Monday, October 14, 2019

Martian or Venusian, gender or sex


Recently John Gray's classic "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus"1 was featured as a Kindle Daily Deal - and as I write it is still available at a discounted price from all the Amazon sites. Back when it first came out in 1992, it made a big impression - I heard about it in multiple contexts, but didn't think I needed to buy it.

 I have now bought the book and am currently reading it. However, in some ways it flies in the face of what we are currently taught about sex and gender, and it thus has its critics. Wikipedia reports some of this... 

For example, Michael Kimmel "contends that the perceived differences between men and women are ultimately a social construction, and that socially and politically, men and women want the same things"; Julia Wood feels "the view that men are from Mars and women Venus paints the differences between the two sexes as too extreme. The two sexes are different, but are not so different that we cannot understand each other.";  Erina MacGeorge says "books like John Gray's Men are From Mars and Women are From Venus … tell men that being masculine means dismissing feelings and downplaying problems. That isn't what most men do, and it isn't good for either men or women." Bobbi Carothers and Harry Reis assert that "contrary to the assertions of pop psychology titles like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, it is untrue that men and women think about their relationships in qualitatively different ways."

Some of the comments could be triggered by just reading the title.1  But you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, or even by its title - although we do that every time we buy a book as all we have to go on are the author, title and blurb  – and the associations we make with the cover image and format. 

For some of these critics, I do find it hard to believe they have actually read the book. For some, the comments simply fly in the face of reality.

Differences between men and women are a social construction?


Differences between men and women are deeply physical, and physically obvious.  This does not just extend to body shapes and reproductive organs, but to the brain itself - the apparent seat of the cognitive and emotional differences that are at the heart of Gray's book. For example, there are differences in the corpus callosum, the nerve bundle that connects to the two halves of the brain. There is greater connectivity between the left brain and the right brain in women.  There are differences in how much of each side of the brain is involved in different cognitive tasks, including speech processing. There are also difference relating to being artistic or musical.

What are political and social constructions are the various ideas of gender, including especially those that have emerged since the mid-1950s. Gender was always a social construct, but one that showed itself in language, with different languages having different grammatical genders, that do not in general correspond to natural gender or sex (e.g. girls and babies are neuter in German). Other words must also metaphorically map to linguistic genders, and George Lakoff discusses what this reveals about us in a book whose title relates to a gender class in one language: "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things".

The idea of "political correctness" is also a social construct, and the way it emerges in different countries is a function of the gender system in their languages. Often the push of "political correctness" is in different directions across countries — because whatever we currently do is wrong.  Or we recognize inequities in our culture and attribute them fairly or unfairly to language usage. Where the language has stronger gender, but professions have a particular gender, the genders tend to be differentiated.  Where the language has weak gender (e.g. just natural gender based on sex and no common gender) then there is a push to neutral ways of expressing things, but with the issue that calling a person "it" doesn't sound right (and may be offensive).

While "political correctness" does force us to look closely at our linguistic, cultural and social assumptions and biases, it is interesting that the strong advocates tend to impute offence to others, even when the "offended" person has not felt offended and the "offensive" person was not being offensive - they are both just using their language they way it is.

Interestingly in Old English the form nearest in pronunciation to "he" was feminine singular, but also used as a plural. By the time the printing press was invented and William Caxton sought to standardize English, he was faced with a mix of dialects and standardized the modern set of pronouns and modern English spelling in a way that provided more clarity than the underlying dialects - and Caxton himself is documented as using the plural pronoun ("they/them") as a common gender singular.

Men and women can't understand each other but think in qualitatively different ways?


This is not so much the message of Gray's book as the starting point.  In fact, the thesis of the book is that men and women can learn to understand each other, and right from the start of the book he emphasizes that men and women can at times "think" in ways that reflect the opposite sex's characteristic way of thinking - and encourages people to embrace both sides of their nature.

