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useful or are they becoming out of date?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

There is no purpose of life...and all people are equal in pursuing it - By Martin Prior

There is no purpose of life...and all people are equal in pursuing it

Part II: More sex and love?

In the last issue, in fact Part I of the issues on ‘Purpose of Life’, I argued that the purpose of life is those activities we directly pursue, because we have been evolved to pursue these activities to ensure the survival of the species. 

There are indeed linguistic issues: one might interpret the purpose of life as meaning the purpose for which there is life.  Surely there must be an intelligent power to bring about the manifestation of life.  My argument is that if something is conceptually possible, then in all likelihood it will happen at least once.  

But we must return to the activities we directly pursue: thus if I am a stag, I will not see my purpose of life as maintaining the quality of the gene pool.  What?  The purpose of life is to save the girls from those other guys.  They manage both to be wimps and maltreat the kids at the same time (mine of course).  And if anyone questions that they must be philosophers or the like, and probably not very good philosophers at that.

In Part I, I argued that within a socialist framework, it is the activities we directly pursue rather than socialism itself, that is the purpose of life.  And under socialism there must be a fair opportunity to pursue these goals.  A stag would say fair’s fair, why not, as long as this represents equality of opportunity as opposed to equality of outcome.

Now this might suggest that a stag has a lot in common with an economic liberal, where competition is all.  But let us look at my earlier analyses, not least that for the self-image of a supposed exploiter (RHS):

self-image of ‘maroon’ socialist	self-image of economic liberal

I have shown both diagrams in previous issues, but here I have annotated them.  Note that the outer maroon from last time on the socialist diagram has now been termed ‘customary care’, a term I have come up with in the last week: culture, society and custom all overlap.  It should be said that these diagrams, ‘saying it in maroon’, represent an informal account of stages in a socioeconomic process, and as such should be regarded as a tool for formulating a more rigorous hypothesis.

What we see on the right-hand side is that the wider environment, a resource to be exploited rather than respected, is divorced by the market, via supply and demand, from culture, which is now valued for its feeding the demand curve.  One can say a lot about this, but often a species evolves not so much to improve the gene pool as to make it more sexy. Or better equipped for fighting the other guys.  So perhaps one can say that life is for antlers, but antlers are not necessarily for life.

But coming back to the liberal agenda, the modern market does in fact need infinite expansion - often most profitably exploiting resources to extinction – it sows the seeds of its own destruction and periodically it needs to be bailed out by those exploited.  This purpose of life seems to have more in common with a cancer cell.

Would a stag do this?

By Martin Prior