There has yet to be a dual-gendered view of the world that works, and few are addressing it as anything but a nusisance to progress, because progress is measured in terms of profits, not quality of life for everyone.

Social justice in such a world cannot exist, and doesn’t hold much clout as an important function.

Like obscenity, people can recognize truth when they see it.

Thanks.

Comment by peggy — 12/1/2005 @ 6:42 pm

^^^^
CB: I agree with peggy’s main point here.

“We in the modern world are inclined to forget how profoundly childbirth has shaped and continues to shape the female human condition.”

This is why Marx is correct in his statements (criticized on this blog as socalled naturalizing women) that the _original_ division of labor is based on sex. That is not naturalizing women more than naturalizing men, because inherent in that claim is that men have a biology that does not allow them to give birth or , on the otherhand, do not have the limitations of pregnancy and birth. That is a statement about the biology of men just as much as a statement about the biology of women. Women and men are biological complements. Marx is fully aware that with the progress of technology it becomes more feasible for women not to be so limited by childbirth, but objectively, in human history, biology of male and female has contributed to shaping the social roles.

There’s another important point. Children are very important in the obvious sense of perpetuating the group or species. It makes sense pracically, to have a division of labor with “specialists” in childrearing. There is nothing inherently oppressive in this division of labor. As I have written several times, the best evidence from anthroplogy is that there was equivialence of status between women and men. Given the importance of children, and tracing the family through women, there is even an argument that women had higher status than men in ancient society.

That’s exactly what he did to Cynthia. That he could go back and write about it later testfies to his immense gifts of self-reflection and honesty.

I wish more of my childhood heroes had gotten to this place. Most of them are dead (directly or indirectly) ’cause of patriarchy.

December 8 is important for me for another milestone: it is the birthday of James Douglas Morrison, a Southern-born European American man who drank himself to death at twenty-seven. For all his rebellion, he never could rebel against being a “real” man.

More than his amazing talents of singing, songwriting, and performance, his lessons about whiteness, class privilege, and masculinity were a valuable gift to this poor southern Black girl.

John and Jim, my fathers, rest in peace.
love, Yolanda

To Ben: How do you explain the following, scientifically?

Written on 12/8/2005:

Today is the 25th anniversary of Lennon being murdered by a “fan” who had an album autographed by John earlier in the same day (12/8/1980)–the same day that he later put four fatal bullets into the husband,father, writer, visual artist, and musician. (You may have heard of a little band from Liverpool… The Beatles?)

John Lennon is a great example of someone who went from patriarch–batterer of his first wife and neglecter of his first child, to being a profoundly sensitive and equality-loving partner to his second wife, Yoko Ono, and an amazing primary parent to his second child, Sean, who was born on John’s 35th birthday. Yoko spent her days out of the home, in her office dealing with complex business affairs (that is to say, she was a normal non-primary working-outside-of-the-home parent).

Withing a few years time, Lennon went from these lyrics, in “Run For Your Life”:

“Well, I’d rather see you dead, little girl,
than to be with another man”

to these (from “Getting Better”):

I used to be cruel to my woman
I beat her and kept her from the
Things that she loved
Man I was mean but I’m changing my scene
And I’m doing the best that I can.
I admit it’s getting better
A little better all the time

To this:

“Woman is the Nigger of the World”
John Lennon & Yoko Ono

Woman is the nigger of the world
Yes she is…think about it
Woman is the nigger of the world
Think about it…do something about it

We make her paint her face and dance
If she won’t be a slave, we say that she don’t love us
If she’s real, we say she’s trying to be a man
While putting her down, we pretend that she’s above us

Woman is the nigger of the world…yes she is
If you don’t believe me, take a look at the one you’re with
Woman is the slave of the slaves
Ah, yeah…better scream about it

For the rest of the lyrics, see:
http://www.john-lennon.com/songlyrics/songs/Woman_is_the_Nigger_of_the_World.htm

About his transformation, John said, in an interview, that he was even more feminist later in life, after writing that song with Yoko. It was in his last five years, 1975-1980, that he let his non-speech actions speak for themselves, by deeply respecting his partner, and caringly parenting his child.

Let’s not forget that people can radically change, in a matter of a few years. Let’s hope society and its institutions can, as well, in our lifetime. I’ll close this post with Yoko and John’s other, more famous, song:

Imagine
by Yoko Ono and John Lennon
(Live in NYC version)

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religon too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

Imagine no possesions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood/sisterhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…

You may say i’m a dreamer
But i’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

For more on John Lennon, see this site: http://www.john-lennon.com/

I hope you are resting in peace, John.

Love,

Julian Real

This statement is in support of what DeAnander has been saying, and is directed to Ben.

It is in two parts.

Part 1:

Ben, if “nature” is intricately involved in culture, in such a way as to determine what culture is and does, what is this “nature” you speak of, other than a social category some folks came up with to distinguish it from “culture”, often used and abused to “explain” (read: excuse) human beings’ atrocities as “inevitable social phenomena”?

Aren’t human beings, “naturally” also capable of FEELING harm, viscerally, collectively, as damned painful, degrading, humiliating, terrifying, horrifying, suffering-inducing, maiming, and death-causing?

What does it mean that people prefer to discuss atrocities, that are going on right now, precisely now, as I type this, as abstract ideas, rather than as searing pain in the vagina, rectum, or throat, of infants, toddlers, young girls and boys, teenage girls and boys, and many, many adult women, sometimes unknown women who are over 80, who are watching TV until the 30-something guy breaks in and assaults them?