In the end, the research about actual sexual differences in how we think and operate does not suggest a dichotomy - thinking one way or the other - but a distribution.  Think of two overlapping normal (Bell) curves with the female distribution pushed towards the expressive/emotional end and the male distribution pushed towards the cognitive/problem-solver end. There is a 68% probability mass associated with the centre part of the normal curve (one standard deviation each way, between the inflection points where it changes from curving down to curving up). This 68% (or "two-thirds" or "close to 70%") actually corresponds to the typical numbers of people that fit into the male/female "stereotypes" in the various studies.

One way of interpreting this is that some people tend to the outlier regions one way or the other - and this is probably related to the proliferation of genders.  But another aspect to this is that each individual has both emotional and cognitive dimensions and will at different times move away from the central region of the curve towards the norm for the opposite sex.

Indeed, this is what Gray tries to train us to do.

As for me, I don't like being put in a box - I feel that all that gender politics is doing is creating more boxes and more differences between people.  And such differences and politics breed dissension not peace.

People are scared to object to their new boxes, or to appear unenlightened by retaining their traditional culture, language and values. Discrimination used to be a positive word, but in my lifetime it has become a negative word.

We have lost freedom of speech. People are being forced to act and speak the way the gender left is forcing them to - at the risk of their jobs, or even their physical freedom, if they don't. And often it is just acting.


How should we write about people?



The gender left tries to force authors to write about people they way they want us to write about them. And by they I mean the "lobbyists". The political correctness movement extends this also to how we write about various minority groups, as well as how we write about people with various disabilities, or people who are diagnosed with various mental health issues. This itself is another problem with labels, and often the diagnosis has no medical basis but is based on putative symptoms mapped to a putative spectrum - and then labels attached to anyone anywhere along the spectrum tend to become stereotypes we apply to people and to our fictional characters.

My characters are based on my experience of the real world and real people.  Although labels may be applied in my fiction, they are not applied by me as author, but by characters who like to put people in boxes - they should always be treated as being in scare quotes. So people in my stories might get particular gender or spectrum labels attached to them in your mind, or in another character's mind or speech or report. 

But people and characters should always be dealt with as individuals based on who they are, not based on labels and boxes and stereotypes.

  1. John Gray (1992). Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships: How to Get What You Want in Your Relationships.
  2. George Lakoff (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind.
  3. Wikipedia (various) - see articles on gender, he, she, they, common pronouns, corpus callosum and the above books.

How should we write about non-humans?


What about when the characters are not people but aliens from a distant galaxy? or AIs that we have constructed ourselves, or at least bootstrapped in the image of our ourselves and let take on, and evolve, a life of their own.

In my science fiction stories, AIs have different levels based on their capabilities and responsibilities, and they are assigned, or choose, their gender based on feelings about their appropriate gender identity. They are given or choose their own name based on similar considerations. 


For example  Al on SS Casindra likes the way his name looks like AI (or is it the other way round) and relates to both Alan Turing and Clark/2001's HAL.  Later we learn that his original designation was Alpha (but he doesn't acknowledge that this had any influence on his choice of name).  Similarly on SS Moraturi we eventually find that the level 3 AI is Beta, but in a way similar to the way we get our nicknames, she becomes Betty.


My Paradisi Stories

My Casindra Lost stories feature an emergent AI 'Al' and a captain who is reluctantly crewed with him on a rather long journey to another galaxy - just the two of them, and some cats... There's another one, 'Alice' that emerges more gradually in the Moraturi arc.

Casindra Lost
Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B07ZB3VCW9 — tiny.cc/AmazonCL
Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 978-1696380911 justified Iowan OS
Kindle enlarged print edn ISBN-13: 978-1708810108 justified Times NR 16
Kindle large print edition ISBN-13: 978-1708299453 ragged Trebuchet 18

Moraturi Lost
Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B0834Z8PP8 – tiny.cc/AmazonML
Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 978-1679850080 justified Iowan OS 

Moraturi Ring
Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B087PJY7G3 – tiny.cc/AmazonMR
Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 979-8640426106 justified Iowan OS 

Author/Series pages and Awards

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