There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman1
Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
What is it about gender that makes it such a significant factor in determining social expectations, social class and status, and economic and political opportunity? What are ‘gender wars’?
In order to understand why gender remains so influential, we ought to, at least briefly, touch on what gender is. The word ‘gender’ derives from ‘genus’ or ‘genre’ and refers to categorisation. Thus, when we speak of ‘gender wars’ (a terribly misleading and overused term of late), in one real sense we are saying ‘category wars’. This would have been seen as a fairly nonsensical statement until at least the mid-1950s when the term gender reportedly first became equated with attributes associated with sex difference, a change often attributed to the work of sexologist Dr John Money. Prior to that period, it was uncommon to use the term gender to describe sex characteristics. Though gender has long been a term used for grammatical categories in language, the term ‘gender’ has since replaced ‘sex’ on most health forms and official paperwork as a primary, if not the primary, way we literally ‘categorise’ ourselves and other people. Making life for someone transgender, for instance, especially difficult.
This association between ‘gender’ and ‘category’ is a helpful insight, as it touches on the idea of categorising, or defining, people by a particular characteristic, in this case by their sex. A separation of the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ is one useful framework to adopt to look at how influential this categorisation of person by sex difference still is, and to see the ways in which this has manifested. Using these definitions, you have a ‘sex’, usually defined at birth, but you also have a ‘gender’, defined for you by your social group, starting as early as the hospital, and extending to expectations of appropriate behaviours, occupations and other life choices. This is essentially what Simone de Beauvoir was saying when she famously wrote that: ‘One is not born, but becomes a woman.’ Your gender (in de Beauvoir’s example, ‘woman’) is not a matter of simple biological destiny, but is strongly socially and culturally influenced. So while sex is assigned by the appearance of the genitals of a newborn at birth – male genitals, female genitals or a combination, intersex – sex in this context is not quite the same as gender. While sex may be your anatomical type, gender brings with it a cluster of ideas to do with behaviour, social status and expectations that are not natural or unavoidable extensions of those different bodily combinations.
For example, just because a person is born with a penis doesn’t mean he will have short hair, strong muscles, be the breadwinner in the family, be less emotionally engaged than others, be less interested in being actively involved in raising his children, or even that he will not have a slender waist or a ‘beautiful’ face.
To further clarify this point, some ideas about the essential qualities and appropriate place in society for men and women from, say, the days of Ancient Egypt, the Middle Ages, the Victorian era or even twenty years ago are not what they are now, and also vary between different cultures and social groups within the same period – for example, in very conservative circles versus moderate or progressive circles, and in the USA broadly versus in Saudi Arabia broadly. This means that gender is not the same as sex, as the physical anatomy of human beings remains essentially the same, but ideas about their gender category change, sometimes radically.
‘Gender’, in this context, is the phenomenon of flexible notions about what the two primary categories, masculine and feminine, mean: the sort of ‘male = strong, female = nurturing’ gender binary that assigns ideas of masculinity and femininity to different behaviours, modes of speech, even colours and decor, sometimes with about as much logic or randomness as we assigned the categories of the feminine and masculine to language. As any student of romance languages will tell you, most of grammatical gender needs to be painstakingly memorised, as it makes little logical sense. For instance, in French, Italian and Spanish the sun is ‘male’, and the moon is ‘female’ (le soleil versus la lune; il sole versus la luna; el sol versus la luna), while in German the moon is male and the sun female (die sonne versus der mond). Likewise, much of what we identify as associated with a particular gender is a question of a degree of recognisable femininity or masculinity, within the framework of a certain social group at a certain time, though reasons why we recognise some things as feminine and others as masculine are not always clear.
Long hair is feminine/Short hair is masculine. But the hair on the human head grows roughly the same in both sexes, until later in life, when some men lose their hair at a faster rate than some women. In some cultures (and counter-cultures), men traditionally wear their hair long and women wear their hair short.
Pink is feminine. Yet pink was once considered a masculine colour. In Edwardian times it was common to dress young boys in pink and even decorate them with pink ribbons. Some suggest this was because of pink’s association with the strong colour red. Young girls were often dressed in blue, perhaps in part because the Virgin Mary was also often shown in blue. It was some time before any kind of general consensus was formed regarding masculine and feminine colours, and to this day matadors, those iconic figures of traditional Spanish bravery and masculinity, wear long pink socks when they perform. (And a very tight traditional costume, bejewelled with rhinestones, beads and shiny sequins, called ‘the suit of lights’.)
