Abstract: Genetic sex and cultural gender are not competitors in the study of our behaviors, except when a cultural a priori seeks to manipulate the studies. An example with Ellie Anderson, an American philosopher and gender activist, who sees the woman always alone cleaning, that of the couple’s story this time…
Sommaire
Of the kind that militates, of the kind that limits
The couple’s story is gendered, that’s for sure. Even in homosexual couples. Note that I would have made to Ellie Anderson, a young American philosopher who has just published an article on the subject. She affirms that the woman is more competent as a historian of the couple, to characterize and interpret this specific relationship. Intuitively we give her reason: the woman is more sensitive to the details of the life of the couple. But Anderson seizes this datum with a kind of militancy: she wants to make it an effect of culture. It is encouraged by her gendered education that the woman would take care of this task.
She suffers from this load! protests Anderson, who considers it an exhausting exploitation. The relationship cannot function without this work of investment, from which the man would benefit without taking part in it. Here he is comfortably installed, as usual with his toes fanned out, listening to the story of his couple, entirely staged by his companion…
The genre is off to a Hundred Years War
Like the racism I have been dealing with recently, gender is no longer a concept but a battle. Armament, countermeasures, gender recruits in acquired and anti-gender in innate. Dialectics but also science are involved in this arms race. What science do we use? The one who models the data or the one who interprets the model? Science of truth or doubt?
Some repeat over and over again that the real science is that which raises doubts, opening the door to their disputes. Yet interpretations are not true science. This simply provides a model to the data and checks whether it conforms to it. Science lends its ontological look to the physical world. The world can speak its truth. Nothing to do with ours, the one we would like it to say, for example that it has no social sex and that only our culture has built one, renamed ‘gender’.
Hermeneutical work…
Is that the woman remembers better the beginnings of the history of the couple an effect of her education or of a better intrinsic collectivism? Does she have the “mission” of playing such a role through her gendered education? This is the peremptory opinion of Anderson, who begins by detailing what is the “hermeneutic work”, process of interpretation of oneself and of the relationship to others:
She sees 3 dimensions to this work: 1) Understanding her own feelings, desires and motives, and presenting them intelligibly to others. 2) Discern those of others by interpreting their verbal and non-verbal signals, including when these are not very communicative or frankly evasive. 3) Compare and contrast these sets for conflict resolution purposes, integrating them into a common story.
…is heavy
Anderson recognizes that the work of self-organization of the self is universal but it would be “generally not expected of men, at least not in significant proportions” Consequently “the work of hermeneutics weighs disproportionately on women“, “especially in intimate relationships”.
Full of her teleological preoccupations with gender, Anderson wishes to reduce it to a purely cultural affair. She therefore voluntarily ignores its ontology —that the concern for others is an instinct before its cultural shaping, and that it is sexualized. Obvious bias in the nature-culture quarrel that will lead the young Ellie to her truncated conclusions.
Two study trains collide! Death of common sense!
Gender wokism and the ontology of sex collide noisily. Social studies of gender seek to minimize the differences between the sexes while medical studies on the contrary want to raise awareness of these differences. The woman would have a different physiology, imperative to take into account in the biological treatments, but these differences would have become invisible when arriving at the social behavior. Here is the brain well isolated in its cranium. The meninges take on the appearance of a cultural barrier.
Let’s try to make the matter simpler by starting from ontology and a theory of mind, Stratium, which explores this direction. It makes our personality an assembly of mental representations, which negotiate our behavior according to a principle of celebrity rather than rationality. Certain representations may naturally have a stronger celebrity, for example images of congeners more present in women for evolutionary reasons —the asymmetry of role in reproduction. We will see later how this difference can be very easily implanted in neural networks.
Sensitivity and analysis
Conscious space is where our higher representations are woven. Those concerning relatives are the subject of a finer organization in women. Omnipresent work, but it is not necessarily professionalized, analyzed with accurate psychological models. Constructed stories can be as detailed as they are fundamentally flawed. The man is less attentive to the details of social life. Effectively less able to remember the entire history of the couple. In return for this less omnipresence of the environment in his consciousness, he focuses more completely on a subject when necessary. If he has compensated for his low natural sensitivity to the subject by an education in its analysis, he quickly arrives at the correct interpretation, or even corrects an erroneous diagnosis. Without education, he opens his eyes wide or stumbles, testing himself on shifting ground and not daring to admit his incompetence.
The work of collecting social signals is like physical work. There is a genetic predisposition to this skill, but “relational strength training” can increase male fitness above average for women just as physical strength training can boost female fitness above average for men.
Less independence in analyzing one’s own relationship
Sex plays into this social ability, which therefore has an ontological predisposition, but the hermeneutic work cannot be reduced to that. It is done at several conceptual levels. There is a hermeneutic intelligence, connected to many other areas than the relationship with others. One could argue that this intelligence is more objective when the individual is not involved in the relationship, that is to say that the external judgment on the couple is more accurate when one is less inside it.
