Skeletons and Gender Perception

Halloween season is around the corner, by which I mean it’s August and department stores are already filled with their spooky festive decorations. And it’s hard to walk into a Michael’s or a Target without immediately being accosted by a hundred new skeleton friends.

And you may have a variety of thoughts and impressions of these friendly specters. You may be creeped out by them, you may love them, you may be entirely apathetic. But for me, one thought always strikes me as I look at a skeleton — it always seems like a man.

And by this I do not mean that it seems like it belongs to a man, but rather that skeletons themselves seem to be characters (most likely as a result of media and artistic representation), but I never look at a skeleton and see it as a female character (or as belonging to a female either, but more on this later).

I first had this realization when I was with my friends at Stanford’s Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Someone had hung two small paper skeletons on the bathroom door in an act of love-making. My friends and I disagreed over our perception of the genders of the individuals engaged in the act. It’s the first time I ever really considered that every person is physically the same in the end.

So began my journey into the gender and sexuality of skeletal representation. Have you ever seen a female skeleton character in a movie? Maybe you have but a majority of skeletons in movies are either male or are distinctly “feminized” by the addition of clothing, hair, and makeup (the exception here seems to be the 2017 Pixar film CoCo, which I’d argue is not about the representation of skeletons so much as the representation of characters who happen to be skeletons — they are all, regardless of gender, wearing clothing indicative of their past lives). On Ranker’s “The Most Notorious Skeletons of all Time” list, only one to two female skeletons appear.

Think of all the male skeletons we’ve seen in popular Halloween movies and other media — the taxicab driver in Halloweentown, Grim in the Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. Jack Skellington, Skeletor, Eddie from Iron Maiden, my personal favorite the Horned King from The Black Cauldron, the list goes on and on. The maleness of skeletons seems to be pervasive.

And it’s important to take a look at whether this is the case across all monsters or just skeletons. The exemplary monster of any breed is normally male (except for witches). Dracula, the werewolf, the mummy, Frankenstein’s monster — they’re all male. And while they have their female counterparts, mostly for love interests, if only one monster can show up in a representation, it is usually in its male form. Which is strange to me. Why is the witch the token female? Mummies certainly were female and male. Could a woman not also be bitten by a werewolf or vampire?

And of course these considerations have to do with all sorts of factors including when these stories were written and by whom and for what audience. The gender skew in lead actors is no surprise to any of us. But what’s interesting is the ways in which these representations shape our subconscious understandings of not only monsters and their roles in our lives, but also the overarching roles of gender as well. (The topic of the masculinity of monsters in general and the role this plays in our conceptions of power and fear is the topic for another article.)

While doing research for this article, I also wanted to learn just how distinct male and female skeletons really are. Evidently “sexing” a skeleton is not as easy as CSI and Bones make it out to be. Sexual dimorphism in humans is slight compared to other large mammals. From a biological point of view, humans fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between tournament species animals, which show wide sexual dimorphism between males and females (think lions) and pair bonding species which mate for life and have little sexual dimorphism (think penguins). Obviously these categories are generalizations and there are exceptions, but keeping this framework in mind when assessing the biological aspects of skeletons helped me to understand why or why not there may be differences in the aesthetic expression of human skeletons, and then come to understand how this affects our perceptions of gender as influenced by social conceptions.

While there are differences physically between male and female skeletons (around the pelvis, for obvious reasons) and size in general, for the most part, when the average person sees a skeleton, they are unable to tell immediately whether the skeleton is that of a male or a female. Even more so, assuming the skeleton is not particularly small, no one can assume the age of the individual when they died, or their race either. Whether the CSI expectation that we can project 3D images of skin and hair and other telling facial features onto a skull is accurate, or whether an expert forensic anthropologist can deduce the gender and race of a skeleton is not what I question here. What I am concerned with is why skeletons themselves seem not genderless, but male to the average viewer.

To make this point more clear, take the social media example of the Bone Tiddies meme (yes this is real). To quote the Know Your Meme website:

“Bone Tiddies is a phrase popular on Tumblr used in reference to an image of two fake skeletons laying next to each other and one has bones shaped like breasts to show that the skeletons belonged to a man and a woman. The image and phrase is meant to parody the sensitivity of homophobics who could be offended at the portrayal of a romantic relationship that is not explicitly heterosexual.”

But let’s take a quick moment to unpack this — the female skeleton had added feminine features to set it aside from being a man, but the male skeleton…? The male skeleton did not require any added masculine features (beard, pectorals, penis, etc.) to get across the message that it was a male. Why? Why is it that not only are skeletons by default easily assumed to be male (hence before any of the skeleton cartoon characters speak, we know the voice will be that of a male, and we are jarred if it has a female voice), but that beyond that — maleness is the norm, and anything feminine needs to be an “added on” feature?

Now, critics here may argue that the reason the bone breasts were added was because there were two individuals, so that feature in itself was enough to show that one skeleton was female, and we can assume that because of the lack of the breasts in the other one, it is male. I’m willing to accept this as a possibility, but it is of note that the easiest way to differentiate a skeleton’s gender is to add breasts and feminize it (think how many cartoon characters have eyelashes, bows, or are painted pink in order to show their femininity, while their default counterpart is left the same and not over-masculanized to represent its maleness).

A side note for the moment that this skeleton-gender issue is a particularly Western, 21stcentury philosophical issue of note. Long hair, dresses, other gender markers that the Western observer would mark as “feminine” are not exclusively, or inherently feminine (that is the point — these are societally constructed conceptions of gender and what are “typical” or “appropriate” expressions of the gender binary in the current temporal and social space).

