In the time since I started reading these gender books, I have had several rather long conversations with others, male and female, in conjunction with my readings. Though in my younger days I might have pounced on some poor unsuspecting souls in the student center for these conversations, this time around the people I spoke with are all friends. The sum of my impressions from these many hours of talk, plus lots of thinking and reading, and grumbling and arguing with each essay I read, all together have left me slightly shifted from my last post.
First, as far as essentialist arguments go- There are differences between male and female humans, most obviously bodily differences. I haven't yet read it this time, but years ago when I took my last college gender studies course, some of the authors we read made a huge deal of the experience a young woman has learning about sex, specifically learning that sex means allowing a man to enter/penetrate/violate her body, in a part of her anatomy she may have never really even acknowledged. It was stated by many of these authors repeatedly that control of the knowledge of sex was a part of how men kept control over their sexual relations with women. Boys certainly have a more obviously accessible sexual region for self-exploration, and engage in more masturbation, and in some eras and places were encouraged to explore sex with prostitutes or other lower-status women prior to and during marriage. But the knowledge boys have to gain about sex is not really any nicer than that girls get, according to such models of sex.
Many classic authors, of fiction and non-fiction, drill into their readers that a man's life energy or essence drains out with his semen, prompting some rather visible men to avoid sex entirely, and live as monks. The idea of the sex act, for an uninitiated boy, is perhaps as scary as for a girl, too, in the idea of his most sensitive organ being engulfed/taken/devoured by the body of a woman. Two images from popular media come to mind here. The first is a rather bizarre porn horror film about killer vaginas with teeth, that bite off men's penises. The second, from a book by Neil Gaiman, describes a goddess who consumes men during sex, absorbing them penis-first through the rift in her skin that is her vagina. I am sure if I went looking I could find plenty more. Even if men don't exactly buy into them literally, there are other interpretations of these images as metaphors, which many men seem to accept, such that when they have sex with women they expect sex to be a way for women to entrap them into marriage and domesticity. Meanwhile women, who have grown up on the same range of stories in many ways, expect that they can only get a husband by such entrapments, and also assume they actually want domesticity.
A study I came across in a social psychology course years ago comes to mind. In this study, researchers wanted to know whether men and women differ with respect to visual-sexual arousal. The primary target, still, for pornography is men, and certainly the plots and aesthetics in many types of porn are geared towards men exclusively. That the market is so structured does not mean women wouldn't enjoy porn, yet most women don't use pornography. The researchers set up conditions so that test subjects would view various sexual, semi-sexual and neutral imagery, with sensors arrayed to monitor where the subject's eyes focused, and for how long, as well as gathering heart rate, respiration, etc. Male subjects liked porn, according to the results. Women didn't respond much to the porn, which, was not to surprising either. However, women also didn't really look at the porn; their eyes kept sliding away from the naked bodies on the screen, and especially from penises. Follow-ups to this found that women, if they became used to the idea of it being ok to be sexually aroused by the sight of naked men, they looked at pictures of naked men longer, and their physical arousal began to resemble that of male subjects.
In the decade since reading about these experiments I have paid much closer attention to my own and my friends' behavior with respect to sexuality. Considering that I started out as a 'good' Seventh Day Adventist, this really may just mean that I went from pretending sex didn't exist to acknowledging that it might be fun to try sometime. Still, I think the potential for men and women to be practically identical in their degree of sexual interest is huge. If our parents and communities weren't hell-bent on training us out of being comfortable in our own skins, girls could figure out and enjoy masturbation almost as easily as boys. And, if it is not culturally taboo for women to enjoy the sight of naked men, and sexuality on screen, women can and do find such sights arousing.
All this does in fact link into what else I have been thinking about tonight, though on the surface I am still pitting men against women in endless comparison. Ultimately, though, just as with environmental issues and racial issues, after so man decades of debate and argument, it isn't that the points are unclear, or that there is no sign of a direction in which to move. The biggest problem I see in gender studies is that we are all individuals. We do not have 'man' or 'woman', or 'white', or 'black', or any other category stamps on our hides when we are born. Gender is made up of the interaction between our own individual traits and the gender constructs our families and society buy into. Race, a different concept from gender structurally (one is born with the phenotypic 'race' of one's parents, whereas, one is always born by way of a woman's pregnancy, through the sexual coupling in some form of a man and a woman.) is also socially constructed, as can be seen in the label 'white', which now includes the Irish, and Eastern Europeans, and usually Italians, though all these groups were at various times set apart as racially inferior, and which does not include Japanese or Chinese people even when these people have paler skin. I, as a 'white' woman, am a sort of yellowish orangeish pink color, and the only 'black' person I met who really looked black in color was from a particular Sudanese group. (yes, I see the beginnings of a typical rambling rant starting here. sorry.). . .
So long as we are stuck trying to come to a consensus about who is right and who is wronged, bickering back and forth, training each new generation to pick up the fight where the departing generation left off, we'll get nowhere. If anyone recalls the Doctor Who episode where the Doctor has a daughter by a DNA replication device, that is the sort of war we have going on with respect to a lot of things anymore. So long as we band together as men and women (or human and hath, in the episode) we won't know each other, understand each other, like each other or really be able to love each other. Each of us is an individual person, first, and so long as we can interact with each other at this fundamental level, we stand some chance of shedding the baggage we've all inherited, our parents' parents' wars, that have kept us at odds for these generations. Is this rewriting history? Perhaps, but really it is saying, whatever the history, we are here now, real flesh-and-blood humans, with our brief shimmeringly glorious lives still in full swing. What happened in the past is over, and if we want to thoroughly enjoy the life we have left to savor and enrich, we need to do it by actually living our own lives. The only place gender studies has in this model of my life or of life in general is to the extent that others can force gender upon me and those around me. The only way to really beat such forces seems to be to embrace life even more tenaciously. If Society, or Government, or History, or any force can make me into some sort of boxed-up gendered white disabled woman, it is not because they hold a gun to my head, but because I choose to change myself in response to them. That would, by the way, be a lot easier to say if I was independently wealthy; as an introverted intellectual, I find it hard to attract the supportive network of friends and loved ones that would make it certain that a roof will always be available, a meal always there when needed. I really envy some of those classic thinkers who could afford to just live and write, and think, without worry of homelessness and starvation. I will almost certainly have to find a job that will test my sense of self, in a part of society with plenty of boxes to put me in.
But, where there's a will (or whip?) there is a way.
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