By Lauren Hermanus
I read (on a blog) that chicks and okes are different. I shuddered. But my shuddering was linguistically motivated. I like other colonially trained young ladies find the word, “chick”, inane. I find the invoked comparison of a female of the human species with a downy, speechless, flightless, tweeting little thing, odd. But, you know, cheeky mare, old cow, and the parochial favourite, bitch, women rouse a desire to compare us with animals. “Bitch” is interesting. It can also be used to refer to a man if he has been sufficiently stripped of those things we commonly associate with masculinity: agency; sexual prowess; opinions and a deep, firm and commanding voice.
Having recovered from my initial shock I must admit that some residual discomfort remained. I hear slogans chanted form the mouths of educated women, “feminism is dead!” My friends visit strip clubs where they watch other women straddle poles in uncomfortable looking panties because they are just as sexually expressive as men. Other friends of mine do not dream of gazing at poles but grinding their fun-parts up against them while they themselves are gazed at. It is a more traditional approach if you think about it. Men in the viewing seats; ladies on the auction block. A third contingent of my feminine friends positively push their male companions out the door and into the strip club with a lunch box, money for booze and strict instructions to get sexual gratification. It seems women are also different from each other. And whatever the difference between women and men, there is certainly no consensus as to what it is.
It must be said that those friends who hail the death of feminism — let us define it as attention to the question of sexual difference and the role that various answers has in shaping society — have not suffered the burden of their gender as many South Africans do. They have not, for example been raped in order to teach them whom they are allowed to love as some gay and lesbian men and women have. They have not been forced to have unprotected sex because they have no agency in the relationship. They have also not been in physically or emotionally abusive domestic relationships. They have, however, all walked down South African streets and feared being raped because they are women. Some have felt themselves on the fringes of a male-dominated workplace. And many have starved themselves; hurt their feet in torturous shoes and been called whores, sluts and slappers for any number of reasons, only some of which have anything to do with their sexual preferences. There are things it would seem as old as this old gal feminism herself.
Yes, men and women are different. This difference has a history as long as broader human story. Unlike the difference between bitches and dogs, for example, the difference between women and men is not natural. Yes, blah, we are all animals. Boys have penises et cetera. However, we are peculiar animals with language and political institutions and psychological norms and social norms and codes and laws and the need to attribute meaning to life and all it constituent areas. These various enterprises do not incorporate an external and essential idea of sexual difference from outside. Difference only becomes meaningful within these various areas in which words are used to give it meaning. Illustrations are in order.
We still, by and large, believe that women are the kinds of things that are attracted to men and that this should be taught and enforced. Many South Africans find the Civil Unions Act offensive. Here the definition of women within the law is at odds with that within our general social mores. Not mine! Let us be clear. Luckily the law has won this time. We also generally believe that women are the sorts of things at whom we are all entitled to look. Allow this slightly hyperbolic point for want of space: none of my friends watch men at strip clubs and almost all find the idea preposterous and even emasculating for the man on the pole. Sports Illustrated invites well-proportioned lasses to become the fodder for adolescent sexual awakening, and builders whistle even when we are covered in cumbersome winter garb. Sexual difference is a powerful thing.
There are cases where the difference between men and women needs to negated in the service of more important differences like, for example, between healthy consensual sex and rape. Our Constitutional Court made exactly this concession when it conceded that the sexual violation of men also constituted rape, after a lower court had said in no uncertain terms that sex is not about a penis “penetrating” a vagina. It seems a trivial thing, but I am sure that for the male victims of rape it is not. And for our society as a whole, it is not. It is not trivial when the definitions and rules in society change and allow new expressions of ourselves.
Both women and men participate in the norms that constrain us. Sometimes this is done with lots of room for choice. And sometimes we are unable to move and unaware of that fact. We are all socialised by various channels to believe that certain things are acceptable and others not. Even us left-leaning-pinko-liberal-free-the-panda-hummus-eating-wine-sipping-humanities-educated-individuals. Even we do not get our ideas from inside our skulls or from a higher and more perfect source than language, culture and all the other institutions for which no one signs up.
Here I approach my conclusion, arrived at from an admittedly oblique angle. In my informed and considered opinion, and (I’ll take it) speaking as a woman with no desire to grow a penis, feminism is a heterogeneous, interesting and vitally important discourse. Unlike some feminists, I do not believe that it only pertains to women. Feminism is a critical perspective from which the violence implicated in the way we understand the world in terms of sexual difference becomes visible. If language and culture and other institutions are the media through which difference becomes meaningful, and if these things change over time (which they do, sorry fundamentalists) then is it not better to actively engage in the process than to glibly dismiss the discussion and lose out on the opportunity to change the world?
There is feminism that I find to be intellectually limiting, overly-prescriptive and even offensive. There is feminism for porn fans and feminism for prudes. To dismiss hundreds of years of different women articulating that “different” perspective that can be collected under the banner of feminism is chauvinism at its worst. It is a pillar of sameness that refuses to tolerate a challenge from outside its smug self. I shave my legs and wear mascara and study in a field dominated by men. My experience is not the same as anyone else’s but it has much in common with various groups of individuals for complex and colourful reasons. I have many polysyllabic sentences yet to write on the subject. No one has to listen and similarly, no one needs to shut me up. Not one person I know who dismisses feminism with a fowl swoop over the dinner table has read any of what I consider to be intellectually respectable feminist writing (across disciplines) and tend to ignore the gender dimension of social problems. We have a president now in power at whose rape trial people chanted, “burn the bitch”. Why? That is all that we annoying feminists ask. “Why” upsets the apple cart. But I happen to value my right to “why” and encourage everyone out there to try it out.