What are these mechanistically behaviour-ordering “genes” you speak of as possibly determining of our behaviour, when we know Barbara McClintock showed, already, that they are not at all “determining” (let alone commanding) in the way some politically patriarchal sociobiologists have argued, to allow themselves and other men to rape women with “objective, neutral, observed” science on their side–the side that wants to rape with impunity (not that rapists, generally, face real behaviour-altering consequences, of course)? Genes are factors (part of the stew), yes, but not stable ones: that is to say, they are adaptive, as humans are to “nature”.

If genes are, in a meaningful sense, “in charge” of culture, how do we explain the following things:

1. Heterosexual men of many Colours’ (only decades old) over-attraction to corporate pornographer/pimp’s airbrushed, digitally altered images of fingernail painted, eye area-make-uped, lip-reddened, tweezed, dyed-blond, hair-straightened, taut-hard breasted, vulva area-shaved, leg-shaved, armpit-shaved, stiletto-heeled, “born-female” human beings?

2. How do we explain, “biologically”, “scientifically” a portion of those same hetero-males letting known “she-males” fellate their drunk-enough penises?

3. How do we explain the increasing number of men who would rather spend their days and nights staring at those sorts of images than spending quality time with real human beings, like, say, their real human wives and real human children?

4. Can you hear the screams of horror and cries of terror of women and children being raped right now? What are you doing to end that global atrocity, say, in your own community?

“The Chocolate Thesis”

(-:

I think it’s a sterile debate, no pun intended.

The degree to which our behaviours are triggered by adaptive (or once-was-adaptive) patterns from our deep primate past, is fascinating to discuss. I am all in favour of thinking and talking about genetic markers, the effects of hormones and various brain chemicals on behaviour, etc. But in the end the dazzling variety of human social behaviour worldwide suggests that we are capable, as kingroup and social animals, of coming up with many diverse creative solutions to the riddles of our genes and our oversize brains — and that the easy conflation of our contemporary or historical socially constructed norms and realities with “biological fact” is largely a copout.

If our lives consisted entirely of the biological facts for which we evolved — for the vast majority of our species arc — then I wouldn’t be sitting artificially upright typing arbitrary characters onto a screen in response to people I have never seen, heard, or sniffed … if we suggest that patriarchy is biologically determined by sexual dimorphism or selection behaviour among early hominids, then we are at a loss to explain cultures where land is owned and controlled mostly by women in matrilineal descent (Bougainville), where patriarchal authority over the nuclear family has never evolved or has been abandoned for adaptive reasons (Tikopia), where old women (surely the weakest and most expendable persons under patriarchy) exercise administrative and political power (five-nations confederacy) and so on. The dominance of the patriarchal wheat/beef cultures over all others during our last couple of millennia may possibly be just a phase.

The problem with sociobiology is not that all of its claims are intrinsically bunk, imho, but that its claims are often selectively made as a apologia for existing conditions. The same accusation may be reversed and hurled at the radical anthropologist — Mead is a pet hate-object on the Right, for example, routinely accused of falsifying data, basing sweeping conclusions on small samples, etc. The interpretation of human/social behaviours is deeply ideological because it reflects or challenges our baseline assumptions about what is possible (and politics, remember, is the Art of the Possible, hence our assumptions about human nature define our politics).

My $.02: Genes surely have some effect on our brains and hence on our minds, but so does chocolate chocolate doesn’t really explain male supremacy and imho neither do our genes…

Thanks for the Sociobiology Sanitized link, which I did at least read. I’m having trouble wrapping my head around all the ideas, especially how everything relates to Mead and cultural relativism. Ripley indeed portrays the Mead debacle as closed, but he does offer a number of arguments against blank slate (lack of) human nature. In an early chapter he examines different sexual cultures in great apes such as gorillas and bonobos, and his comment about the relative lack of human variation as compared to these other species made a lot of sense to me. If culture is indeed the trump card over our genes, then why don’t we see far more variation in human sexual practices? I would assume we see more intra-species variation in humans than great apes, but to ignore genetics seems silly. “Culture as a trump card over our genes” is of obviously a straw man, as you yourself said. But then don’t you need to address human nature (or as Ridley says, genetics) instead of just focusing on the nurture?

Here are some good quotes from Ridley:

“If I am to sustain my argument that genes are at the root of nurture as well as nature, then I must somehow explain how genes make culture possible. Once again, I intend to do so, not by proposing “genes for” cultural practice, but by proposing the existence of genes that respond to the environment–of genes as mechanisms, not causes. This is a tall order, and I may as well admit, right now, that I will fail. I believe the human capacity for culture comes not from some genes that co-evolved with human culture, but from a fortuitous set of preadaptations that suddenly endowed the human mind with an almost limitless capacity to accumulate and transmit ideas. Those preadaptations are underpinned by genes.” (p208 The Agile Gene)

(as a reaction to Gould, p188-9)
“…it is not just mistaken to base policy and morality on an assumption of malleable human nature, it is dangerous.” (quotes Pinker on why social scientists see any idea of human nature as an excuse for people doing bad things) “…There is nothing factually wrong with arguing that human beings are capable of learning, or being conditioned to associate stimuli, or reacting to reward and punishment or any other aspect of learning theory. These are facts and vital bricks in the wall I am building. But it does not follow that therefore human beings have no instincts, any more than it would follow that human beings are incapable of learning if they have instincts. Both can be true. The error is to be an either-or person…”

Not being a biologist or geneticist I have some trouble with the finer points of the evolutionary psychology vs Gould et al debate. It seems like the sides disagree to a large extent on the evidence but to a larger degree in worldview. Gould is quoted in Ridley as saying no evidence exists to support genetic determinism, but it’s hard after reading Ridley and being familiar, at least on the surface, with Gould’s (amazing) work, to imagine Gould meant genes have no effect on our minds. Your Dusek article talks about Gould’s attacks on evolutionary psychology, but it doesn’t get across to me how or why a denial of selectionism, or any of the rest of his critique, is relevant to the cultural relativism debate.