One species, two realities

Given that the realm of politics, in fact pretty much everything is largely, if not completely, a male thing, is it any wonder that men who claim to be progressive, you know, enlightened and liberated, for the most part are absolutely clueless about 50% of the human race? In fact, judging by appearances, it would seem that females are a different species, let alone judged by their behaviour!

As I sit here and watch TV dramas, I’m struck by how men are most often portrayed; as insensitive, self-centred, egotistical, arrogant and quite often brutish. Even men who claim to be ‘enlightened’, when push comes to shove, display an appalling ignorance about the nature of women, their inner and outer lives. About how women relate to each other; the nature of their socialisation; how they move in space; how they connect to the world around them and especially of course, how they relate to men.

I suppose I have a degree of envy, I feel trapped in my male mind, the sheer weight of upbringing weighs on me, drags me down. Of course it can be argued that the same applies to the upbringing of women, yet the very nature of what can be viewed as a burden for women, also has a very positive side; socialisation; childbirth; nurturing, even the home, ‘taking care of things’, of each other. Can the same be said of the male, except of course, when at war? Note how women, when together, without men, interact in a very different way than men. They touch each other, embrace each other, they occupy space in a different way. Women listen, men talk. Life becomes a struggle for me as I strive not to be a man, nor, for that matter, to be a woman, in spite of myself but it’s impossible. Even men who purport to become female, so-called transgendered, are in fact, imitating the female, even down to the tiniest gesture, the tiniest detail, else the illusion crumbles. A perfect copy? But they are actually doing it for men as it’s men who decide what it is to be female. What a contradiction! What an irony. No wonder men are so fucked up. Is it envy, an escape from the burden of being a man? But it’s an escape into the fantasy, as men perceive it, of what it is to be a woman.

Yet we are taught, conditioned, that men have all the advantages; after all, we make up the rules; we decide. We are ‘in charge’. We are taught that being a man is being in control, making decisions. The burden of masculinity is that we hide our emotions, for showing emotions is to reveal our weakness, our vulnerability, our essential but suppressed humanity. Thus the denial of our humanity is what it is to be a man. Yet another contradiction, yet another irony.

The point is, the self-conscious mind has moved us beyond our bodies but still we carry the legacy of our biology, of our genes and capitalism has very effectively exploited the dichotomy between our minds and our bodies. Thus we think we think. This is best revealed in the world of advertising, so crucial to the making of money and the warping of minds. Psychologists have plumbed the depths of our minds and found us wanting, needing and those needs are real, advertising merely diverts them to more profitable pastures. Yet the very act of diverting reveals so much, if we care to look. ‘The fantasy of the skin, the fantasy of being someone else, the fantasy of the faraway place’, as the unusually sensitive man, John Berger, put it more than 60 years ago in ‘Ways of Seeing’.

This separation between mind and body manifests itself most clearly in how our desires are manipulated and it’s most clear in how capitalism has transformed how women are perceived, knowing full well that mens biology drives them in a specific and quite singular direction. Thus women are literally created in the minds of men. The female body has been elevated in ways that surpass those of the past. The transformation is, at first sight, not at all obvious, as it seeks not to modify the female form, for example, as the corset and bustle did in Victorian times but to focus on the intrinsic differences between the male and female body (‘the fantasy of the skin’). The focus on ‘perfection’ for example, so the female body is idealised (‘the fantasy of being somebody else’) a state that women must strive to attain (‘because we are worth it’).

By contrast, the male mind is either, all about power or, it’s negatively compared to the sophistication, the perfection of the female (minus her mind of course) and inherent in these two states is the role of sexuality. Thus we see men presented as clumsy, crude and unsophisticated, interested in only one thing; conquest and the degree to which this reflects and reinforces a society that glorifies violence, indeed lives by violence cannot be minimised, the two are intimately connected.

So how do we alter men’s perceptions of what it is to be a woman or indeed, women’s perceptions of what it is to be a man? The problem of course, is that it’s impossible to see the wood for the trees. By this I mean, our two states, the state of men and the state of women, appear as acts of nature, as immutable and unchangeable. It’s as if we live in parallel universes, we gaze at each other (when we care to look) across an unbridgeable chasm. But changing our circumstances can change the way we think and act but only over time, a long time and even then, we have to change, transform our circumstances. The power of society to shape us, is immense. We live by example, our parents lived by example, their parents lived by example, back into history. But events do change us, albeit in tiny increments, some of which stick but most don’t transfer from one generation to the next. Not only is the inertia immense, change is dangerous, it threatens the status quo of the most basic unit of society, the family, already under threat from a disintegrating capitalism.

‘Abortion investigations causing women ‘life-changing harm’, says UK expert – The Guardian, 27 January 2024

Is it possible to bridge the gap between the sexes without a total rearrangement of, well everything? The obstacles seem immense and immoveable. No matter what we look at, men and capitalism have got there first and defined the nature of, well everything. Science, history, sociology, biology, economics, politics (of course), relationships, down to all the sub-divisions of all the above. Of course, women make inroads, there are changes, improvements, some large, gains are made but fundamentally, does anything really change? On one level, it’s really simple; when men look at women they see a social construct, it’s all appearance, hence the focus on how women look, what they wear, how they behave and this is so deeply ingrained in men and in women that it’s impossible to remove it. We call it the male gaze and all men do it whether we want to or not. It’s a reflex, ingrained in us literally from birth. In one sense it exploits our biology but who is doing the exploitation?

We’ve come full circle, we are back to looking at how capitalism exploits our biology, we are, after all, still animals, part of Nature in spite of our pretensions to being Lords of the Universe and it’s our incomplete and very distorted understanding of our nature that enables capitalism to do what it does; to exploit our animal heritage for profit and critically, to control us.