Objectify This

There’s no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.
-Albert Ellis (Ironic Curtsy: Irrational Woman)

In her essay “Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism,” Elizabeth Grosz writes of the problematic implication of “patriarchal frameworks, methods, and presumptions” in contemporary feminist theory and rhetoric. She concludes that this relationship needs to be “acknowledged instead of being disavowed. Moreover, this (historically) necessary binding by patriarchal terms is the very condition of feminism’s effectivity in countering and displacing the effects of patriarchy: its immersion in patriarchal practices (including those surrounding the production of theory) is the condition of its effective critique of and movement beyond them. This immersion provides not only the conditions under which feminism can become familiar with what it criticises but also the very means by which patriarchal dominance can be challenged.”

In his essay “Nonrational Foundations of Rationality” from Sociological Insight: An Introduction to Non-Obvious Sociology, Randall Collins argues that society is “based on trust”, at the most fundamental level.

This trust, also known as Durkheim’s “precontractual solidarity,” is critical, because “left to their own rational self-interest, individuals take unfair advantage of contributions that other people make to the community as a whole.” Society works because most of the time people don’t take their groceries and leave the store, and most of the time they don’t drive under the influence on a suspended license.

This brings us back to Grosz’ point, and to my own. Some proponents of “egalitarianist feminism” promote the idea that men and women are equally rational, rather than the “biologistic” perspective, which defines “women’s social and psychological capacities according to biologically established limits. It asserts, for example, that women are weaker in physical strength than men; that women are, by their biological natures, more emotional than men; and so on. Insofar as biology is assumed to constitute an unalterable bedrock of identity, the attribution of biologistic characteristics amounts to a permanent form of social containment for women.”

These ideas of a “biological basis” of rationality and emotionality firstly take for granted our cultural constructions of gender roles, but secondly, and more importantly, they conflate the demonstrated biological differences between men and women with the sociocultural differences between men and women.

In addition, the “biological” theory of gender roles leaves us in an awkward bind: by treating the male personality as the default, “rational” personality in contrast to the deviant, female “emotional” personality, these scientific theories of gender offer us a

definition of humanity as rational (and as excluding women, some of the time) that we’d like to believe, but which itself demands evidence for this rationality. And it’s evidence that is difficult to scrounge up.

I mean, really: is that what we seek to do with our lives- compute and follow rational outcomes? Most of the social sciences are based on studying the ways in which human behavior deviates from the expected, and on trying to understand the ways in which nonrational motives dictate human behavior- – because they are in control so much of the time.

‘But’, you might protest, ‘are you not trying to rationally deconstruct rationality as the basis of human behavior? Is this not a completely self-defeating exercise?’ I don’t think it is; I think it’s only rational that rationality be knocked down a notch. Rationality cannot explain everything; as Albert Einstein said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

To return again to Grosz, I’d argue that the deconstruction of our patriarchal mindset must begin with a reexamination of the differences between men and women. We know that men and women are biologically different (in biology, this is known as sexual dimorphism); but we do not know exactly how this difference manifests itself in us as we experience our lives.

We must recognize that to be perfectly rational about these things is to admit that we cannot yet with any precision compare the emotionality of men and women; but that our historical cultural conjectures about the hysterical emotionality of the female and our disempowerment of the female have lead us to undervalue and overlook the role that emotion plays in society.

Feminism has historically involved a celebration and universalization of personal truth, as a form of self-empowerment in the midst of schools of thought based on the celebration of and identification with the patriarchy.

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