Lauren Hermanus is a (graduate) scholar of philosophy and complexity theory.
Asserting ‘feminism is dead’ in this world, nevermind SA, betrays the level of cognitive damage suffered by the educated-liberated. You are not free to assert that ‘feminism is dead’. This view seems to take the issues of feminism and class apartheid, etc to be coterminous with national liberation. National liberation requires a practice of freedom (a practice denied it by its brand/version of colonialism), feminism is part of that practice of freedom. Then, feminism is not about body count, but it also is about body count. What I mean to ask is: how to bring women together? The economic situation will not necessitate this, in this instance it is the state and state violence. So, how to use and mend this abstract structure of ‘the state’? Lauren Hermanus, continue to write with, for and on behalf of all of us your far-flung sisters in Uganda, Iran and beyond. Thank you for your eloquence and your honesty.
I’ve just been reading up on the brain to try to understand adult ADHD (a generally male disorder). It is quite clear that, just like many other parts of our body, chicks, bokkies and vrouen have brains that are VERY different to us men. We have substantially different anatomies (thank GOD!) and that includes our brain, our thinking, our characters and our philosophies.
I then open M&G and see this blog and my mind just bloggles.
The weight of our brain is not an indication of our intelligence; Einstein had an extremely light brain. Some mornings after a heavy night, I feel like I have one of the heaviest brains. The difference in brain weight is however a sign of vastly different brain structures. Please then could someone explain to me how, when corrected for body weight, the female human brain is 10% lighter than the males. If you don’t correct for weight, it’s almost 30% lighter! Why do men have lighter frontal lobes, used in planning, but a bigger hippocampus, used in finding our way (I believe this is why women multitask and men NEVER get lost – LOL).
Continued in next post…
Continuation…
Added to this – Our differences are not just limited to the brain but also (amongst many other things) to our hormones which make us think and react very differently. There is some interesting new research on PMS and aggression but you don’t need any fancy scientific investigation to support the age old adage that men think with their B***. We all understand the big part testosterone plays in men’s social responses.
Men and women are different, we are constructed to look different and our brains are hard wired to think differently. What then of our different philosophies?
Perhaps it’s all to do with evolution. Maybe at some deeper psychological level, females want to rear offspring from the best donor available, while men need to get their sperm into as many recipients as possible (mind you, us men probably don’t have a deeper psychological level! It’s all just the size of the …, or some other delightfully crude thought).
People are different full stop. What bothers me most about gender cliches is that although they are true in many, even most cases, there so many cases of individiuals for whom they are not true, and this therebye negates their inclusion into the gender according to our societies’ ridiculous standards. Any girl who hates playing with dolls, likes blue, wants to play in the mud, or isn’t mad about boys lives life as a kind of paraiah and freak. The smae goes for guys too. Really we all have a spectrum of characteristics and who we are is incredibly fluid.
“… with a fowl swoop over the dinner table..” Another animal metaphor?
There is power in ‘Why?’
Nice, thank you Lauren.
First, I must apologise for the ‘fowl’ fell swoop. One of those automated mistakes I picked up after submitting the blog, which I assumed was not being published after some time elapsed between submission and its appearance in the world and so did not bother to correct. But yes, haha, it is amusing and after I cringed, I laughed. In answer to concerns that this blog is boggling, I have some remarks. I have no qualm with biological, physiological and psychological descriptions that provide generalisations of characteristics that render men and women distinct. Yes, I acknowledge, in fact, I insist that men and women are different. However, in order to contextualise my position some underlying assumptions should be unearthed. Firstly, from an ethical standpoint, certain descriptions often from natural sciences but not exclusively so, have resulted in incorrect understandings of differences between men and women that have shaped the world. The history of madness, for example, is one in which homosexuality was treated with electroshock therapy. So this is my first point of departure, understanding, knowledge, abstract things all have material or concrete effects in the world. These effects can often be devastating. This is a piece about sexual difference, but I am interested in all differences. I do not think men are evil. I believe that general descriptions can be given.
However, here is the point that is crucial to understanding my argument. I do not believe in an objective reality to which human beings have access without any form
of mediation. As soon as something is meaningful then it is interpolated in a web of language, culture and various institutions and conventions in society. This position is informed by my philosophical education. There is a gap between the world and how we understand the world. No discourse academic or otherwise can give an absolute and complete description of reality. Without even taking subjective, that is individual, quirks, idiosyncrasies, histories and experiences into account when considering the ‘objectivity’ of a description, the inter-subjective forms of mediation mentioned above are always already at work. But now I attempt to summarise the whole history of philosophy and that requires more space than a comment.
And so boggled reader, I think we miss each other. I appreciate your point that physical differences, like brain size, produce higher level differences that are not necessarily good or bad. If that is your point, I agree. My point is that differences on different levels, for example biological differences and economic differences are not reducible to one another. The point is that in a country in which female physical differences, which I do not disparage, render women vulnerable to violence such as domestic abuse, rape and workplace discrimination because biological differences are understood to explain and justify a specific treatment of women in society. As for biological clocks and the like, well, maybe. How we value the desire to have children and raise them is not biological but social. All questions of value are social.
I agree with Po. Maybe it’s because I am a “normal”, heterosexual, very feminine-looking, happily-married (no kids) woman who never had dolls, loved blue and played with toy animals and cars, in the sand and mud, and climbed trees. I hate gender stereotyping! Be who you really are, regardless of your gender.
I rather like the image of some cute chicks making a ‘fowl swoop over the dinner table’.
i am shelving this one for future reference. Thank you very much and the follow up was icing on the cake. Best.