The Subject

There is much talk of men being the primary subject. Or more specifically, white, relatively young, European or North American males are the subject and the rest of us are but a variation to this ideal of human being. There is currently endless literature on this, to the point that my topic almost feels redundant. Yet this still needs to be stressed. Why? Because of the same reason that all the rest of literature is written about this and that is to bring the issue to light, to de-normalise it. 

 

I’m not saying that every white man has an easy life and that all is handed to them, of course not. It’s not about privilege, it’s about identity. When your culture, gender, appearance and so on, is not the norm, you start to question your validity as a human being, thus hindering your progress. The plant does not question whether it is a rose or a lily… it just grows. 

 

We can’t. We create and accept cages all around us. Cages that cut our roots and make us silent and insecure. The first of these cages is that of our appearance. We fall into the trap of being “different” and step by step, day by day, we carve wounds into our personal being to the point of running the risk of never actualising the potential of the beautiful thing we might have been. We hope one day someone will notice the gift we carry inside of us and that belief will elevate us to heights of acceptance, of success, of happiness.

But it seems that an actualised life is only reserved for a few. That only certain people can walk this Earth feeling worthy, feeling error free. I have noticed that Europeans and North Americans already have more self-entitlement than people from other origins (South Americans for example). Only these people can relax their defences to the point that they don’t have to worry about being persecuted and being belittled. Once that is out of the way they can think! They can think of the world and of self-development! Whereas the rest have to think on whether their existence is remotely ok.

Why has most of Philosophy been written by white European males? Answer: it hasn’t. Philosophy as a subject is a very ancient discipline that has existed all over the world. The Philosophy we study in the Western world is the edited Philosophy of the Western world (apply the same principle with most if not all subjects). It is not THE Philosophy, just the current trends of the latest European thought. The thought of men of privilege who never had to fight starvation or persecution and thus were able to sit and think, and investigate themselves and our Universe. But do not misunderstand me please, I do not see this as a bad thing at all. I think this should be the goal of a society; to develop itself to the point where its people can dedicate themselves to contemplation, to art, to investigation, without the struggle to survive another day.

There are still millions in our world who live in a daily struggle to survive, to feed themselves, to look after their children whilst in a war zone. There are still millions of girls and women who cannot access the most basic education, there are still people who are so ignorant of themselves and their own history that they take a nationality as a thing of pride, but do not want to take any moral responsibility for the things that that nation has done.

The reason why it is important to realise these things is that once we become aware that the wealth and power of nations is built upon the blood and sweat of others, and not because of some divine entitlement, we begin to grow some kind of empathy for other nations, for other people. Only through understanding each other can we become complete people and start doing something better for this otherwise ridiculous world.

Eliza Veretilo

Meeting illogic with illogic

I was somewhat enraged by this poster, which I think illustrates something

on many levels. Apart from anything else, if you try and make constructive comments on feminism, the post-feminists and other rubbish comes out of the woodwork.

But in particular it illustrates the false assumption that if you focus on one thing in one situation, this is a negative statement about other situations. Take for example:

Feminist: Men shouldn’t rape women.

Humanist: People shouldn’t rape people.

Are we to assume women are indifferent to men being raped? Absolutely not. They might be the first to offer advice.

When we hear the clamours of Fathers for Justice, can we assume that they are indifferent to justice for mothers? Er, well... we may not be entitled to assume that, but one is very inclined to think this is the case.

Essentially we jump to conclusions that reinforce what we already believe.

And I am going to jump to the conclusion that the author doesn’t respect women.

I think feminists are right to focus on disrespect for women. Women don’t get enough and in ways men get too much. Unfortunately, while it is sometimes intuitively clear, sometimes it is far from clear what respect consists of. There was a time when it was felt to be sexist to say women should have greater representation in Parliament and on company boards because they have something special to offer.

Nowadays this is regarded more positively. Provided of course that focussing on this doesn’t imply we ignore other more ‘mainstream’ contributions they might make.

Martin Prior

Masc / Fem

We are now the masculine and the feminine.  We are the hunters, the gatherers, the fathers, the mothers, and the workers.  I  cook, I clean, I work, I study, I spend, I shop, I drink, I diet, I commit, I explore, I travel,  I settle, I go on top, and under. Who am I? What sex am I? Can you tell by considering any of these activities I do? I am not a he/she I am the new masc/fem, masculine, feminine. Whatever new crappy term you would like to use it does not matter. What question this raises, however, is as follows: are these terms, these ideas (masculine and feminine) still

useful or are they becoming out of date?

