That Plunger Thing
You know, like the kind on the old movies and cartoons,
Where they push the T-shaped handle down,
And the dynamite goes off?
Some thoughts on gender in the year 2017:
male
māl/
adjective
1.of or denoting the sex that produces small, typically motile gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring.
fe·male
ˈfēˌmāl/
adjective
adjective: female
1.of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) that can be fertilized by male gametes.
So, bear with me, and try not to let my white penis color your judgements of my opinion,
I don’t have to identify as male or female, and you can’t make me:
i·den·ti·fy
īˈden(t)əˌfī/
Verb
1. establish or indicate who or what (someone or something) is.
i·den·ti·ty
ˌīˈden(t)ədē/
Noun
1.the fact of being who or what a person or thing is.
It seems at present that the fact is I have to specify that not only am I a “biological or cis-male,”
I need to also clarify that I cannot produce ova, but instead produce spermatozoa.
If there’s any doubt, I can jizz right on you and prove it, with science!
This is not a gender issue. Gender is something else entirely:
gen·der
ˈjendər/
Noun
1.the state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones).
It’s now impossible to have a conversation about this.
This whole topic has become offensive, and sticky,
Be that smegma or semen, it makes little difference,
If you bring it up you’re bound to get stuck in the gender fluid.
Already, as I write, I can see the gears churning up my reader’s preconceived notions. I must be with the alt-right. I’m probably a Nazi.
Typical white man.
I can see how they will take offense at my use of dictionary definitions to describe something they have chosen not to think of as concrete, scientific, or relating to biology.
Internally, I have a censorship program that’s throwing up red flags left and right about who’s going to be offended, by what, what judgements they’ll have about me, and how that might impact my friendships and relationships. Whose feelings will be hurt?
Obviously, if I was saying any of this in an internal memo at Google,
I’d have been canned by the algorithm yesterday,
Too busy cleaning out my desk to retort.
And I haven’t even said anything yet.
So for my LGBTQCA friends out there,
Let me clarify what I’m NOT saying,
As all statements must now do,
So as not to leave a freshly ploughed field to plant straw cis-men in:
I don’t hate anyone because of their sex, their gender, or their color.
But I hate having to tiptoe around a minefield of words that are off limits,
I hate having to cite the dictionary to have a fucking conversation,
I hate that instead of changing our behavior or anybody else’s,
We’ve twisted the language into a fucking pretzel,
And now we can’t really communicate,
About this or anything else.
It’s the cheapest and laziest solution to a highly complex problem.
Think for a moment about how easy it would be for a racist, misogynist, misandrist, or supremacist, to simply respond to that internal censor, conform to the linguistic requirements, and blend right in with you. Hidden in plain sight.
Would a member of the alt-right say any of this to you?
Maybe to his alt-right friends (see there how I just assumed “his” gender?)
But probably not in a public forum anywhere, because that’s a fine way to get shouted down, ignored, blocked, or otherwise censored.
Just for having an opinion that disagrees.
You can’t just be wrong without being a hateful bigot, apparently.
Where we likely agree is that our society’s standards of gender are fucked.
Our society is almost hopelessly and constantly (and shamelessly) sexist.
Even the language itself, and the structure of pronouns, is sexist.
It was never more evident to me than in Spanish class,
When I learned a coffee cup is feminine.
Una taza de cafe.
Y, En el lado positivo,
Así son la policía.
Rearranging the pronouns doesn’t fix the underlying neuro-linguistic problems.
“This bias about occupations can end up having pernicious, sexist effects. For example, machine-learning programs can translate foreign languages into sentences that reflect or reinforce gender stereotypes. Turkish uses a gender-neutral, third person pronoun, “o.” Plugged into the online translation service Google Translate, however, the Turkish sentences “o bir doktor” and “o bir hemşire” are translated into English as “he is a doctor” and “she is a nurse.”
— Princeton
“In order to be aware of bias, in order to unbias, we need to quantify it,” Caliskan said, “How does bias get in language, do people start making biased associations from the way they are exposed to language? Knowing that will also help us find answers to maybe less biased future.”
— PopSci
We’re all conditioned by language and culture to identify certain traits and behaviors as male,
And other traits and behaviors as female,
Which have nothing to do with biology.
So if you identify as male or female based on society’s standard of what that means,
YOU’RE JUST THROWING FUEL ON THE FIRE.
The same one that’s burning your house down.
America has never been more polarized,
And here’s one more topic we can be on different sides about,
One more thing we poor folks can fight with each other about,
While the rich are happy to fuck each and every last one of us regardless of our genitals or identity.
Biological sexual dimorphism is a scientific fact.
Gender is an imaginary social construct.
Which one of those do you think would make a better control mechanism,
The one you can back up with peer reviewed control group studies?
Or the one with the same rules as religion and/or dungeons and dragons?
There is nothing biologically feminine about wearing a dress while arranging flowers and sipping tea, crying or empathizing with your fellow human beings.
There is nothing biologically masculine about wearing pants while punching a heavy bag and drinking a beer, laughing and making fun of your fellow human beings.
There is almost no relationship between sex and gender the way it is portrayed in our culture.
The construct is primarily artificial, and it’s unhealthy for both sexes.
In reality, women are better assassins,
And I personally know some guys that are amazing with a sewing machine.
Here are some ways that men and women are not created equal,
Which hold up to scrutiny in the real world, according to science:
“Women excel in several measures of verbal ability — pretty much all of them, except for verbal analogies. Women’s reading comprehension and writing ability consistently exceed that of men, on average. They outperform men in tests of fine-motor coordination and perceptual speed. They’re more adept at retrieving information from long-term memory.
