I once had a discussion in a Gender and Comm class in which a young woman maintained to me that the *only* difference between men and women was that women had the children.
Well, yeah. Duh.
Well, no. Or infertile women would have male privilege.
We can make lots of divisions between people--people who can jump higher than three feet and people who can't, people who have blue eyes and people who don't, people who can curl their tongue and people who can't.
And the chances that, say, the mean average weight of the people in the first group and in the second group is going to be exactly the same is pretty low; how many things in nature end up being exactly the same? But the difference is going to be between rolling 1d6 and 1d6+1.
I don't believe there are exactly two biological sexes. Or three. Or even necessarily unidimensional spectrum with men on one side and women on the other. Human beings are produced in all sorts of wild and crazy shapes and sizes. Some have what we, after we are already soaked in patriarchal language, come to recognize as a penis, and some don't. But that recognition is rooted in a set of inherited categories that don't arise naturally in nature; we already have some idea of what we are going to see.
The impetus which leads us to see the difference between biological maleness and femaleness as a meaningful difference at all is one which is always-already born of social and cultural factors.
And reproductive technologies are changing and expanding. Alien Nation, maybe not, but still.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-26 02:06 pm (UTC)I once had a discussion in a Gender and Comm class in which a young woman maintained to me that the *only* difference between men and women was that women had the children.
Well, yeah. Duh.
Well, no. Or infertile women would have male privilege.
We can make lots of divisions between people--people who can jump higher than three feet and people who can't, people who have blue eyes and people who don't, people who can curl their tongue and people who can't.
And the chances that, say, the mean average weight of the people in the first group and in the second group is going to be exactly the same is pretty low; how many things in nature end up being exactly the same? But the difference is going to be between rolling 1d6 and 1d6+1.
I don't believe there are exactly two biological sexes. Or three. Or even necessarily unidimensional spectrum with men on one side and women on the other. Human beings are produced in all sorts of wild and crazy shapes and sizes. Some have what we, after we are already soaked in patriarchal language, come to recognize as a penis, and some don't. But that recognition is rooted in a set of inherited categories that don't arise naturally in nature; we already have some idea of what we are going to see.
The impetus which leads us to see the difference between biological maleness and femaleness as a meaningful difference at all is one which is always-already born of social and cultural factors.
And reproductive technologies are changing and expanding. Alien Nation, maybe not, but still.