*ducks*
But seriously, I hear this is a terrible book. Many people believe it's misogynistic and sexist. I'm not about to read it, so all I have to go on are some rather shocking quotes (which I can't find at this moment), and the title. The title is bad enough, if you ask me, though there are surely some queer-friendly feminist-friendly people that wouldn't have a problem with the title alone. Ignoring the aparently anti-feminist content, essentialist-type feminists may in fact which to claim that men and women are from two different planets. (Sometimes I feel this way, then I remember that I am (at least according to John Gray, the author of the book), a man... and that many of my friends are also men... and yet I'd put them on the women planet). So that starts us off with critisisms of the title (statement) alone. Perhaps I'd like to say "women are venus and men are from mars except the ones that aren't" tacking on some disclaimer about this being far too simplistic a mentality... that sex/gender can't split people up into two non-problematic categories describing personality and roles any more than whether someone likes coffee and tea. Key word being non-problematic :).
Getting to the point, how many things can you find wrong with the title of this book? (If you want to deal with the content of the book, just start another thread of discussion). I've listed one thing... namely the essentialist separation of men and women.
I recognize that my one point here could open up a whole discussion on whether men and women can be separated like that in anyway... neat.
Also, even if you hate the title of the book (but especially if you don't), feel free to post some things about it that are not bad. :) I think the first response I had was "hehehehhehehehehehehe, oh wait... you're not joking?". Well, it was good for a laugh. But seriously there might be something more than that :).
(I also hope you don't find this a silly and pointless exercise, it's meant to get discussion going more than seriously figure out whether the title of the book is a good one).
Take care!
speaking of essentialist feminism...
Maybe I should have said "Difference Feminism" ... I just stumbled upon it on wikipedia. This points out some advantages to stressing differences between men and women. (I'm pretty sure these things were not mentioned in John Gray's book) :).
From Wikipedia:
Difference feminism is a branch of feminism that stresses that men and women are essentially very different beings, instead of past feminisms of equality that stress a fundamental sameness between men and women in some way. Difference feminisms may have arisen due to issues with legislation - equality feminisms may have assured that women have gotten suffrage for one, as well as other rights, but for more important and influential changes (for example, medical related support), the assertion that women are different was necessary to make. Difference feminisms can stress either the assertion of a fundamental biological difference, or an emotional difference, or both.
Feminisms of difference were popular in the so-called second wave feminism. Difference feminism was important in responding to problems resulting to women not being given proper provision for differing needs that they may have; for example biological reasons such as for childbirth, and others.
Was Thatcher from Mars?
Was Thatcher from Mars? ;)
I've come to believe, after much experience doing it, that distinguishing between "good" and "bad" by saying "womanly" and "manly" essentially is a bad idea and leads to much schizophrenic thinking. For one thing, male supremacists are the first ones to say they are bad because they are male and women are good because they are female, but they go on to say that bad is good and good is bad. For another, it makes it politically impossible to criticize femininity, and femininity is not imo the good twin of masculinity, they are both evil twins. Femininity is also destructive, dehumanizing, and very often violent and certainly intolerant and cruel.
Also I think that most people misinterpret the second wave era. Indeed, essentialist feminists often say they are *rebelling* against the second wave. The second wave was known for strict social constructionism. The movement was a close cousin of Marxism, and used the same vocabulary. Women were considered a sex-class. Even lesbian separatism was often defined in social constructionist terms; lesbianism as a political chocie to be wholly centered on women and live separately with women to escape male supremacy, *not* male biology. Often lesbian separatists said explicitly that if male supremacy did not exist, they would not want to separate from males, they would not be offended by male bodies. And even the underlying assumption that for social reasons women only communities would be low conflict turned out to be untrue just like the similar Marxist notion that workers would unite and be free of ethnic prejudice or conflict and competition if not for capitalist manipulation. Workers unions became plagued by cronyism, lesbian separatist communes became factionalized - sometimes between social constructionists and essentialists, sometimes between whites and blacks, between primitivists and pro-civilization types.
Utopian books by second wave authors include science fiction with males breastfeeding with hormone therapy, males pregnant, artifical incubators replacing pregnancy and reproductive sex. All of these were proposed by second wave feminists, and essentialist feminists are absolutely aghast and apalled at such suggestions, not to mention many modern ecofeminists who reject technology.
And even essentialist feminists in the second wave era were sometimes a bit different than what is more common today. Valerie Solanas did seem to believe that men were inherently inferior, but she argued that civilization, technology, science, reason, cities, urbanization and suchlike were all inherently female. She defined maleness as living in the wilderness and baying at the moon, giving into 'base urges', war, destroying civilized structures that were built up. She admired civilization as creative - which she saw as a female trait, and an invention of women via the development of agriculture, weaving, and settlements. Incidentally this is also how Marxism sees it, although Marxism doesn't admit anything as "female", the Marxist evaluation of history posits that economy determines social structure. So they reason that since according to scientific ideas about prehistory, women were sedentary and men roamed more, civilization, urbanization, domestication of animals and industries like weaving, sewing clothing, were all probably invented by women. Since second wave radical feminism is a political cousin of Marxism it has very similar paradigms. For that matter, ecofeminism's critique of that and idea that "women's nature" is 'natural' as mystic as it pretends to me is consistent with the rest of eco-movement's critique of pro-technology leftists. In the 80s the ecomovement frequently denounced communism on the grounds that it promoted industrialization and this was not natural to human beings.
