The commentator's implication that a scientific and a micro-causational approach is a male approach and, as such was somewhat distasteful. She could not say how this compared and contrasted with what she would interpret as the woman's approach. The implication was that males involve themselves in stripped-down, reductionist experimentation and females did, er . . . Something else. Something inscrutably, ephemerally and quintessentially female.
This raises two questions: to what degree has society's 'acceptance pendulum' swing away from misogyny to misandry and to what degree do we confuse the manifestations of nature and nurture.
Not so long ago, the mother-in-law, wife and blond jokes were acceptable. Not so today, and quite right. Nothing gets a political point across better than humour. Guys are now the butt of jokes, as much by men (to show just how right-on they/we are) as women. The pendulum has swung from, 'a woman's place is in the kitchen' to 'a man's place is in the wrong', or, my personal favourite, since it alludes to Schrödinger's Cat, Quantum Theory and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal: If a man is talking to himself alone in a wood, is he still talking nonsense? We guys are now expected to accept that we are useless, emotionally fragile, emotionally illiterate, solipsistic, brutish dullards and that those with two x chromosomes are infinitely superior. Women can multi-task, they don't get man-'flu', they are more resilient et c.
Studies have shown that women cannot multi-task any better than men. If the stereotype of man-'flu' is shown to be an actual physiological or psychological phenomenon, then why is it not treated with sympathy, rather than thinly humour-veiled disdain and cited as more 'evidence' of wimpish lack of resilience.
After 20,000 years of a largely misogynist world to complain about the minor excesses of the pendulum starting to swing the other way, at least in Britain, is a tad churlish and it is only to be expected that in the drive toward equality of gender value that we should overshoot the mark. But overshot the mark we have. For example, during a supper, I fell into conversation with a woman who describes herself as a 60s feminist about these issues. She held forth about the reasons why there existed no gender antonym (if that term exists - if not, then allow me to coin it) for misogyny, citing many instances of scholarship on the subject. When I said that the word is 'misandry', she said, rather tetchily that, "That's just a made up word!" I was a bit taken aback by this since she is a monumentally clever and very well educated person. I had clearly stamped on a nerve (guys, eh?) and blurted out, "But all words are made up." Which didn't help much. Clearly, it was not appreciated that a man should challenge a scholarly feminist world view; manifestly misogynist, I shouldn't wonder.
On another occasion discussing these issues with two women, one a very dear friend and, how can I put this delicately . . . boots with the other foot, so one can assume sound feminist credentials and another whom I can describe as a friendly acquaintance. To illustrate my point I told a joke: What's as offensive as a male chauvinist pig? . . . A woman who won't do what she's told. My chum laughed heartily, since it is very good satire. The friendly acquaintance was outraged and I was downgraded instantly to 'acquaintance' and have remained so. She would not accept that since she made no objection to the pejorative term 'male chauvinist pig' she was expressing an acceptance of the implicit stigmatization of a gender from a linguistic determinism point of view, she was guilty of society's current trend towards misandry. This acceptance was compounded by her over-reaction to the second pejorative about women not doing what they are told. I think she missed the point of the joke - the hypocrisy. Since I was already in the merde, I picked her up on her Herstory. She claimed that etymologically history is derived from the male personal pronoun. I was surprised I managed to re-enervate my masseter muscles from the effect of slack-jawed incredulity this claim had on me in a timely manner. I said that our word history has its etymology from Greek histor meaning story and is unrelated to the classical Greek male personal pronoun (αυτου). It did not assuage her irritation with me that Herstory is a perfectly valid neologism (relatively) to describe the study of women's history, women's historical perspectives and historiography.
In my life as a teacher and a parent of girls, I have observed that if one is fastidious in making no assumptions about how boys and girls think and having always been sensitive and sceptical towards society's assumptions and stereotypes, then many boys show many traits that society determines as feminine and vice-versa. There are unquestionable differences in brain development, especially during adolescence and the intimacy of the central nervous system and the endocrine system must have a profound effect. I think we tend, by our gender expectations, whether implicit or explicit, to enhance difference and inculcate differences where perhaps none exist.
The sooner this pendulum swing attenuates the better. The sooner the True Fallacies and argumentum ad populum on this issue the better. Let's have some balance.
No comments:
Post a Comment