VIDEO TEXT: Gender and Language

Our second video premiered on the last day of January and we’re a little late with the text version but here it is. We’ll always publish a written version of the text, to aid close analysis and detailed discussion—just in case anyone’s up for it  😉

(Apologies, as always, for any undetected last-minute script changes.)

GENDER AND LANGUAGE

I was in a Twitter argument a while ago with a bunch of TERFs and one of them said to me straight-out, “There’s no such thing as gender.”

There’s male and female, she insisted; beyond that it’s a matter of individual character and personal choice—“feminine” and “masculine” are purely imaginary categories.

I suspect this claim is as obviously true for many as it is self-evidently nonsense to many more. My response was along the lines of “It’s all very well for you to believe that…”—because gender is like God: so many people assume its existence that insisting it’s nothing but an irrelevant fairytale just muddies the problem: both gender and religion structure everything from the law to how long you grow your hair.

Also, if you want to deny either gender or God, it’s crucial to isolate, extricate, and respect the core truth on which each misconception is founded. But we’ll get to that.

I’m gonna leave God for another day—well, mostly—because after we sort out exactly what gender is we’ll look at the relationship between gender, integrity and authority. Authority, if you’re a little fuzzy, is the power—and sometimes specifically the right—to control, command or determine. It is, in an obvious sense, the ultimate form of human power, logically entailing, as it does, the right to violence.

So obviously God will get a mention, but I want to explore something that I think says more about people than about God—a network of relationships between authority, integrity, identity, power, and gender.

So what is gender? Well, I’m so glad you ask, because that is a devilish complex question.

Up until the mid-20th century, the word gender was mostly only used to refer to parts of language—that is, the subclasses within a grammatical class like noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb. Word classification into a gender subclass—masculine, feminine or neuter—was and is still allotted according to a schema that’s partly arbitrary and partly metaphorical: referring, of course, to human sex. But, stemming from the Latin genus, gender for hundreds of years meant sort, class, kind or type and only by the 15th century was it being used to refer specifically to sex as a class or type… which, if I’m not mistaken, made it a kind of meta-metaphor, in which sort of sex refers back to sex of sort…

But here’s the interesting bit: the Latin comes from a Proto-Indo-European root-word meaning to beget—that’s the man-word for having a baby. Which goes back to what I was saying in The Politics of Penetration, my first video, about sexual dimorphism ordering the way we perceive the world.

Anyway, still for another four or five hundred years after that, gender just meant sort, class or kind, either of word or of human. But during those five centuries, the emergence of the so-called Enlightenment, the growth of imperialism and industrialisation, the development of democracy and the beginnings of feminism, and finally the devastating effects of two massive multinational wars within thirty years, all piled up on each other to cause an existential crisis in western civilisation. The twentieth century saw social revolutions from beginning to end—first for labour, then for women, then for the family, then against war, then for women again, then for the right to love whomever you love, and then for pure liberty of identity… and through all that a new meaning of gender emerged, distinguishing more-or-less sex-based psychological, behavioural, and cultural attributes from actual biological sex. A grand new abstraction.

But as we stumbled toward the end of the millennium, it all started to go awry. While we were agitating for our personal freedoms, global capitalism was turning us into consumers—a whole new slavery. In the west—that is, the Anglosphere and Europe—the Church, or rather Churches, the religious powers of Christendom as a whole—long threatened by the advance of science, materialism, and globalism, have found multiple ways to push back. Patriarchy, it turned out, would not be vanquished by peaceful or even passionate protest, still less by an appeal to reason.

In fact, western patriarchy, unable to permanently silence the voices of women—or indeed of those men who see its failings whether or not they perceive them in gendered terms—patriarchy survives by a shrewd mix of adaptation, coercion, deception and violence. Plenty of people are working to counter those last three; I want to look at how patriarchy, intrinsically opposed to modern ideas of social justice, has adapted to maintain majority control of western society in the face of twentieth-century human rights standards.

This adaptation is systemic and structural; the modern economy is built quite literally from blocks of what Raewyn Connell called hegemonic masculinity. Competitive, hierarchical, aggressive, acquisitive and invasive—not to mention inflationary, deflationary and focused on the short-term (or as we like to say, tumescent)—modern economies are structured around the traditional activities of men, which is why stockbrokers, despite their limited social value, earn so much more than childcare workers. The global economy is a masculine structure created from the exploitation of the structurally vulnerable and the rape of the Earth.

Can we humanise the economy by interposing the feminine? Democracy tried. Socialism tried. The green movement is still trying. Small countries have succeeded, more or less. Larger nations not so much. The global Covid-19 pandemic—spawning new variants, dragging out for years, exhausting governments’ capacity for intervention, bringing healthcare systems and economies alike to crisis—has accelerated the approach of an economic and societal collapse that loomed only distantly not so long ago. As billionaire patriarchs ready themselves to discard this resource-drained planet like an ageing trophy wife, can we re-elevate the Feminine? Can we recognise the repressed genius, the denied divinity, the timeless glory of that mature mother, and rebuild the world in Her likeness too?

Gender. It wouldn’t exist, but for patriarchy’s rigid, exploitative structural division of society. Subscribe to be notified of my next video, when we’ll look at how patriarchy masculinises integrity to maintain authority.

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