Notice, however, that the subject is I, and not everyone. I can only speak for myself, the activities I do. I cannot speak for all. I could perhaps speak of my culture, but not everyone in my culture does what I do. Maybe the majority does do the above, but this is a concern of sociologists to investigate not a philosopher.  So I pass the task on to them, what do people do now? Are there any clear distinctions in our activities between the sexes? I’m not sure there are. 

Nevertheless, if, for example, men generally are: staying at home, rearing the children, doing the cooking, the cleaning, and spending, whilst the women are working, travelling, drinking and being on top; can we describe the men as masculine and the women as feminine? Are these gender roles based on sex? If they are based on sex, I’m not convinced there is strict correlation. And if they are based on sex, then we would have to constantly modify the meaning of the terms to fit with the complex behaviours -- which may be distinct between man and women, or not.

Or did a philosopher think of these concepts then just apply them to which object fits with it? Is this likely? That a philosopher sat on the steps of a stoop, and said, “Let’s make up two separate ideas where one is defined by being physically strong and the other is physically weak.” They then went out into the world and looked at the males and the females and noticed that men were more physically strong, and that more women were physically weak. And then the philosopher defined man as masculine and women as feminine?  This doesn’t seem that likely.

From these thoughts I would conclude that I would want to see some scientific evidence that there are a lot of women that act the same, a lot of men that act the same, and these same ways are different between men and women. If this can be proved to be true, then these ways may be defined as feminine or masculine, but until then I am happy to abandon the notion all together.

Ellese Elliott

This is a man’s, man’s, man’s world

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

The Feminist Reaction To Evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology is a theory that states psychological mechanisms evolve casually as a survival skill to over come the 'hostile forces of nature'.  The theory can make predictions based on what would be advantageous to survival, thus describing the teleology of human nature, with physical and psychological mechanisms that help to achieve this goal for the longest time possible.  Evolutionary psychology gives a description of human nature, with strong results. For example fear and snakes.  By developing the psychological state of fear, we greatly enhance our survival chances; we feel fear when we believe our life is under threat and this causes us to develop reactions and intentionality that guide us to avoid these situations or at least focus in order to avoid fatalities.  Once we developed fear and experienced poisonous snakes, we inductively learnt to react with fear in the presence of snakes, thus we have a natural fear of snakes even though this danger is far more reduced today, with anti-venoms and such, it is still a part of our nature to fear snakes.

Psychological mechanisms develop by maximising what will optimise our survival, which will be definitive of our future natural dispositions, but something has changed in our environment which has caused defiance to certain developed psychological mechanisms.  This defiance took manifest in feminism (for example).

One psychological mechanism which both male and females have developed is attraction. In the largest survey of its day, looking into the habits of what males and females find attractive in the other sex, (buss, D.M. (1994a). the strategies of human mating, American scientist, 82, 238-249), this survey was done over six continents, over 10,000 subjects, from Nigeria to Japan and showed that women rank financial resources 150% more important then males in finding a long term partner attractive.  This would make sense as a male who can provide an abundance of food for this female and possible child will increase their survival prospects.  Women who attracted good hunters would have been more successful in surviving and breeding then women who didn't and thus the psychological state of attraction is mechanically joined with a successful male. In short resource access causes attraction in women.

But given our now advanced science and agriculture, do women still rely on males to provide in the same way? For example the sex disqualification act of 1919 allowed women to work and divorce  men and as we have grown, women now have a strong presence in the work place and gain highly powerful and respected jobs.  It seems analogous to the fear of snakes, a evolutionary lag in attraction is still present but is changing.

The natural environment hasn't changed but the social environment has and not necessarily in a evolutionary beneficial form, the idea of a women earning more then the male, at least 50 years ago and before, may have been off-putting to other possible mates as they would be emasculated, yet the feminist force has continued pushing against evolutionary mechanisms. 

Feminism can be seen as a reaction to evolutionary psychological mechanisms in the sense that the dependence on the males is caused by out-dated social structures, and in this sense feminism is progressive, but a more profound transition has occurred in this defiance to psychology.  Evolutionary influences give rise to automaton women or, as Simone de Beauvoir would have said, psychological mechanisms are responsible for women's state of immanence, and so there is an existential shift, affirming being and not automaton instinct, allowing choice instead of doing what is required to survive and as women becomes more successful it seems reasonable that attraction to wealth, will be displaced to other factors, perhaps creating a turn towards intelligence, wit and honesty.

But in summary, our sociability is moving to point that is causing a choice based on being and not reflex survival mechanisms, re-defining psychological states that will affect change in human nature.  It is interesting that the more independent we are of mother nature, the more independent humans are, becoming existentially authentic in choice, allowing decisions to be made by self reflection and not mere mechanisms. It shows we are moving away from what Darwinian evolution distilled in our physiological and psychological make up and entering a phase which is unknown to us.

T.C.R.Moon

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Gender' Issue 26