¡Ululación! ¡Todos es flexión del género!
The narrator of Unbearable Lightness recommends that we notice and cherish the coincidences of life. For Tereza, that means seeing significance in the coincidence of Beethoven, a book, and Tomas. Being in tune with these coincidences lets us live our lives with a sort of novelistic beauty.
I am in two minds about this. I don't want to go into them now, but to sum up: one is cynical, material, nativist, the other is romantic (blech!), I might say spiritual, and...I don't know a word for what I mean*...the best I can say is solipsistic, but that's not quite right. Anyway, this post is not about my attitudes towards coincidence. It is about a coincidence; namely, everybody seems to be talking about gender!
These are the things in my life that are coinciding:
- My slow progress through The Blank Slate has landed me into the chapter entitled "Gender." It is, like the rest of the book, a defense of nativism (thank you for the word--I'm going to be using it all the time now...) in intellectual discussion of gender. He continues to claim that academia has traded its scientific integrity for emotional conviction about what he describes are the Blank Slate, Noble Savage, and Ghost in the Machine doctrines, and that this means that a certain branch of feminists (that he describes as the 'gender feminists') have made discussing the biological or evolutionary origins of gender high heresy. They tend to hold that the premise that there are innate psychological differences between the sexes leads inexorably to the conclusion that gender inequities are just; because they are anathema to the latter, they religiously reject the former. Pinker, of course, thinks this is bogus reasoning. He outlines why, even if there are biological (not just socially constructed) gender differences, this is no reason to justify gender inequity, and then cites reams of scientific research saying that those biological differences must exist.
- The beauty of coincidence (or perhaps trick of cognition that synthesizes experience into coincidence) is that even books as disparate as The Blank Slate and The Unbearable Lightness resonate in each other's tones. Unfortunately, the theme of lightness and heaviness that dominates the first chapter didn't sing to me. But it was interesting that Tomas and Tereza's behaviors were precises those described by Pinker as the archetypal, evolutionarily advantageous behaviors of their respective sexes. Tomas, because he was a male who had to make minimal investment in offspring, was inclined towards polygamy, and found it perfectly suited to his tastes. Tereza, who would have had to make a large investment in any offspring, desired monogamy and was loathe to Tomas' infidelity, a sign that he would not put maximal investment in any potential offspring with Tereza. (Even Sabina, who makes no such demands on Tomas, might be identified by Pinker as an example of a female with relatively high testosterone or androgens....)
- Meanwhile, two friends who happen to have -ive-ournals are thinking about issues of gender identity and sexism as well. theshowmustgo0n is...well, I'm not really sure what she's doing. She's fighting whatever internal battle she's fighting in a language that, I've realized, is largely foreign to me. But it involves her femininity, her identity, an existential crisis.... At the same time, secretspice apparently just went to some sort of conference on gender privilege that's reshaping her world view. Her -ive-ournal post implies that she believes that gender is for the most part an issue of either social construction or individual choice--I have a hunch that she is a supporter of the Blank Slate ideology at heart....
Gender was never a particularly interesting topic to me until last year when I crawled out from under my rock and it became more important in dealing with some dramatic issues around me. As I process this information I'm finding myself drawing some pretty dismal conclusions. I might write about them later on, but that would involve overcoming a few inhibitions I have that make me antsy whenever I talk about sexuality. If there is an air of detachment about this post, it's because that's one of the few things that I have a really hard time speaking directly about. Must be the British blood.
In the mean time, at least I've got book learnin'!
If last term was the term of being roasted by my roommate on race and class issues that I had never really worried about, this term might be the term of being roasted by feminists. I think the first step would have to be learning their language though--I still don't think there's a direct translation of the phrase power dynamic or social construction into mine.
* Suck it, Sapir and Whorf.
p.s. I don't know Spanish, but AltaVista does...sort of.