Fe/Male

Is gender a fiction?

Thus far in the Fiction Campaign, I’ve been focussing on some fairly familiar Only a Game topics, but I’d like at this point to take a wild diversion into a slightly different space. Although I have made a few remarks concerning gender in the past, it hasn’t been a bull I’ve grasped by the horns (or a cow I’ve grasped by the udders) to any great extent.

If I suggest that gender is a fiction there are at least two ways I can be misunderstood. Firstly, I can be taken as being an idealist – in suggesting that our physical body doesn’t matter, only our mental categories for gender. But our physical body clearly does matter in the issue of gender, this is not irrelevant to the issue – it is central. Secondly, I can be taken as suggesting that gender roles are entirely socially constructed, and hence that there are no significant differences between the genders beyond the physical. This objection encodes the very problem I want to address in this piece: the concept of exactly two genders is precisely the fiction I want to expose.

In keeping with prop theory, I want to look at how gender fictions come about, and this begins with the physical body as a prop. The obvious difference between a male and a female body – the primary and secondary sexual characteristics – prescribe different imaginings, first and foremost that someone with a penis “is a man”, while someone with a vagina “is a woman”. The principles of fiction at work here are, as ever, culturally instantiated, but the difference in the physical prop (our human bodies) make for a great deal of authority in respect of the game of gender.

Those for whom scientific fictions hold even more authority have the Y chromosome as an extra degree of vindication in the male-female fiction. As a matter of fact, if this game were determined solely by genetics the gender fiction would be essentially binary – since either you have a Y chromosome (male) or you don’t (female), not counting a few borderline cases that are significant but tangential to my discussion. But despite the mythology, genes do not make people, they make proteins, which make animals, which people “live in”.

Headlines like “Revenge, Brain Study Finds, is a Male Partiality. For Women, the Emotion is Empathy” are a common way for newspapers to grab attention. We love having easy ways of bearing upon issues, and gender is such a familiar game that playing into it works brilliantly to get our attention. But every time we encounter a ‘men x, women y’ scenario it is not necessarily taken in its safest interpretation – namely “statistically speaking men have greater incidence of x, women have greater incidence of y”. It is actually more likely that we simply file the new information into the two boxes the gender fiction dictates to us: thus men want revenge, and women feel empathy. And if, like myself, your physical gender is male but you feel empathy more strongly than revenge, you face a disparity between the facts of your experience and the claims of the gender game.

Nowhere has this been felt more strongly than in the case of sexual identity. What is a gay man to think with respect to gender? They’re body prop says “boy”, but their brain isn’t so sure. In fact, brain studies of the anterior hypothalamus and amydala have shown that the gender-differentiated qualities of these brain region are “almost reversed” in the case of homosexuality. In other words, and again in a mostly statistical sense, homosexual men have part of the neurobiological wiring of heterosexual women and homosexual women have part of the neurobiological wiring of heterosexual men.

So now we have already some problems with the binary gender game. If we accept brain imaging scans as props (or, perhaps as an easier route, the experience of our everyday interactions) we have four ‘genders’. Taking body and brain gender terms as our point of reference we have male-male, male-female, female-male and female-female as gender translations of heterosexual male, homosexual male, homosexual female and heterosexual female. This is already starting to make the gender game look very messy.

But that’s not all, because the dimensions of binary gender by no means end at sexual identities. Consider as just one more example the role of testosterone. The normal game of gender expects aggression, competition and revenge to end up in the male box. But as it happens, testosterone affects men and women in the same essential way – female bodies produce less testosterone but are more sensitive to its effects. And for various reasons, some physical some cultural, we end up attaching the effects of testosterone to gender – such that aggression, competition and revenge are “male” behaviours, not testosterone behaviours. (After all, how, at the level of everyday life, could we possibly have access to this kind of neurobiological reading?)

Does this relate to sexual identity? Not really. It turns out that lesbians are not statistically different from heterosexual women in terms of the proportion of people with elevated testosterone levels – although “butch” lesbians do show elevated levels of testosterone with respect to other lesbians. Which isn’t exactly surprising. But if we want to throw our net wider and include every female body with elevated testosterone, then we have to add marketing executives and all sorts of other statistical cases that just don’t relate to sexual identity at all. So here we have another aspect of the gender fiction that seems in a naïve appraisal to fall into the binary gender boxes but which is nothing of the kind. The testosterone related behaviours don’t even seem to favour physical male over physical female in quite the way we might expect – there are plenty of “tom boys” who are just as competitive as their physically male peers.

