MYTH AND GENDER

Gender vs The Springhill Mining Disaster

Digging into heroism

Image Creative Commons with Attribution — Canada Library Archives

In David Samson’s book on intentional communities, Our Tribal Future: How to Channel Our Foundational Human Instincts into a Force for Good (2023), I found a fascinating exploration of gender and heroism . . . the preoccupations, in fact, of this series on Myth and Gender.

Samson makes the following points:

1. We have an innate tendency to see gender. Gender is likely baked in cognitively.
2. Gender roles are consistent across a wide swath of cultures, so gender is likely baked in behaviorally as well — but paradoxically, “gender-specific” traits don’t have a binary distribution.
3. In fact, traits often considered as gender-defining are not that firmly attached to sex-at-birth at all. Although apparently innate, they nonetheless emerge situationally in all genders. An excellent (and surprising) example is heroism. Details below.

(I do a deeper dive into the first two points in the nerd-core version of this story.)

Samson is an academic with pedigrees in anthropology and evolutionary biology, but also someone who lives in a self-assembled tribe. Let’s consider his points in more detail.