Gender EvolutionHow did the roles of men and women in society change?
Before the onset of the XXI century it seemedthat in the world of the future only technologies will evolve, but with its transformation into the world of the present, it turned out that it is far from perfect. Even after seeing the sixth iPhone, we still continue to dress the boys in blue, and girls in pink, and when they grow up - wait for them to be “male” and “female” actions. Nevertheless, in society, the new round went a slow but sure process of revising the established standards and connections - it turned out that it was no less interesting to follow him than the adventures of the Higgs boson. We talk a lot about the perception of physicality, the search for harmony with ourselves, as well as how important it is for our common comfort to learn to accept and love the diversity and uniqueness of people in a multicultural global reality. However, this process is impossible without an understanding of how the existing relationship models took shape, how the notions of “right” or “traditional” were fixed in our minds and why changes are inevitable. We start a big conversation about gender roles - social perception of gender - and what is happening in the modern world with the concepts of "man" and "woman".
Text: Alice Taiga Photo: Vera Mishurina
Stay in my shoes: How gender roles work
To understand how strongly our behavior is dictated by gender roles, it is enough to analyze the day in the life of a modern person. If, of course, you do not live in a retreat, then others, guided by the understandable and learned experience of the many thousands of years of patriarchy, most likely expect you to be included in the generally accepted system of values and concepts. A decisive son and an attentive daughter, a disciplined husband and a calm wife, an authoritative father and an affectionate mother, an initiative subordinate and understanding boss - we unconsciously integrate into this coordinate system so as not to be strangers among our own.
The gender roles are based on the comedy and tragedy drama. Recall the episode of "Friends" about a male nanny: everyone becomes more comfortable when a girl becomes a nanny, and not the sentimental and often crying boy Sandy with the perfect education and amazing characteristics. Or remember what happens to Betty Draper in Mad Men when a single mother comes to the peace-loving village of housewives, who divorced her husband, works a lot and brings up the children herself.
We call unbalanced men “hysterical” behind our eyes, and decisive girls with principles called “chicks with eggs,” compete in a sense of humor using gender stereotypes, and deafeningly laugh at the same jokes of Barney Stinson or Michael Scott. In our speech, we constantly choose emotionally colored and far from gender neutral descriptions of ourselves, surrounding people and phenomena, and it is these descriptions that demonstrate and reinforce the perception of a particular sex.
Who benefited from shifting gender roles
We live in an era of more active involvement of men in family affairs and the mass release of women into the public space, and women's images into the cultural one. It seems that one can speak of “new” gender roles, if the word “new” was not one of the most dangerous, often used and uncertain. A series about new relationships, a site about new women, round tables about new men is, first of all, a commercial proposal, and the discrete memory of a man in the 21st century rarely provides an opportunity to make sure that the “new” really never existed before. Both sexes now, as before, are not spared from putting pressure on gender roles, and in addition to it, there is a constant pressure of success stereotypes. If an archetypal wife at the plate turns into a strong woman, and a conditional wolf on Wall Street can rely on working for less money and socializing with her family, both of them will be under pressure from the cultural dominant of personal success, self-realization or inner harmony - no less authoritarian than the previous division of the functional M and J.
No publicly acceptable privacy? Then, maybe, you have success in your work. And if not, then why do you live? Who do you want to be in five years? Choose something and follow the dream! Several times a day we go through such painful dialogues with ourselves or others and learn the “correct” answers so well that we begin to believe in them ourselves. Gender roles are constructed and consolidated through stylized repetition of actions, Judith Butler writes about this in the book "Gender Trouble". Repetition creates repression, and the habit claims the first nature. At the beginning of the XXI century, 3-year-old children without hesitation answer the questions about gender and gender behavior in a standard and expected way.
Recall the gender fuck that Conchita Wurst showed: there were beardy women, travesty shows, and cross-dressing on the stage in front of the crowd, but the appearance of such a person on the stage of an old-fashioned competition of a non-existent united Europe became number one for the whole week. Ask any specialist from advertising: Conchita in the modern world can only sell news about itself (as news about any atypical behaviors are sold), but cannot sell any goods, even its singing, for more than one season. In marketing, they do not pay money for originality, but pay for repeating a friend. Scenarios for global sitcoms and environmentally friendly gluten-free bars for residents of a small city are produced for target audiences with a fair certainty that those who consider themselves like everyone else and those who consider themselves special can be equally easy to calculate and measure - not by the heads, so on tags and likes.
