Doing Difference

page five

Gender, new and improved

When Cathi Hanauer’s anthology, The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood and Marriage, was first released in 2002, it was pitched as a book about the anger that bubbles up when real life fails to match women’s egalitarian expectations. But the essays in Hanauer’s collection tend to reveal more about women’s disappointment and disillusionment with the new complexity feminism forces into the work/marriage/motherhood mix than the searing rage and righteous indignation one would expect to find. When these woman writers get angry, they get angry at their men, not at the system; when they reach an impasse they resort to envious daydreaming about the uncomplicated lives of June Cleaver and Mrs. Brady of The Brady Bunch fame. Although the contributors to The Bitch in the House are not representative of the general population— all the authors are well-educated writers and editors, which is a rarified kind of life and not one most people can depend on to pay the rent— the book’s popularity suggests that the uncomfortable sensation of being squeezed between the ideal world that never was and the ideal world that could be is an experience many women share.

Partly in reaction to reviews of The Bitch in the House which called attention to the singular domestic/relational ineptitude of some of the Bitches love interests, Hanauer’s husband set to work editing a companion anthology from the male point of view. Even the title of Daniel Jones’s book, The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood and Freedom (2004), speaks volumes about our knee-jerk acceptance of gender difference; bitches come right out and “tell the truth,” but bastards must “try really hard to explain their feelings.” The bitches delve into themes of the personal— sex, solitude, work and marriage— while the bastards tackle big universal subjects like love, loss and freedom.

I actually enjoyed the essays in The Bastard on the Couch, although once again they represent the lives and lifestyles of an elite group. On the whole, the Bastards took more chances than the Bitches, which made for more interesting and nuanced storytelling. But what really surprised me was how easily these men made the connection between doing housework and relinquishing both power and the male prerogative of leisure. Calling on metaphors of Man the Hunter and the iconography of Ward Cleaver and his TV Land ilk, the bastards also find their lives painfully constrained by gender edicts about masculinity, femininity and male norms of success. As Fred Leebron writes in “I am Man, Hear Me Bleat”

I always wanted to marry my equal or better— anyone less never occurred to me. This is what our generation of men does; we marry our equals. …But you know what men give up when they venture into this kind of so-called equality? The give up equality. Why? Because there is no such thing as equality. Because men have long recognized that women are their domestic superiors, and perhaps that’s why we’ve so staunchly and unjustly guarded our castles of work. Because women haven’t had the so-called privileges we men have had for the entire history of the world, they are now knocking on the door of the patriarchal fortress, and as the patriarchal door comes crashing down in my particular house, who is there to be squashed underneath it but me.

It may be that acceptance of women as men’s “domestic superiors” sensitizes men to the true scope of what’s at stake if we strive for sexual equality without seriously rethinking gender. On one hand, if women become men’s true equals in the public sphere but retain a larger share of authority in the home, men will end up without a domain of influence— something that men, at least those in the dominant class, are not accustomed to and might predictably feel a little bitter about. On the other hand, if women relinquish their primacy in matters of home and child-rearing to include men as equal caregivers but fail to achieve full social, political and economic equality, they stand to loose even the smattering of social power that flows from their presumed mastery of the domestic/relational realm. In other words, our current gender story ends in a stalemate, and we will need a far more capacious imagination and collective vision to move forward. As Cynthia Fuchs Epstein writes, “It is no surprise that dichotomous models are an ideological weapon and survive challenge because it is easier to propose a dichotomy than to explicate the complexities that make it invalid.” No wonder Ozzie and Harriet have come back to haunt us.

Meanwhile, an emerging sub-culture of “rebel” mamas are reconstituting traditional gender ideology as an act of dissent. In The Paradox of Natural Mothering, sociologist Chris Bobel describes her study of mothers who embrace a particularly intensive style of “full time” motherhood she defines as natural mothering. “While her contemporaries take advantage of daycare, babysitters, and bottle feeding, the natural mother rejects almost everything that facilitates mother-child separation. She believes that consumerism, technology, and detachment from nature are social ills that mothers can and should oppose.” One of Bobel’s interview subjects, who describes herself as a “radical feminist,” explains: “I would like to be considered an equal person in society. But that doesn’t mean I have to do the exact same things that somebody else does. …I feel that someone, and I feel that it should be the woman, needs to be the focus of the family, to keep the family running, organized, on track, spiritually, physically, and emotionally.”

