Sexing: Equal, but Different?
How has our perception of the sexes affected our self-perception? How has our perception of gender affected our politics and culture? Both of Laqueur’s articles, both of Terry’s articles and the films we watched in class can be related to these basic questions.
The first of Laqueur’s articles, New Science, One Flesh, deals with the sixteenth-century idea that men and women have ‘one body,’ the only difference being that women’s bodies simply have inverted male organs. Given this mind set there are a couple of viewpoints that could arise: 1) men and women could be viewed as equal in all respects; 2) women could be viewed as imperfect men. Laqueur’s second article, Discover of the Sexes, looks at the transition from the idea of one body to two distinct sexes. Laqueur stresses that the one body has never completely left our society, though the two sexes proposal is the most common scientific theory now, as well the leading socially accepted idea. I would agree with Laqueur that there are remnants of the one body theory still prevailing today; in my human sexuality class we did a section on embryology and one of the main theories that came across was that males and females have the same cells, just the srY gene in males causes them to differentiate from the female body. Laqueur states, “sometime in the eighteenth century, sex as we know it was invented” (149). This was a very strange thought for me, rooted in my own social context it was difficult for me to image a time where the sexes were not thought of as so separate; we definitely live in a “women are from Venus, men are from Mars” society. I thought Laqueur did a good job of summing up the feeling of the eighteenth century when he discusses the writings of Poullian de la Barre. La Barre was very devoted Cartesian dualism in which “self is the thinking subject, the mind, and that is radically not the body” (155). La Barre goes on to say, “from this it follows that the mind, this decorporealized self, has no sex and indeed can have no sex. Gender, the social division between men and women must therefore have its foundation in biology if it is to have any foundation at all” (155). This is a very strong statement to make since it does not allow for transgender people, whose gender does not match up with their biological sex. It is also interesting to note that if the “self” has no sex, then why do we almost always mention our sex when describing ourselves?
These articles were complimented by the video, The Human Sexes, which we watched in class. The film had an intellectual explaining how the social differences between men and women have occurred ‘naturally’, because of our biology. The film talked about the well-excepted theory that our society for thousands of year was hunter-gatherer, in which the women gathered and the men hunted. The film then looked at how we went against nature, by giving the example of female body builders; they also touched on the nineties trend of very androgynous clothing for women, they then used strippers to symbolize ultimate femininity. The film did not give an example of feminine men, but if you look at current fashions for the ‘metrosexual’ man, they too have a sexless look.
The first Terry article we looked at examined the history of medicalizing homosexuality. This again goes back to the western need to atomize a ‘problem’. In the case of homosexuals, the Judeo-Christian church has viewed homosexual acts as sinful for centuries; therefore Christian doctors and scientists, who view homosexuality as unnatural, seek to root out the ‘cause of homosexuality,’ so that they can cure it. The second Terry article, Fluid Sexes examined the idea of a single individual containing attributes of both sexes, thereby creating many genders. This article delves more deeply into the idea of how much of gender is determined by our biology, and how much is determined by our environmental factors, our society. Terry gives the example of a study done in the 1930’s that used hormone therapy to attempt to cure homosexuality. The conclusion of this study being that “just two years later, a study of hormones in homosexual personality development found no conclusive findings in this regard” (162). Terry also cites studies of other cultures in which the gender roles as we know them are reversed. I think both of these examples are evidence of gender being influenced by society. In truth I think this is impossible to answer without bias, we are all set in one biological form and one cultural setting.
As Laqueur states, “Sexual difference no more followed from anatomy after the scientific revolution than it did in the world of one sex” (163). The trend of fluid sexual identity is already going strong in the twenty-first century; it will be interesting to see if we continue in this vein, or whether we revert back to a previous notion of sex. Hopefully we will learn to stop condemning the practice of homosexuality, especially on the grounds of it being unnatural since it does not produce children; this one way to help solve the overpopulation problem. Maybe there are notions yet to come that have not yet been conceived.
Article Citation:
Jennifer Terry, 1999. Medicalizing Homosexuality and Fluid Sexes, IN An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pp. 40-73, 159-177.
Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body And Gender From The Greeks To Freud. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.
Picture links:
http://www.freedomfly.net/images/2BigWomen.jpg
http://foreveramber.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/01/18/pradamenswear2.jpg
