I am a habitual caller on certain radio programs. I can never seem to resist getting in my two peanuts worth and there are times after hearing any idiot blather on like, well, an idiot, on the air then I really begin to see blood. For example, the other day a couple of young men were being interviewed concerning their perspectives on feminism, sex and rape culture. They seemed innocuous enough until one of them referred to sensitivity, gentleness and compassion as feminine characteristics. My comment on the phone was succinct enough. I said that these are not feminine, but human, characteristics and that men, in order to maintain power, dominance and hierarchy have simply rejected these most essential and humanizing qualities.
During the late seventies and early eighties, while in my twenties, I was developing my own ethos of feminism, largely influenced by my lesbian feminist friends and by Germaine Greer (if you haven't yet read The Female Eunuch, then get off your duff and buy a copy. You'll also find it in the library.) I was during that time attending a Mennonite house church made up of radical feminists, men and women, and we were all discussing and praying about finding a way of living that is human in the godliest sense without having to define ourselves through binary masculinity and femininity. For me it wasn't a huge leap, given that I have always been naturally androgynous. We were leaning rather heavily on the notion that all people are naturally androgynous and that conventional masculinity and femininity are mere social constructs. I swallowed that one whole. I still think there is merit to it though I have modified my position a little bit.
You see, Gentle Reader, I really don't believe that we live in a one-size-fits-everyone-kind-of-world. I have come to believe that there happen to be, out there, tonnes of naturally masculine, he-man Marlborough Man types. Even without social conditioning, these guys, as toddlers, would not have gone for the Barbie Dolls, nor for the Easy Bake Ovens. Similarly, there are also scads of authentic girly-girls in the world who as young children never would have thought of playing with toy cars and guns. But not everyone fits the binary. There are so many subtle gradations between the poles of binary gender that I think we do everyone a disservice by labeling those who do not fit as androgynous, or intersex or transgender, or pick any one.
I don't know why we have to do everything by labels and categories but perhaps we could at least appreciate that before gender and gender variants we are all human beings. We are individuals, no two alike. But we are still forced from earliest childhood to fit the binary. This is particularly cruel for people with gender dysphoria but it also stifles the rest of us and keeps us from growing. Long ago, it seems, it was agreed that men, because they have deeper and louder voices and are physically bigger, stronger and more muscular, were naturally expected to assume dominance, extinguish all their gentler and more beautiful traits and turn into rampaging dangerous beasts not very different from Tolkien Orcs. Women, in order to cope with being dominated, evolved the feminine exaggerations of their gender identity.
I'm not suggesting that none of this innate. Probably some of it is. Neither am I saying that men and women are completely alike and the same. By the same token I will bet you bagels to donuts that you will find just as much variation within either gender as you will between the genders, if you remove the variable of gender conformity and childhood conditioning.
Regardless of how alike or different people can be because of gender I think that we need to take a new approach to gender. We need to see ourselves and each other as human beings first and from there we really need to get to work, women and men, on reclaiming those traits and characteristics of our humanity that we have had to barter off in order to fit within an artificially imposed gender binary.
As God said to Adam and Eve: "One of you gets to pee while standing, the other gets to have multiple orgasms." Herein lies the difference and therein is where the difference ends between men and women.
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