Sunday, December 9, 2012

December 8, 2012

What used to be called masculinity/femininity (a hyphenated bipolar dimension now usually viewed as two orthogonal dimensions) have been reconceptualize.                                                                                   Philip Savoer and Clyde Hendrick, Sex and Gender (Sage Publications, 1987), p. 7

That "orthogonal" might stump you. But ortho- is Greek for "straight" or  "correct"; and -gonal simply means "angle."
The authors, editors of a collection of essays, are simply saying that it ain't just male-female anymore; it's gotten more complicated. But only because Sex was too narrowly defined before. Before what? Before The Woman's Movement.
      The Woman's Movement has brought us so much. So much more than anyone, including the women themselves, knew they were bringing, when the Second-Wave-Feminism struck the patriarchal shore in the last years of the turbulent '60s.
     Not only sex and gender have changed of course. Everything has changed. And changed for the better. And it's still changing. And if the world is to be saved, The Woman's Movement will save it.  

I'd like to be able to speak of the nature versus nurture debate in my journal. So let's unpack the term, make sure we know what it means. The debate only began a hundred or so years ago, but the nurture part of the equation comes from the tabula rosa of John Locke and refers to one's environment; Locke philosophized that a person is born with a blank slate on which her environment writes. But after Darwin (1848), nature entered, and you have a debate. Nature of course are our inherited characteristics . . . built into our cells. Pre-environment. In fact, a relative of Darwin, Francis Galton, is given credit for the phrase "nature versus nurture debate," in the late 19th Century. Agency versus structure (socialization versus individual autonomy is how Wikipedia puts it) is another way of saying the same thing, but more contemporary.
It's the most interesting question, isn't it? Why do we behave the way we do? Is it biological? Is all behavior a social construction? I said to my friend, Charlie, yesterday, "Even sex is a social construct," and he immediately replied, "What about biology?" Many feminists believe that biology is raised as a male sword to sever social constructionism. They ask sarcastically, "Are you saying woman's natural place is in the kitchen?"


     It's the most interesting question, isn't it? Why do we behave the way we do? Is it biological? Is all behavior a social construction? I said to my friend, Charlie, yesterday, "Even sex is a social construct," and he immediately replied, "What about biology?" Many feminists believe that biology is raised as a male sword to sever social constructionism. They ask sarcastically, "Are you saying woman's natural place is in the kitchen?"
     But what about violence? Male psychologists believe that men are six times more likely to commit murder than females. And as they study other mammals, they find the male almost always seems more violent than the female.
     What of the effect of testosterone, which females don't have?
     Some feminists, who generally favor nurture over nature of coure, like Carol Gilligan, opt for a combination, an interaction of genetic and environmental causation; but no one has found the link between the two, if they do interact. And, yet, to consider environment and genetic entirelty separately is counter-intuitive. I'd like to dig more deeply into gene-environment interaction, as it's a new and important field, and its impact is felt in every branch of Science and the Humanities.



What's most fascinating to me, but I haven't read the literature, only made observations in the garden, is what is known as sociobiology, that is, that is that principles of natural selection apply to behavior as well as physicality. Natural selection is Darwin's theory of evolution: (1) inherited variations within species; (2) competition and survival of the fittest;
(3) natural selection results with better adaptation to the environment. Behavorial tendencies are assumed to be inherited. My cat, Glenwood, told me this.

     In mammals, Parental investment theory is the observation that males can have many offspring; women are usually limited to one a year. The Ugandan kob may be an extreme case, but these antelopes are usually used to prove that males are phsycially different from females for a reason.
     A lesser known theory of Darwin's is sexual selection. For example, if the male can spread his seed around and have many offspring, but the female must invest an entire year to a single offspring--a year and quite an expenditure of physical capital--then it behooves the female to be very selective in her choice of mate, in the genes she'll be tending for so long and at such expense. Hence, says Darwin, the competition between males, to demonstrate to the female that theirs is the greatest, wisest choice of mating material. Because this can be seen as a female exerting behavior upon the males, Darwin called it "sexual selection."


My pussycat, Glenwood, has never met another cat. He was found in a cellar, about a week after he was born, no sign of his mother. No
siblings. Joseph rescued him and gave him to me to look after while he went to Florida. When he came back a week later, I wouldn't give
Glenwood back to him. (We had a Facebook contest to name him, and we both live in the "Glenwood" section of Greensboro, N. C.) Yet Glenwood exhibits almost every behavior of any cat I have ever had. (He doesn't purr.)
     Humans exhibit many characteristics of our mammalian forebears. Yet there is a myriad of behaviors that no other species exhibits, certainly in our male-female, female-female male-male relations. (I am pretty ignorant about most but all aspects of Transgender.)
     "Glenwood" says he has absolutely no interest in sugar. Sensitivity to sugar is extremely rare in carnivorous animals.
     Scientists are fond of comparing giraffes and monkeys. They think there's a reason the monkey doesn't want a  l o n g  neck.

I'm going to have to do a lot more research on animal-human morphology before I reach any conclusions. So far, I only see men doing the research and reaching conclusions that seem very male-centered to me. I'd like to see up-to-date research, as mine stops before 1990. For example, here is the conclusion Douglas T. Kendrick reaches in "Gender, Genes, and Social Environment," but I would have to question every word in it, although I don't doubt it represented scientific knowledge of 1986, when he wrote it:
     "When we consider learning biases, the general map is provided by the genes; but the specific stimulus topography is provided by experience. Similarly, genes code for the development of certain structural features, but the effects of those features will depend on life experiences. Life experiences also have a reciprocal effect on the biological organism resulting in chronic alterations in biochemistry."

 






     
      
 

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