Myths and Realities of Gender Differences
The
gender mythology of our culture and many other patriarchal cultures is
that women are docile, non-violent, unconfident, incompetent, and
emotional. Lt. Col. Grossman in his excellent book On Killing tells us
that there is no difference between men and women in combat physically
or psychologically. Women are capable of violence and even rape, though
our society does not recognize this yet. There is rape and torture
among female prison inmates. A lesbian friend of mine told me that in
the lesbian dating scene there are rare but real lesbian serial rapists,
and when they are reported the police often are not willing to believe
that women can rape and are unwilling to give protection to the gay
community. There have been documented instances of female gang members
gang raping men. Women, including young girls, have been said to be
more psychological than physical in bullying compared to men and boys,
but they are clearly not docile, unconfident or incompetent.
What,
then, are the differences between men and women? Most obviously, there
are physiological differences that relate to sex and procreation. In
addition, there is one dynamic of psychology in which women relatively
differ from men. Men tend to seek power through NOT being social,
isolating themselves and their opinions, whereas women tend to seek
power through BEING social, interacting with others. The two best
examples are 1) classic women ‘let’s talk’ vs. men ‘I don’t want to talk
about it’ that becomes strained in many heterosexual relationships
(like choosing a restaurant, where women wants to discuss and man wants
her to just pick), and 2) male boss ‘don’t bring it to me until it’s
done and done right’ vs. female boss ‘let’s go over the details so we
are on the same page’ difference of support offered.
This
does not mean that all men are antisocial or that women are social, but
there are many instances of this dynamic that become clearer when we
become aware of it. One offshoot is that women are more self-conscious,
conscious of being watched as the object of gaze, whereas men are more
conscious of the object watched, of the goal or destination they have in
mind. Women want to be desired, whereas men want to get what they
desire. Again, this does not mean that women are incapable of firm
goals any more than men are incapable of being self-conscious, but the
dynamic is quite present and familiar to us. Some say that there may be
a genetic difference, including differences of male and female emotions
and brain chemistry, but others argue that this is merely cultural.
Other than this RELATIVE difference, there is no good evidence to
suggest that men and women are very much different at all. The work of
Piaget suggests that men and women undergo the same mental development
in the same set of stages at roughly the same ages.
In
apes and the most ancient nomadic and tribal societies, there is
evidence that women often had status and leadership positions. Women
were shamans, leaders, and there were often central female mother gods.
As people began to collect into city states, we can see patriarchy
increase. Why did this happen? The best explanation so far, one that
does not rely on any inability of women, is the increased size of the
community. When people lived in small communities, women could raise
children at the center of the village, as the political center. As city
states increased in size, it made it increasingly difficult to raise
one’s children at the public center. Thus, women retreated into the
home, and men, who had to be the go-for before now were the ones who
could venture out of the home and into the centers of political
activity. Today, devices allow women and men to raise children while
fully participating in public life, but women are still more confined to
the home in balancing life between home and career.
When
we look at the cultures of the world and their historical development,
we can see that all cultures have taken part in a similar oppression of
women, but at the same time women have had increasing power in society
and new cultural movements have to appeal to women to be successful.
Consider that Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, the three largest
cultures so far, all had to offer women better status and rights than
they had previously. In Buddhism, there is a story of a naga princess
who is enlightened upon hearing the Buddha’s teaching, but when she goes
to the monks to have her enlightenment confirmed they tell her she has
to be reborn as a man before getting enlightened, so she levitates and
transforms into a man and flies straight up to a high pure land (heaven)
in front of them. Note that you can read the story as a progressive
Buddhist woman and say that being a man is no significant thing, or you
can read the story as a conservative Buddhist monk and say that she had
to become a man before rising. Jesus had many women as followers, and
Christianity appealed to women of ancient Syria, Greece and Rome by
teaching that men cheating on women is equally as bad as women cheating
on men. Under Islamic law, with regional variation, women can divorce
their husbands and receive a portion of the property, as well as refuse
consent for sex. All three of these religions also oppressed women. In
Buddhist and Christian traditional culture, nuns were only allowed to
teach children, adult men unwilling to be taught by women.
Modern
society has continued the trend, such that today women have equal legal
status in many nations but covert sexism and a lack of women owning the
property persists. A United Nations 2004 report claims that women work
20% more a day on job and home together than men do (10 ½ hours to men 8
¾ hours). Worldwide, women are 51% of the population (technically the
MAJORITY of the population), do 66% of the work, get 10% of the income,
and own 1% of the property. Thus sexism, overt and covert, is quite
alive in spite of counter claims.
