Eye on Gender

The Guardian on April 15^th had no less than four pieces which together told almost the whole of the story of gender, the lunatic tale of unquestioned perceptions, delusions and power that is the essence of gender at work in our world. 

Oops, there I go again, telling it as I see it. The Emperor has no clothes! Gender is mad. Those who created and maintain the delusions of gender unconsciousness won’t like it. Oh, well,I’ve got nothing to lose. I've already lost it, thank god.

Back to the Guardian, which I once swore I would never read again because of what they printed about my kind, and now read regularly. It’s a great paper, when it is. Last week it gave enough on my favoured subject to keep me going for a year.

First was a great piece about testosterone and making and losing money, you can read that here

Then we have the venerable Polly Toynbee despairing over the girlification of young women and the dissolution of hope, which you can read here

Followed by the matter of women in their forties losing out in comparison to their male counterparts in the money they are rewarded with, and, inherent within that measure, how they are valued less, although we don’t say that. It’s never the men I speak to, incidentally, it’s the others. Read that here

And all this awful stuff is followed by some brighter news from Spain, where Senor Zapatero, Mr Shoemaker, the premier, has created a majority of women in his cabinet. It appears that some men don’t like this. Good grief, they’ll be driving cars next. Read that one here.

The first piece is about the effect of testosterone on making, then losing money. The picture is of men shouting and waving their hands and getting excited in a group. I can feel the testosterone thick and electric in the air as much as I could almost smell the oestrogen in a crowd of noisy teenage girls on the bus the other day. Heady stuff.

One question here is this; am I my hormones? The answer to that is; more than you might think. And this is from someone who has known those two fine sex hormones, oestrogen and testosterone, so I’m not guessing. These chemicals help create our personalities, our relationships, our values, the nature of our lives.

I’ve known the buzz of testosterone and have felt the real high it brings, even alone. But when people dominated by testosterone get together in groups, a kind of madness comes over them, sometimes with a good purpose, sometimes not, often competitive. I think of those TV images from the journalists ‘embedded’ with the testosterone fuelled armies invading Iraq, the trading floors in the investment banks, football teams and crowds, suits round boardroom tables and so on.

Testosterone highs are addictive. And it’s not like a drug, it is a drug. A mind drug that affects consciousness, so that it affects how we see, it changes our perceptions and with that it changes our worlds. As does oestrogen, in differing ways, some beneficial, some not. But we think it is all real. One thing that interested me is that I found personal and social power that I never found under testosterone after I started taking oestrogen, just to complicate the picture more. Nobody ever told me that being a woman in society would mean I was powerless, so I wasn’t. It reminds me of talking to a very senior woman police officer who told me when we talked over the issues of gender and power that she never had any trouble. When I asked why, she said, without hesitation, that it was because she knew who she was.

What it all comes down to is the usual power and perception game, which is as internal as it is external. If you know who you are, you don’t need to play it. And what I’ve been coming to more and more, from my own particular gender perspective, is that the essence is not so much to do with women and men, but masculinity and femininity and their stereotypes, which all live in the mind. Because these things are not what we see, but where we see from, they are usually invisible.

Read Polly Toynbee, read about women’s pay being set lower by those who have the power to decide these things, then read about Zapatero, the Spanish Prime Minister who has used his power to give power. Could it be the only way out of the mess is to get men in power to give some of what they love so dearly away?

Doesn’t bode well. What do you think?