What is interesting, then, is how the default maleness of skeletons shows just how deeply gender conceptions have permeated into the human subconscious. When presented with a body stripped of all its identifying humanness, it becomes male to the viewer. Without a feminine marker, we not only do not know what gender the individual identified as in life, but more than that, we assume the body is masculine. We are more uncomfortable with and confused by agender status than we are with incorrectly assigning the biological sex of skeletons literally 50% of the time.

This has particularly been on my mind while exploring conceptions of gender and sexuality in philosophy and popular culture. This may have something to do with my recent interest in Ursula LeGuin and coming to know that sci-fi in general has always explored gender and societal constructions around gender as a way to reflect back on how our societies, here, on earth, are shaped by gender roles and perceptions that are arbitrary. But while gender conceptions in aliens are useful theoretical tools, the literally close-to-home perceptual case of skeletons gives light to how humans’ conceptions of gender in ourselves has pervasive impacts both societally and ethically.

There are two complementary issues here to consider — one, the fact that biologically, sex itself exists along a spectrum, and two, that our constructs of gender are also arbitrarily constructed by society. The first, as noted, here, is coming into scientific conversation through a variety of cases involving individuals with XXY chromosomes and Guevedoces,individuals who possess female anatomy until puberty, during which they develop masculine features due to a delayed production of testosterone.

How examples like these, and the concepts of agender and gender fluidity come into play in a society that has historically had a strict gender binary with equally strict gender roles is interesting. If we come to accept that the biological underpinnings of the gender binary are shaky, one would think that gender expression would then become either less important or less expressed. But this, too, is complicated because individuals who are female identifying have the right to express that femininity and have it be a part of their identity. The ultimate point here is that one’s personal conception of gender should not limit another’s personal gender expression.

What becomes of note philosophically is that femininity and masculinity do not equally exist apart from “neutral” on a spectrum, but that femininity in modern Western culture requires an excess of effort to differentiate from the “norm,” more than masculinity does. I am not arguing that there are not also societal pressures for men to be more “masculine” i.e. conform to society’s expectations to restrict emotion and be physically strong. I do not want to minimize the existence, and the overall effects, of these expectations. Rather I want to analyze why the default body, in this case the default skeleton, is viewed as more masculine than feminine.

Why does any of this matter? (A question that most people ask me when I discuss any philosophical question that’s been on my mind.)

Well, aside from the fact that the way we perceive gender as a society and the role that that in turn plays in how we interact with each other, judge each other, pay each other in the workplace, and a variety of other deeply important issues, it is important to note that our conceptions are often so pervasive that even those of us who think critically about these issues on a daily basis can find out that we have deeper subconscious biases and thoughts than we may even realize.

One way in which this is true is that we assume that our understanding of culture and gender has always been the same, everywhere, and that people in the past and in every group around the world share our limited views of the gender binary and gender norms. Or, even worse, that those who do not share our views are wrong or ethically wrong.

Take for example, my favorite media instance of skeleton gender confusion (to be fair there aren’t many). Two skeletons had been discovered embracing in the wreckage left over from Pompeii. Originally, the skeletons had been assumed to be female. However, in 2017 when the skeletons were discovered to be male, we got a variety of lovely popular questions like Is That Skeleton Gay? (oof). In this article of the same name, though ironic, it is noted that “What’s especially strange is that two men who died in the same place at the same time in a catastrophic event are assumed to have been lovers. As classicist David Meadows tells me, “They weren’t ‘gay’ when they were thought to be women.””

And, of course, the real reason this all matters is nicely summed up in the following paragraph:

“Projecting our contemporary assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality onto the past is clearly problematic, but examples abound. In her book The Bioarchaeology of Socio-Sexual Lives: Queering Common Sense About Sex, Gender, and Sexuality, anthropologist Pamela Geller provides numerous examples of this phenomenon and takes on the issue of heteronormativity in interpreting the past. One of her central points, she writes, is that “discoveries of decedents whose bodies have been identified as romantically entangled, compulsorily reproductive, or occupationally divided say more about our present state of socio-sexual affairs than they do about past interactions and intimacies.””

Beyond the issues implicit in projecting our current state of affairs on the past through archaeological discoveries, this issue of seeing skeletons as masculine should act as an example of just how pervasive and problematic our gender conceptions of our fellow humans are, and of specific note, the continued subjugation of women as the “other.”

If I held up a picture of ten skeletons to a stranger and asked, “how many of these are women?” I wonder what the answer would be? “None.” “A few?”

What if I asked, “How many of these belonged to women?” I’d probably expect “I don’t know” or “50%.” Certainly not “all.” But I can imagine a response of “none.”

If I were to ask questions about a particular skeleton, I’d imagine the responder would refer to said skeleton as “he” or “it” or “they,” but never “she.” There is always something extra required to shift the default assumption of the gender of an individual from male to female.

The default status of maleness is pervasive. I won’t go into it more here. But every time I hear the phrase “the lawyer” or “the philosopher,” I am still always happily surprised if the referent in question turns out to be a woman. This is sad, as someone who is a female philosopher and aspiring lawyer. If anyone should have an open mind about these things, I would hope it to be me. I would want it to be me. If the depth of these subconscious gender notions extends beyond the normal daily conversations, to our perceptions of even skeletons, then clearly the issue of gender is no longer “skin-deep.”

I seek here, as with all my articles, not to find answer to questions, or elicit deeper meanings from critical issues, but mostly to start conversation around these issues and get people thinking about the things they normally do not think about.

If you have any questions or comments please email me at kshughes@alumni.stanford.edu. Thank you!