FAQ: But men and women are born different! Isn’t that obvious?
That idea is known as “essentialism”: the belief that there are uniquely feminine and uniquely masculine essences which exist independently of cultural conditioning. Both actual (minor) and alleged (major) differences between the sexes have been used to justify inequities and constraints which harm women emotionally, financially and physically.
Even where (and if) such differences do exist, why should such differences justify sexist oppression? *
Biological determinism is one form of essentialism which has been used to argue for male superiority for all of recorded history: that men are naturally stronger, smarter, more rational and more trustworthy and thus are entitled to rule both politically and domestically. The more science discovers about biology the more this male biological superiority is shown to be utterly without foundation: for any quality measured there is far more variation among the group of all men and among the group of all women than there is on average between individuals of opposite sex.
A common corollary belief is that while men are physically and rationally superior, women are morally superior. At times influential groups of both men and women, both feminists and anti-feminists, have subscribed to this view. It is equally without evidentiary foundation, and has often been used to give women a sense of power in the role of morality enforcer which acts to support the larger social system of male dominance (and which especially excuses the male sexual exploitations of women as due to a baser moral nature which can’t be changed, but which “good” women have the duty to “tame”).
Masculine and feminine traits have been culturally placed in opposition to each other, and claimed to thus complement each other and result in harmony when men and women are constrained within the accepted sex roles. Masculine roles differ across societies, but are always portrayed as not only different from but also superior to the feminine. Women and men who transgress the boundaries of the accepted sex roles are considered “not real” men/women, and usually denigrated and sometimes abused and punished by outraged defenders of normative sex roles. It is this rigid ghettoising of masculine and feminine, and the assigning of superiority always to the masculine, that feminism challenges.
* Spot-the-strawfeminist: It is often claimed that feminists say there are no differences between men and women, by people who tend to condescendingly point to women’s chest area as they “debate”. Rubbish – feminists are, on the whole, not blind. What feminists say is that neither the size of the fatty glands on one’s pectoral muscles, nor whether one’s reproductive organs are innies or outies, are indicators of deeper essential differences, and nor such indicators of sexual dimorphism relevant when discussing rights, equity and sexual egalitarianism.
Introductory:
- Winter (Mind the Gap!): Biological Determinism – A Rant
- tekanji (The Official Shrub.com Blog): The Gender Similarities Hypothesis
- tekanji (The Official Shrub.com Blog): Embracing Your Inner Skeptic
- Kathleen Trigiani: Out of the Cave: Exploring Grays Anatomy. A series of essays ripping the veil off the romanticised submission of Venusians in John Gray’s odes to essentialism and thus male dominance, the Mars/Venus canon.
Clarifying Concepts:
- Innate or socialized? A look at “the stereotype threat”:
There is a well-documented psychological phenomenon, the “stereotype threat”, which describes how stereotyped groups perform worse as their group membership is emphasized. In many experiments, all that is needed for it to kick in is a subtle reminder that the person belongs to the group — for example, asking subjects to check a box for race or gender at the top of an exam.
Today in the journal Science, lan Dar-Nimrod and Steven Heine report that certain quite specific stereotypes about gender and math trigger this effect. The study, appearing under the somewhat unfortunate title– “Exposure to Scientific Theories Affects Women’s Math Performance”– is sure to stimulate controversy over how ideas about gender and ability are discussed.
[See original article for explanation of said study.]
The study suggests that genetic theory can give powerful support to discriminatory stereotypes. It is likely due, in no small part, to the way genetics is presented to the public, with an emphasis on determinism.
[Mad Science Mama (Mad Science Mama): Stereotypes: Larry Summers and the Observer Effect] - More on the impact of socialization:
Gender essentialism is the assumption that women are naturally like this, while men are naturally like that, and nature made it so and anyone who deviates from that pattern is a freak. Most commonly it comes in the form of “women are naturally submissive and men are naturally dominant”.
This is an absolutely unprovable statement. It is an opinion, not a fact. Look at the amount of gender conditioning we receive from infancy: different colors for girls and boys (in some cultures), commercials proclaiming boys like toy guns and trucks while girls like dollies that pee. Throughout life, we are punished for deviating from our cultural gender norms, and yet very few people find it easy to avoid those deviations.
If it’s so natural, why all the conditioning?