Physical decoration or embellishment is a ‘feminine’ pursuit. Indian maharajas wore ornate jewellery with sparkling gems, as have many kings, popes and other powerful men. Traditionally men have worn wigs, lace, stockings, gold jewellery, velvet robes, tribal makeup and perfumed scents, among other supposedly ‘feminine’ accessories. Decoration of the human body has been practised across cultures for millennia.
Wearing makeup is feminine. But pharaohs wore makeup. And warriors. And kings. And male tribal leaders.
Nurturing is feminine. Many men are fathers and carers and very clearly nurture others, and some women are not nurturing at all.
If you are still unsure, conjure for a moment an image of a person in a skirt and makeup, with a trim waist, high cheekbones and long glossy hair. Am I describing a female fashion model? Or a male Polynesian warrior?
When we speak of ‘gender wars’ we are in fact speaking of a war of notions – specifically notions about categories of people and things, and the role of those categories. We are not literally saying ‘penis versus vagina’, or ‘person who identifies as a man versus person who identifies as a woman’, but ever-changing and culturally specific idea versus other ever-changing and culturally specific idea. Discussions of gender are not man versus woman, but idea versus idea. And for all the gender difference we imagine, we actually have much more in common than not.
The American Psychological Association has this to say:
Are boys better at math? Are girls better at language? If fewer women than men work as scientists and engineers, is that aptitude or culture? Psychologists have gathered solid evidence that boys and girls or men and women differ in very few significant ways . . . Evidence has piled in for years . . .
For example, in 1990, Hyde et al. concluded that there is little support for saying boys are better at math, instead revealing complex patterns in math performance that defy easy generalization. The researchers said that to explain why fewer women take college-level math courses and work in math-related occupations, ‘We must look to other factors, such as internalized belief systems about mathematics, external factors such as sex discrimination in education and in employment, and the mathematics curriculum at the precollege level.2
It is hard to overemphasise just how radically the American Psychological Association’s statement that ‘boys and girls or men and women differ in very few significant ways’ contradicts the traditional teachings about men and women that influenced generations of thinkers until only very recently. For centuries it was taught that women were mentally inferior to men, and could not engage in critical thinking. Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, believed men and women to be so fundamentally different that the severe disciplining of girls should begin at birth, to prevent the chaos their unfettered exposure to the world would cause: ‘Do not permit them an instant of their lives free from bondage . . . always justify the burdens you impose upon girls but impose them anyway . . . They must be thwarted from an early age . . . They must be exercised to constraint, so that it costs them nothing to stifle all their fantasies to submit them to the will of others.’3
Clearly, having women in any positions of power would throw the state into chaos and peril. As German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel put it: ‘When women hold the helm of government, the state is at once in jeopardy, because women regulate their actions not by the demands of universality, but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions.’4
Women were long considered to be so different from men, by virtue of their sex, that they were thought to have ‘wandering wombs’. It was believed that a woman’s uterus was erratic and destructive, and could float freely through the body causing a medical condition (actually a number of conditions) called ‘hysteria’. In fact, the word hysteria derives from hystera, the Greek term for uterus, or womb. Thus the term ‘hysterical’, which is used to describe irrational, disruptive behaviour and lack of self-control, could be translated roughly as ‘acting like someone with a womb’ (i.e. acting like a female). This gives some insight into the history of the notion that women are irrational at an essential, biological level, in a way that men, who do not have wombs (but, it should be noted, have penises and plenty of testosterone), are not. This idea of the ‘wandering womb’ dates back to at least the fifth century BC – with Hippocrates, usually dubbed the ‘father of western medicine’ (there is apparently no ‘mother’) – and was taught as a medical fact for generations, right up to the modern era. This is just one example of the ways in which a woman’s entire existence was thought to be defined by her sex. In her book, Delusions of Gender, academic psychologist and writer Cordelia Fine compellingly outlines centuries of ‘neurosexism’, prophesising that ‘in fifty years’ time people will look back on these early-twenty-first-century debates with bewildered amusement and wonder how we ever could have thought that that was the closest we could get to equality’.5
While it may be easy to scoff at the idea of a ‘wandering womb’ now, it is prudent to again consider how influence tends to perpetuate influence. Old notions perpetuate themselves from generation to generation while new ideas encounter the most resistance and require greater force and activism to take hold. It is then notable that the same philosophers who laid the early groundwork for our modern thinking – men like Hippocrates, Plato, Rousseau and Hegel, whose names are as familiar to us as our own, and who are still taught to each new generation in our schools – are the same men who taught that women were inferior and incapable of rational thought, ever at the mercy of their sex. (In Timaeus, Plato likened the womb to a wild, independent animal that moved through the female body, ‘blocking passages, obstructing breathing, and causing disease’ at will.)
