but where is the cheese?
Before I get started, I just wanted to make one thing clear: I’m definitely a proponent of gender/sex equity. However, I’m not naïve, so I have to concede that historically and socially, the sexes are not equal, and I will attempt to explain why this is.One of the greatest mysteries of life concerns purpose. Without purpose, there would arguably be no civilization because people would just simply be another animal on the planet, living tired patterned lives of eating and reproduction. We would have no reason to develop society because we would only be concerned with self-survival—keeping both ourselves and our species alive by ensuring that our children make it to reproduction age.
So at the basic level, people need to eat and reproduce to survive as a species. Already, each sex has a role: women bear children, and men father children. However, evolution shows that this was not always the case. In a very simple manner, creatures reproduced asexually for the longest time. But this could create problems because this meant the next generation was essentially a clone of the previous generation, which would make them very prone to environmental changes and more difficult to adapt quickly unless several mutations luckily occurred. With the “creation” of the male sex, two beings of the same species could now mix their genes for more genetic variation for their children.
Biologically though, males and females are essentially the same. In the womb, the penis corresponds anatomically to the clitoris, males’ nipples are only remnants of the actually-useful female nipples, and so forth. So there really is no reason for there to have been such a sexist human history. If anything, men should have been the discriminated sex since they’re the more useless sex, reproductively-speaking.
This is my theory on why there are now very strong gender typecasting—a theory strongly based on the ideas set forth in the Ender’s Game series. Women have the children and have to bear the responsibility for at least nine months ... and then possibly several more years once the child(ren) are born. Men can go around and father dozens and dozens of children. Already, we have the more sedentary-leaning women and the more migratory-leaning men.
Now, let’s look at past civilizations. The most successful ones are the ones in which the society does not move around a lot. (A noteworthy exception, of course, is the vast Mongol Empire of yester-millennia.) So we see an interesting “being sedentary” parallel between civilization and women and. But if there is some sort of connection here, what about the men? Don’t they want to move around and conquer and shit?Here lies the bulk of my theory. Since men need women for species reproduction, and women may not allow the reproduction without some type of fatherly commitment beyond impregnation, the men have to stay sedentary and be bored. What else can they do to combat this “inequality”? Oh, I know! Create a society and culture in which the men can have political, economic, philosophical, etc., roles while the women stay home and raise the children.
Thus, a very significant exchange occurred. Women were able to live (their [theoretically] preferred) more-sedentary lifestyles in established regions, but lost ground in the power dichotomy. Men gave up their “natural” instinct to be more-migratory for the “power roles” in the aforementioned establishment of civilization.
Then, with centuries upon centuries of societal- and cultural-conditioning of these developing roles, we came to have vast social differences between the sexes. Really though, I don’t think men and women are that different. At the very basic and core level, men and women have always wanted the same things. We have only merely been “brainwashed” to think about things differently because we are one sex or the other (or both sexes like that South African runner, but I digress ...).
So the next time you bitch that men are assholes are women are crazy, just remember sex doesn’t matter. There shouldn’t be a difference at all. In fact, I think the reason that one might demonize one sex is simply because that sex is the sex one would be attracted to and, thus, allows to get emotionally closer, which would also potentially lead to being more hurt by. Of course, this is another topic entirely. There are also the homosexual and bisexual (and asexual and pansexual ...) perspectives to be aware of too....
Unrelated, but I'm currently listening to Daedelus's "Fair Weather Friends."
While you seem to acknowledge that women traditionally have been subjugated because of their reproductive role, your thesis buries this essential fact by positing that men acheived their dominance because women had their dicks in a cage. This is a disingenuous argument because it subverts the gender hierarchy-- stating that "women may not allow the reproduction without some type of fatherly commitment beyond impregnation" overstates the power women often have in traditional societies. While the restrictions placed on male sexuality vary wildly from one civilization to another (from monogamy to polygamy to what have you), what is consistent is the utter subordination of women. It is far more likely that traditional gender roles arose out of a man's desire that a woman sire only his own children, rather than a woman's desire that her man not "roam" as you put it. Women have often been placed in a position of weakness because of their inability to control their own reproduction; it is much more questionable to make this same argument about men.
ReplyDeleteThat said, you should read Camille Paglia. Her argument is more psychoanalytical, but she also counterintuitively stresses how our variant roles in reproduction shaped civilization.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the constructive comment! I should have prefaced saying that this is a highly undeveloped "theory," if you could even call it that.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I have given the gender/sex difference thing a lot of thought every so often, and I really think that all (if not most) of the "difference" is drawn from cultural/societal evolution rather than biological evolution. Women are physically-sturdier than men are across the entire life span: from conception (more male babies than female babies dying from whatever complications) to old age (women live far longer than men). Males are the weaker/fairer sex. Thus, on a general level, biologically, women >> men.
So then I thought about before culture, before civilization, before society ... what differences existed between men and women? And reproduction is essentially that only difference before gender roles even became "established" (if there was even an era of the origins of gender roles). Therefore, I think that something arose from men's and women's different reproductive roles to have somehow set the gender-role difference in motion.
My "theory" on civilization being grounded in women's want for stability is no doubt weak, but my main purpose was to get people thinking outside of contemporary socially- or culturally-driven mindsets. Or something.
I agree with you that biology gets the shaft in gender theory, despite its obvious significant role. This is mainly a problem with the academy-- most gender theorists come from a humanities background (like me!). But your response points to the difficulties of formulating a theory that tries to imagine biology in a vacuum-- although you beckon to a time "before culture," you are theorizing within your own culture, so your only hope of reconstructing a precultural existance is always already tainted. You say "women want stability" and make what you think is a convincing biological argument as why this may be so in a precultured environment, but it is still an argument informed by culture-- and if you don't believe that even the most empirical science cannot be blindly steered by mistaken cultural assumptions, take a look at the large catalog of racial theories made by biologists in the last two centuries. In other words, you can't escape the role culture plays in gender by imagining any primal pre-culture gender, because this is really unknowable-- a sort of gender Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
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