During the late summer of 1995, ABC ran a special, hosted by its Zeitgeist correspondent John Stossel, concerning recent research into biological differences between the genders. Of course, the show played up the "Women Are From Venus/Men Are From Mars" angle, ratifying (as all mainstream media must do) the current gender identities, and in this respect it simply turned into a higher-toned afternoon talk show, Oprah with footnotes. I found myself constantly saying back to my as yet non-interactive television "Yeah, but -- " and "It all depends on how you define -- " and "Who's interests are being served -- " My companion, bless her heart, only told me to quiet down once, and I lowered the running commentary to a mutter.
What bugged me about the show? What bugs me about almost all commercial television's offerings: the way the broadcasts function as a kind of doctrinal clearinghouse for the reigning ideologies of our less-than-benign capitalist order. And not just commercial television. I think back to Bill Moyers' A Gathering of Men on PBS at the beginning of the decade and the "men's movement" that it helped spawn, and I feel just as bugged. In this case, the particular status-quo ideology that irritates me and which each of these shows reinforced (and I don't mean to make them specially emblematic, just mildly so) is the belief that gender differences represent real immutable differences in the essential natures of men and women rather than specific, historically induced (and therefore socially changeable) behaviors. Or another way to say this: If people believe that gender differences have an immutable character, they can then say that the unequal distribution of power and benefits between men and women is a natural outgrowth of biology and can't be changed by political or social action. In either case, as long as this ideology colors our conversation about relationships, those of us interested in the search for equality and social justice for everyone will be too busy cleaning cobwebs out of people's eyes to make much progress in a forward direction.
Let me explain this more clearly by getting away from declarations and into reasons.
Aside from the fact that women can bear children and men can't, the differences assigned to men and women all have a cultural origin. While biology clearly determines our sex, our gender, the cultural uniform we wear because of our sex, comes socially tailored. And for Americans living in the 1990s, this means that gender and all its associated behavioral duties come tailored by a capitalist regime interested in profit.
How does the capitalist regime profit by maintaining the myth of irremediable contrarities between men and women? As it does with any challenge to its authority: by the time-honored stratagem of "divide and conquer." From a purely market point-of-view, dividing the genders helps conquer purses and wallets: just walk into any Filene's or Jordan's and see how the owners have dedicated whole floors to lá difference. A society in which the genders might move toward androgyny would cut profits by half, which is why John Stossel and Robert Bly must be enlisted to shore up the verities that make target marketing possible.
But the powers-that-be do not just use a "divide and conquer" strategy for the mostly benign purposes of market segmentation. David Montgomery, in his excellent , details how the rising industrial order re-shaped institutions and definitions of proper behavior in order to discipline workers to accept the primacy of wage employment. Sometimes the effort was brutally blatant, as in strike-breaking, and sometimes more subtle, as in making unemployment a crime through vagrancy laws. But in all cases the effort was deliberate, calculated, and, in the end, highly effective because the regime had the means to divide their opponents and conquer their resistances.
What happened then happens now, and one has to see gender differences in this light, as aspects of a strategy for controlling the vagaries of human temperament for the greater glory of the dividend. For instance, we can see the dynamics of this strategy in the separate, and usually uncollaborative, men's and women's movements. Now, in the short space of an essay I cannot do justice to the intensely diverse viewpoints that inhabit each of these movements; suffice it to say that neither of them has a unanimous tone or principle. However, I do detect two contrary directions in each movement, like opposing magnetic poles, and these force-fields are the outward signs of the regime's success at keeping the two movements from combining into a single genderless movement for social and economic justice.
One "pole" is, in fact, just this desire to level political and economic inequalities for everyone regardless of gender, a focus on class issues that partially nullifies the tactic of "divide and conquer." We saw this in the women's conference in Beijing, which, while it, rightly, focused heavily on the need to boost the social and economic power of women to make choices for themselves, also declared that enlisting men in reliving women's suffering is an essential ingredient for success. In other words, justice for women is not at the expense of men but is a way to recalibrate the world so that no one suffers from exploitation. For the men's movement, people like Sam Keen, in his Fire in the Belly, propose a similar credo, that ensuring justice for women ensures justice for us all.