The traditional ‘cure’ for hysteria was heterosexual sex. It was through heterosexual sex that the wandering womb would be put in its ‘proper place’. By a penis. In Greek mythology, when Argo’s virgins refused to honour the phallus and fled to the mountains, they were thought to be mad. The Argonaut Melampus, a physician, urged them to have sex with virile men. Upon doing this they were reportedly healed and recovered their wits. In Victorian times hysteria was often dubbed the ‘widow’s disease’, because without sex the ‘female semen’, stored in the (presumably wandering) womb, was thought to turn venomous.6 Without a husband and his penis, women were in peril.
In the Victorian era some doctors reported that at least a quarter of women suffered from hysteria. Though some of those patients suffered from disorders we now identify in both men and women as schizophrenia, anxiety attacks, depression and so on, many of the women diagnosed and treated for hysteria were not sick, but were simply displaying a normal emotional response, including frustration with a situation we now acknowledge as oppressive. Their resistance to servility and restrictive (male) authority branded them difficult or ‘uncontrollable’. It was common at this time to warn women that they would be at risk of this terrible disease if they engaged in ‘unfeminine’ pursuits and did not recognise their proper place in society as wives, mothers and homemakers.
Keeping in mind this long-standing notion of the woman’s body falling into disease without the penis, popular Freudian ideas about ‘penis-envy’ seemed like a logical next step.7
The old prejudices – women are animals, less than human, unable to think like men, born merely to breed and serve men – were not so easily dispelled by the crusading feminists, by science and education, and by the democratic spirit after all. They merely reappeared in the forties, in Freudian disguise.
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963
It is noteworthy that many of the influential philosophers of the past taught that women had, and should have, secondary status to men. Michèle Le Doeuff, in The Philosophical Imaginary, writes of significant ‘philosophical anti-feminism’ and states that it ‘would be all too easy to compile a large book based on the horrors voiced by philosophers, notably from the eighteenth century onwards, on the subject of women’.8 With some restraint, she quotes only three examples in her chapter ‘Long Hair, Short Ideas’, including Rousseau, who stated in Émile that ‘the search for abstract and speculative truths, for principles and axioms in the sciences, for all that tends to wide generalization, is beyond the grasp of women . . .’ Again, exaggerating difference (in essence stereotyping) protects the logic of inequality and in many cases, including this one, reinforces the privileged position of the author.
‘Natural order’ and the threat posed to society by women’s changing roles has been argued since long before women’s suffrage, and continues today in different guises. Take, for example, a segment televised on America’s Fox News on 29 May 2013 discussing the results of a study showing that 40 per cent of households in America now have a female breadwinner. In the segment, host Lou Dobbs spoke of ‘troubling and concerning statistics’, and society being ‘torn’.9 In no uncertain terms, he indicated that women breadwinners were a clear sign of the dissolution of American society. Fox contributors including Doug Schoen, Juan Williams and Erick Erickson (all working men) expressed dismay over working women, and in particular working mothers, and the damage feminists had done to the institution of marriage and to the welfare of children and the family unit. Schoen claimed that women who earn more than men ‘could undermine our social order’. (Oops, my bad.) Williams declared that women breadwinners were an indication of ‘something going terribly wrong, and it’s hurting our children’, and Erickson asserted that, ‘When you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and female in society, and the other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complementary role.’ Closer to home, Prime Minister Tony Abbott has previously claimed that it would be ‘folly to expect that women will ever dominate, or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas. Simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons.’10 These seemingly deeply held essentialist positions on gender remain surprisingly common, despite research showing that ‘one’s sex has little or no bearing on personality, cognition and leadership’.11
Male ideas about the ‘mysterious’ female reproductive system have long provided fantastical excuses for restricting women’s rights. In 1873 Harvard president Edward Clarke famously argued against women’s education, claiming that the blood demanded by the brain would prevent the female reproductive system from developing properly.12 The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche claimed in 1888 that, ‘When a woman becomes a scholar there is usually something wrong with her sexual organs.’13 Neurologist Charles L. Dana wrote in 1915 that women’s upper spinal cords were smaller, thereby affecting their abilities in ‘political initiative or judicial authority in a community’s organization’ and thus compromised women’s ability to vote. Revealingly, he also wrote that the push for women’s rights was ‘selfish’, ‘an echo of the childish demand: I want my doughnut and I want it now!’14
More recently, US politician Todd Akin bestowed extraordinary powers of selective sperm extermination on women’s sex organs when he explained in 2012 that no woman should have legal access to abortion even in the case of rape because, ‘If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,’15 and Sheikh Saleh bin Saad al-Lohaidan, an adviser to a group of Gulf psychologists, claimed in 2013 that women should not be allowed to drive, on account of their ovaries, because ‘functional and physiological medical studies show that it automatically affects the ovaries and pushes the pelvis upwards . . . That is why we find those who regularly drive have children with clinical problems of varying degrees.’16
We now have a body of scientific knowledge to inform us that men and women have much more in common than not, much more than previously believed – both sexes having similar cognitive skills, verbal skills, intelligence, non-floating reproductive organs and so on – yet despite all of this available knowledge, notions of gender have not entirely caught up. It is popular to suggest that men and women are not simply two sexes of the same species, but from Mars and Venus – different planets. Sex difference is still used as a primary way to categorise people even where reproduction and the arrangement of the genitals has no bearing, and when we analyse statistics in just about any area of life, we see how our gender category correlates strongly with pay and opportunity.