There is no consensus on what exactly "male" and "female" mean. But I think if we stop trying to make things "male" and "female" and just focus on figuring out what we like and what we don't like to see in people, we may be able to come to a consensus. ;)
Women and men may be from "different planets" but so what? Europeans and Chinese are from "different planets" too. Of course, some people say that's in the genes also.
arbitrary division
First of all, thank you for that :). You provided a lot of good information that I might have learned at some point, but have long since forgotten.
Secondly, re:
Women and men may be from "different planets" but so what? Europeans and Chinese are from "different planets" too. Of course, some people say that's in the genes also.
Very true, and yet things continue to be divided by the sexes (or genders) again and again... on job applications, passports, signing up for accounts on websites (not this one!), etc. And your observation about Europeans and Chinese being from "different planets" as well. We don't see "race" asked for much anymore (though certainly more in some areas than in others...), and a lot of people would be rather upset to see that question. Yet "check here for male, check here for female" still exists everywhere and it's darn right annoying (especially for those that don't identify as either, or can't check off what they identify as without being harassed).
The question people like me as is... why divide up as male/female? Why not green eyes, blue eyes, brown eyes? (Of course, in that case, I'd like to be equally annoying and provide no other options for people who fall in between...).
From a medical perspective, I can see why knowing someone the physical differences between males and females is important. Medically, you can't always treat males and females the same. But then... (a) knowing someone is allergic to aspirin is also very important, but that can be between you, the doctor, and your medical records. why can't your genitalia? and (b) we're no longer talking about male/female in the usual way, we're talking about people with penises or vaginas (or both), etc.
With that said, sure it is important to recognize that "women" are not equal to "men" in that a lot of them can get pregnant and so on. But... not all women can get pregnant :). Instead of fighting for special rights for women, then one could work for rights for those able to have childen, etc. Then we are addressing the question of difference without clumping a whole bunch of differences together in a way that really doesn't describe everyone (Clumping qualities/differences also perpetuates the idea that certain qualities need to be together always... the qualities of men belong to men, the qualities of women belong to women).
I guess the point is that we have these two very very big categories that are supposed to include everyone. Everyone is either a male or a female (but not both). Within these categories are an incredible amount of things... some strongly associated (males have penises), some more weekly associated (females are less tall or males are more rational). The strength of each association is different for each person.
So everyone must be a male or a female, and male entails (for example) strongly (penises, agression, short hair, among other things), and weakly (taller, less touchy-feely, among other things). Female entails strong vaginae, clitorises, long hair (among other things), and weakly make-up, and a desire for scented-soaps and bubble baths.
THIS, to me, needs to be challenged. There aren't a lot of people that will say guys can't like a bubble bath or girls can't be tall (weaker asssociations), but there ARE a lot of people that say a girl can't have a penis and a guy can't have a vagina (stronger associations). None the less, when a lot of people think of "girl vs guy" (as with the title of John's book), all these associations (weak and strong) come to mind. The stronger the association, the harder it is for someone to get away from without being harassed.
This, combined with the fact that 'women' and 'men' don't actually properly divide people even in the strongest, most "straightforward", medical sense (clitoris/penis length -- medically there is an ambiguous area where babies are usually surgically made to be one or the other)... means it's time to get rid of these broad generalizations :).
I hope that made sense. Comments welcomed and appreciated, as always.
zeee mikie ranting
Thanks. :)
[i]From a medical perspective, I can see why knowing someone the physical differences between males and females is important. Medically, you can't always treat males and females the same. But then... (a) knowing someone is allergic to aspirin is also very important, but that can be between you, the doctor, and your medical records. why can't your genitalia? and (b) we're no longer talking about male/female in the usual way, we're talking about people with penises or vaginas (or both), etc.[/i]
Yes that's just it. You are no longer talking about them in the usual way - the social way. You are talking about them in a strictly medical way, and that means it is quite unimportant whether an individual is hormonally "male", physically "female" and chromosmally "ambiguous". Because essentially you are no longer talking about female and male at all, you are talking about statistics.
Medically you can't always treat Europeans and Chinese the same either and medicine is racially as well as sexually based for many good reasons.
