[culturehandy]

I pitched this in the Community Forum and it was well recieved.

This thread is all about the politics and cross cultural and societal views on gender.

I started thinking increasingly about gender when the media frenzy about Caster Semenya emerged. It is my opinion that the only reason people questioned Ms. Semenya's gender is because she appeared to be "masculine". That is, she looked masculine according to the ideas of society at large. Had she had softer, more "feminine" features, questions of her gender would not have come up.

So, what is gender? We know that there is sex, your biological sex, but gender is a social construct.

[angie_21]

In my anthropology classes, I was taught to use the word "sex" for biological distinctions, and "gender" for sociocultural constructs that are loosely based on sex. Even with biology it can be hard to define real categories of male and female sex (as the Caster Semenya case has made us all aware), but with culture and gender its even harder because things change from century to century, and decade to decade.

Up until the 20th century in "Western" culture, women were considered to be passionate, sexual temptresses with little self control, while men were honorable and pious. Somewhere along the line that changed, and for the last hundred years people seem to believe that real women should be chaste and calm, while men are hot-tempered sex-fiends. What made people suddenly change these ideas? I can't imagine women and men suddenly biologically changed from one polar opposite to another.

I can't imagine how difficult it would be for a child to be brought up gender-neutral in our sex-bsessed culture. From day one, boys are bombarded with shame when they act feminine, and girls are still, despite the attempts of feminism, chastised for being unladylike. It's probably the strongest indoctrination our culture will ever enforce on us (other than the growing pressur eof consumerism, but I digress...) and to be raised the first 5 years of your life outside of that paradigm, and suddenly be thrown into it and teased mericlessly by your peers for being "weird" and different, would be tough. Like it or not, humans depend very strongly on these cultural constructs to understand the world they live in, and we're still teaching our children to be pretty mean when people don't fit in.

Wow, CH, I love your comments on that article! So true!

But in regards to the whole thing about nature and mammal biology - A lot of our ideas regarding animal sex and reproductve roles are also really strongly influenced by the gender ideas of the scientists studying them. People choose to see what makes sense to them. It took a long time for biologists to notice, for instance, how sexually promiscuous female chimps are. It isn't always empahsized how very agressive female mammals can be, both physically and socially. Also, there's a wide range of gender and sex roles even in nature. I think it's orangutans (maybe also gorillas?) but non-dominant males never reach sexual maturity, they stay in a kind of semi-adolescent phase unless they are strong or lucky enough to become a dominant male, in which case they can biologically progress to sexual maturity way later in life, long after adolescence. There's so much more that goes on in the world that people are only starting to see now that we realize that things aren't as black and white as they seem, and that culture can actually influence biology instead things only happening the other way around!

I'm reading a textbook on race and racism, and it's almost exactly the same question. If something is biologically not real, but believed by so many people, it becomes "real" in a very different, but equally powerful sense.