Tuesday, December 8, 2009
We are better at different things
A question that I want to ask is whether or not we think that creating a government that is autonomous of sex would be the best thing for our Country. MacKinninn defines sexuality and gender as political terms. Concrete medical research points out the biological differences in men and women. For one thing, men are much better at compartmentalizing emotions. Perhaps this is a reason that men tend to take the dominant position in our society. It is not necessarily a bad thing that men are better at this, and that women are worse, but it is a factor that would cause the genders to rule in a different way. I don't know that looking toward a political state that possesses an autonomy of gender would even make sense. Maybe we are put in our societal roles because that is what we are inherently better at. Men might just be inherently better rules, where women might just be inherently better nurturers. But I guess maybe we are in those roles because society says that it is so... Would creating an absolute autonomy of gender ever work in our society? Or would it fail?
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A couple thoughts . . .
ReplyDeleteTo say that there are biological differences between men and women does not entail social superiority in any way. Men are generally taller, heavier and more prone to heart disease than women. These are biological facts which require social interpretation. When we assume that these biological conditions entail a particular social order we make it difficult to criticize that order because responsibility for that order seems to be the product of nature rather than human decisions.
To be clear, MacKinnon never suggests that sexual difference should be ignored. Her argument against existing rape laws is that they ignore sexual difference by defining rape from an explicitly male perspective and then claiming that that is a neutral--natural?--perspective based on what normal intercourse involves. Her recommendation that rape laws be based on the victim's perspective of the crime is an attempt to explicitly acknowledge sexual difference rather than deny it. For more on this, see my response to Jim's post "Rape vs. Sex."
The aim is to produce legal structures that acknowledge all gender perspectives rather than restricting law to the expression of a certain group or class by pretending that the law has no gender specificity.