The condition of women in western society certainly leaves something to be desired; I only have to bring up the subject before the reader calls to mind recent events of rape, concealed sexual harassment, denial of reproductive rights, wage inequality, and, of course, all of the other examples of inequality that have been circulating around the news. When roughly half of the US political body, namely the Republican Party, is being widely accused of waging a war on women, I need not enumerate specific instances to convey the extent and severity of the situation.
Modern society divides men and women into separate castes by gender and discriminates based on this division. This idea was developed and expanded on in Kate Millet’s 1969 seminal work Sexual Politics. As she described, men and women are raised and expected to fill gender roles based on their biological sex: a longstanding cultural institution that has bound the human race to distinct identities of either masculinity or femininity. Regardless of social status “... a truck driver or butcher always has his “manhood” to fall back upon...The literature of the past thirty years provides staggering incidents in which the caste of virility triumphs over the social status wealthy or even educated women” (Millet 36). In the face of such an absolute system of division, it may be necessary for us as a society to move beyond, not jut gender roles, but the concept of gender itself so that we may approach a society that values people for their inherent worth.
There are many benefits to viewing gender though the lens of class and caste which provide a deeper basis for understanding both it’s history and nature, but before we can do this we must first thoroughly come to terms with the distinction between sex and gender. Sex is inherent in the biological makeup of a person – X and Y chromosomes, genitalia, and not much else. Notwithstanding, there has recently been a degree of psychological and neurological investigation into the innate differences between men and women that when viewed from the lens of gender appear to be more like physiognomy – an outmoded pseudoscience – than studies of real biological differences. The data collected by such experiments and studies isn’t false per say, but the differences they illustrate are largely rooted in gender, not innate sex. In contrast, gender is non-standard. While most cultures around the world categorize people as one of two sexes – X or Y chromosomes and one of two genitals – the cultural identity and expression of that sex varies from place to place. While being male or female – a function of sex – is a universal condition, being masculine or feminine – a function of gender – is not.
The conception of gender – masculinity and femininity – is not a set of facts but a set of values. In modern western culture, strength, bravery, and stoicism for example define the masculine while tenderness, beauty, and sensitivity define the feminine. Our understanding of gender as a system of values culturally is demonstrated by our ability to gender even abstract and inanimate professions – the “masculine” engineer as opposed to the “feminine” nurse. Men and women are assigned a set of values and expectations of behavior from birth that often exclusively hinge on their sex. While the nuances of what it means to be “masculine” or “feminine” may change from culture to culture the separation of the two castes is virtually absolute. This separation is an essential feature of any caste system; people of different blood do not mix.
Traditional differences between the genders are mostly a result of culture. Although this idea may seem outlandish, to dismiss it is to grossly underestimate the power that culture possesses. For example, the social obligation to community and nation in Japan is something that starkly contrasts with deeply held values of individualism and independence in the USA. Concepts like libertarianism that treat every person as their own island, a political movement that has gained traction since the 1970’s, is a concept that would be strange and unheard of in Japan. Even deeper than culture, language itself can influence how people think and even what they see, a theory known as the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis. Exemplifying this is the way color is treated within language and how that affects our ability to distinguish between different shades. In many languages there is no distinction between blue and green, specifically with the indigenous Himba people of north Sudan there’s evidence that shows it takes longer for them to be able to distinguish between blue and green, for which they don’t have separate words than other colors (Reiger & Kay 5).
These phenomena are also not endemic to separate cultures but can show up within separate castes of a single culture. The mentality of a warrior class is very different from that of the laboring class. In medieval Europe, not just the livelihood but mindset and wold view that separated the estates. People from the peasant class were assumed to be unintelligent and uncultured in comparison to the high nobility. More significantly, women were considered to be of an entirely separate estate system from men. As opposed to the male peasant, nobility, and clergy system, women were classified instead within the feminine estates of virgin, wife, and widow. And while there were exception of female monarchs, this system largely assigned women as having value insofar as their relationships with men were concerned. This system is no extraordinary example either as the ranking of women as a subordinate class has been observed across the world.
As with any such system this structure fundamentally requires men and women to act within certain parameters and it is this social expectation of heteronormativity that causes women to view their self worth in terms of physical beauty and pick on the ugly duckling, and similarly causes boys to deny their emotional selves and shun those who don’t do the same. The caste system of gender holds men and women to unfair and often artificial standards creating a negative social environment even before the consideration of women's subordinate roles in society. In many areas where women are grossly underrepresented – such as politics, Wall Street, or academia – it is the very division in the caste system that promotes the domination of one sex over another. In systems such as these where power and influence are made through connections and favors, one if far more likely to favor one’s own caste or group. Similarly to how ethnicities self segregate in prison systems, people within a caste deal with and promote members of their own group. It is cultural tradition that the ruling class is white men in all of the examples I’ve given, however there is no reason the same phenomenon would be observed should it be a different group in charge.
