#1
The fourth (and final) sense of no guru is where there can be no guru, such as in sex or gender: If a guru is one who presumes to speak from a deeper knowledge, no one can reasonably speak on behalf of a sex or gender other than ots own. Furthermore, unlike religion and politics, there must, of biological necessity, be at least two gender identities—male and female (whereas it is plausible that there be a single religion or political system). It’s the general wisdom in American culture that the subjects of religion and politics be avoided at the dinner table and in mixed company in order to preserve peaceful conversation. However, in my experience, the topic of gender today is at least as inflammatory, and deserves to be added to the list.
I feel the need to preface this essay with a proviso about my formal innocence so that expectations won’t be too high on the part of those more familiar with feminist philosophies and politics. By way of disclosure, I have never applied myself to gender studies other than what I have learned from personal experience and any content in anthropology that pertained to sex and gender. Nonetheless, I am aware of the history of feminism and the women’s movement, which serves as the “umbrella” for all gender issues. Perhaps to prepare the sophisticates even more, what follows will likely be categorized as “post-feminist” (with a nod and a wink to the “difference feminists,” (and hoping that’s not misinterpreted)).
Women’s movements began in the UK and USA in the 19th Century, their aims being women’s rights in many areas of life, capped by the successful suffrage movement and women’s entry into the political arena. Part of the movement survived after that by continuing to monitor bias, but in the middle of the 20th Century the movement turned its attention to women’s inner and intimate lives, pointing to how women had been unconsciously affected by men’s values. Many feminists today decry the errors of that second “wave” of the movement, and my thesis here will point to what I see as the biggest and most lasting part of that mistake. The third and current phase of the movement has turned toward the quality of women’s multi-layered experience in society, mitigated by ethnicity and class along with gender. (This phase coincided with the maturing of the “Me” Generation, which was bred on the mantra “Do your own thing” and new spiritual and psychological programs encouraging people to manifest their dreams into reality.) Post-feminism is a belief that the women’s movement has achieved a structural balance between the genders and the movement is no longer politically relevant other than to preserve what it has achieved. Some also contend that, in pursuing certain aims apart from civil rights, the movement is doing women (and the rest of society) a disservice, creating discontent with their own nature and causing confusion and conflict in careers and conjugality, broadly speaking.
Much attention today is paid to sexual preference. However, sexual preference presumes the ability of a person to identify the gender of the individual ot is considering sexing, so the issue of gender identify is not just personal, it is social from the get-go: Even if an individual chooses not to have sex, the sex or gender with which one identifies has many other implications for the society in which ot lives (as will be belabored here).
The current confusion and consternation about gender start at an elemental level in its relation to sex, so it is necessary here to begin with the basics. Essentially, people can describe as sex whatever acts they wish, but from a biological point of view, procreation demands two types of people, one contributing an ovum and one a sperm—the two elemental sexes, female and male. The pleasure that “Mother” Nature or God “the Father” implanted in sex is (merely) a means of enticing us into coupling and thus perpetuating the species (without which any further discussion would be futile). Consequently, at the risk of seeming insensitive, the two elemental sexes will be treated here as synonymous with the two primary genders. Until ova and spermatozoa are produced in laboratories on an industrial scale, and bodily reproduction is obsolete, the binary divide between male and female remains, well … impregnable.
Part of the confusion today concerns “Gender X,” also called the “third sex” and “intersex.” The X gender includes individuals whose anatomical attributes, internal and external, are both female and male, or are ambiguously between the two. (Individuals with organs that are anomalous—unlike male or female—are also included.) With all due respect for Gender X, their morphologies have not altered the principles of procreation, nor, therefore, the elemental bifurcation of sex-gender. (Many individuals who are anatomically Gender X choose to identify as female or male.) The gender identities that are defined by sexual preference independently of anatomical attributes—that is, the various gender categories that exist under the rubric of “Queer People”—nonetheless use the elemental genders as the primary points of reference. The surgical procedures that some transgender people undergo always make a move to one primary sex-gender or the other. The inner reality of gender takes shape as a spectrum of identities between the two poles of male and female, so that individuals are more or less male or female in both attitudes and attributes. (There is some talk of gender identities that fall outside the male-female spectrum, but this is essentially a linguistic broadening of the word “gender” to mean any type of kind of person, reflecting identity issues that would better be solved, I think, by creating new terms to satisfy people’s new psychological needs (if not by resolving whatever societal functions or dysfunctions breed the new needs).
It is in response to the contentiousness about gender, which intruded on my personal life and my professional career, that I state my case here. After a while, it was the only topic that caused me to pause in the classroom, to divert or cut short the discourse—to censor or mute myself. I could discuss topics in religion and politics without pressing people’s “buttons,” but not gender. The problems clearly arose from the fact that the information and observations I had to offer, as an anthropologist, departed from, or outright contradicted, prevailing feminist ideologies. Instead of inspiring disputation of the academically healthy sort, the response to the discussion was to dismiss it on the grounds that my thinking was a survival of an anachronistic culture of patriarchy. Those students who liked me as an instructor despite my position on gender presumed to pardon me for those views or perhaps practiced some form of pupil denial. Among the administrators at The New School, my reputation on the topic of gender was that of a Neanderthal. In the long run, I did not stop teaching about the social nature of gender among primitive and traditional peoples, I just stopped connecting the implications to contemporary life, normally a major part of my teaching technique (although I sometimes did it anyway, puckishly, being sure to wear a smile). In private conversation I eventually began to beg off—literally pleading we not pursue the topic.
The academic side of my problem in communication can be found in the concept of patriarchy, which is used in anthropology to mean a social system dominated by men, as a matriarchy is one dominated by women. In anthropology, there is no implication of injustice or imbalance in these descriptions: All civilized societies need power structures, and such structures run most commonly along the lines of gender, age and kinship. The structural power that one segment of society wields is counterbalanced by other kinds of “power”—spiritual or psychological—wielded by the other segment/s, resulting in a balanced, stable state. However, in the current parlance of gender politics, patriarchy means a society dominated unjustly by men—so that the word can’t be used without implying bias and unfairness. Consequently, my analyses of our own social system were often taken, despite my protestations, to be apologies for prejudice: I was, in some people’s minds, labeled a sexist rather than what I do confess to being, which is a sexualist.
The word “sexist” connotes a prejudice whereas “sexualist” means merely making reference to differences in the sexes—the parallels to “racist” and “racialist.” it is racialist to say that “black” people can generally play basketball better than whites because it can be observed in virtually any professional game, but it’s racist to assume that any given black person can play basketball well. Likewise, it is sexualist to say that men can generally run faster than women, based on track records, while it would be sexist to assume that any given man can run fast. It is symptomatic of our culture—part of our crudity—that the distinction between sexism and sexualism, like that between racism and racialism, has been mucked up. A sexualist sees the differences statistically—that one sex is more likely to be better at something than the other—not absolutely or exclusively so. To be clear, the sexualist should insert qualifications such as “generally” and “probably” to all assertions, but this becomes tiresome. Today, there is sometimes the perception of prejudice where there is none (although perhaps more commonly there is the presence of prejudice where none is perceived).
Whether one believes that human beings arrived via evolution or Creation, it appears the sexes started out quite different from each other. The underlying question for feminists today is how fast humans can evolve (or how soon God makes a miracle): If the sexes are as distinct as the evidence that follows seems to suggest, it could take nature a mighty long time (or take a big miracle from the Almighty) to accommodate the current gender agenda.
In splaying out my case, the next section describes the natural differences between the sexes. The last section is devoted to the implications of those differences for society today.
No Guru 