Previously, I’ve thought of gender as a pair of overlapping Gaussian distributions such that there are peaks for ‘male’ and ‘female’ but individuals can land anywhere in the gender landscape. But even this is a simplification, because there is more than one dimension at work in the gender game – I’ve singled out three already that on the surface seem to be gender issues (physical body, brain wiring, testosterone levels), and there are certainly many more that could be counted if we start taking into account other aspects of the gender game such as clothing, jobs, parental roles and so forth.

Ultimately, what this shows is that if we strip away the gender fiction (as best we can) what we’re left with is an eclectic landscape of gender, in which there may well be two well defined regions, ‘male’ and ‘female’, and there may indeed be many people who can settle quite comfortably in these established spaces. But there is also a vast rolling countryside of diverse gender identities that will never comfortably fit into the binary gender fiction. Tension surrounds this game from within and without – from people who cannot make the fiction work for themselves, and from people who believe in the fiction so completely that they suffer cognitive dissonance in the face of anything that violates its rules.

What’s the answer? Well we aren’t going to be putting aside the game of gender any time soon, but we do need to begin recognising that it is a game, that is fictional that there are two genders in anything but the trivial sense of there being two basic styles of sexual organ. The discussion of sexual identity as a separate topic to gender only serves to reinforce the binary fiction of gender, and the ridiculous rag tag fleet of assorted identities becoming gradually appended to LGB’s originally tightly defined remit (now anything from LGBTQI to QUILTBAG) reinforces the original fiction by making another binary division into ‘conventional’ and ‘unconventional’ gender identities. Politically, this might serve certain immediate purposes; conceptually, it might not be the most helpful approach, particularly if the goal is acceptance for the full range of sexual identities.

The problem goes right to the heart of the project of individualism – on the one hand, we are all individuals; on the other, we assert our individuality by conforming to group identities (including outsider identities that are defined in contrast to orthodoxy). A new mythology, a new game of gender, might be just what we need to take us into new cultural spaces. But how this new fiction might be constructed is, at the moment, anyone’s guess.

The opening image depicts the Hindu gods Shiva and Shakti, who embody the masculine and feminine principles. I do not know to whom it can be attributed.

Comments

[Mordechai Buxner]

I'm one of those who don't feel gender stereotypes apply to them at all. In fact, I find that more of the female stereotypes apply to me than the male ones. I've responded to this realization by rejecting the idea of gender (other than the physical) entirely. If everything you can say about one gender or the other also applies to many people in the opposite gender, then why is the idea of gender worth preserving?

[Mordechai Buxner]

A retraction: on reflection, I don't think the female stereotypes apply to me any more than the male ones. I just thought they did because often we treat the lack of masculine traits as a sign of femininity. Evidently I haven't rid myself of this damned binary thinking.

[Chris]

Mory: it is interesting how the binary thinking about gender can make the *absence* of traits at one end of the scale feel like the *presence* of traits at the other. And it's also interesting the extent to which binary thinking is embedded in our thought - given the way neural architecture is constructed, this tendency is quite natural, although that's not to say we can't push beyond it.

Best wishes!

[VagabondEx]

I've read/seen/heard somewhere that there is a significant difference in the way the genders produce testosterone: in the male body it is produced together with some other hormone that causes happiness/joy, while in the female body it is produced together with hormones that cause stress (sorry for being so vague, I've heard this years ago). They are also produced in different organs.
Thus, for a man, situations that raise the level of testosterone (i.e sports) will be chemically more joyful than they are for a woman. This could explain why men tend to be more aggressive, etc.

Obviously, this is not my idea, I cannot defend it against any questions, I just wanted to add this as food for thought.

Chris, on the other hand: You have had a questionnaire about the Myers-Briggs personality types, and iirc there was also a question about the sex. Did you check whether there is a significant difference between the typical male and female gamers?

[Chris]

VagabondEx: the data I've seen suggests that testosterone response is more or less identical between the genders, although you are right that it is produced by slightly different biological mechanisms.

As for the differences between male and female gamers, see this piece from July 2008. Here's the short version:

Overall, the main finding of this part of the statistical analysis is that which was introduced at the start of this piece: women consistently provide lower numbers to describe their game playing competences, the importance of emotions to their play, and their enjoyment of various patterns of play. However, it is also telling in which specific areas this finding proved statistically significant.

It is probably premature to make a statement of the kind that women are less interested in fiero or excitement than men, but the findings in respect of gender do suggest that men are more interested in gameplay generated by the fight-or-flight response than women, and that women would in general prefer to play in an apparently unstructured way, or in a form with few penalties for experimentation (e.g. sandbox games).

