But first, let us first remind ourselves of the general forms the
problem of gender takes. Some
of these are as follows:
gender inequality;
gender conflict;
the subjection of women in almost all spheres of public and private
life;
hegemonic relationship dynamics;
hegemonic family structures;
hostility to sexual diversity;
the mistreatment of people who are not biologically male or female,
such as intersex people;
the mistreatment of people who do not conform to masculine or
feminine gender expectations, the consequences of which include
exclusion, alienation, mental health problems and suicide;
and the abomination that is rape, among others.
The myth we will look at today is this: that the problems of
gender are traditional – and that as societies progress to become
more enlightened and modern, they overcome these problems.
But before we begin, here is a cute bear for no particular reason.
Now then. As with “nature”, there are loaded concepts involved
here. Terms like “traditional”, “progress” and “modern”
are stacked to the sky with baggage to declare. But at their most
literal, they together imply something very simple – indeed, that
is their problem. They imply a straight line. A straight and singular
path of development, on which human societies advance through time,
and on which the further they travel, the smarter, wiser, fairer, and
just generally better they become.
At first glance that may sound accurate enough. We are, perhaps,
better off considering ourselves “elderly” in our 80s, and not in
our 20s as a few thousand years ago. A lot of us have access to
things like advanced medicines, traffic lights, washing machines,
solar panels and video games now, making our lives safer, easier and
more enjoyable than the lives of our ancestors who did not. There
are a few irritations unique to our time as well – say, the
escalating ecological disintegration of our planet, and the triumph
of a greedy, materialistic, exploitative and violent market
fundamentalism – but if we ignore minor things like that, the
general impression that as the centuries have elapsed, the experience
of human life has, on the whole, improved.
And so the narrative goes for gender. A society where there is less
rape is more modern than one where there is more rape. A
society where men and women both have opportunities to participate in
political life is more advanced than one whose national
cabinet is a masculinised lair of misogyny. A society which grants
equal legal recognition to diverse forms of the family is more
progressive than traditional societies where you get
arrested for living with someone of the other sex without being
married, or beaten up by religious police for holding hands. Where is
the problem?
Well, consider statements like these.
“Those people still treat
women like chattel.”
“Why is this medieval
law still in place in the twenty-first century?”
“That country is stuck in a time
warp.”
I have emphasised the temporal references in these statements. As
examples they are abstract, but still typical of what you find in
serious news, commentary, or roundtable discussions on the gender
problems at issue. I have heard this sort of language even from the
most intelligent and courageous of people, whose credentials and
ethical integrity in the struggle against gender are beyond reproach.
But something about that phrasing still makes me feel ill.
History is Not a Blob
The immediate problem is this. If
we recall, that gender and its problems have no
convincing basis in nature;
that they are at once so
harmful to human individuals and societies,
yet at once so prevalent; that things like rape, the subjection of
women, and the persecution of sexual diversity can only be properly
called abominations;
then we must conclude that they
are as abominable at any time in the past as they are now.
That
is to say, a place does not still
treat women like chattel; if it ever
did it was already in violation of the universe. A law that forbids
cross-dressing or cohabitation without marriage, or punishes rape
victims, is not medieval,
nor does existing in the twenty-first
century
make it worse than in any other, because it is already infinitely
offensive to life
regardless of when it exists or existed, and it always has been, and
it always will be. A country which mutilates children's genitals, or
where political and military life is either the preserve of men or
imposed through conscription, is not stuck in a time
warp
so much as stuck outside
of time.
We are talking about things that should never
have been able to exist.
Do not worry, however, if you were not convinced by the “gender is
not natural” conjecture and cannot relate to this. There are more
than enough empirical reasons alone to suspect this purported
relationship between gender and time.
The basic problem is that as the “gender is natural” myth is
based on bad science, this “gender is traditional” mirage takes
shape from a lousy approach to history. At its core, it is selective
reductionism. That is, it grossly simplifies, and thus misrepresents,
both the past and the present – and in so doing reduces the vast
and colourful heritage of humankind on Earth to a singular, writhing,
amorphous, stern and remorselessly violent blob of authoritarian
patriarchy.
Lousy history. The first thing you should notice when you look at the
past is that it is in fact huge. The second thing should be that we
know so little about most of it – both because of the limits of our
records, especially for societies which did not write or whose
artefacts were made of perishable materials, and because we are such
masters of confirmation bias (i.e. seeing what we want to see) and of
doctoring our pictures of the past
to suit our values, interests and arrogances in the present. But even
from what remains, we can observe that, although yes, almost every
society has a sorry history of gendered repressions and atrocities,
these were very far from uniform. Examine the history of any society
and it will be seen that there are times when they were better on
gender, and times when they were worse; and that these fluctuations
were driven not by the turning of the clock, but by the bitterest of
confrontations of changing interests, changing values, and struggling currents of kindness and cruelty.