- Looking at difference from a feminist POV:
It came to seem less reasonable to me to argue that men and women did not have biological and anatomical differences in their brains that might result in functional differences. Although establishing a functional effect for anatomical differences in the brain is difficult in humans (and so my belief is that there isn’t any current scientific evidence for a conclusion such as the one cited by the Absorbacon post), I came out of the research project with a revised opinion of the science: it seems less reasonable to me to blindly imagine that men and women would have reproductive differences and differences in hormone production and release in the brain, but not other differences in the initial hardwiring of the brain.
However, the science still has not completely resolved this point when it comes to humans, and while it is likely that our different genetic makeups prescribe different neural circuitry in the brain, the nervous system is particularly plastic, and we have yet to distinguish between the effects of nature vs. nurture in the development of the human psyche. I think that while it is reasonable to believe that male and female children might start out with sexually dimorphic circuitry, as we develop post-natally, our brains are capable of converging.
[Jenn (Reappropriate): Sexual Dimorphism and Feminism] - Debunking commonly held myths about language differences:
Louann Brizendine’s book The Female Brain, published last August, featured a number of striking quantitative assertions about sex differences in communication. The jacket blurb claimed “A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000″, while the text (p. 14) gave the same numbers in the other order: “Men use about seven thousand words per day. Women use about twenty thousand.” Dr. Brizendine gives a set of references in her end-notes, but none of them support those numbers. In fact, no study of any sort has ever measured any numbers at all like these, as far as I’ve been able to find.
What are the facts about sex and talkativeness? There’s an enormous amount of individual variation, and each individual talks more or less depending on mood and context. Against this background of variation, many studies have measured how much women talk, on average, compared to how much men talk, on average. The differences that they find between men and women as groups have always been small compared to the differences among men as individuals or among women as individuals. And more often than not, these small group differences actually show men talking a bit more than women do. For additional details, see the links at the end of this post.
[Liberman, Mark (Language Log): Sex differences in "communication events" per day?]
Recommended Reading Offline:
- Anne Fausto-Sterling (Basic Books, 1992): Myths of Gender: biological theories about women and men. ISBN 0465047920
- Hyde, Janet Shibley (American Psychologist 60 No. 6, September 2005): ‘The Gender Similarities Hypothesis’, pp. 581-592.
Socialize: del.icio.us | digg | reddit | Squidoo | Technorati
This would be a good time for you to read up on male privilege.
And just because I happen to have the document open, here’s some food for thought regarding the true reason that we have things such as women’s studies and women’s movements:
It’s written from an American perspective for an American audience, but the same basic principle applies for other feminist movements around the globe.
That might have something to do with the way that women are blocked from “dangerous” positions in the military in many countries. It’s not my area of specialty, but just doing a quick google search turned up these links:
Women in the U.S. Military: Selected Data
Facts About Women in the Military, 1980-1990
Women in Combat category On The Happy Feminist
The case for women in the military
Feminism and Military Gender Practices: Israeli Women Soldiers in “Masculine” Roles
And that was just what I pulled up on the first page. They tend to be American-centric, but the same principle applies for any military that practices sex-based segregation.
Gah, now this makes me want to do an article on women in the military for the FAQ. But I need to finish the sexism one first. x.x
Oh, I wouldn’t say that men necessarily protect women during war.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/congo/story/0,,1947147,00.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/4078677.stm
http://joost.com/040000i
http://www.feminist.org/news/newsbyte/uswirestory.asp?id=7260
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3693/is_199503/ai_n8724330
And this is just the tip of the ice berg. Men use the rape of women as a weapon during war.
The website that MansVoice points to in his comment is a trollish blog, menarebetterthanwomen.com, with intentionally provocative anti-woman articles like “Old men are saviors, cougars are gross”. Instructions to the reader, “Ladies as always, this site is totally off limits.”
And a book you can buy!
His appearance here is the blog equivalent of the grepping loon on Usenet, responding to a dog whistle Google hit on
men women superior
to try to incite argument and get people to visit that site.
And just like the grepping loons of yore, he is oblivious to context.
I don’t know if he actually misunderstood what was, to me, fairly straightforward prose, or he pretends because understanding it would just cut the fun short. If he misunderstood, well, that’s a hoot, since he is supposed to be smarter, because he’s a man. If he understood, then he’s trolling.
To steal a line from Joanna Russ, aren’t all those men dying in battle to protect women….protecting them from other men?
But anyhow, I dont wish to debate on this issue.
“I wish to lecture on this issue, but I don’t want any of you ladies talking back.”
MansVoice may well be a grepping loon, but his comments will continue to be approved (up to the prescribed limit of 3 per day for known antifeminists) as long as he continues to abide by the Comments Policy.