Can a gender role be a free choice?
A century before, Butler Jung talked about the presence of Animus and Anima in each person and insisted on an archetypal attitude towards male and female, in which there was much more social pressure than biology. And although in some societies the paradigm of life within the gender roles of a male earner and a female keeper fades into the background, it is quickly replaced by the social demands of self-realization and perfect time management. In an era of informational transparency, quick decisions and a ready response with the motivation of every life choice are often required - from attitude to family and profession to social role and consumption.
Achievements, age and lifestyle - indicators that measure us society
In life, under the slogan "Just Do It", reflection has not the highest productivity, and universal recommendations about behavior within the framework of the binary opposition are becoming harder to try on. Lifestyle editions publish seemingly opposing in installation, but equally hysterical intonation messages range from "It is time to settle down and find the right person" to "Why I do not want to have children and have that right." This reflection can be gender-colored or not, but it contains fears and worries about life achievements, age and lifestyle - indicators that society measures us and ourselves in crisis situations. "How to have everything and be yourself" or "Why the main things in life should be started up to 30 years old." Sounds familiar?
How many genders are there
Feminism of the second wave received a theoretical backup in 1949 in one of the main books on the women's issue "Second floor" by Simone de Beauvoir. The book is filled not only with interesting biological and historical references about the economic and social mechanisms of oppression of the second sex, but also criticized the dominant philosophical systems: Marxism, capitalism and psychoanalysis. In the last part of the book, de Beauvoir formulated a vector that women can try to follow in order to become co-creators of history, and not just act within the framework of given systems. 65 years later, Australia officially recognized the existence of a neutral third sex, and among the nearly billion people of India since ancient times there are about 6 million people living outside the binary gender system. In the media field, discussions about the atypical behavior of children associated with hormonal changes or upbringing within a gender-unsuitable gender role do not cease, and these discussions are equally taking place on the territory of biology, psychology, sociology and politics. The vocabulary of sociologists, philosophers and biologists over the past decades has been replenished with the carefully studied notions of transgender, postgenderism, intersexuality and transhumanism, but let's be fair, this is not some kind of new sexuality, but long-awaited terms for sexuality repressed and depressed. It is enough to read the ancient Indian epos or to read the fairy tales of the Indians to find all the concepts of gender roles described above: the fragility of sex and its social representation has always existed, but did not receive a scientific language, and therefore was ignored by the majority. Cloning, birth control, child-free movement, hormonal pills from pregnancy and euthanasia raise scientific questions about who is responsible for the emergence and cessation of human life. But at the same time, the 23-year-old girl’s campaign to raise money for an abortion on Kickstarter shows how real the mass public discussion is at the same time: a private request on the Internet turns into harassment and the flow of hateful and intolerant remarks. With all the visible changes, there are only two gender roles in the minds of the majority, and there is no consensus on whether such a division is true, in the near future. The discussion of feminists with apologists of the patriarchal structure does not look like a war of the worlds, but as a conversation in different languages with disjoint arguments. Whether it was once in the history of mankind in a different way - the story in which, after the winners copied it a hundred times, only a few obvious answers to questions about human self-determination still can tell.
Why are gender roles a policy area?
In the already mentioned book The Second Sex, which even those who are very far from feminism will avidly read, Simone de Beauvoir draws a convincing history of the objectification of a woman, concluding that "not the inferiority of a woman determined her insignificant role in history, but an insignificant role in stories doomed her to inferiority. " There is no point in repeating or interpreting her judgments: the book is simply and ingeniously written and filled with gender stereotypes throughout human history performed by key historical figures. In the quotations cited in The Second Field, Pythagoras, Aristotle, and the ideologists of the USSR, despite the 2500 years of history separating them, are equally far from the ideas of gender equality and changes in the ruling order. De Beauvoir clearly and succinctly explains the Eurocentric world of the colonizer, which is based on domination and suppression: in this role at various times were the Greeks and Romans, militant Christians and Enlightenment activists, apologists of the theory of evolution and the tyrants of empires.
The logic of tyranny is traced not only in relation to women, but also in respect of otherness as such, as a result of which we have a linear history of beauty or a one-sided political history of the world, in which the diversity of ethnic groups and cultures does not appear. The French philosopher Franz Fanon spoke at length in his research on how colonization distorted the identity and social systems that were unusual for white people and imposed their own authoritarian standards through violence. Indeed, in a supermarket of modern ideas, the history and tradition of non-dominant peoples is the missing regiment or the farthest regiment, depending on the popularity of the supermarket.