Gender mattered when people were not allowed to vote, stand for office, own their own property or earn their own money simply because they were born female, and although those battles have been won by the feminists of the past who cared enough to fight for equal rights, sadly gender still matters. It is only when we consider these various imbalances in representation, pay and financial security for one half of our population that we begin to see the true status of that half. And seeing that true status at all may not be easy for some. According to research from the Annenberg School at University of Southern California, when men make up 83 per cent of a group, the men in that group think it’s fifty-fifty men and women, and if just 33 per cent of the people in the room are women, the men perceive that there are more women in the room than men. In other words, having women as only a fraction of participants seems to read incorrectly as gender equal participation – or even female ‘domination’.
So while it is common to imagine that the struggle for equal recognition and participation for women was over when women’s rights activists won the right to vote or access birth control, many people today forget that life outside the home was not an option for most members of society who were female – just because they were female and not male – until only relatively recently. Many forget that their own mothers were not allowed to open bank accounts without permission from a male family member, and most were not encouraged to imagine that they could have fulfilling careers, let alone run a company – or an entire country. In the United States, until the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, women could legally be passed over for promotions in the workplace, and it was not until 1972 that married women who were teachers in South Australia won the right to keep working, for example. That is barely forty years ago. Married women needed the consent of their husbands to obtain a loan as recently as the 1980s, and marital rape was not widely recognised as a criminal act until the past thirty years (and in some countries a man can still legally rape his wife even if they are estranged).
Is it realistic to imagine we would have no cultural hangover from such recent legal practices? Yet the gender inequities we see are so often described as ‘natural’, ‘biological’. Inequity based on gender is not inevitable or ‘natural’ any more than keeping women from voting because they had wandering wombs, or smaller spinal cords, was natural. It would be quite remarkable if the influence of centuries of teachings about women’s inferiority didn’t have an effect that took multiple generations to resolve. When we see how far we’ve come towards greater gender equity (and it really is extraordinary) we are seeing the work of feminists, some of whom were beaten or jailed for their troubles. The women’s rights movement is one of the most successful civil rights movements in history and when we see statistics like those in the previous chapter, we see why it is still very much needed today.
This doesn’t mean it is the only type of activism needed, or even that the need for activism will always be evident on a personal level to individual women, however. Many women and girls will find that the category ‘female’ defines them more than any other primary category, but others find their primary category as, for example, non-white, lesbian, a person with disability, a person of a minority culture or faith, or a person of low socioeconomic means may instead take prominence (generally in addition to the category of gender). They are made aware, often from a young age, that perceptions of them largely stem from that characteristic.
A primary category can be thought of as a response to the question: What characteristics make me most ‘other’ from the dominant group in my culture? When several of these primary categories intersect, the experience of being ‘other’ than the dominant group is increasingly problematic, as various forms of discrimination intersect (as has been pointed out by feminists like Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term ‘intersectionality’ to study this effect).
