This is a comment by Graham Phoenix on the post “8 Myths About Sex Differences“.
I want to know why there is this relentless pressure for us to believe that we are the same? I find that life is infinitely more interesting if I look for the differences between people. My wife and I love life together because of sameness and difference. We have similar interests and find enjoyment and satisfaction in them, that’s what brought us together.
What we celebrate, though, are the differences, the polarity between us. We are man and woman, male and female, masculine and feminine. We are not opposites but there is a polarity, a tension, a spark between us that comes from the differences between us. They are biological, emotional, hormonal and logical. Our life together grows because we explore and celebrate these differences. Don’t spoil our fun by telling us we are the same!
Photo credit: Flickr / Shayne Kaye
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I think that the push to recognize sameness is more about recognizing that difference/sameness exists irrespective of sex and gender. You are different from your wife because you are different people, less probably because of your biology than because you are different individuals. The flip side is recognizing that men are not all the same and that women are not all the same–because they are more than just a member of a particular sex and gender.
Exactly. And that last bit took feminism awhile to wrap it’s head around…but it did eventually.
The differences I identify are due to our biology, and its consequences. In terms of simple personalities there is sameness between us, that’s what brought us together. It’s the differences between us due to biology that make our relationship what it is. Yes, of course there are personal differences at work here but the spark is due to our polarity which comes from us living in our respective masculine/feminine cores.
While sameness and difference may exist irrespective of sex and gender, sex and gender do name a set of differences. Not all differences are merely individual: we also participate in differences that transcend ourselves.
The differences named by sex and gender may be handled in a clumsy fashion by most, but that need not make them any less genuine. They are perhaps more akin to family resemblances: while no one in the family has every particular family resemblance, and some don’t seem to have any at all, family resemblances still exist.
Gender has a first person presence in us and gender difference marks off a dimension of shared human experience that will for ever be inaccessible to us. The exact contours and content of that shared experience is also profoundly unclear, precisely because it doesn’t have a single core.
This is one of the most exciting things about gender and sexual difference: while naming a difference and a sameness, it is profoundly mysterious. There is no easy way to pin down its presence or absence, but it is real nonetheless. It is not some fixed selection of features, but varies from person to person. It is a participation in a mystery greater than ourselves, and one of the reasons why the area of sexual and gender difference continues to fascinate so many of us. It is a set of existential riddles that admit no easy solutions. How wonderful!
I think a further question would be asking where the difference or sameness comes from. It would be a mistake to downplay the power of cultural norms in influencing gendered behavior, but at the same time such is rather different than a purely biological cause. I think that recognizing the overlap (and disparity) between the two can create a more nuanced understanding of sex and gender.
Agemaki, I agree with you. We beat our heads against a brick wall if we try to assign the sameness/difference to purely biological or cultural sources. For me it starts with biology and goes on the be influenced by family, friends, media etc. That’s why there is such an interesting mix.
If the issue was purely cultural then I don’t see why gay men and women should have such difficulty. The difficulty they have is that they are, on the whole, born with a biological sex that doesn’t align to their gender orientation. If you accept this then you have to agree that we are born with a biological sex and a gender orientation. This is before cultural influences come into play. In the majority of people their sex and gender tend to line up.
Cultural influences work on this orientation but don’t create it. If they did then gay men and women could be ‘cured’ by reversing the cultural influences. This what happens with psychological issues that people. It is, however, generally accepted that being gay is not psychological. Whether it’s a gene or some other mechanism is not clear.
“If the issue was purely cultural then I don’t see why gay men and women should have such difficulty. The difficulty they have is that they are, on the whole, born with a biological sex that doesn’t align to their gender orientation.”
No. This is a misunderstanding and a conflating of gender identity and sexual orientation. The two are COMPLETELY separate.
Ok, I accept that. I’ll withdraw the argument and think about a bit more.
Well, I do not accept that at all – they are not “completely separate”. To say they are completely separate is to deny the relationship between sexual orientation and gender identity.
When I say completely separate, I am referring to the fact that whether your male, female or intersex (biological sex) does not influence whether you identify as a man, woman, queergender, etc (gender) which does not influence whether you identify as gay, straight, bi, poly, etc. (sexual orientation).
So what do you mean when you say I am “denying the relationship between sexual orientation and gender identity)?
One issue is that people normally work forward from sexual identity to sexual orientation. If you identify as a woman, and you are only sexually interested in women, then you would identify as homosexual. Is there a model that works backwards from sexual orientation to get sexual identity? For example, I have never heard of someone starting out by identifying as heterosexual, then stating they must be a woman because they are only interested in men.