But racial and sexual medicine is based on *statistics*, not essences. Statistically women are way, way more likely to get breast cancer, so all women are given pap smears, mamograms, after a certain age. But there are men who get breast cancer, and women who were never *really* at risk at all. It's not that they lack a 'gendered essence', they just fall outside of the statistic. Statistically Americans are way, way more likely to have asthma than Bolivians. So if an American has trouble breathing a good doctor will start to suspect asthma, but not 'essence'. Women past menarche in the industrialized world have way more severe problems with menstruation than is typical for the developing world, where most women report *no pain* at all during menstruation, and many report that they sometimes don't even *notice* menstruation. Nobody has really explained this discrepancy or the asthma discrepancy.
It's just that medicine has not advanced far enough to give individualized analyses, and so they rely on racial, ethnic, national and sexual statistics. Those have medical bases but if we insistently pretend that women and men are polar opposites rather than imprecise hormonal tendencies on a broad continuum, then no male who gets breast cancer would ever be treated, no female with prostate cancer would ever be diagnosed (yes there are potentially females with prostates at risk for prostate cancer).
You said it yourself that these designations do not cover intersexed people. That begs the question: how are intersexed people treated medically without anybody "knowing" their sex? Just fine if the doctor is good, because sex is an arbitrary social marker, not a medical one. A transsexual woman is hormonally female and becomes at risk for breast cancer, but will never be at risk for uterine cancer. A medical establishment that can't see this simple, obvious subtlety, just because it wants to pretend that there is medically such a thing as "pure male" and "pure female" is criminally useless, and more concerned with ancient religious mythology than real health care. And doctors like that are frequently nothing more than butchers. Don't even get me started on the baby-genital mutilation that as we speak doctors continue to anxiously defend because 'intersexed genitals are scary!' "Inherently rational" male doctors, of course. *ROLLLEYES*
And as an aside I cannot fathom that anyone could stereotype men as a 'rational sex'! Men have the worst reputation for irrational outbursts.... I'd say all masculine culture is in and of itself pretty much just one, big, huge irrational outburst. ;)
Real health care teaches that "male" and "female" are social labels. Medically people can be divided into "estrogen-prominent" or "androgen-prominent" hormonally, can be divided by the length of their clitoris or penis, the fusion of their labiae, the internalness or externalness of their ovaries, whether their androgen receptors are working. They can be divided by their chromosomes, xx, xy, xxy, etc., they can be divided by having or not having a uterus. There are people hormonally male and chromosomally male but their androgen receptors are insensitive, so they are physically female. They may be at risk for many things females are more at risk for - like breast cancer - but maybe also are at risk for male chromosome-related problems. There are people with a clitoris and vulva and testes, descended and undescended, who can and have become pregnant and had children.
There is a high and low end of androgens and a high and low end of estrogens for males and females, and a male and female at one end of those extremes inevitably have much more in common with /each other/ medically and hormonally speaking than they do with anyone of "their [so-called] own gender" at the opposite extremes. So medically they should legitimately be turned into their own statistical middle gender. Medicine is not about preserving "male" and "female" it's about preserving individual life and health.
The only thing is most people don't get the hormone or chromsomal testing they need to establish that, because they are - for entirely social reasons - frightened of being shown to be 'unmasculine' or 'unfeminine'. But that has nothing to do with good medical science or the best possible way to look after an individual's health.
There are already men who can breastfeed and with some hormonal infusions most men probably could choose to breastfeed. Indeed, there's are lots of documented cases in all kinds of mammalian species of males adopting infants of their species and suckling them, even when no milk is produced. There's a case of an orphaned gorilla who was put into a zoo and rejected by all the females there. The zookeepers were considering killing it, then someone decided to try one of the male gorillas and he adopted the baby straight away and did this behavior of suckling it and cooing it. And none of this should be surprising since we all in our heart of hearts know that all of that stuff is learned. We already know that male gorillas raised by humans or as circus attractions act nothing like wild male gorillas do: they show little aggression, no understanding of sex let alone interest, no understanding of gorilla social cues or mores, and unless they've been abused will prefer human company and human culture.
Then there are cases of wild children like Kamala and Amala: http://www.feralchildren.com/en/showchild.php?ch=kamala
Nobody told them they were essentially feminine as they were raised by wolves who don't seem as enamoured of this concept as primates are. Anyone arguing essence needs to work around these two somehow. Not only did they behave like wolves, their very tendons had fused making it more comfortable for them to walk and run on all fours. Their bodies quite literally developed differently based on effectively their environmental situation. If the environment can cause a humans limbs to fuse and encourage a taste for raw meat it seems to me we need to go waaay farther than "male/female" before we get to the treshold at which it stops being nurture and starts being nature. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's my honest impression. And until people stop being too scared of the implications to honestly investigate it, it will keep being.
Also it seems to me more people now are being called intersexed that used to be called "female/male". As if people are trying to 'purify' their genders from this new, terrifying menace.
The reality is that to some degree or other we are *all* intersexed. There is no such thing as pure female or pure male. People who are scared of this are ultimately scared of themselves.