One of the dippiest, catchiest commercials of my youth was for Campbell’s soup. I remember it precisely; I can still sing the snippet of song at its center.

“How do you handle a hungry man?” crooned an offscreen voice. A very deep voice, I should add. It then answered, thunderously, “The Manhandlers!”

That was the name for a line of especially hearty Campbell’s concoctions, and the images that accompanied the lyrics, depending on which iteration of the commercial you saw, might be hockey players slamming into one another or basketball players jockeying for position under the net. The message was that a man worked up a sweat and then ate up a storm — in this case, a beef-and-noodle hurricane, or at least a split-pea squall. He was a force of nature with untamable appetites.

That was the 1970s, and what strikes me isn’t how much has changed but how little.

Oh, sure, we’re having a soulful discussion, at least in the media, about the elasticity of gender. Just over two weeks ago, the cover of Time magazine read, “Beyond He or She,” and in smaller type: “How a new generation is redefining the meaning of gender.”