(Note: this is different from someone stating they are really a man though they were born a woman, because that goes to sexual identity still, independent of orientation. Even though that person was a born a woman they would identify as a man and they would then identify as straight.)
Right by “sexual identity” I think you mean “gender identity,” first off. I’m not trying to be nitpicky, here, but I think it’s important to get the terms right.
On to the rest…I think what you’re referring to is that a person’s sexual orientation (gay, straight, etc) is contingent on their gender. Someone who identifies as a man, for example, can’t be a lesbian. And even a term as broad as “heterosexual” is at least partly defined by your own gender. I am homosexual because I am attracted to the same gender as myself, which means I must have first determined my own gender before I could define whether I was homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, etc.
Right, I think that’s a language problem and an issue with the way our society has traditionally conflated gender and sexual orientation. What if the words we used for sexual orientation had nothing to do with what gender we were, but just about which gender(s) we were attracted to? Imagine something like….masclusexual and femisexual, and multisexual, or something. Mascusexual could be defined as being sexually and romantically attracted to self-identified men…which is problematic itself considering the limitations of the gender binary, but we’ll set that aside for the moment. Get what I’m saying? My point is that although sexual attraction to male or female bodies is arguably an inherent trait, the concept of homosexuality and heterosexuality are cultural constructions.
So when I say biological sex, gender and sexual orientation are completely separate, I mean that one is not contingent upon the other. A person’s gender does not determine their sexual orientation, and a person’s biological sex does not determine their gender. Our culture has just conflated them all, and to such a great degree that even groups that exist outside the normative (straight, cis-gendered) are limited in their definitions by the system that they have to work with.
!!! I don’t mean to be rude, HeatherN, but I am amazed at the contortions of your language! No wonder people give up and go away when faced with someone trying to discuss this subject in a way that implies we are all really the same and we really have to be careful not to offend anyone.
I don’t follow your logic and please don’t try and explain it to me. I would rather experience the wonder of life than get tied up in contortions of language.
Thank you for the discussion, should we leave it now?
It’s not “her” language. It’s language used by LGBT community advocates and activists as well as those who study sexuality and gender.
I mean, if you were going to talk about cooking and you basically said chopping vegetables was the same as baking pastries, you’d be informed of the difference.
You don’t have to accept that language means things, or continue in the conversation, but those terms mean real things.
So basically, you’re “normal” so you don’t have to think about these issues…so you’d rather just ignore them? Yeah, privilege is lovely.
So when I say biological sex, gender and sexual orientation are completely separate, I mean that one is not contingent upon the other. A person’s gender does not determine their sexual orientation, and a person’s biological sex does not determine their gender. Our culture has just conflated them all, and to such a great degree that even groups that exist outside the normative (straight, cis-gendered) are limited in their definitions by the system that they have to work with.
And you can see this play out in homphobia.
Often times the logic behind homophobia is that said person’s romantic/sexual attractions do not match their gender identity. Why do they have to “match” in the first place?
Also this seems to come up in transphobia as well.
Yes, HeatherN, I am ‘normal’. It’s not that I don’t have to think about these issues, I choose to work with and help other ‘normal’ people. That does not give me privilege, it’s just who I am. I have as much right to be and use language as you. I am not in your world and don’t really understand it, again that doesn’t make me privileged. It just makes me ‘normal’ to use your description.
Julie, I accept that it’s the language of a community, and I accept that it means something to that community. This is the problem that most people have with discussions of sex and gender. The language may be necessary but it becomes so convoluted that it ceases to mean anything to most people. That does not condemn it, it’s just a view.
I’m not sure the cooking analogy works, anyway for me. A potato is a potato and does not generally self-identify as a carrot. There is a simple botanical description that is a potato. Chopping or baking are completely different and can be simply described. The difficulty with the sex and gender issue is the confusion between biology, preference, identity, sex, gender, orientation… The combinations have become so numerous, I’m sure for a good reason, that I, and I’m sure many others, get completely lost.
Her I am continuing the conversation…. Oh dear…. I should listen to myself….
“The difficulty with the sex and gender issue is the confusion between biology, preference, identity, sex, gender, orientation…”
Is that it also can be described. I mean, I understand it. If one wants to learn something, one will.
