Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!usc!orion.cf.uci.edu!uci-ics!tittle
From: randolph@Sun.COM (Randolph Fritz)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: sex/gender
Summary: The problem of differences between men and women
Message-ID: <115261@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 13 Jul 89 05:13:14 GMT
References: <54213@aerospace.AERO.ORG>
Sender: news@paris.ics.uci.edu
Reply-To: Randolph Fritz <randolph@Sun.COM>
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 73
Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu

A lot of good comments have been made about the relations of the
biological sexes and the cultural genders.  I think I'd like to add a
simplification of some of the arguments of descriptive and
prescriptive thought.  While academics may do works which are
apparently entirely descriptive or prescriptive, day-to-day we learn
in order to act and act in order to learn.  So these kinds of thought
are very closely linked.

In the case of all those studies of the differences between men and
women -- we do them because we want to use that knowlege in our lives
and in our wider politics.  I could, I'm sure, find substantial
psychological difference between people who weigh more than 150 pounds
and people who weigh less (for one thing, there are probably more
women in the lighter group :-).  It's unlikely, though, that we are
going to do masses of studies on this subject; weight is a rather cool
social issue at the moment.

The other consideration is that in the area of reasoning about groups,
the language is corrupt.  Gretchen Chapman comments:

  For example, perhaps women are doomed to being nuturing and there is
  nothing anyone can do to change that.

Let's look closely at the semantics of this sentence.  Now, one of the
problems with this is that it contains an implicit statement; that men
are free to not be nurturing.  Masculine qualities are sometimes
assumed to be the opposite of feminine qualities.  On top of that,
it's pretty evident that no woman is nurturing *all the time*.  So
what is meant by "being nurturing" is a predisposition towards
nurturing perceptions and behaviors at certain times.  By writing
"women are doomed to being nurturing" you imply that nurturing is a
kind of object which can be found in all women.  This all is plain
silly -- there is no reason to assume that masculine behaviors oppose
feminine behaviors and behaviors are patterns of actions, rather than
objects.  Yet it's the way we all learn to think.  And, for most of
us, it's the only way we think.

Now it's quite evident that Gretchen Chapman knows this perfectly
well.  Yet she also writes:

  But if someone provides empirically evidence about a sex difference,
  I refuse to close my eyes and pretend it isn't real.

Gretchen, there's of course no reason to close your eyes . . . yet
what makes you so interested?  Unless you're a clinician for whom this
is useful information, a scholar in this field, or a social policy
maker -- what difference does a statistical difference between the
sexes make to you?

Point of all this, to reiterate, is simply that, as a culture, we have
a whole mass of theories about behavior (as do all cultures, as far as
I know), and those theories use gender as an explanation where it
simply won't do.  A lot of studies are done to support these theories.
Since the prevailing theory of gender has women as submissive, it's a
problem for feminists; it must either be transformed or criticized and
destroyed.

And, as an extremely radical idea, I throw out the hypothesis that we
might be able to construct a culture which considers people to have
temperaments without regard to gender or sexual orientation.  Sex, you
see, is a given.  You look at a baby and (usually) you know.  So you
can start the prescriptions at a very early age.  Temperament, on the
other hand, must be learned through interaction.  Just how would such
a culture model psychology?  How would they relate sex and
temperament?

++Randolph Fritz  sun!randolph || randolph@sun.com

"My role -- and that is too emphatic a word -- is to show people that
they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as
evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment
during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and
destroyed." --  Michael Foucault, *Technologies of the Self*