I’d love an explanation of this snippet (bolded below), which seems to be missing a crucial word or two in order to make sense:
We can’t debate this point if we can’t find your meaning in there, MansVoice.
More relating to annared’s points above:
The Essence of War (from Reclusive Leftist)
In response to MansVoice, I’ll steal from a recent Pandagon post:
Great quote, SarahMC. I just tidied up the formatting and links a bit.
Oh good, Tigdog. Looks much better that way!
I’ve updated the FAQ to include a quote from Why there will be no more gender essentialist comments allowed on this site.
Here’s a possible addition to the clarifying points.
While it’s clear there are *overall* differences between “the average man” and “the average woman”, statistically most of these differences (other than the reproductive system and a short list of other physiological differences) are dwarfed by the differences between the “shorter-than-average man” and the “taller-than-average man”, or the differences between the “stronger-than-average woman” and the “weaker-than-average woman”. (Even for the reproductive system, variation between individuals is much larger than most people think. And as for hormones, testosterone is converted directly to estrogens by most cells before it’s used, and estrogens are converted directly to testosterone by some cells — only a few types actually care which they get.)
For mental differences, it’s even more extreme: all “average” mental differences ever measured between men and women by legitimate studies which tried to control for socialization effects are miniscule-to-nonexistent, while the differences among individual men and among individual women are huge (several orders of magnitude larger). The language studies aren’t the only ones which look like that: they *all* look like that.
Given this, the “differences between men and women” don’t say much about real individual people. For any characteristic where “men are more X than women” (yeah, except the reproductive tracts and a few other physiological points) I can pick out a woman and a man where that woman is more X than that man, without trying very hard at all.
Basically, if the activity you’re thinking of isn’t directly related to the reproductive system, “born male or female” is a very poor, even worthless, substitute for looking at the individual.
I’m sorry if this is off the point but this is what I think:
– Women and men are different
- Men are naturally physically stronger but this doesn’t mean all men are stronger than all women in everyway.
– I’m sure a female athelete is stronger than some beer belly man that sits on the sofa watching football.
- I’m sure a female scientist is more clever than a man who drinks all his brain cells away down at the pub.
– Thing is, men are “on average” stronger than women, this is something we were born with and we can’t help, there is nothing we can do about it.
– If we tried to be masculine and weight train everyday, I don’t think we’d get much respect, terms like “lesbian” etc come to mind.
– I think the only way for women to be classed as equal and to be truelly respected would be to be ourselves – and be happy.
– Ignore those who are sexist.
– This doesn’t mean we have to be feminine, this doesn’t mean we have to be masculine, it doesn’t mean we have to be anything!
– This only means we have to be ourselves and not care what those men think! Do they care what we think? No.
– At the end of the day I reckon fairly few sexist men would look at this site and it would change their mind, they wouldn’t take us seriously.
– If we want equal pay and such why don’t we just set up women only businesses and such? They might say that is sexist but if we can’t make it in things we want to do in life because of male views, we should find away around it.
– Anyway if this is all wrong I’m sorry, I’m not experienced in debating and that :S
– And I know you probably wont want to dumb down what your saying but I’m finding it hard to understand everything.
Thanks! x
Sorry to not reply to your comment earlier, Annabelle. I think you’ve got some good ideas mixed in with some naive misunderstandings above, and I would suggest that you try and read the article again and follow some more links to get a better understanding. All this takes time to absorb if the ideas are very new to you.
This stood out to me:
But why do we as a society view women wanting to be strong as trying to be “masculine” or “lesbian”? Why is is that our society equates “feminine” with a conspicuous effort to appear physically fragile?
Why can’t it simply be accepted that it’s good to feel strong? Krista Scott-Dixon has some good tips for women who want to lift weights.
I understand this is a really old discussion, but I just came across the thread and this comment was too good to let go:
“The scientific method was in fact created as a counter response to Kants’ “thing in itself”. Essentialism has no place in this discussion what-so-ever and every scientist I’ve ever heard of rejects such drivel for the unscientific mysticism that it is.”
What was this guy’s hangup on Kant? Do you think he was aware that the scientific method predates Kant, that Critique of Pure Reason was written partially in response to the empiricists and not the other way around, and that a lot of later philosophy of science was in fact based around Kant’s epistemology?
I would imagine not. Take the blatant factual errors, add in the complaining about how they are being ‘repressed by the evil feminists’ and this thread is full-on surreal.
Oh, hey… there were pages of other comments.
