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?

  [BetaCandy (Feminism @ THL): Why there will be no more gender essentialist comments allowed on this site]

• 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.

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