Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!daemon
From: rshapiro@bbn.com (Richard Shapiro)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: gender/sex (was feminist spirituality)
Message-ID: <12411@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 2 Jul 89 15:37:27 GMT
References: <1336@cattell.psych.upenn.edu> <42102@bbn.COM> <6740@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu>
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In article <6740@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu> bloch%mandrill.UUCP@ucsd.edu (Steve Bloch) writes:
>rshapiro@BBN.COM (Richard Shapiro) writes:

>>The crucial
>>step of feminism, one of them at least, was to point out that gender
>>is a purely social construct [...]

>Well, not PURELY social.  Aside, of course, from reproductive
>differences, there are certainly skills at which the average woman is
>significantly (in a chi-squared sense) better or worse than the
>average man, and for some of these there is no evidence to indicate a
>social explanation.  However, there is quite a bit of overlap in the
>curves. [...]

>It's plausible, for example, that for biological reasons women could
>have more "nurturing" (whatever that means) personalities on average
>than men.

Here you're confusing "sex" and "gender". The physiological differences
(organs etc) are what define sex (as in male or female).  Gender, on the
other hand, has been abstracted from its linguistic context to refer to
the social and psychological manifestations of sex, i.e.  masculine and
feminine. This is a major difference, and in my opinion one of the most
significant and far reaching theoretical advances which came from
feminism. In other words, it's much more than semantics. As soon as you
begin to derive social differences from physical ones, you start on the
slippery slope of natural gender. If feminine and masculine are in some
degree natural, eternal, "God given", who's to say how large that degree
is?  If women are "naturally" better at nurturing, aren't they
"naturally" more family-oriented than public-oriented? And if this
family/private orientation is natural and eternal (as it must be if it
derives directly from physiology), why isn't it legitimate to claim that
a woman's (natural) place is in the home?  And so on.  If there really
were natural genders, than feminism would seem to be in big trouble, it
would seem to be flying in the face of the undeniable facts of nature,
which is precisely the most common argument made against it.  But, along
with showing the theoretical difference between sex and gender, feminism
has taken another major step. It has shown that most supposed examples
of natural gender differences have no basis in biology (or Nature) at
all, or at least no demonstrable ones -- that the "naturalness" is
nothing more than an assumption based on the state of things now and in
the recent past; that explanations from biology really are not, in fact,
very "plausible", no matter how common sensical they may seem on the
surface.

There's a whole politics and ideology hiding behind the confusion
between sexual differences and gender differences: that's one of the
lessons I've learned from feminism. I think we want to keep the politics
and ideology in mind as we pursue this discussion.