Essentialism and Why It Sucks

Excellent point about sex and gender and the way we study them in a post on this article at Sex in the Public Square:

My frustration comes from the fact that researchers like Chivers insist on trying to pull apart the cultural from. What is it that drives the notion that our biology is where the "truth" about us would be found if only we could clear away the confusing layers of socialization and culture? I would much prefer to see research examine the intersection of the biological and the cultural giving equal "truth value" to both. This is a theme that comes up over and over, especially in relation to the discussion of Chivers's work. In fact if we could get past our desire for biologically essentialist answers we could see the variations in human experience that would allow us to start breaking down the false binary of male/female = boy/girl = man/woman.

I think she's absolutely right, that the nature vs. nurture argument is just kind of silly. When we get down to it, almost everyone agrees that it's actually some combination of the two, but the whole basis of the argument is really polarizing. It's like we're pushed into picking a side, and then everyone ends up ignoring compelling or interesting information that would favor the "other side."

I'm taking a class on gender and sexuality right now, and we've been talking about how our concept of two natural sexes each with a corresponding gender role is a fairly new one. Up until the Enlightenment with its emphasis on physical "truth" and the imperfection of anything metaphysical, the body wasn't that important in conceptions of sex and gender.

Philosophers like Aristotle and Galen, who both talked about sex and gender extensively, thought that "man" and "woman" were essentially gradients of one physical sex. Of course, under this model men were "more perfect" and women an incomplete or flawed version of the perfect male. Because women were metaphysically less perfect than men, their bodies came out differently. The spiritual essence of the person, made up of what we could now consider their transient gender characteristics, was actually their essential being. The body was only its physical manifestation.

This is precisely the opposite of how we measure things today. What I think Elizabeth Wood gets at very well in her post is the silliness of both ways of seeing things. There is no truth without both biology AND culture, the physical AND the metaphysical. Nature is informed by nurture to create who we are. There can be no studying one without admitting and looking at the other. Trying to isolate either is always going to present a skewed picture.

Print News

I read the newspaper today. This isn't completely remarkable, but it's not something I do every day. I get the New York Times emails and I scan the headlines. Whoopie.

Now, though, I'm back at my parents' house and they get the print version of the San Francisco Chronicle, so I actually sat down at breakfast and read through most of it. I didn't read every article, but I looked through the whole thing.

You know that accent people on news shows put on? The one that sounds excessively pleasant and strangely modulated? I could hear that going in my head. The news is written so formally, the voice in my head as I'm reading (yes, I hear the words I read) might as well be from a computer robot. You know, those ones online you can play with and make them say funny things in different accents.

In print news, they edit their quotes. To be grammatically correct and everything, to make sure it all is perfect. They do it in magazines, too. And I always find myself re-editing them in my head as I read to try and figure out what the person actually said. It's usually pretty easy to tell, and the original quote usually flows much better than the oddly formal edited one.

I hate that silly formal English. As the author of a column, it's really annoying when they change my nicely flowing slightly casual writing into this stilted, old-fashioned crap. I bet it's one of the reasons that the news has trouble reaching young readers (and viewers). It's a really unappealing tone of language.

Now, I know they're striving for balanced, objective reporting, but does "perfect" grammar really effect that? Yes, having a standardized language could in theory make news seem more objective, but that language can still be manipulated to favor a bias. It simply promotes the illusion of objectivity. I think objectivity is bullshit anyway, but I'll write more about that later.

I just think that if they used words and phrasings that are more casual and commonplace, they might do a better job of reaching their audience.