But in the studies of social anthropologists there is evidence that there were examples of systems in the world without gender domination, and matriarchs cannot be the antonym of patriarchy. There are hundreds of evidences in the abrupt information about lost civilizations and wild tribes, traces of which are so hard to find in the context of modern culture, that there was another scenario of relations in society: equality and minority of gender roles.
What civilized nations give way to wild
Most historians agree that the Paleolithic did not give men an advantage over women. Physical strength was not the deciding factor: many women could participate in the hunt if they wanted to, the skeletons show the development of the same body parts and similar muscular activity with different sizes and weights. Plus, the women provided two main conditions for the survival of the tribe: the continuation of the clan and the constant provision of food to the tribe - unlike hunting, in which success depended on chance, gathering was a regular and stable source of strength for the whole community. The families were neither nuclear nor patriarchal, but consisted of cooperating clans that did not compete with each other and did not compete for limited resources. The deterioration of the climate situation put the first people in a situation of need for survival - the exit was the domestication of wild animals and agriculture.
The taming of animals and violence against nature made it permissible and violence in the clans
Around this time, according to Engels, there was a destruction of the balance between the sexes and the emergence of predetermined gender roles. Pregnant and lactating women could not risk the health of unborn and young children on the field or in contact with wild animals and gave priority to men, sharing zones of influence. Taming animals and violence against nature made violence in clans permissible. Women at the same time could be subjects of power, but within the framework of marriage or regency with a minor heir in no civilization of the world, the throne was not granted to a woman by default, and the personal desire for power was a decisive factor.
How did gender roles work in depressed cultures?
The relative freedom was different cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt: in ancient Egypt, according to the descriptions of Herodotus, women could dispose of property and trade. Residents of ancient Persia participated in the war, received benefits for the birth of a child, and also had the right to live in partnership with a man without marriage and to conduct religious ceremonies. One of the most famous female commanders (not the only one) was Pantheus Arteshbod, the wife of a military leader and an outstanding warrior herself. The independence of the Persian women is emphasized in the fantasy saga "The Game of Thrones" - the only female character-warrior hails from the Middle East. While Khalisi collects troops under his banner and performs in open battle, the other female characters influence power indirectly through men playing cards of their wife / bride / mistress roles (Cersei, Melisandre, Sans, Margheri) or as a criminal and warrior disguised as men's dress (Arya, Brienna).
If you go back to Sumerian mythology, the Akkadian goddess Ishtar not only personified the dual nature of love and war, but also could turn men into women and patronize prostitutes, virgin heterosexuals and homosexuals at the same time. With the spread of Hellenism, the unique in social relations, the ancient Persian system was subordinated to the vertical of ancient colonialism. The ancient Greek philosophers of the Athenian school clearly spoke about gender roles, and Aristotle's disciple, Alexander of Macedon, transferred the maxims of his teacher to the boundless zone of his influence.
Opposition to the Athenian approach could be spartan, if Sparta had not suffered a political defeat - contrary to stereotypes, the position of women there was much better than in Athenian democracy. Tears and temperament in the warriors of Sparta were considered a sign of excitement and indifference to their clan and land, and women rightfully disposed of life in the city, property and security, freely replacing men in times of hostilities, could divorce and not lose at the same time and from childhood developed physical force The late Roman civilization at a later stage was much less patriarchal than the ancient Greek: women were allowed to form their education and their children, thereby increasing their sphere of influence, in addition to owning land and the ability to participate in legal proceedings.
In parallel with antiquity in the Mediterranean and the emergence of monotheistic religions, wild tribes were scattered throughout the world with a variety of pagan beliefs and a flexible system of social roles. In Southeast Asia and Africa, Latin America and Siberia, among the North American Indians and Australian Aborigines there were wild tribes, not creating a material culture, but living in the present without a trace and dissolving in customs and rituals. So, pre-Confucian China was a shamanist — most of the shamans were women. About Zulu rites for sex change and Indian imitations of menstruation among men no one suspected in Europe before the era of great geographical discoveries, they are now known to very few people except anthropologists. Многие раннехристианские пророки были аскетами и не акцентировали внимание на поле и социальных ролях, пытаясь отойти от предписаний и правил жизни, вели затворнический образ жизни.