To forget this complexity is not
only sloppy but dangerous. If instead we feed the reductionist (and
often essentialist)
blob of gendered horror, it then explodes back on the history and
splatters all over our collective consciousness. Its embodied
assumptions and prejudices seep through the gaps in our knowledge,
saturating them with the illusion that the past was just generally,
with only half-mythic exceptions, a time when gender inequality,
conflict, and regulated conformity to rigid social roles were
ordinary. We re-interpret, reject, ignore or simply forget any
records even potentially contradicting that. And in doing so, we
poison the study of history, spiking it with the gendered
contaminants of life today just as the nationalists spin their past
atrocities into glorious acts of heroism, and the religious
fundamentalists portray their own faiths as intrinsically peaceful
and others' as incorrigibly bloody.
And now the converse: the selective reduction of the present. While
the “gender is traditional” narrative portrays tradition as a
singular gendered amoeba, it portrays the present in contrast as a
radiant, coruscating triumph of education, technology, and liberal
values. These, the narrative goes, have equipped us to smash the
shackles of gender subjection like never before, breaking free of
tradition's restrictive, rapacious morass, and raising our arms to
embrace a sunlit present which, as far as gender is concerned, is
freer, safer and more tolerant than any time in our history.
The actual present is as follows. Rape, and rape culture, infest
almost every society in the world, while politicians, moral
authorities, the police, the courts, and social services in even the
richest and most liberal countries remain comprehensively inept at
stopping it or participate to sustain it. Men still dominate the
political, military, academic and sporting landscapes of virtually
all countries – on the one hand, particularly in the military, they
may be forced by law to become killing machines and die for miserable
causes because they happen to be men, while women find their paths to
these fields obstructed, inundated with ridicule, or
straightforwardly blocked. Homosexuality is punished by law in almost
half the world, is discriminated against in virtually all of it, and
in a dozen countries faces the death penalty. Children are still
segregated by sex in many schools, and treated differently in all
aspects of life on the basis of whether they are boys or
girls. So rarely can men and women, girls and boys, interact with
each other free from the influence of visible or invisible rules
around how they are supposed to relate, or what they should or should
not express to each other. Humanity drowns in a sea of overlapping
gendered pandemics – domestic violence, emotional abuse, sexual
slavery, sexual apartheid, female infanticide, “honour” killings,
“morality” police, gender-related mental health problems and
suicides, bride kidnappings, human trafficking, genital mutilation,
unequal laws and wages and sizes of meals and recognition of evidence
in court, hegemonic and arbitrary body image standards, failed
relationships, child custody battles, and cultural media saturated to
bursting with the same gendered tropes, ugly stereotypes and
male-female relationship dynamics repeated over and over again.
But what is the present's most extraordinary characteristic of all?
It is that these impossibilities, this caterwauling rampage of a
thousand abominations, is allowed to fade into the background noise
of social and political life: to the ticker-tape headlines, the
corners of the inner pages of newspapers, and the protests of people
whom the mainstream tells to just calm down, and asks: can't you see
that we are a modern society now, where men and women are more
equal than ever before? Would you prefer to live back in [arbitrary
period], when [stereotyped culture] used to punish people like you
with [horrible atrocity]? Can't you stop making a big deal about
nothing? When are you going to just, you know, calm down?
An Earth with nothing on it might be an improvement over that. Yet
that is what we call democracy, enlightenment,
modernity, and liberal bloody values.
Let's look up some actual history. Are men, women, and diverse
individuals and families closer to equality under Putin's Russia than
they were under the less maniacal phases of the USSR, or even the
Tsarist period? What if we apply that question specifically to, say,
Chechnya? Go and look up what Ramzan Kadyrov has done to it as far as
gendered repression is concerned, in the present, and try
imagining what could make a society more gender-heinous without it
driving you to a nervous breakdown. Do homosexuals and others with
non-heteronormative sexual identities or orientations live in safer,
more inclusive conditions in Uganda, Nigeria, Belize or Malaysia
today, or did they in the centuries before British imperialism injected their
societies with fear of sexuality and of the sexually different? What
of all the other lands transformed and civilisationally butchered by
European colonialism, such as in Francophone North Africa, Southeast
Asia, the Caribbean or the Pacific Islands? Were the women of
Afghanistan freer under the Taliban in 2000,
or the monarchy in the 1920s? What about gendered repression in that
artificial construct called Iraq, say in areas currently controlled
by ISIS, compared with under the Abbasids or the Ottomans? And what
of the rigorous traditions of women in combat, such as in the Kingdom
of Dahomey, or the Kurdish Peshmerga, or the ancient Amazons – how
do these compare with the masculinisation of armed power in most
nations today?
