cliterature

I have previously blogged about how cleaning products are now being presented in advertising like gigolos, luring us away from our boring husband (or old boyfriend?) products (mops, none-skin-softening dish soap etc). Apparently adultery metaphors are hot in the advertising world.  Now the Health Discovery channel is in on the act. Trying to lure us away from bad foots and seduce us with nutrition. But, um…

Seduced by a carrot, really? Is this co-sponsored by the American Carrot Council trying to subliminally push the appeal of the dual purpose vegetable? Also, isn’t the whole problem with junk food the short-term thrill of “attractive” tastes and, um, “mouth feel” leading to unbalanced and/or excessive food intake? That is, we need to stay with reliable, good-for-us carrot rather than jump out the window into the fluffy white-bread arms of Mr. Sexyburger? (Not the other way around).

The site has a photo feature titled, disparagingly, “weight Loss Fads”. This apparently includes the title thumbnail, a women boxing (obviously for weight loss? Obviously a hilarious fad?) and Gloria Swanson* (excerpted here)using hand-weights (ditto?).  If women exercising is innately hilarious I do wonder about the overall goal of the program and why Bally fitness are apparently so deeply involved in it (as advertisers).

I also find the absence of any real science rather patronising.  Informational articles like this piece about soda never do more than non-specific hand-wave at ”stacks of research”, “new research” and “a study, out of the University of Texas”.  The reader is assumed to not want to, or be able to, understand the source material? Would a citation in a foot note be that bad, if only because the people who did the research probably deserve some credit? (Let alone because I might not trust the copy-writer’s interpretation of their data).

 * Gloria Swanson was a dedicated and influential proponent of healthy nutrition, including rather progressive attitudes about natural foods, vegetarianism and yoga–she lobbied for the first American law limited pesticide levels in foods.  She was also an astounding actress and founded successful companies producing make-up and clothing.  Frankly, she deserves more respect than this.

One of the main points I make about gender, often implicitly, is that gender does not have moral value.  That is, being one gender rather than another does not, in itself, affect your significance or worth.  This may seem obvious now that women, in most first world countries, have equal standing in terms of voting, receiving services, under the law etc.  However there are still in direct avenues by which men and women are devalued.  For example, a mother is presumed to gain custody unless fairly clear reason is given to refuse her–the same is not as commonly true for men.  Women still commonly get paid less due to a legacy of paying less for traditionally female career and continuing to discourage men from entering them (e.g. “nurse” is still named after the ability to lactate and male nursed are asked why they didn’t become doctors).  So the attributing of value to gender is now more subtle and more difficult to change.

 The second point that I like to make is that we attribute traits to gender that do not correlate to gender.  For example during the early modern people women were considered ‘less moral’ because they were often opt to do the ‘wrong thing’ if it avoided an even greater wrong (e.g. stealing medicine for a sick relative).  Now we realise that there are different, but internally consistent, types of morality and they tend to differ between men and women.

 Thirdly, gender is used as a false dichotomy, when realising just how heavily most traits overlap between men and women.  That is, although IQ test (most of them invented by men in a previous century) tend to give men a slightly higher overall score,  but this 3-4% is not significant when compared to the fact that the vaste majority of people fall in the area were the gender scores overlap.  So knowing a person’s gender does not in any way help predict what their IQ would be–let alone their actual “intelligence” (whatever that might be).

Nevertheless, my overriding perspective on gender is that, in most cases, no great weight should be be placed upon it–so why do I go on about it so much?  Is that not hypocritical?  I would say: no.  Because in order to disregard gender we can not make it disappear, and so we must make it transparent.  Gender is a window we see through and to see through it we must… see through it.  And to do that we must look at it very closely and clean away the grime and encrusted dirt of centuries of mythology and bad science.

It is an old joke to say “the masculine embraces the feminine”, meaning that one can (a.k.a. once could) say “he” or “man”; and be understood to mean “a person” or “the human species”.  It is, in my opinion, archaic to assume that using a term that is male can be assumed to include men and women.  But if anyone is going to be archaic I suppose it is going to be the Pope who is tasked with head up one of the biggest, oldest traditions on the planet, the Catholic faith. 

But a beleif can be ancient and progressive.  For example, the the Pope’s Christmas message touched on the preservation of our planet–a bridge between ancient and modern ideas of stewardship and protection.  Specifically Christianity and environmentalism.

However, three years ago Pope Benedict gave his Christmas message in gender neutral terms.  So my appreciation of his 2008 message was undermined by the confusion of jumbled genders in passages such as: “Since faith in the Creator is an essential part of the Christian Creed, the Church cannot and should not limit itself to transmitting to its faithful only the message of salvation. She has a responsibility for Creation, and it should validate this responsibility in public. In so doing, it should defend not just the earth, water and air as gifts of Creation that belong to everyone. She should also protect man from destroying himself.

And is this use of the masculine to embrace all humanity as casual an unintentional anachronism?  I would argue that it is, in fact, a deliberate step back from gender neutrality–given the very next part of the message:

“It is necessary to have something like an ecology of man, understood in the right sense. It is not outdated metaphysics when the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and asks that this natural order be respected. This has to do with faith in the Creator and listening to the language of creation, which, if disregarded, would be man’s self-destruction and therefore a destruction of God’s work itself. That which has come to be expressed and understood with the term ‘gender’ effectively results in man’s self-emancipation from Creation (nature) and from the Creator. Man wants to do everything by himself and to decide always and exclusively about anything that concerns him personally. But this is to live against truth, to live against the Spirit Creator. The tropical rain forests deserve our protection, yes, but man does not deserve it less as a Creature of the Spirit himself, in whom is inscribed a message that does not mean a contradiction of human freedom but its condition.”