Information about these experiences must be fished out of a history that has been rewritten many times: early Christian teachings, contrary to the patriarchal values of a single church, were excluded and destroyed at closed church councils of 4-7 centuries; Many of the remaining testimonies about the preaching of Christ and the life of the apostles were not included in the biblical canon and exist as supporting texts and additional testimonies — far less popular apocrypha. The Acts of Paul and Thecla were the very apocrypha. They talk about the disciple of the Apostle Paul Föckle, who acted beyond what was prescribed to women, actively preached and was a prominent missionary. And although Paul and Thekla appear in the Acts as equal persons, there are no women among the 12 apostles, despite the number of martyrs and preachers in early Christianity. It was this tendency that the suffragegists tried to break at the end of the 19th century, when they offered their perusal of the Old and New Testaments.
Why the expansion of knowledge about the world has not changed the system of division into men and women
The great geographical discoveries made with European culture the same as the development of the plow and the taming of wild nature: violence against tribes from another ecosystem turned the carriers of European culture into rapists in their own society and families. Women who took an active part in the management of a family affair or city during the times of the colonial wars ceased to have influence as soon as the men returned from long journeys with wealth, obtained by deception and the destruction of their own kind. A huge number of cultures were physically exterminated, others were modified by Christian preachers. In the rare notes of traveling orders in America or Africa, one can notice sensitivity and interest in the carriers of ideas in which there is no place for gender stereotypes and the struggle for power.
Until the middle of the XVIII century, women are perceived as a weak variation of a man with a clitoris instead of a penis and a uterus instead of a developed scrotum.
In his book "Making Sex", the historian and sexologist Thomas Lacker connects the emergence of the first empires with the beginning of the downfall of femininity to underdeveloped masculinity. He uses medical reference books and treatises of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, which try to scientifically explain the world around - and I must say, their attempts do not withstand criticism: until the middle of the XVIII century, women were perceived as a weak variation of a man with a clitoris instead of a developed penis and a womb instead of a developed scrotum . In the European territory, already in the Late Renaissance, all types of non-reproductive sex were banned and atypical gender behavior was prosecuted.
The transition to urban culture creates in England and France, and then in other countries (whether Protestant or Catholic), the institution of marriage, which literally translates as "shelter" and introduces a woman into submission from her father to marriage and her husband after. And the Dutch legislative system, working with Roman law, automatically transfers social stereotypes from metropolitan areas to colonies, spreading atypical social relations in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, which were not there before.
How art compensates for gender injustice
At the same time, theater and masquerade traditions have a huge influence in big cities. In London, Paris and Madrid, baroque spectacles disguise social tension with a recurring motif of dressing up as the main conflict. In Shakespeare and Tirso de Molina, in Lope de Vega and Calderon, the change of social and gender roles is the same detente in which heroes decide their fantasies and dreams unfulfilled in the patriarchal society: many marriages in XVII century comedies become possible only because the in the vice of the system, the heroes are revealed from their true side in the atypical roles of servants and gentlemen, men and women.
The last significant breakthrough in the definition of gender roles was undertaken in the middle of the XIX century with the advent of modern urban culture and industrialization, followed by the division of labor and the tremendous competition of people of different origin in a hostile environment. Darwin’s theory of the origin of species will adapt to the patriarchal paradigm of social Darwinism, in which the fittest survive, and to Darwin’s own writings, which have remarks on atypical gender behavior in nature and on the diversity of sexual relationships of different species (albeit without conclusions) distorting and selective approach will be applied.
At the end of the 19th century, Great Britain, the main and strongest empire, followed the whole of Europe by canonizing the role of a woman in Coventry Patmor’s poem Angel in the House, which he dedicated to his virtuous wife, and John Everett Milles would draw her idealized portrait. At about the same time in this city, Jack the Ripper brutally murdered a huge number of London prostitutes who had been humiliated and raped by the police for decades for sexually transmitted diseases, and Oscar Wilde would undermine his health in prison on charges of sodomy. Reactionary laws and private histories show that even now women’s images in culture mask, but do not change the state of things. Two world wars and three waves of feminism were not enough for the system to stop reproducing itself: gender stereotypes in 2014 prevent not only taking the wife’s last name after marriage, but also calculating their strength in their careers and earnings when they meet with the “glass ceiling”.
Are gender stereotypes alive?