Natural mothers actively resist the deteriorating values of a culture they perceive as excessively materialistic, over commercialized, and un-family-friendly through the practice of mothering, and believe they have the power to transform society by modeling an alternative, child-centric lifestyle. But as Bobel notes, “Natural mothering, rooted in biologically determinist understandings of gender, reifies a male-centered view of role-bound women. The ‘natural’ in natural mothering may liberate mothers from a mechanized and commodified experience of their maternity, but it reproduces a gendered experience that subordinates their needs to those of child and husband.”

“Natural” mamas are just the most recent cohort of feminist-informed women to claim that women have a special prowess when it comes to caring for others and repairing the damage men— and “male” values— have visited upon the world, and to argue that women's “innate” capacities should be elevated in social stature so they are honored as different from but equal to men. As Cynthia Fuchs Epstein writes, “…Two feminist perspectives compete today to explain the sex division in our society. One model— a dichotomous one— holds that there are basic differences between the sexes. Some of its proponents believe the differences are biologically determined; others believe they are products of social conditioning… or lodged in the differing psyches of the sexes by the [processes] that create identity; still others believe the causes of the difference are a mixture of both factors.” Difference or cultural feminists “believe that differences are deeply rooted and result in different approaches to the world, in some cases creating a distinctive ‘culture’ of women. Such differences, they think, benefit society and ought to be recognized and rewarded.”

According to Epstein, a second feminist model of gender contradicts this essentialist perspective, suggesting that “most gender differences are not as deeply rooted or as immutable as has been believed, that they are relatively superficial, and that they are socially constructed (and elaborated in the culture through myths, law and folkways) and kept in place by the way each sex is positioned in the social structure.” Barnett and Rivers, along with Epstein, Tavris and other reputable scholars agree that most definitive research from the fields of sociology, anthropology, physiology and psychology supports the view that the actual differences between the sexes are relatively insignificant and that it’s the social meaning we attach to maleness and femaleness which generates and enforces gender difference.

Nature, nurture or structure?

Of course, there is one irrefutable difference between men and women, which is that women can get pregnant, gestate an embryo, give birth and produce breast milk and men cannot. There are quasi-scientific theories— captured under the heading of “sociobiology”— that propose the gendered division of labor arose from women’s (so far) inalterable biological condition and glorify Early Man as the mighty hunter/warrior who fearlessly set out to stalk his prey and subdue the enemy, while Early Woman, with her baby in a sling and her basket of roots and berries, trailed meekly behind in his protective aura. Over time, so the story goes, natural selection would favor men with aggressive tendencies and women with nurturing instincts because their children would be more likely to survive and reproduce. Then, voila!— after a few hundred million years of human adaptation to a vast array of cultural and environmental conditions, here we are in our historically complex, technologically advanced society, freshly minted versions of Man the Provider and Woman the Nurturer. We will all be infinitely better off, these theorists assert, when we simply accept our true natures— which, on inspection, generally means giving men all the money and leadership and sticking women with the kids and housework.

There are quite a few things that are troubling about this approach, not the least of which, as Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers point out in Same Difference, is that it’s impossible to know how our pre-historic ancestors actually lived or how they functioned in social groups. Most conclusions about the social behavior of early humans are merely conjectures based on observations of primate behavior and/or anthropological studies of modern non-literate cultures. The other problem with sociobiological theories is that they are rarely used to challenge traditional gender ideology. The notion that the social behavior of men and women is predetermined from the get-go is most often used to make sense of women’s subordination. (And, as Barnett and Rivers note, it makes for great news copy: “The idea that we humans were hardwired back in the Stone Age has become a favorite theme in the media despite its speculative nature.”) Sociobiology casts the saga of human evolution as a dramatic tableau— just imagine all those virile hunter-types strutting around in their loin-cloths!— but it shouldn’t be confused with real science. As Epstein remarks, “Gender distinctions are basic to the social order in all societies. Like age, gender orders society and is ordered by it.”

Sociobiologists, like social philosophers, churchmen and others before them, argue that the division of labor by sex is a biological rather than a social response. But if this were so, sex-role assignments would not have to be coercive. Social groups do not depend on instincts or physiology to enforce social arrangements because they cannot reliably do so. Societies make it the responsibility of people from certain groups to be responsible for such social needs as food, shelter, child care and leadership. Nowhere do they depend on “nature” to get the jobs done.

There appears to be ample evidence that gender is not a fixed expression of biological sex, but rather a set of rules that govern the status and mobility of individuals based on the sex role assigned to them. And if human nature plays any part in the expression of gender difference, it’s probably a minor one: as Robert W. Connell writes in Gender and Power (1987), “It is possible that there are some innate differences in temperament or ability between men and women. The hypothesis cannot be ruled out entirely. But if they exist, we can say quite confidently that they are not the basis of major social institutions."

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