For this reason, and because the experience of gender roles changes through different stages of life and in different social groups and environments, gender is situational. For some girls, particularly in an institutional setting with an equal or dominant representation of women – for example, a girls’ school with a lot of female teachers – it may be hard to relate to the idea of gender-based inequity at all. But what about *name one great female character in film*? We had a female prime minister, right? My teachers are all women. I see women in leadership roles all the time. So what’s everyone still banging on about? It may only be on graduation, when those same young women find themselves with generally lower salaries and therefore less financial security than their male friends and colleagues (with one major factor being that traditionally female-dominated occupations pay less than work in traditionally male-dominated occupations, and males tend to hold the higher-paid leadership roles in both) that any inequities become clear. As of 2013, for instance, the health care and social assistance sector had the highest gender pay gap (32.3%), followed by the financial and insurances services sector (31.4%) and the professional, scientific and technical services sector (30.1%).17 For others, it isn’t until maternity issues arise that any inequities become clear. In job interviews there may be questions about ‘settling down’ (a roundabout way of asking: Will you get pregnant and stop working?) asked of women of child-creating age and not men of child-creating age.
These things can seem like isolated incidents at first – in any individual case you could say the woman was less ambitious, chose a less well-paying position, wasn’t suitably qualified for promotion – until the larger pattern, or the statistics I’ve mentioned, becomes clear. If women do have a family, there is likely to be a moment when they discover that what they thought the domestic agreement was is not the reality at all. A full-time working woman may find that her partner and family members do not think the father in the relationship should be equally sharing childcare or housework after all, and that she is expected to quit paid work, or accept only part-time paid work, or work full time outside the home while also doing the majority of the housework and childcare inside the home, paying for any additional childcare out of her salary rather than a shared account, and driving the kids to and from childcare or school. In fact, even today, ‘among couple families whose youngest child is under 5 years, mothers do the lion’s share of child care and home-making, even if working full-time.’18
A report in 2013 by the Australian Institute of Family Studies found that mothers working full time with a youngest child under five were spending on average an additional 3.6 hours on childcare and 2.4 hours on housework a day.19 That is per day. Imagine the toll that takes on a person’s energy levels or ability to succeed outside the home. In Delusions of Gender academic psychologist Cordelia Fine describes a fascinating phenomenon: When both parents work full time in a household ‘women do about twice as much childcare and housework as men’, but when a woman starts to earn more than her male partner, the gap may actually widen, rather than diminish, with some studies showing that the more a woman earns over and above her male partner’s salary, the more housework she does.20
One posited explanation for this otherwise seemingly illogical phenomenon is that the division of housework and the effort put into the performance of the traditional good wife role is a conscious or unconscious strategy by one or both spouses to avoid criticism for the woman’s choice to have a high-powered career, and the fact that the man’s choice, or circumstance, means he does not occupy that expected breadwinner role. This effect appears to be most salient in a cultural or social context where the traditionally masculine role of breadwinning and income-earning is particularly highly valued.21 Basically, she has to be seen as not neglecting her wifely duties (See, I’m still a good wife! I’m still a good mother!) and he doesn’t want to risk further deviating from gender expectations by taking on ‘feminine’ duties, hence sociologists have dubbed this phenomenon ‘gender deviance neutralisation’.
And after all this paid and unpaid work, when it comes time to retire, women are penalised for their lower salaries and the unpaid work they have done throughout their lives with substantially less superannuation. (Just like any other unpaid carer, the vast majority whom just happen to be women.)
These issues are all common experiences for women in contemporary Australia, and elsewhere.
In some periods of a person’s life, the experience of gender may be entirely positive, particularly when gender-based expectations and opportunities appear to fit the desires of the person in question at that life stage. Indeed, it’s rather helpful not to be drafted to the front in a war you don’t want to fight, because you are a woman, but not so helpful to be excluded utterly from the corridors of power where decisions about war and the future of your community or nation are made. Likewise, it is not so helpful to be excluded from major decisions about your own family for the same reason. Though women have traditionally been associated with ‘running the household’ and all that entails, including providing meals, teaching children, and so on, there was little doubt to whom people referred when they mentioned the ‘head of the household’. There are benefits to belonging to a gender that is considered weaker, but relatively few, because the area you are permitted to occupy is so much more narrow. (There are also real drawbacks for men to traditional or mainstream ideas of masculinity, and though this book focuses on women and girls, I do discuss some of this briefly in chapter 12, ‘The Beautiful Man’ and chapter 15, ‘Playing Mothers and Fathers’.)
