Sex, Gender, and Society

In our conversation today about whether we were "born this way" or everything is a social construct, we had a lot of great points that resonated with me for the rest of the day. I couldn't shake the idea of everything being societal constructs and I continue to think about how it's thought that society constructs how we even perceive reality.

What Riley said was great. There is always this misconception that gender and sex are synonymous, but they aren't. They aren't related at all in the sense that you can have specific genitalia, but in the words of many great feminists, you are what you become from the sum of your actions. Do women act more feminine because they are socialized to be feminine? Are men predominately more masculine because we are socialized to be masculine?

These are questions that are at the heart of this on going discussion and I think it is apparent that we may never know. If you take the approach of writing and think that everything comes down to the writer, then you would essentially believe in the "born this way"mentality. If you think it's the time period, other literary works, and society then you would think that sex and gender is probably societal.

When looking at conversion therapy, it's very difficult to subscribe to someone not being born the way they are. It's hard to look at the data that is available about those that have gone through the transition process to feel more comfortable with their body.

On the flip side, normality, stereotypes and how we think of people and other issues are all based out of conditions that have been developed over time by decades if not centuries of ideas. Many of these ideas aren't new, but they have finally gotten the attention that they've needed to spark discussion.

Bring the conversation back to last week, in the US and even Europe when many of these essays were being developed, there was a masculine capitalist hegemony that dominated the culture. Of course, if you look at many European countries, they have progressed out of the hyper masculine culture that drove them to conquer much of the world and raze nations. The US on the other hand, has been at was for something like 98% of its history and has no indication that it will every stop.

I don't think it is a coincidence that France has progressed into a more open and fluid nation and stepped away from the aggressive mentality that they once had. I agree that gender could potentially be a capitalist construct to force people into production based gender roles. It is an attempt to dehumanize individuals to commodify them so that they can just be written off as externalities. It's not a coincidence that many women characters are marginalized, omitted, or abused. It's not just by happenstance that women are the people that are suppose to nurture the working husband after work and be the homemaker. It's just an expense that can be placed back on to the workers.

To sum it up, women were born with breasts, but it wasn't until society fetishized them that we were able to package and sell them as a multibillion dollar industry. It was made into a product of industry.

Everything isn't black and white and the writer can't write unless they exist within a society that creates that very existence of their being. Whether it's their language, their political beliefs, how they view equality and everything else. We are an accumulation of everything that we've ever experienced.