However, Keen's book illustrates the opposing "pole" of this dichotomy, the one that illustrates most clearly the way "divide and conquer" has infected the otherwise clear and rational efforts to obtain equity and freedom. While Keen clearly sees the destructive effects of acting in the old male style of thug and bully, he, like Bly in Iron John, wants to celebrate a new kind of maleness, a warrior/wolf mentality; but neither realizes that this new guise simply re-establishes the emotionally constricted Marlboro-man machismo in different clothing. They think they have a new man; in reality, it is simply "this old man came rolling home."
The women's movement has its own opposite "pole," but the end result is just as hobbled. From Camille Paglia's hip critic one-upping her more dowdy and un-with it sisters to Naomi Wolf and Christina Hoff Summers' catalog of feminism's "sins" to goddess worship and the practice of pan-pagan witchcraft, the movement seems distracted by trying to figure out what it means to be a "woman." (I recall one time, while waiting in the check-out line, seeing a heading on one of the women's magazines: "Is It All Right To Be A Feminist And Still Like Nail Polish?") The fundamental principles that first drove women to organize and seek justice for themselves seem to have been blunted by this squabbling over femininity.
I'm not sure if the adherents of each movement see how their better impulses have been contaminated by the regime's "divide and conquer" strategy, but they acquired a taint. Each movement has within it, bidden or unbidden, a mythology that aspects of temperament and character are gender-allocated, for instance, that women act more nurturing by nature, or that men have a natural urge for being warriors. In other words, biology determines essence, that men and women are really different based on some inherent disparity in biological wiring rather than just apparently different because of different backgrounds and upbringing. Therefore, the mythology goes, they share few or no common interests or needs and will remain forever in a kind of milder Hobbesian state of nature, the war of every man against every woman. (A variant of this "divide and conquer" mythology lurked throughout Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, applied to race rather than gender but with the same goal in mind: to negate efforts at social justice by saying that one simply cannot change nature when nature has ordained that, on average, white-skinned males have lots of power and dark-skinned males and females don't.)
And so long as the movements try to re-define terms, behaviors, or policies without looking at the regime's rules that control the definition game, then the "man/woman" dichotomy will persist, with all its attendant capacity for discrimination and misunderstanding, for curdling the inevitable differences of normal human variety into claims of privilege and "turf."
Would it ever be possible to have a genderless world? In other words, would it be possible to create a social and economic regime in which people are taught to be people and not necessarily men and women? I don't know, since very few people have conducted experiments along this line, mostly in utopian or religious communities whose dynamics can't be readily transferred to an urban industrialized society. But I did get a glimpse of how such a society might begin in an article I read about the men's movement. One of the interviewees tells an extremely interesting story about friends of his expecting a child. When it came time for the delivery, friends and family joined the husband and wife in the birthing room. When the child came sliding into the world, the midwife immediately covered up its genitals with a towel so that no one in the room, including the parents, knew if she cradled a male or female.
What a deliciously ironic moment! I wish I could have witnessed their reactions. Keeping the biology muted forced people to see the child as an entire person. Because they didn't know its sex (and they would have had to call it an "it" because we have no pronoun for a generic person), they couldn't begin building expectations and prejudices. Finding their cultural definitions useless to describe what had happened, they had to, if only for a moment, create some new way to see that child. In that momentarily new philosophical soil cultural regeneration could take root.
If this society of ours ever is ever going to find its way past this insane phase of profit and translate its best intentions into actual historical construction, it will need to use that midwife's magical towel to delete any bogus divisions between people, whether they be rich/poor, black/white, or male/female. And that will happen only when we discard the capitalist regime under which we live, enamored as it is of divide and conquer.
(October 1995)