None of this is to suggest that even the superior examples in all
these comparisons had a gender record better than downright
deplorable. What it makes quite clear, however, is that societies do
not necessarily get better at gender over time and can just as
easily, rapidly, and unexpectedly get much, much worse. And they can
do so, moreover, while wearing all the trappings of modernisation.
It also enables us to look at the aforementioned gender
deplorableness through the ages in a more suitable light. Too often,
we accept them as simply how we were: those timeless cultural images
seared into our minds, of dominant men and submissive women; of women
as spoils of war; of witch-hunts; or those pseudo-scientific dogmas
which once portrayed women as lacking in mental faculties, taken for
granted as though authoritative fact, and used to justify denying
them property, the vote, or participation in political, social or
economic life. We must recognise that these were not so much reality,
as broken reality. Not
intrinsic to us, but chosen.
We must look upon this past with faces lined not with stone, but
torrential tears of shame, and hold our ancestors responsible for
what we can only recognise as disgraces, disgraces of
incomprehensible magnitude, and disgraces as elementally odious for
being carried out then as they would be if they happened right now.
One final, crucial oversight of the “gender is traditional” myth is
that it ignores the diversity within all societies. In any society, in
all times and places since gender appeared amidst us, there would
have been those suspicious of it, and critical of it, just as there
are now – and just as there remain in every society today
individuals as bloodthirstily sexist or heteronormative as at any
time before. For conversely, even in the most tolerant and
gender-equitable eras, there seem always to have been the haters, the
zealots, the control-freaks attempting to reawaken the abomination of
gender from its dreadful slumber; and too often they have succeeded –
perhaps, as is usual, with the sponsorship of self-regarding
political or business interests. But even when the abomination's
whispers clouded the minds of masses into hysteria, to set loose the
most utterly appalling gendered atrocities – from Nanjing to the former Yugoslavia,
from Dhaka to the
eastern Congo – there were always the dissidents, the activists,
those who hurtled through the shadows or stood tall in defiance to
save as many people as they could, who said no to corrupt authority,
who told the majority it was wrong; those who put their lives, or far
more, on the line to roar the gendered horror back to the pit. And
when societies recovered to relative sanity – when the demons of
gender receded – it was the courage and sacrifice of people like
those, not some purported long-term trajectory of progress, to which
those societies owed their gratitude.
It is always important to understand things in the context of the
moral conditions in which they took place. But we must remember that
those conditions are not literally of the times
at all, but rather of the people in them, and the conscious choices
they made. And no matter how the clock of the universe reads at any
given moment, it is reasonable to expect that any sane person in that
moment can understand that there are some things no guise of morality
can ever fit. So it has always been, and always will be, for the
inequalities, conflicts, subjection and sheer pain of the things that
issue forth from the maws of gender.
Modernity as Arrogance
There is one final problem with the gender-and-progress narrative,
and that is the much bigger beast on whose hide it is but one of a
thousand scales. We might call it a problem not so much of history as
of meta-history – that is, of how we conceive of history, of our
journey, itself.
A story is not a straight line from A to B. Rather it is an unfolding
webs of tangents, shocks and surprises that twist in complex
directions we cannot always understand, because the frames of
orientation themselves change too. Otherwise it would not be a story
– there would be no journey, nothing to tell. And our story is one
of the most complex of all.
There are two models of the human journey which have both been
disastrous. One, especially favoured by people pessimistic about
human nature, considers it cyclical. We go round and round in
circles; nations and revolutions rise and fall; we soar to the skies
upon our hopes and dreams, then plummet into the spiked pits of
reality; over and over again in a spiral of miserable futility. It is
a model made of cynicism, which tells us to swallow our despair and
accept the injustices of the present, for any attempts to correct
them inevitably land us with worse.
Frankly, if that is our lot then we may as well all drop dead.
However, our concern today is with the opposite model: that which
presents our journey as a sequence, a progression from primitive to
modern, whether in knowledge, or technology, or prosperity, or moral
values.
This,
though on its face optimistic, underpins one of the most upsetting
disappointments of our time: that thing we have called development.
The history-is-a-sequence model is not solely to blame for its
blunders – we also have to consider the paradigm's hijacking by
market-fundamentalist economists, and the legacies of the colonial
division of the world between North and South, among other things.