This makes is clear to me that a deliberate choice was made to desert the use of gender-neutral language and insist that the female listener subsume herself within a male identity.  And further that the interests of the Earth are to be subordinate to preserving what is presumed to be the correct role for humans, which differ depending in being of the male and female sex–with an explicit repudiation even of the notion of culturally-created gender.  And, lest the full implications of this be missed, the very next passage goes further:

“The great theologians of Scholasticism described matrimony - which is the lifelong bond between a man and a woman - as a sacrament of Creation, that the Creator himself instituted, and that Christ, without changing the message of Creation, welcomed in the story of his alliance with men. Part of the announcement that the Church should bring to men is a testimonial for the Spirit Creator present in all of nature, but specially in the nature of man, who was created in the image of God.”

I am not a person of faith, but I have a reverent and deep respect for ancient and ongoing beliefs that are at the core of human culture.  Most people believe in God and religion is a great force that moves across the face of the planet.  The Catholic church and Christian leaders in general have increasingly embraced the need to protect the planet.  But so long as this secular and universal concern is explicilyt subordinated to an agenda of opposing divorce, gay marriage, extra-marital sex and evolving gender roles I doubt our ability to overcome the selfishness of pollution and wastage that is threatening to irrevocably degrade the planet.

I do not expect the Catholic faith to change in its position on these issues.  But I did hope that the common cause of inter-faith communication and protection of the planet could be raised above, or held equal to, agendas that are less universal and less inclusive. 

The Pope’s message should, of course, be tailored to those of the Catholic faith, but three years ago it reached out to and indeed embraced those from other religions and secular traditions.  In 2008 it is beginning to sound more like there is no room for us at the Inn*.  Women, animals, and the wider environment may come in from the cold–so long as we accept the idea that the creator made a place for us in the basement, not in the living-room.

*”Inn” in the Bible being a translation of a word meaning “upper room”.  At the time of Jesus’ birth a house often had an upper floor for the people and a lower room in which animals were kept. 

In the United States approximately 10-16% of construction workers (1, 2, 3) are female–and groups within and oputside these industries have clealry states goals of increasing the particiation of women in skilled trades and management, and reducing obstacles for their participation in laboring roles. However, the most recent data suggests that, when newly hired, women are paid an average of 79% of the wage of a male worker. 

Perhaps they do not appear the this line up below because about half of these women participate in an administrative capacity, and that is not really “working” as compared to laboring, trades and management?  And As for how many women are employed by railways, I just couldn’t find out.  There are several associations for railroad women (1, 2, 3) but they do not state the demographic situation or any goals on relation to it.  In fact all I can find on this subject is historical, mainly in relation to the involvement of women in railroad professions during World War II.  By contrast, the interest (scholarly and popular) in womens’ contemporary involvement in the railways seems to be almost non-existent. 

This is the time of year where people start to bring up trivia, such as that the reindeer ostensibly pulling Santa’s sleigh would–if they have antlers–be female (or castrated males).  Bull reindeer, you see, shed their antlers before Christmas.  It is interesting that it matters.  Are Santa’s deer presumed to be male because they do physical labor, or on some weird assumption that only males have horns.  This is true of some species, but in most horned species both the male and female go equipped.  (And that would include common livestock like cows, sheep and goats of their horns were not surgically removed).I spend quite a lot of time on this blog questioning what people assume about gender.   But it is worth considering that although the meaning of gender beyond chromosomal and anatomical domain is disputed, gender itself is a categpory even broader than species.  That is, there are far more individual out there that are female, than that are human.  This is not to say that I have more in common with a female giraffe than a male human (although it may sometimes feel that way) but that the meaning of gender can be considered across species boundaries.

It is said that in technical terms, only humans have “gender” which implies a cultural meaning attached to perceived male-ness or female-ness.  Animals are described, in most scientific publications, as being of the male or male ’sex’ not ‘gender’.  But I have recently noticed a number of exceptions.  This may be simply because ’sex’ is a word that makes people uncomfortable because it is now used vastly more often to refer to copulation than to specify between male and female.

I would argue that referring to an animals “gender” is equally justifiable because animals are also treated differently, by their own species and others including our own, depending on whether they are male or female.  And this is not only for innate and unchanging biological reasons, but also due to what individuals learn during their lifetime–due to within and between species culture.  I would argue that more sentient species of animal have a basic concept of their own gender and that of other animals that goes beyond reflexive reproductive acts.

And animals are a diverse and shocking lot when viewed with an open mindm rather than through the lens of Disney-fied assumptions that plague even scientific endeavors.  Research focused for a long time on male combat, not female choice.  On aggression and not bonding and appeasement.  In the animal king/queen and drone-dom every  norm of femininity from size to nurturing role is reversed as a norm in some species, and by at least some individuals in every species.  Even if you hold animals do not have “gender” not every animal of a certain sex follows the life path typical for the species.  Some either do not want to, or chose not to breed, some are homosexual in their focus, some are poor or abusive parents, some fill the role in their community more typical of the other sex. In short, every ‘deviancy’ painted as unnatural in humans is found in other animals.

So by saying sex is more pervasive than species I am not say it is more rigid and standardised–quite the reverse.  Looking at the mouth brooder, the lilytrotter, the reindeer and the honeybee, it is in fact flexibility and diversity of sex roles that we see.

And p.s. to be perfectly honest, why are Santa’s reindeer shown with antlers?  I suspect it is because later days artists find that embellishment aesthetically pleasing, and no other reason.  After all, Santa doesn’t employ all that many fact checkers to protects his brand and trademarks from such misrepresentation.   (Although, if Santa is sensible the team are non-breeding girls and eunuchs rather than bulls exhausted after the rut or pregnant females.)