Thanks for commenting!

[VagabondEx]

Chris, thanks for the quote, this is exactly what I was looking for. I'd like to make a few comments on this topic, and will do that at the original post. If you have time, please check them.

[Notsylvia.wordpress.com]

There is no doubt, that higher levels of testosterone correspond with a higher tendency towards aggression, however couldn´t it be that there are societal factors which cause these higher levels.
From studies I have read, it is actually a combination of dopamine and nor-epinephrine, which cause a higher production of testosterone.
And in a laboratory experiment with chimpanzees it was the combination of high levels of those three neurotransmitters which increased the level of violence so much that the apes were attempting to kill each other.

I´m convinced that social attitudes (revenge versus forgiveness) aren´t caused predominantly genetically, but rather more by beliefs which are passed on from one generation to the next.

On the other hand I do believe that there are fundamental differences between men and women apart from their sexual organs.
Female brains are connected differently than male brains.
Experience has shown that even in countries where there is a large emphasis put on the equality of men and women (like here in Iceland), young women still choose predominantly social sciences above natural sciences, and social and service jobs above technical ones. By the time kids enter high-school the majority of kids who are good in math are boys and in the computer programming classes my son took sadly there was not a single girl.

Every complex thought is a combination of many electro-chemical impulses coming from different parts of the brain. It seems to me that the less connectedness of the male brain allows men to concentrate better on mathematical logic than women.

Women can learn to concentrate in the same manner, but it doesn´t come as easy.
Since a womans brain is more connected than a man´s her thoughts will more often combine some emotional factor with her logical thinking.

So while men can plan ice-cold wars from a pure statistical point of view, a woman would always connect the statistics with the human consequences. A man will see the numbers of bombs and fighters needed for success of the war, while a woman will automatically visualize the torn up bodies of children.
Of course men can train themselves or can be trained by their environment to think like women, while women can train their brains to neglect any emotional distractions and think like men.

There is one thing I found in my personal experience, that is that men communicate in general different from women, even on the internet even in writing.
I´ve once taken the trouble and started counting the contribution of men versus women on left-wing political websites.
And although the editors publicly proclaimed their sympathies for womens rights they could not bring themselves to even try get an equal proportion of men and women contributors. The proportion was in all cases about five men to one woman.

I asked myself why.
Are there really not enough women sending in contributions?
Actually I don´t think so. I think rather that womens´ contributions do not meet male standards of expression, because women just communicate different from men. And in the male brain these kind of differences appear as unprofessional or lacking objectivity or what the crap else.
In order for a woman to be accepted by a male editor she has to turn herself into a male look-alike pretzel to meet the male standards of the "right" kind of communication.

In case you wonder, why I´m writing all these long comments,Chris:
It´s kind of an experiment for me. I want to see, if it is possible for me, a religious woman, to have a rational and honest discussion with a secular man on philosophy and politics.

So far it was seemingly impossible for me to communicate without the men feeling attacked or offended, although I did not mean any offense, just stated an opinion different from the one the man has stated.
Can it be that any from of difference of opinions coming from a woman will feel for a man as being a personal attack on himself?

[Chris]

Notsylvia: I have no problem with you writing long comments, although fielding so many at once can be demanding! :) I hope that you will settle down into a more comfortable rhythm in time... But either way I am always happy to have discussions with the "players" here, and I seldom manage a short comment, so I must be open to verbosity from everyone. :D

"I want to see, if it is possible for me, a religious woman, to have a rational and honest discussion with a secular man on philosophy and politics."

I don't see why this isn't in principle possible; you're not the only religious person here. Although I'm not sure if I am a "secular man"... I'm a member of a Unitarian Church, for instance. I like to see myself as "somewhere in the middle" on most of these issues - open to secular arguments, open to religious arguments.

Moving to the topic itself, a lot of your comment here presumes the categories "male" and "female", which is what this piece is trying to critique, so it is difficult for me to pursue a lot of your points.

I will say that the neurobiology of aggression does involve the three chemicals you mention - dopamine, norepinephrine and testosterone. However, dopamine is part of the reward system that maintains *all* behaviour, and its presence - while not discountable - will be found in any behavioural situation. Norepinephrine is more relevant - this is essentially the biochemical analogue for anger, and anger and aggression are clearly connected. I've written quite a lot about this in the context of play, but I won't recap it here.

Thanks for commenting!