Alright I’ll try to be brief and use very little jargon. Your assertion that all of the language that I’m using just doesn’t affect you or pertain to your world, is actually kind of wrong. For one thing, statistically you’re bound to know someone who’s LGBT. But for another thing, this language applies to straight people too. “Straight” is as much a creation of culture as “gay.”
When I made my (admittedly snarky) comment about privilege, I was referring to this: you fit into the norm and so are buffered from having to think about your gender or sexual orientation. You are straight and you are a man who is also male. (The same thing could be said of a straight woman who is also female). It is so ‘normal’ that your identity is assumed to be natural. And it’s considered so natural, that you aren’t asked to define it or explain it to anyone. You can quite safely ignore all the discussions about sexual orientation and gender because society has made it possible for you to do so. That doesn’t mean they don’t apply to you…it just means that society has buffered you from having to worry about them.
So the reason I got snarky wasn’t that you were unfamiliar with the language I was using. Heck, I had to take the time to learn it too. It was the dismissive way you were talking about it, as if it was language which didn’t apply to your world, when in fact it does. Plus, if you’re going to talk about gender (which you do), then it’s good to be as well educated and knowledgeable about the subject as you can be. In this case that means understanding the language (and the concepts) surrounding gender and sexuality studies. Again, the part where privilege comes into play is where you say “I am not in your world and I don’t really understand it,” and then assume that is okay. If you’re going to discuss gender, then you have to understand (or at least try to understand) all the discussions about gender. Ignorance is not nearly as big of an issue as wilful ignorance.
And I would seriously be more than happy to explain all of these terms ideas to you, as many times as you need to understand it. Seriously, feel free to e-mail me at theblissfollower@gmail.com.
Thank you, Alistair, the subtlety of it is very well put.
A great read on this subject is “Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference” by Cordelia Fine.
Think it comes from a relentless desire not to be prejudged according to stereotypes ascribed to an entire group circumscribed by a seeming arbitrary qualifier like race, gender or nationality.
We should absolutely celebrate the diversity in our differences, but it would be great if those differences were ascribed to our choices and actions alone.
Noble thoughts, Random_Stranger. In my experience, though, it just doesn’t work like that. Much of our differences come from choices made for us by our circumstances. Your race, sex and nationality are pre-determined by others, mostly your parents. That doesn’t mean you need to live by those but it does make it more likely that people pre-judge you based on them. Humans have a deep need to understand other people they come into contact with. If they don’t know them they pre-judge them based on what they see or experience. If they then have the opportunity to get to know them then their view can become fuller and more rounded. The problem is when pre-judging becomes prejudice. When their initial assessment, and that of others, becomes a stereotype that affects how the person being judged is treated.
Accepting the differences between people does not need to lead to prejudice. It can involve understanding those differences and seeking to explore them. Stereotyping is not celebrating differences it’s suppressing them. Seeing us as all the same is also suppressing differences, it’s a form of stereotyping.
I think we’re mashing theories of evolution – evolution is statistical and relational – frequency of alleles and their relationships – a hard 1-1 mapping of replicators to phenotype characteristics is not to be had, but that does not mean there is a lack of strong statistical significance. We expect variation. That is indeed the engine of evolution. We also expect clusters.
@ Graham: “Accepting the differences between people does not need to lead to prejudice.”
Yes and how difficult that can sometimes seem! The ultimate difference we all navigate continuously is the realization that there are others who are not us – this seems like a trivial statement but for the fact that young children, and some that are diagnosed as autistic, are not able to properly process the idea that a false belief can exist outside of their own mind, meaning they don’t appreciate that other independent minds actually exist (Google Sally-Anne test for more experiment detail).
There is me and there is everyone else – what happens when that distinction is diffused? We tend to brand it as a collective, hive mind, and even go as far as associating it with political systems such as communism/sameness. The ability to make choices is contingent on the restrictions against those same choices – for how would we deal with someone who was not influenced, in any way, by external forces that constrain their idealized free will? We would typically label such a person a psychopath.
It’s a sad thing, but most people that say there /is/ a difference between men and women, use it as excuse for poor behaviour, use it as excuse to tell people how to live their lives, an excuse to tell women they should shut up and stay in the kitchen, or men to shut up and go to war like ‘a real man’ so when many people say there is, there is a backlash; people don’t want to give /those/ people any sort of excuse, real or otherwise, for their asshat behaviour.
“…most people…”
Where did that come from? I assume you’ve had some bad experiences, but that doesn’t justify such a ridiculous comment!
That is such unjustified stereotyping, it’s completely unnecessary!