A year or two ago I set out to study modern gender; or rather, what modern culture sees as gender. --I hold a belief in a Rational Evolution of Society, meaning that society rationally evolves or it does not change unless it makes sense to change, and that this rational society "knows best" about the particular topic. In other words: The more society's opinion evolves, the closer it gets to the platoian Truth of the topic.
Gender and sexuality has been around for a long time. It has been studied for a long time and there is a diversity of opinions on the matter. I wanted to find the platoian Truth--the root of what it means to be Male or Female. My quest was prompted by what I thought was strange: if society advanced to the point that there were no differences between men and women, would anyone care about what your gender was? would they be the same? And in light of the things I've learned on this journey, I would say yes and no. Because it is still complex, yet it IS understandable.
The differences extend beyond the physical differences: hair style, clothes, tone of voice, manerisms, and yet they are connected. It extends beyond chemical makeup, and yet, it is connected to the chemical makeup.--and strangely, humans are very astute at detecting the chemical makeup even though that makeup is so subtle.
Part of the trouble of this research endeavor is the constraint of language in describing minute differences. This quest has primarily been one of discovering the right words to use and secondarily has been actually understanding the differences. One can easily point out comparisons, such as the color blue been socially seen as associated with males, and pink associated with females, but to put into words why that is, is a challenge.
I'm going to start by describing men and women by their perceptions of each other, however, both sides are contradicting.
Women see men as both lazy and hard working. They are aroused by hard working me, and yet assume that all men are lazy. These two contradictions place the male gender into two categories: those worthy of 'mating' and those not-worthy. --Mating isn't the best term for this, but it will have to suffice. Mating as I am using it can be sexual attraction, fathering children, coming to for protection, desiring his attention, desiring to please or impress him, and many other things.
Those non-worthy men obsessive over their hobbies and interests but present and share that obsession in excess to the annoyance of both men and women, while those worthy men keep their interests and hobbies secret except to fellow interest-lovers or when prompted. Curteous communcation skills make a worthy man, whereas discourteous communication makes a man fall into the not-worthy category--with one exception. Worthy men challenge the status-quo, they refuse to submit to blind obedience without purpose, and the key to this exception is what I deem Quiet Understanding.--worthy men make the appearance that they know some further information, which prompts them to disobey and be discourteous to the status quo. One can infer that worthy men incite change, they stand alone in order to force that change, they challenge the norm seemingly because they know better than the norm. --whether they actually know or not is debatable, because this Quiet understanding is afterall 'quiet'. To effectively pull this off, the man has to remain quiet up until the moment they are challenged to explain themselves. Their plans must be kept secret up to the moment when the tension has been ratcheted up and the situation has become a sort of do-or-die.
If the man brazenly barks his agenda all over town and cries the end of times or openly disobeys the powers that be to make a point, he becomes the unworthy man who is passionate about his hobbies and interests and won't shut up about them to the annoyance of both men and women everywhere.
To be a worthy man, you must have a mind of your own, an agenda and plan of action to obtain it, and you must be constantly working towards it in secret to those who might oppose it, but opening to those who encourage it and want it just as badly.
In the viking age, the worst insult a man could be given was to be accused of being like a woman. --The same is true for these days, though the definitions are construed... The worse insult for someone who professes to be of male gender is to accuse them of being unworthy. Unworthy men carry bias as being weak, unintelligent, awkward, cowardly, and lacking in life-purpose.--making jabs at a man on any of those fields will breach him to the core unless he is so far on the worthy side that his confidence isn't affected by them.
The contradiction for women is that men are both courageous and cowardly depending on their worthy or unworthy status.
Unlike women, Men see women as a collective of categories. They generalize women into one category and assume the biases of all categories.--or more simply put, they form a personal opinion on women that they use as a paradigm for all women even when it contradicts the subject (a woman) before them.
To men, women can be any combination of the following traits: the sum of beauty, curvy, long-haired, domestic, motherly, lover of animals, pacifist, friendly, intelligent, bitchy, demanding, demonic, rude, fake, selfish, self-serving, sexual, dominant, jealous, full of and interested in gossip, passionate, naive, and many more (a longer list is due, but may constrain my argument).
The varying opinions on what a woman is can be confusing for a man (and perhaps even women)! For this reason, men don't talk about women as often to their fellow male friends because the differences of definition confuse the conversation. It is rare for two men to find this shared definition, and by very virtue of what makes a man, if he is 'worthy' then he doesn't reveal such until he is confronted--and if he is unworthy, then his opinion is taken lightly because of his annoying ethos and few will join with him in discussion.
This explanation also justifies the common statment by men that "women are an enigma." Yet, women are able to understand other women because they compare their own beliefs about what is womanly, and they compare themselves against their own biases about what a woman is and feel negative emotions if they fail to meet their own personal definition--at the same time they shun women who don't meet that same definition. In a sense, women self-regulate what it means to be a woman, and as society evolves and changes, the definition will change as well.
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I will continue part 2 at a later time. In part two, I will discuss the ramification I philosophize occurs when we cease to make distinctions between genders and allow people to choose their gender completely.
(personal note: not a spectrum, but various levels and fronts)
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