprising, then, that many psychologists, sociologists and feminists have speculated one of the keys to gender equality is men becoming more actively involved in early child care. A neglected masterpiece in this field is Dorothy Dinnerstein's 1976 book, The Mermaid and the Minotaur, in which she argues misogyny and aggression are ''inevitable consequences of childrearing's being left more or less exclusively to women''. She theorises that, because infant sons and daughters envy their mother's ability to provide all the child's needs, that envy and powerlessness drives us to destroy the ''bad breast''.

It's a thought-provoking book and those who reflexively disagree with Dinnerstein - a psychology professor at Rutgers University before her death - may want to reflect on the fractured state of racial and gender relations on the planet as a possible hint we're still doing something profoundly wrong as humans. It follows, if we're to encourage true equality between the sexes, that men as well as women must embrace each other's traditional roles.

At Stanford University in January, the influential feminist Gloria Steinem concurred with Dinnerstein saying, ''she always argued men raising children … and developing their whole human selves, in the same way women develop their whole human selves by being assertive and daring … was the key to world peace''. ''Nonetheless, here we are and gender roles are still confused with 'nature', just as racial differences were once falsified by pseudo-science,'' Steinem added.

Thirty-five years on, real science might well have caught up with Dinnerstein's ground-breaking work, with a well-regarded study, released last year, confirming testosterone levels in men - long associated with aggressive behaviour in males - fell by a third when they cared for children.

''The real take-home message,'' Peter Ellison, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University told The New York Times, is that ''male parental care is important. It's important enough that it's actually shaped the physiology of men.''

Dinnerstein foresaw the backlash such views could stir, noting ''it's easier for women than for men to see what's wrong with the world that men have run''.

''Not all women who see this… are ready to understand their collusion in that process.

''It's easier for us to see ourselves as the relatively guiltless members of the species,'' she said.

I guess we truly are in this together.