Before this
enterprise even takes its most basic shape, I would like to clarify the
following point: under my understanding of people, a human being is an
individual, a person, a personality so to speak, before they are a ‘man’ or a
‘woman’. Thus my article will concentrate not on the fact that this world is
mainly controlled by the biological male, but on the fact that what we classify
as ‘male’ characteristics are the dominating side of our culture.
So why do I say that you
are an individual before you are a man or a woman? I’d like to present three
arguments to support this claim. The first argument is found in the observation
of children. Children are thinking, feeling human beings who are not yet of
reproductive ‘capabilities’ and thus do not display specific gender
characteristics. They have not yet being assigned gender roles; at least at an
early age. At a later stage we force this upon them. These beings who are
not yet manly men or femme fatales still ARE, they live, feel, create,
experience, laugh and cry without a specific gender role to fulfil. Children in
play, also play with their identity. They have personalities and make choices,
yet when a boy likes dancing for example, we might fall on the prejudice of
claiming that that’s a feminine tendency, here we are assigning the activity a
gender and thus we impose this prejudice on the boy. The boy was expressing a
liking for the activity, not a sexual preference or a gender tendency. To a big
extent that is what we have done; we have given what originally is a biological
role, the gender, to an activity, an abstract concept or a thing. We do that
assigning constantly.
My
second point is the huge psychological variety of shades and degrees of between
male and female that we have amongst individuals. Who is completely male or
completely female? None. We have different shades of the palette of assigned
role activities. Yes, some cultures and people are stricter than others in
their assigning of roles; but human beings keep coming to the world with an
extreme originality and variation in the scale between male and female. People
come into a society which is frightened of that obscurity and forces upon every
individual the so called way of belonging to their genre. The person is only
validated (especially during adulthood-productive and reproductive age) on
basis of their gender. The person then becomes obsessed on being this male or
female ideal rather than whatever version of human they are. This of course
creates a schism and its obvious conclusion of suffering and a feeling of
inadequacy. Sad times. We cannot bear the beaming individuality of the human
creature.
This doesn’t mean that we
would all be ambiguous beings if there weren’t gender roles, but it would mean
that a man who enjoyed fashion wouldn’t immediately be classified as a
homosexual and a woman who plays sports and is of larger physical mass wouldn’t
either - and the same with personalities. A freer ‘gender’ concept would give us
greater freedom to do different activities whilst still remaining true to
ourselves. Besides the fact that men can’t bear children and women can’t father
children, we have a greater leeway in gender roles than we think.
My third point as to why we
are individuals before we are a gender is that although our body is male and
female, our psyche is not. The mind of human beings, both, the one that
collects information and logically processes it and the one that creates and
imagines, are neither male nor female,
they are both. We have yet again tried to give gender to things such as
creativity, saying it is a more female attribute than, say, scientific
thought. This last point is very important as it brings me to the thesis of
this article. This is a man’s world because the accepted thought
characteristics of our historical time belong to the assigned category of male.
We have reached a point
in our culture where we have assigned different affects to different genders.
For example, our culture identifies violence with male thought, and female with
a nurturing principle. We also think of ego consciousness as male; aggression
(thus wars), the logical mind (thus science), inventiveness, outward acting.
The male is the builder of civilization, and I should also mention religion is
a male institution, culturally. On the other hand, we think of the subconscious
as female, as female characteristics in our culture are thought to be passive,
creative, intuitive, uninviting and concerned with preserving the status
quo. Yet in this division, we can
clearly appreciate that the first set of characteristics are the most widely
accepted in our culture, as we find the subconscious frightening. Even in this
separation we can tell that what we have built up to be the ‘male
consciousness’, is the accepted consciousness and what is considered the
‘female consciousness’ is feared and unknown and thus repressed. Our society
keeps hurting and trying to control what represents the unknown part of the
psyche and the connection of humanity to nature through birth, the female.
Thus when I say this is a
man’s world I mean the choice of consciousness we have adopted; the masculine-technological. This man’s world represses female elements, including his own.
If the male was to be devoid of nurturing elements and compassion, he would be
biologically hard wired to be so, yet he is not. Here I would also like to add
that the great human qualities of love, strength, compassion, intellect and
imagination, do not belong to one sex or another and thus we could advance and
reach a true civilization if we merged the different types of consciousness,
instead of repressing them, in order to reach true understanding.
Till that day, good bye.
Eliza Veretilo
The Philosophy Takeaway 'Gender' Issue 38