Gender inequity may or may not have much effect on an individual woman at any given time, particularly one of less common circumstances – say a woman born into wealth, or a woman who broke through a particular barrier into a position of power, or who found great financial success in a traditionally female-dominated domain that didn’t offer much resistance (fashion, beauty, interior design, cooking, baking, caring roles, etc). Some of these women will quite vocally insist that no woman experiences disadvantage because of gender because she didn’t, cheerfully ignoring all statistics to the contrary, and often such women will be rewarded for taking that position because it protects the status quo and she doesn’t risk being thought of as a troublemaker, complaining about the boys, and being ‘shrill’ or ‘tedious’ by pointing out the broader issue of inequality. But as women have traditionally been afforded only a very narrow role in public life as carers (the more poorly paid positions in childcare, nursing and midwifery, for example), we see that the majority of occupations unrelated to those traditional caring roles have been resistant to change, and over decades of activism and social change some professions have been more receptive to including women than others. Therefore the negative aspects of gender become particularly salient when stepping outside of those female-dominated settings.
How to counter this? Should we reconsider the value we place on different types of work and insist on better pay for traditionally female-dominated work? It seems sensible, considering that involves, among other things, the early teaching of our children, the citizens of the future. Or do we push to get more women involved in powerful, male-dominated professions? In parliament? In decision-making roles? Does that mean cultural change and, if so, just how long will that take? Does that mean quotas? Or do we focus away from the paid workplace and begin to view unpaid caring work as the vital thing for our communities that it clearly is? All of the above, perhaps – hence there are so many levels of ongoing activism.
And then for many women, added to these issues is the spectre of physical and sexual violence and domestic abuse, something one in three women,22 including myself, have experienced in their lifetime, with domestic abuse being the number one cause of homelessness for women.23 In Australia, on average, each week one woman is killed by a partner or former partner.24 Three-quarters of the women killed in NSW in the twelve months before September 2012 were killed by someone with whom they were in a domestic relationship.25 Sexual assault happens to males and females, across all age groups, but is significantly higher for females aged ten to twenty-four.26
For a lot of women and girls, that reality follows them, influencing even the most basic choices in an otherwise free society – Can I walk home alone? Should I take a taxi alone at night? How do I respond to my male boss’s sexual advances? Will I lose my job if I say no, or lodge a complaint? Will my ex show up angry? Am I safe?
There can be a moment of realisation, perhaps even a ‘welcome shock of recognition that other women had experienced the same things’, as Elspeth Probyn describes it in her book Sexing the Self.27 In my case, it was both deeply gratifying and infuriating to discover I was not alone – that so many other women had experienced sexual assault and abuse and, like me, suffered in silence. Recognising the larger picture helped me to realise that gender still matters, still lays out a certain path for us (one we can resist, albeit not without effort), and still presents particular gendered experiences – and that realisation helped me to break my silence.
The fact that women were once barred from owning property, or voting, or working once married because of their gender is one reason why it is helpful to separate the ideas of sex and gender, recognising sex as anatomy (including different genitals, hormones, reproductive functions and so on) and gender as a cluster of historically specific and changing social ideas about the masculine and the feminine, with many of those ideas differing from person to person and social group to social group, and with many of those ideas existing without good reason (like the now debunked ‘wandering womb’ theory).
I prefer this way of thinking, this separation of gender and sex, because it can act as a bridge. It is the recognition that there is less difference between us than we thought. Because I have a vagina and you have a penis just means we have a different sex. Because so much of what we think we know about those two categories, male and female, is informed by flexible and culturally specific notions, we can change our notions about each other. We can bridge the gap between the sexes to create more liberated and well-rounded lives for women and men. We can see that women are also breadwinners and scientists and drive cars, and that men are also emotionally engaged, capable parents and carers. We can enjoy both hot rods and an attractive piece of clothing, or enjoy music, science, maths, painting or hands-on parenting, while being of either sex. We have aspects of what we think of as masculine and feminine traits in each of us.
While recognising that there are differences caused by a combination of biology and cultural influences that inform our experience of the world and our own bodies, we can nonetheless also see that we have far more in common than not. Our sex need not primarily define who we are, what we are capable of, or what we can be expected to enjoy or engage in. In other words, the boy with the Barbie doll does not have a problem with identity. He simply has a Barbie doll. The full-time working mother and full-time stay-at-home father have not given up something essential to their identities by taking on those roles: they have negotiated their lives as it works for them. Likewise, a stay-at-home mum is not anti-feminist any more than a stay-at-home dad is. Other characteristics, such as individual ability, personal relationships, personal choice, past experience and education, are far more important than that box you tick defining yourself as M or F.