It is therefore correct to say that man forgets most of the details of his social relations, but it is wrong to conclude that his hermeneutical work is inferior. This work is based above all on the quality of the Observer, this pre-frontal analyst who evaluates our behavior, who is neither sexed nor gendered.
Counter-demonstrations
In support of this counter-thesis, men make excellent psychologists. Their professional hermeneutical work is precise. Women, in this profession, have the potential for better empathic work. That is to say, they can facilitate the appropriation of the hermeneutic diagnosis by the person. Unfortunately, empathy tends to fizzle out when you make it your profession. Experience shows that mothers, “natural” psychologists, are less precise about the diagnosis of disorders but more involved in correcting them.
Another argument: the current generation of young women, emancipated from cultural injunctions, continues to be better at remembering the details of love affairs. Culture has changed, nature remains. Anderson refrains from thinking that culture is an organization of nature. The deep cultural unconscious is the natural. We can seek to emancipate ourselves, but the right way is not to pretend that culture has been parachuted from a world of masculine ideals, dear Ellie.
The history of the homosexual couple is gendered
Culture is the thickness of complexity that blurs the difference in behavior between the hen and the rooster vis-à-vis the chicks, without annihilating it. Only a recent aspect of contemporary culture, gender activism, seeks to deny the existence of this influence.
As I remarked at the beginning, the history of the couple is gendered even in homosexual couples. Which makes it absurd to make hermeneutic work a social injunction. Impossible to understand the difference between two men or two women. It is also difficult to see innate in it, since the sex is the same. However, sex is a simple predisposition, and influences multiple aspects of development. If we have to look for a feminine or masculine principle, it is at the junction of the innate and the acquired.
A more fundamental definition of feminine and masculine
I have already expressed my position: they are the two principles in every human being. I thus free them from the tyrannies of cultural gender and genetic sex that would like to appropriate them. This opinion finds its force in a theory much broader than that of the mind. Reality is organized around a conflict, individuation vs collectivization, in matter as in the mind. I make the masculine principle the desire for individuation in the mind, and the feminine principle the desire for collectivization.
Genetic sex has the effect of shifting the initial balance between these two principles. While the cultural genre manipulate this balance repositions it more in tune with contemporary ideas. Everyone experiences these cultural pressures on their innate drives in their own way. Gender is not cultural but the result of the interaction between an innate sexual tendency and a culture that channels it and can reverse it. We can become more individualistic or collectivistic, more masculine or feminine.
The deprogrammed society of the feminine
Anderson’s effort corresponds from this point of view to a masculinization of women. My regret is above all that there is no joint effort by men to feminize —in the sense of collectivize! Today the masculine is constantly gaining ground…
Last comment: the collectivism of women and their excellent memory of social events is simply explained on the neurological level, by an early and reinforced connection of emotions to these events. The importance of emotions in memory engraving is an established fact. The masculine being often a dedifferentiation of the feminine, it is also possible that masculinity is a deprogramming of these links, favoring individualism and aggressiveness, complementary characteristics of feminine collectivism.
In conclusion
The incomprehension between discourses of the genre is due to the fact of privileging the ontological look/the innate or the teleological/the acquired. The mistake ? Make them competitive. From the moment I choose one in this article, the supporters of the other will have rebelled, considering their position devalued. But it is such a reaction that is demeaning. You have to observe yourself reacting in this way with the philosophical method that I have developed elsewhere and which ensures the coherence of this blog.
How to agree people convinced that 90% of a behavior comes from the innate with others just as convinced that 90% comes from the acquired? By explaining that the percentage makes no sense. It is not a question of arbitrating between rival forces. We are faced with proposals of the innate retro-controlled by the acquired. Everything has been gradually sedimented into conceptual layers since birth. Indissoluble entanglement from which it is ridiculous to hope to derive causal percentages.
Do you gender your rosebush?
The way you cultivate your rose bush more or less highlights the characteristics specific to its variety. Can you attribute a causal percentage to your culture when the color is good but the scent less distinct than expected? It’s silly. You are in front of a mixture of qualities which are no longer those of the genes themselves. Same qualitative aberration when sex and gender compete. Let’s get them out of the arena, which has only ever existed in our minds.
That is, to be clear, we can compete with representations of sex and gender in our conscious space, but not with “real” sex and gender, as drivers of mental organization, the first buried in genetics, the second also very inaccessible due to its effects dating back to childhood.
Let’s step out of the scene
We bicker with different, very identity-based mental scenes, where nature and culture have their roles already written. Only uninterpreted science sheds some light on how the scenes were constructed. Gender studies are rare to be included. You will benefit more from reading Stratium, to have a theoretical framework where to install these studies in a good place.
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Hermeneutic Labor: The Gendered Burden of Interpretation in Intimate Relationships between Women and Men, Ellie Anderson 2023