Feminism
is the movement in reaction to sexism and prejudice against women. The
basic idea is that women should have the same status as men in society,
or “women are people too”. At my high school assembly years ago, Kate
Weber asked the crowd ‘Who thinks women are equal to men?”, and when
most everyone raised their hands, she replied, “Then you are all
feminists!”, which impressed me much. It is a shame that people, men
but also women, are afraid of calling themselves feminists, largely from
the backlash of the 80s between the second wave and third wave of
feminism which said that militant feminists simply hate men and that
feminism is more about anger and revenge than it is about love and
equality.
In
America there were three waves of feminism, each building on and
addressing new issues from the previous wave. The first wave was the
women’s suffrage movement of the early 1900s in America and Britain.
The most famous figure is Susan B. Anthony. She argued that the
abortion issue should be set aside to concentrate on women’s right to
vote as an adult citizen and women’s right to refuse sex to their
husbands. Note that Mohammed said this over a thousand years ago,
recorded in the Ahadith in 600 CE, and yet there are still problems
today in Islamic culture as well as our own. The first wave, not of
course known as that till the second wave, culminated in 1919 with 19th
amendment to the US Constitution.
The
second wave was the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s and early 70s
which is also called the Women’s Liberation Movement or Women’s Lib.
Defined by Carol Hanisch’s phrase “The personal is political”, it took
off in early 60s and culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1966, backed
by both NOW and the NAACP, the biggest American anti-sexism and
anti-racism groups working together. While the first wave said ‘this is
America so we deserve to vote’, the second wave was part of
anti-establishment left movement that said that America was a corrupted
institution that needed to be changed.
Simone
De Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in France in 1953, arguing that women
had been marginalized as ‘The OTHER’ by men using Hegel’s idea of the
master-slave dialectic (my German Hegel professor ‘a woman needs a man
like a fish needs a bicycle’ speaking of feminists using Hegel). The
Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan was another major feminist
work of the time, much more published in America than Marxist De
Beauvoir’s, arguing that women were not feeling fulfilled as homemakers
and mothers and they needed an identity for themselves as individuals
beyond the identity of the family. Women who went to psychologists in
the 50s and complained that their lives were unfulfilling were often
prescribed valium.
The
major criticism of the second wave movement, which only fully rose in
the third wave was much embodied in the work of Gloria Jean Watkins,
known as ‘bell hooks’, an early critic of 2nd wave feminism as white
middle class women empowerment that ignores all else in the name of
‘feminism’, thus hooks’ ‘womanism’. The third wave was after the 80s
backlash against the 60s progressive movements that began in the early
90s and continues today. The third wave tried to not only pay attention
to black women, Latina women, third world women, but also to break down
the idea of women as essentially different from men but equal.
The
two big issues, which are still being fought out today, are 1) Is
gender a subjective construct (in the mind) or social reality (in the
world)? And 2) Did feminism accomplish what it set out to achieve, or
did it in part hurt its own efforts in telling women that sex makes them
oppressed? I was talking with a BCC co-worker, and she said her son
and his friends in high school think that the oppression of women is a
thing of the past and feminists are hippie women who don’t shave their
armpits and hate men. Notice that this deals with these two issues: the
kids misunderstand feminists as both anti-sex and ignorant that the
battle is over.
De
Beauvoir famously wrote, “One is not born a woman, one becomes a
woman”. Judith Butler says that gender identity is performative. Both
of these figures thus back the Poststructuralist conception, that
identity is created and performed. If a woman puts on makeup and wears a
short skirt, is she being oppressed or is she actively expressing her
individuality? The second wave came under fire from the third wave
because some feminists told women that if they tried to be sexy they
were being deceived and made into property This drew a fight between
anti-pornography and anti-prostitution feminists and younger
sex-positive feminism. I had a friend at Berkeley who was involved with
the Lusty Lady, a strip club in downtown San Francisco that is a worker
owned co-op, the only one of its kind, and she also was an activist for
prostitute’s rights here and in the third world.
Pro-sex
feminists ask, even if we are talking only of abusive male style porn,
should we make porn illegal? Should we try to deny men watching women
and lust, or should we empower the individual woman to live as freely
and equally as men in a complex world? Many feminist critics have
argued that some TV and movies seem to be pro-feminist (Sex and the
City, Ally McBeal, Bridget Jones’ Diary) but in fact they are stories
where a working white woman (and her friends) try to find the perfect
man to find happiness. They are not critical of society and remain
centered on white professionals.
bell hooks (1952 – present)
Born
Gloria Jean Watkins, bell hooks (yes, spelled lower case on purpose) is
a feminist and social philosopher who argues that class, gender and
race are complexly connected. Critical of second wave 60s feminism
focusing on sexism to the neglect of racism and the gap between the rich
and the poor, she labeled herself a womanist (not in spell check, but
now added to my dictionary) and argued much like Foucault did with
Chomsky that power, even resistance movements, reinscribes itself and
thus feminism can itself be a marginalizing force. This is also similar
to Judith Butler, who views culture and feminism as a complex and not
as a simple struggle between the forces of good and evil. While
feminism made gains in the 60s and continues to do so today, bell hooks
was critical of the movement as it was populated mostly by white college
women who are upper and middle class, live in first world countries
such as the US and UK, and disconnected from the lives of many women who
are impoverished, are unable to attend college or a good career, and
who are overwhelmingly of European descent.
