From: amz@cis.ohio-state.edu (Arnold M Zwicky)
Subject: masculinity and femininity, round 4
Followup-To: soc.motss
Summary: the curse of dualistic thinking
Originator: amz@iguana.cis.ohio-state.edu
Organization: lsa, osu, outil, stanford,...
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 17:49:40 GMT

jns has focused on the crucial points here, i think.  the issue
of inappropriately dualistic thinking is especially important,
and i want to talk about it again in still another way, just
to make sure the lesson is clear.  [oh god!  *teacher talk*!]

step 1.  biologically, human beings can be pretty well (though not
perfectly) divided into two nonoverlapping sets, the two sexes, female
and male.  this difference is important to all human beings,
regardless of their culture.

step 2.  culturally, various other properties are associated with the
two sexes, giving rise to (quite culture-specific) notions of
femininity and masculinity, different gender roles.  every culture
does this.

step 3.  [here's where we start getting into trouble.]  in some
cultures, the reasonably clean dichotomy of sex, female/male, is
translated into a parallel *dichotomy* of gender, feminine/masculine,
gender roles that are assumed to be as nonoverlapping as the sexes.
not every culture does this, but the ones that readers of this
newsgroup belong to are seriously into dualistic thinking (as jess
noted), and so all of us have been bombarded all our lives with
messages that presuppose a sharp distinction between the feminine and
the masculine.

step 4.  [still worse.]  in some of these cultures, these gender role
differences are assigned great social significance; people care a hell
of a lot about them, much more than they do about, say, the
distinction between blue-eyed people and brown-eyed ones, or the
distinction between blond(e)s and brunet(te)s.  [i'm not saying eye
color and hair color are without significance in our cultures, only
that they're way way down the list, far below sex and race and age and
class and religion and...]  not every culture treats gender
differences as such a big thing, but *we* do.  [it is telling
that people in our cultures usually treat sex as the first property
they give in a description of someone, and that they are very
disturbed when they cannot classify someone's sex.]

step 5.  [still worse.]  in some of these cultures, one of the sexes
is held to be better, more fully human, or whatever, than the other - i
believe that it is always the male sex that is favored this way - and
consequently many properties of the corresponding gender role are
believed to be intrinsically better, more attractive, etc.  not every
culture assigns values to genders asymmetrically - some treat one set
of properties as good for men, others as good for women, without
making an overall value judgment - but *we* do.  [this produces such
absurdities as the view, held by many of both sexes, that the
relatively higher pitch of women's voices is intrinsically grating and
connotes unseriousness of mind.]

step 6.  [a real stunner.]  in some of *these* cultures, the false
dualism of step 3 is translated into dichotomous categorizations
*within* the class of women and *within* the class of men, giving
things like a sissy/wimp vs. real-man/man's-man dualism for men and
(within the further subclass of gay men) the dualism variously labeled
queen vs. stud, nelly vs. butch, effeminate vs. straight-acting, and
Q-gay (queer gay) vs. R-gay (real-man gay).  as if this weren't
appalling enough, steps 4 and 5 get repeated here, with the result
that effeminate gay men are judged to be less good and less attractive
than straight-acting gay men, and people *care*, a lot.  [isn't
this where i came in?]

what to do?  well, one standard solution is no good at all.  nothing
is really improved by saying that instead of a clean dichotomy in step
3, you've got a scale going from one gender to the other; this is
still a dichotomy, just a sloppy or fuzzy one, and it's compatible
with all the mental mischief that goes on in steps 4 through 6.  (some
of my misgivings about scales for the classification of sexuality, like
the kinsey scale, arise from this point.)

but what, in fact are we *trying* to do?  if what we're after is how
to understand the attitudes and behaviors of most of the people around
us, a lot of the work is done: the analysis above (which is in no way
original with me) is a sketch of the solution, which needs only to
be filled out in various ways.

if what we're after is to discover our own location on the maps of our
cultures, then again we have the basic tools.  everybody deviates to
some degree from the expectations of their cultures - even from the
expectations about what kinds of deviations there are [note the
characteristically faggy jacking-up of the discussion by one level] -
so everybody is a bit off the map in one way or another, but that too
is a kind of location with respect to the map.  [on expectations about
what kinds of deviations there are: note the widespread resistance to
the idea that there are straight men who enjoy sex with other men in
general, or with gay men in particular.]

if what we're after is to find the "true" categories of sexuality and
sexual imagination - to discover a good, especially a predictive,
taxonomy that applies even within one culture (eventually, you'd hope,
for human beings in general) - then essentially all the work needs to
be done.

if what we're after is to discover our own location on the "true" map,
we have more work still than that to do.  nelson minar and others who
have posted feel very strongly, and undoubtedly accurately, that the
map we got from our culture is drastically inappropriate for them,
that they're *somewhere else* entirely.  but they have no means as yet
for discovering what this other place is like.  we'd have to jettison
all of the bad stuff from step 3 on, to re-think everything from the
ground up (this is called "radical (re)analysis"), to get way
*outside* our culture in order to see more of it.  not impossible,
but not easy, and really only doable in bits.  (you have to have
*some* place to stand, after all; you can't get utterly out of
your culture.)

if what we're after is change, then it's a lot more harder [double
comparatives are rarely called for, thank goodness, though i rather
enjoy producing them], as i argued in a letter to nelson that he
quoted parts of much earlier in this thread.  changing yourself,
changing the world - the latter harder still than the first [though i
write postings like these, optimistic even at 2 1/2 times nelson's
age].  but no matter how deeply alienated you might feel from your
culture, you're going to buy some of its beliefs and attitudes and
values, and there isn't time enough to abandon or subvert all the ones
you'd rather not have.

"we are all racists...even me", says my friend chuck lawrence -
alluding to the fact that his african american race is an important
component of his career in law and teaching, and asserting that there
is some shame about his race that will never get rooted out of his
soul, no matter how hard he argues with himself, no matter how many
black-affirnming truths he knows.  we are all effeminophobes (and for
that matter, homophobes and misogynists)...even faggots like me; even
i have been known to utter sentences like "i have nothing against
effeminate queers; it's just that my taste in men is for...[supply
various masculinely loaded descriptions here]" and to experience
momentary embarrassment in the company of flaming queens.

the question is how to get on from there.  

arnold (noting that not a single effeminophile has stepped forward,
         while we *have* had a certain amount of "it's just that
         my taste in men is for...")

       (thanking rob bernardo for pushing me into thinking through
         some of this and then into talking about it on soc.motss,
         with him, four years ago)