All of this leads to the nature of the gender caste division preceding institutionalized sexism and discrimination in that even if we manage to achieve equality of the sexes as pursued by third wave feminism, it will in actuality be nothing more than a nominal equality of gender. So long as the caste system remains we can’t hope to achieve more than separate but equal between the genders, and even then the extent of “equal” is dubious.
Western culture, and most cultures in general, are so rooted in the gender binary that removing it from daily life would leave our world so unrecognizable that a world structured like that is nearly unfathomable. Gender gives people an easy identity to latch onto and take pride in. Male codes of honor, or any gender norm held in societal regard, are attractive things to strive for because achieving them grants one the admiration of not only their own group but society as a whole. The social reward of fitting in with one’s own gender is so powerful that one of the worst things to be accused of as a man or woman is to be un-masculine or un-feminine. Identity is held so dearly to people that it is nearly impossible to change it.
In cases of genital malformation and consequent erroneous gender assignment at birth, studied at the California Gender Identity Center, the discovery was made that it’s easier to change the sex of an adolescent male, who's biological identity turns out to be contrary to his gender assignment and conditioning – through surgery – than to undo the educational consequence of years, which have succeeded in making the subject temperamentally feminine in gesture, sense of self, personality and interests. (Millet 30)
When considering that gender is built into language itself, with many words in non-English languages being inherently gendered in grammar, the notion of a post gender society becomes even more distant.
This is an illustration of the ultimate problem of how to change a culture. All social progress is difficult, slow, met with enormous resistance, takes many lives, and is more often than not only successful when the group lobbying for change have everything to gain and nothing to lose. As of now, we take situation in a case by case basis – pushing for one set of rights or another; however, this is a solution focused on treating the symptoms and not the illness. The dominance of gender identity and caste division is not a social practice to be changed but a system that needs to be, at the very least, weakened.
A partial solution, I believe, lies in the way that children are reared and educated. Simply raising children without assigning them a gender based on their sex is a possible start but it still leaves them with only two options. The caste system still exists and while people may have improvements in equality masculine and feminine will still exist divided and unequal. In The Republic, Plato discusses the role of women in society – arguing for what we would see as equality. While in spite of believing that women were, on average, inferior to men in most tasks, he argued that we cannot make assumption on what a person should or should not do based on their assumed nature. “By this reasoning we could just as well ask ourselves whether bald and hairy men have opposite natures and once we agree they have, forbid the hairy ones to be shoemakers if that’s what the bald ones do, or vice versa.” (Plato 119) Socrates goes on to discuss why men and women should be equal to serve as guardians, the military and ruling class of his ideal city. What makes this a potential solution is how Socrates lays out the education of the guardians. Rather than be raised by parents with clear masculine and feminine roles, they are raised communally by the guardians where their main identity is that of the guardian value system instead of being masculine or feminine.
While Plato certainly wasn’t concerned with pursuing such radical gender equality in practice (in fact he didn’t care much at all for social issues beyond the pursuit of justice as a form of knowledge), gender equality appears to be in some ways a byproduct of his idea of the ideal education system. This system emphasizes the pursuit of a just set of ideals and to form an identity around that; gender falls by the wayside. Educating and raising children outside the system of gender as an identity may be a legitimate path towards true equality.
But here we are stuck yet again between theory and practice. The goals I’ve set out mimic the ideal which, unfortunately, is a direction not a destination. Change will not come overnight, nor will it come through any single education reform – if any at all. It may be that the only way progress will be made is through the spreading and understanding of these ideas throughout society so that people may willingly move towards and understand the necessity change, but even that is a tentative proposition. Combined with the widespread hostility towards third wave feminism and the unwillingness to listen to the ideas they profess, we once again arrive at a troubling prospect for the future. Until we as a society can see over the mountaintop, until we can understand the nature of sexual inequality, the distinction of sex and gender, the caste system of gender, and the negative impacts of holding people to such artificial value systems, until we understand that gender is facet of society that we can do without we will be blind and unable to know what direction to move in.
Works Cited
Millett, Kate. "Theory of Sexual Politics." Sexual Politics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970. 23-58. Print.
Plato, and Raymond Larson. The Republic. Arlington Heights, IL: AHM Pub., 1979. Print.
Regier, Terry, and Paul Kay. "Language, Thought, and Color: Whorf Was Half Right." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13.10 (2009): 439-46. Web.