But at the core of development, at least for most of its reign as a
keystone concept in international politics, is precisely this
narrative that societies can be measured against a linear yardstick
– calibrated, of course, to the journeys of the
societies that designed it – and according to this, be called
“more developed” or “less developed”, or worse still,
“developed” or “developing”, as though all societies walk on
one trail through time and can be compared by their relative
positions upon it.
This
too is ahistorical, ignoring the effects of
histories
– often colonial histories – and the diversity both within and
between societies. But as anyone who has had their present or future
decimated by IMF shock therapy or structural adjustment programmes will tell you, its implications are hardly limited to how we look at
the past. Never mind either that, as we have considered, a society in
which gender problems exist may have moved
backward from its starting point.
Those societies which measure themselves the highest on this scale
like to refer to themselves as modern. Therein lies the heart
of this myth. For modernity, very simply, means the present, as
compared favourably to the past. It is no more than to attach the
most gratifying of value judgements to our image of ourselves here
and now, relative to the past; and in the process, to turn our backs on the
entire catalogue of hideous present inadequacies we have herein
discussed.
In literal terms, modernity is a nothing. Anyone can think themselves
modern, in any time period, and think so with equal validity – that
is, none at all. Even were we to attain a wonderful state of love and
magic with lots of happiness and peace and fuzzy animals, there would
always be room to improve. The very concept of modernity is nothing
but the hubris of the present, spun to sound respectable. That is
just what we need in a present like this, is it not?
And that is why I call the gender
myth in question the Myth of Modernity. Because the idea at its root
is that there is such a thing as modernity at all: a landscape of
glorious furnaces of progress, which, as we draw closer to it,
radiates liberating heat that blasts off our gendered baggage. The
myth is that this modernity exists. It does not. And so long as we
believe that it does, we will always believe, by definition, that
modernity is us; and
so will we puff out our chests at our ancestors, while persisting
nightmares, including those of gender, leech through the human soil
and pollute the prospects of the future.
Those ancestors probably thought themselves modern too. If the dead
can see, they are surely humbled by hindsight. If the dead can speak,
they surely warn us not to repeat their hubris – if only we, the
living, will listen.
Traveller, there is no path, the path is made by walking
So if history is neither a blob nor a line, what does that mean for
us, and our struggle against gender?
Two beacons, glowing in the mists of time. A beacon of hope, and a
beacon of warning.
The beacon of hope blinks through gaps in the terrible history of
humanity's gender repressions, gender conflicts and gender
atrocities. It signals to us: yes, you have been terrible – but not
always terrible, not
uniformly terrible,
and not terrible in the ways the essentialists would have you
believe. There were times when you were better. You can research the
history, discover these times, and learn from them. You may not know
gender's causes, but you can dig up plenty of its drivers, especially
in its intersections with forces you can so easily prevent if only
you properly valued their costs: thuggish nationalisms, moral panics,
mass hysterias, bad spirituality, economic abuse. Your science and
technology may not make you superior to your ancestors, but they do
provide all the equipment you need to disperse the illusion that
gender has any inherent connection to 'tradition'.
But heed the beacon of warning. It signals to us: destroy your
complacency. Abandon the myth of continuous linear progress, for it
is a lie. There is no invisible railway of time on which you can
simply ride to victory against the terrors of gender. Your struggle
will not win itself; the outcome is not written in the stars.
Instead, take responsibility. The awareness, the criticism, the
better examples and choices you must make – these require a courage
for which no fate can substitute.
If nothing else, think again if you have thus far made statements
about gender with those unwitting references to time: when you
suggest its barbarities are unacceptable for still
being present (rather than being present at all),
or reflect a medieval
society (rather than a failed
or broken society).
Little words like those may seem trivial, but it is on these very
trivialities that the gender abomination gorges itself until its
tentacles are so fat they fill up our entire social backdrop, and
thus settle in our minds as normal. Gender belongs neither in
the past, nor in the present: it comes to
them, from outside of time.
And ultimately, gender inequality,
gender conflict, gendered discrimination and horrors like rape cannot
be “progressed out of” by modernisation, any more than a
ghoul can modernise out of undeath or urine can modernise into water.
Gender's existence is a brokenness that transcends time; no sooner is
it written in the pages of our story than its eldritch ink rots the
whole book to muck, no matter what chapter we are in at that moment.
It is thus not enough, for us who fight it, to concede it the past as
a price for the future; because then we give it a place in our story,
when we must give it no place at all. It does not belong, whenever
and wherever.
Hopefully the whenever now
invites closer scrutiny. As for the wherever,
we shall explore that with the third myth: the Myth of the Others.