That’ll teach me to post responses at 1 a.m.
I might have to look at the settings for the comment threads if that wasn’t obvious enough, Chris!
Are the other comments somewhere else? I haven’t been able to find them. The top of the section says there are 54 replies to this thread but I only count 4 (before this one). I just assumed the old ones dropped off after a while.
kandela, do you see the “Older Comments” link just above the “Leave a Reply” text? Click on that.
Ah, thanks. Now it seems obvious. I guess I just expected it to be at the top of the comments section.
Men die because they are told they have to, wars are started by people who don’t fight in them, generally…..
Man voice barely warrants a response. Personally Im embarrassed, as a male.
I am trying to learn about feminism because I find a lot of self proclaimed feminists irritating, and I want to have half clue what I’m talking about next time a get embroiled in a feminist debate.
Having watched generations of children grow up through extended family, and talked to the elders of this family, some of whom were and are feminists…
It is agreed that there are general differences, but these manifest in proclivity and attitude, personality rather than aptitude, it would be utter heresy to say that women werent as capable of any given undertaking as men, with perhaps the exception of those that require extreme physical exertion….
I mean these are kids that are brought up by feminists and surrounded by strong women… but the feeling on the whole is that boys and girls tend to lean in certain ways, and handle problems differently…
What causes this and whether there isn’t subtle gender conditioning going on anyway is impossible to answer I guess….
Making this a post a waste of time….
I’m here because I’m interested… that’s all.
I think I agree with a lot of “feminism” but that isn’t really a unified view point is it….
Maybe its just a discussion that goes on and on… I guess I would consider myself a humanist and a socialist, but I’m not sure I identify with feminism…. Im not sure I can I identify with a cause that refers to its gender, which is not my gender, as its name.
I support womens rights, and mens rights, I feel sorry for men some times as I think they do have there own crosses to bare, being male can lead one into situations that are very difficult, and what ever the causes, men and women are different. That much is obvious. maybe difficult to quantify
The way men and women function socially is different i think, and what ever the causes of this difference, artificial or other wise….. It is in a persons best intrest to understand these differences if they are to make their way in the world,
that much is true…..
Dont know how relevant this post is.
But I have always made a
….. have always made a distinction between academic feminism and pop feminism….. I am exposed to pop feminism at time which I find irritating, the arguments are often badly thought out and often just an excuse for general misandry….
(sp?)…
Academic feminism tends to be well thought out, as you would expect….. which is why Im trying to get a handle on that…..
“A common corollary belief is that while men are physically and rationally superior, women are morally superior. At times influential groups of both men and women, both feminists and anti-feminists, have subscribed to this view. It is equally without evidentiary foundation….”
Do you honestly believe that? This is so stupid. Yes, there is so much evidence to support biology and the advantages that men have over women; vice versa.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_of_gender
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human#Biology
You need to catch up own your homework. Not everything is a social construct, despite 2-dimensional view of feminism offers.
It is a strong argument and something that feminism has yet to refute besides using reverse psychology, sexual manipulation, and ad hominim attacks. If these tatics weren’t so affective feminism would be like creationism. No substance.
Do I honestly believe that there is no evidence for rational superiority in men and/or moral superiority in women? Yes.
Do I honestly believe that the much-touted male physical superiority is confined only to muscle-twitch speed and upper body muscle bulk, which enables average men to overpower average women in unarmed physical conflict? Yes. There are many other physical qualities where there is minimal difference between the sexes or where women have the physical advantage – pain thresholds, cold endurance and response time are just a few.
Yes, humans have sexual dimorphism which leads to some persistent phenotypical differences between XX and XY individuals. The point is, when we are talking about social/economic/political equality in all fields of human endeavour, how much do those differences matter?
There are far greater differences for any measurable biological quality within the genders than the average differences between the genders – there are lots of men who are physically weaker than the average woman who are not automatically excluded from certain fields of employment/study despite being smaller/weaker than the average man. There are lots of men who are not as smart as the average woman who are not automatically assumed to be incompetent in the STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) fields and are thus not discouraged from pursuing those careers. There are many men who would rather be full time parents/homemakers than their ambitious and talented female partners, yet they are pushed to be the breadwinner even if she could earn more money for the family because “men and women are born different”.
On the schoolyard, when the bigger kid picks on the smaller kid and tells him to stay away from the areas that the bigger kids have staked out for themselves, we have no problem in calling that for what it is: bullying. How do you justify it differently when it’s men telling women to keep out of the areas that men have staked out for themselves?