Are Women Men?
Are Women Men?
The answer is a categorical no, but the question is interesting in itself. Men are women, but women are not men.[1] To establish this, we need to know the essence of men or male organisms generally. The essence of maleness is depositing sperm in the female body and not containing the resulting fetus. The female, by contrast, receives the sperm and contains the fetus. The female does not deposit sperm and keep an empty belly. Therefore, the female does not have the essence of the male and is thus not a male. Women are not men. True, both share reproductive duties and are subject to pregnancy, but that is not the essence of the male, so the woman is not male by sharing this property with the male. Accordingly, men are members of the opposite sex, but women are not. It might be different if women had some characteristic possessed by males that has a specifically male nature, analogous to nipples; but that appears not to be so. Imagine if women had some sort of reduced scrotum between their legs serving no reproductive function, some sort of remnant of an earlier male identity; that might incline us to assign them to the male category in addition to their own. But no such thing appears to be the case—they have no distinctively male characteristics analogous to (functionless) nipples. (The clitoris is not a small penis.) They don’t even have beards or deep voices. They are all woman. By no stretch of the imagination are women a breed of men. If women contained relics of Adam’s rib, we might spot maleness lurking within them, but that is clearly false. Men are not exclusively men, but women are exclusively women. Men are bisexual but women are unisexual. Womanhood is more universal than manhood, being possessed by men and women alike. A man is a type of woman, but a woman is not a type of man. This is because a man is defined by his sexual physiology whereas a woman is defined by her sexual role—getting pregnant and giving birth. The concept male is a physiological concept whereas the concept female is a functional concept, i.e., what does the job of becoming pregnant and giving birth. The two sexes have different kinds of essence. The male has the property of getting pregnant and contributing to child-rearing, but this is not his essence, whereas it is the essence of the female. If this entails rewriting our whole conception of the sexes, so be it.[2]
[1] See my “Are Men Women?”
[2] What does this do to feminism?
Butler says that gender is performative
I don’t take that stuff seriously.
I think it’s just plain wrong. We had a girl and a boy and it was obvious from the very beginning that they think and behave in very different, and stereotypical boys. The boy would study how things work, the insides of machines etc., but not too interested in people except as playmates. The girl totally uninterested in boy stuff, but obsessed with the social complexities of her peer group.
They say that parents interact with children differently depending on gender, and that their unconscious bias influences the outcome. Hard to verify, really
You seem to have missed the point completely. I was discussing the biological notion of the sexes not the psychology typically associated with biological sex.This applies across the animal world. You could switch the psychology of your boy and girl and still have identity of biological sex. I said nothing about “gender”.
Sure but I was replying to your point about Butler, who talks a lot about ‘gender’. Sorry for the confusion
We need not get embroiled in her stuff. So you weren’t disagreeing with me but with her? Confusing.
Disagreeing with her.
That’s a relief–you had me worried there.
[2] What does this do to feminism?
a) It becomes defensive and defends its turf with mad ferocity
Or b) it denies the distinction between essence and existence
Or c) it denies the coherence of the concept of essence
Or d) it borrows “philosophical” machinery from Leninism and becomes one with it
Or …
That’s what it does to feminists but what about feminism as a doctrine? Doesn’t it suggest that feminism applies to men too, since they are women?
Absolutely. Feminism applies to men because some men are women and the rest of them are women in a temporary denial.
The difference between ‘men’ and ‘women’ is simple: women go to the women’s room and men to the men’s room, It’s been that way since naybe not Prehistoric Times then at least Classical Antiquity.
But men can go the women’s room and women can go to the men’s without losing their sex.