One
of the most frequently cited sources of the third wave of feminism,
bell hooks argues that feminism is for everyone, not just middle and
upper class college girls and career minded women. Growing up first in
segregated schools and then in predominantly white schools, she saw
firsthand that progressives and educators can support prejudice while
fighting for change. She studied at UC Santa Cruz and began teaching in
1976 at USC, then later at Santa Cruz, Yale and SF State. She first
wrote poetry under her grandmother’s name, Bell Hooks, later keeping the
name as she wrote essays and books. One of her early and most famous
books is Ain’t I A Woman? Black Women and Feminism (1981), which
examines the dual marginalization of black women in a patriarchal and
racist society. The title is inspired by Sojourner Truth, a black
abolitionist and feminist living in the late 1800s whose speech Ain't I a
Woman is a celebrated work of women’s rights. She is critical of black
men’s sexism towards black women, the marginalization of the poor by
the powerful, and white racism and white supremacism in culture and
media.
While
some are critical of her work, like Foucault she is suspicious of any
side that calls itself the true and the objective, including feminist
and black consciousness movements. For this, many call her, as they do
Foucault and Butler, a post-modernist, a skeptic of conceptions of
absolute truth and a believer in perspectivism and historicism, that
truth is always in a particular perspective situated in a particular
time and place. This is similar to Trotsky and Heidegger in so far as
power and knowledge must continuously transform themselves. A movement
such as feminism must thus be continuously critical of itself and
understand itself as a diverse group of various strategies and
perspectives. I am particularly inspired by her view of education and
teaching. She argues that schools can operate as mind control centers
that breed conformity and complacency with injustice such as
institutional racism and sexism, but they should operate as open spaces
where individuals are invited to question their culture, assumptions and
ideas.
Judith Butler (1956 – present)
Another
celebrated source of feminist philosophy, particularly
poststructuralist and postmodernist third wave feminism which is
critical of power like Foucault, is Judith Butler, a professor at UCB
and one of the most famous feminist thinkers today. She wrote her
thesis at Yale on Hegel and understanding individuality in French
history. Like bell hooks, she began to question feminism and its
assumptions, particularly the monolithic “us vs. them” mentality that is
unreflective and untransparent not only in its assumptions but in its
masking the diversity of the feminist movement.
A
political philosopher beyond the focus on feminism, I myself saw her
give a recent talk (in jeans and a black t-shirt in front of a well
dressed audience) on Palestinians and how their suffering is perceived
and framed in the US and UK, particularly on how suicide bombers
understand themselves and their actions and how they are understood by
outsiders. This is very similar to her work on gender in locating truth
in a human body as a performance in time and space. As she is Jewish,
she has been praised for this, her most recent work by pro-Palestinian
groups and opposed by pro-Israel groups and authors as a traitor and
fool. I particularly admire thinkers who stand up against what they
believe are injustices of their own culture and people.
Butler’s
famous feminist idea is performative gender, that gender, and all
identity, is a performance. Wearing a dress, applying make-up and
watching certain types of TV shows are obvious examples of how
traditional women’s gender is performed. In her most famous book,
Gender Trouble, she particularly uses Foucault as inspiration to
critically examine gender and how it is prescribed and reinscribed
through the actions of people as they identify themselves with a
particular gender. Like Hegel and Foucault, this is a historical view
of truth that suggests that gender and identity are cultural constructs.
Like Foucault and Fanon, Butler is critical of binary divisions and
how they limit our understandings of ourselves and others. Like bell
hooks, Butler argues that supporting feminism means criticizing binary
distinctions such as women vs. men rather than supporting them. Given a
diverse population and the complexity of politics and history, human
beings limit themselves through their understanding of identity and its
complexity.
For
example, men come to see certain actions as macho, and they identify
these with masculinity and heterosexuality as individuals in a cultural
coherence such that their performance of their own identities and
individualities are stylized and polarized. Thus, crying becomes
something feminine or homosexual, in opposition to the masculine and
heterosexual. A male individual, inauthentically as Heidegger might
say, would believe that he is doing what he naturally wants without
critically reflecting on the fact that he has helped participate in his
own enclosure in an identity that limits his individuality and
possibilities.