Men, on average, can more easily juggle items in working memory. They have superior visuospatial skills: They’re better at visualizing what happens when a complicated two- or three-dimensional shape is rotated in space, at correctly determining angles from the horizontal, at tracking moving objects and at aiming projectiles.
Navigation studies in both humans and rats show that females of both species tend to rely on landmarks, while males more typically rely on “dead reckoning”: calculating one’s position by estimating the direction and distance traveled rather than using landmarks.
Women, it’s known, retain stronger, more vivid memories of emotional events than men do. They recall emotional memories more quickly, and the ones they recall are richer and more intense. If, as is likely, the amygdala figures into depression or anxiety, any failure to separately analyze men’s and women’s brains to understand their different susceptibilities to either syndrome would be as self-defeating as not knowing left from right.
The two hemispheres of a woman’s brain talk to each other more than a man’s do. In a 2014 study, University of Pennsylvania researchers imaged the brains of 428 male and 521 female youths — an uncharacteristically huge sample — and found that the females’ brains consistently showed more strongly coordinated activity between hemispheres, while the males’ brain activity was more tightly coordinated within local brain regions. This finding, a confirmation of results in smaller studies published earlier, tracks closely with others’ observations that the corpus callosum- — the white-matter cable that crosses and connects the hemispheres — is bigger in women than in men and that women’s brains tend to be more bilaterally symmetrical than men’s.”
Based on the work of Nero Shah and Diane Halpern at Stanford University.
“Halpern offers a succinct assessment: “The role of culture is not zero. The role of biology is not zero.”
So, for anybody that’s still with me,
I can’t just decide to identify as having better fine motor skills or long term memory. I can’t identify as being four times less likely to be autistic, or have smaller veins. I can’t show you more coordinated activity between the hemispheres of my brain, nor can I shrink my alien-like occipital protuberance.
Even by male standards, my cranium is freakish.
I CAN decide to spend my Sunday in a floral dress baking cupcakes and petting my cat,
But that has exactly NOTHING to do with my genitalia or chromosomes.
Who the fuck doesn’t like cupcakes and fluffy cats?
Just psychopaths, obviously.
And those are not exclusive to gender,
But “Psychology Today” says I’m twenty times more likely to be psycho,
Because I have a penis.
That could be due to lots of factors, including cognitive bias on the part of psychologists, but,
When was the last time you read in the news about a woman shooting up a school, or driving her van down the sidewalk?
I can’t think of anybody I know that doesn’t have some identity crisis or another.
Nobody seems to know who they are, and nobody knows who anybody else is either.
Since the entire notion of value and morality here is a bunch of fantasy anyway,
If you want to play pretend, that’s fine with me.
We can all agree to pretend the dollar has value,
That we owe rent,
To people that own property,
That we have rights,
Deserve to live,
And be treated fairly,
And a whole slew of other stuff,
That we just made up out of the clear blue sky.
We can all agree to pretend that human beings are objectively better than rats, cockroaches, dandelions, and Ebola, so we don’t start butchering each other with machetes. Like THAT’s the thing stopping us.
I’m not in favor of any of it,
But if I’m going to play a game,
I might as well follow the rules, right?
It’s just that I thought games were supposed to be FUN.
It might be fun to identify as a female half-elf every Thursday as I quest through an imaginary dungeon with some like minded friends who enjoy fantasy. But then on Friday I’m going to take my big veins, my upper body strength, my penis and my aggressive tendencies out for a walk — and I’m going to recognize that not only do I substantially differ from each and every other human I meet, but that how I identify does have a huge impact on me because it changes the feedback I get from my fellow humans. I’m going to conform my identity to the desires of the people around me, because social conformity is a prerequisite for interaction, as well as a natural tendency.
Even if what’s being conformed to is completely absurd.
I don’t dress like a man because I have a dick.
It’s because if I dress any other way I’ll get shit thrown at me out of car windows…. And actually, wearing pants hasn’t prevented that.
It merely decreases the incidence rate.
I’ve been called a faggot just for having long hair.
“ The act of constructing one’s identity is not an abstract metaphysical one, it is very much about the veneer, the persona. Dressing can be an act of making the self available to others, not only for appreciation and admiration, but also for objectification. Clothing reflects the self — the identity, the material practice we engage with in daily life (Lynch, 2007; Woodward, 2008). One’s wardrobe is known to be an extension of the diverse aspects of one’s beliefs and constructs social identity (Hill, 2005; Woodward, 2008). In this process of identity creation, there is an attempt to strike a balance between the dynamic interplay of conformity and individuality — identified as a core aspect of fashion (Simmel, 1971).” — Frontiers In Psychology
Is it my fault that I get called a fag for my long hair? No.
Is it an option to change my appearance to avoid it? Yes.
If you want me to identify you using different pronouns, fine.
I’m overqualified to pretend that I can’t see your tits or your dick or whatever poking out through your clothes. I can pretend that biology doesn’t change my strategic approach to conversation with you, because my approach to conversation with you is already a carefully crafted strategic deployment of tactics, designed to replace meaningful human interaction and emotional exchange, because that’s how I survive in an emotional linguistic war zone.
Combat tactics.
I can pretend to take you seriously.
We can all play a fun game together, instead of living in the real world, where men and women and blacks and whites and lefts and rights all share common oppressors… And then we can keep ourselves distracted from the situation until they’ve got our imaginary ballsacks and/or labia nailed down to the evil empire’s work force by US Dollars.
You want to challenge me,
Ask me to pretend we’re not slaves.
I can imagine a penis or vagina easily, I’ve seen plenty.
Never seen a free human being of any gender.
No idea what that looks like.