If it seems that the strength and influence of gender stereotypes have weakened over time, conduct an experiment. Open the dictionary of Dahl's proverbs, collected by the middle of the XIX century, and then read the reader's comments to popular materials on your favorite site. "Hubby at least with a cam, but for her husband's head I do not sit orphaned." "Wife not to beat - and not to be lovely." "Baba road - from the stove to the threshold." "The hair is long, but the mind is short." "The dog is smarter than a woman: it does not bark at the owner." "The chicken is not a bird, and the woman is not a man." "Where the devil does not dare, there will send a woman". Most of them we no longer use, but their meaning is firmly seated in the collective unconscious and crawls into the light at every opportunity.
Dialogues between men and women on sensitive issues in forums or in comments are built most often on the basis of repeatedly lost gender roles. These scripts exposed John Mani and Robert Stoller, John Gray tried to popularize and explain them in "Men from Mars, Women from Venus", the topic of gender constantly sounds in modern art and news, but more often news even on problem sites like Jezebel or PolicyMic are calculated on the distribution of viral content, reproduce ready-made meanings and rarely open their eyes to the other side of the problem.
Why is gender the last and foremost stronghold of tradition?
The problem of gender is inscribed in the spectrum of modern existential and economic problems that our unstable, overconsuming and competitive society is immersed in. Ethnically mixed marriages and migration change the demographic composition of seemingly stable communities: whether it is possible to call European Hong Kong and Asian Marseille and whether it is right to use Europe and Asia in the 21st century correctly is still a question. Alternative sources of income and the modern economy with contract work and bitcoins modify labor relations. But the books on prosperity and life hacking never cease to be bestsellers, only now the advice of Dale Carnegie gives way to instructive biographies of techno magnates. At the same time, the ideal of a communist future and the American dream seem equally unattainable as a strategy for the global community. One discredited inefficient regimes with double standards, the other creates destructive competition and objectively cannot stop the next economic crisis. And if with political ideologies or professional choice people can still risk introducing these systems to the outside, then gender, one of the most basic, intimate and constant constants, seems to be the last link between this man and this woman with the idea of man in general.
Prejudice against women making a career exists regardless of what gender the subject assesses.
The experiment on the labor characteristics of transgender people talks a great deal about the verdicts that have been prepared in advance by most of us in relation to both sexes and their acceptable behavior. Biological woman, having performed a sex change operation, is in a comfortable and almost invulnerable position. But the "man", "who became" a woman, immediately raises doubts about professionalism and receives a few humiliating comments about his work. Another study shows that prejudice against women making a career exists regardless of what gender a person evaluates them. Comments addressed to men contain a lot of constructive criticism and positive comments about the need to work on themselves, comments to women always have an emotional and tough evaluative tinge with the transition to personality. Gender science specialist Londa Schibinger speaks about the general tendency of young children to make choices, correlating with the reaction of the environment: in children, according to her impressions, parents still encourage different qualities and inclinations. Part of her books explain the division into male and female professions and answer including the question “why there were no great women scientists” or just one of the most frequently asked questions “why there are no great women artists”, which at one time Linda Nochlin answered well. This, however, does not negate the fact that in some societies the issue of gender roles is obviously not so acute (for example, Scandinavia) and the existence of women in power, and men in the family, as well as a wide palette of LGBTI relations, do not need additional argumentation there .
Can the modern family save us from the trap of gender roles
As Time scares and calms us at the same time, there is no such thing as a typical family. Indeed, if the number of divorced parents with joint custody, separated spouses and same-sex couples raising children, reaches significant percentages, it is strange and illogical to be programmed for gender roles that cannot be realized in life. Most likely, the man in the sling and the woman working on maternity leave is not the main one, and certainly not the last result of the changing social roles. But, given how late the different forms of life in the family and society get their names (some appeared in the language a couple of decades ago), one can only be affirmed that the most unhurried mutations occur with gender roles. A complete rejection of them is at the same distance as the construction of a new economic system or a hyper-intensive global cataclysm: now no expert will take the responsibility to predict the exact shelf life of the current state of affairs.
In addition, abandoning the usual gender roles, we have to restructure the attitude to daily habits, friends and relatives, change very funny sexist jokes to some other not worse, come up with a new cinema without the usual genres, characters and stories, voluntarily abandon the majority gender-oriented products and boycott work that we get paid unevenly. We will have to forget about going to a psychoanalyst who read Freud's theories, and allow the possibility that hormone therapy and body experiments will become common practice after years of public resistance. Utopian consciousness completes such a scenario that is not similar to modernity, in which the floor can be changed almost as often as the hairstyle, professions - like a hobby, partners - like books at the head, and even these books at the head will have to write about something else and another language to be interesting to us in our new, untapped new roles.