In Perelandra, C.S. Lewis writes,
Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. . . . Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female of organic creature are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine.
I would never want to adopt Lewis’ view of the relationships between the genders. Read The Shoddy Lands short story and you will realise why. But I would like to redeem this quote that has stuck with me since I first read it 7 years ago. If we understand “sex” to mean the simple biological anatomy, then this is inappropriately reductionist to account for the distinction between man and woman. And although gender is socially constructed, Lewis is reaching here for a concept called “Gender”, that goes much deeper than biological difference. The relationality between the sexes gives rise to something powerful and Real (in the Lacanian sense), in their mutuality they create and this interaction raises the human race to “plains of reality” far more substantial than XY and XX.
The roles of male and female are always changing, from society to society and place to place. But it is in our relationality to each other, and the fertile possibility of that, that seems to mark out, for me, what distinguishes the two. It is more than anatomy, but anatomical. It is more than copulation, although it is copulative. The Mars and Venus silliness is exposed in its absurdity by it. But the Real gender, that which is ever-present under the changing and shifting sands of social constructs, male can only be known in the female and female in male. Being a man or a woman may be roles we perform in society but beneath that all, there is gender, the relationality that is made possible because the other has space for us.
Your Correspondent, He makes a mess with words for his wife to clean up
“Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings.”
This sentence doesn’t sound right to me. The different sexes, as well as the tension between them, is a reproductive strategy that isn’t adopted by all of life (Take whiptail lizard species as an example), so I wouldn’t say that life reflects some fundamental Masculine-Feminine polarity. In fact, I wouldn’t say that such a fundamental polarity exists at all (though you probably already knew that).
Maybe im not smart enought to spot it but did you offer proof for what you are saying here or did you say what you think is true?
Are you saying that men and women are can only know themselves when they are around opposite sex people?
You say gender roles are social constructs but add that gender is Real. Do you think then that there is any actions that are exclusively male or female?
Starting from the bottom. Richie: Giving birth is exclusively female. Menstruation too. But once you get outside bodily function, its all for grabs for both genders.
Social construct is a good way to describe gender roles, but I am trying to say that I think Lewis is right. GENDER goes beyond roles and sexuality and represents a deeper, transcendental level of being.
That level of being is the level of interaction that arises because male and female are complementary (in a way that goes way beyond the Keith Chegwin video). My only proof for saying that men and women know themselves as men and women only in relationship to the other is that I believe it.
Morb: Lewis was talking about humanity.
Then what does he mean when he speaks of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings? If this polarity does not divide all created beings then in what way does it represent a deeper level of being? Sure, we can extend the idea of gender to describe aesthetic qualities of some things like mountains or trees, but I don’t see how Gender is fundamental or polarising? Calling Gender Real because we can classify some things as masculine or feminine seems as ill-advised as calling the decimal system Real because we can classify amounts in terms of the number of fingers on our hand.
I like girls.
Ok. but.
Whilst i know that some boys like to play with dolls and some girls like to kick your head in ( oh young korean girl you’ve stayin with me all these years..) but to surely you cant say everything is up for grabs after biological things? What about that boy who was born with a tiny penis so they cut it off and reared him as a girl.. he never adjusted, rebeled all his life against wearing dresses having long hair etc and eventually killed himself. My own daughter is only six months and yet i feel it true to say that she is displaying “girly” traits already.
I recon if your right you’ll need to parse this better.
Yeah only 2 girls Housemate. Big deal.
Well the Real is a product of 20th Century French philosophy. So ill advised or not, both the decimal system and gender could be described in such terms. I think you are maybe missing the playing field. Lewis nor I am discussing the purely phenotypical expression of gender but something relational that comes about as humans find the Other in that which is different from them.
I don’t really understand this post Zoomie.
I think you don’t either…? 🙂
So…what you’re trying to say is:
1. There is something real and concrete about gender that goes beyond our perceptions of gender
2. Gender is not primarily sexual despite being wound up with sexuality
?
I do agree with my own summation.
In the spirit of Alan Partridge’s ‘Ders more ta iorland dan dis’ … ZT is really just saying ‘there’s more to gender than rumpy pumpy’.
gender roles and aspirations are fluid, they change with the needs, values and required skills of the times. Physical strength was a big bonus in society for millennia, now, not so much so typical female gender traits are in the assendent. In some parts of the world hunting/fighting/treking are still assendent.
Surely though, there are a lot or really smart people with expertise in this field who should be studied before asking pro bible-readers like CL Lewis what he thinks.
Who is this CL Lewis? I will never listen to a pro bible-reader (is that like a pro cyclist; do they read their bikes in oxygen tanks to increase stamina?) on any issue, especially fundamental questions of being.
Thankfully, until I get some of CL Lewis’ writings I can rely on CS Lewis, the foremost scholar of 16th Century English literature of the 20th Century and author of one of the great philosophical tracts on love, The Four Loves. As well as being Anglican, he had other things going for him.
It is the “something relational/fundamental reality” that I disagree with. CS Lewis says that Gender is not an imaginative extension of sex. He says it is a fundamental reality that divides all created beings. I, on the other hand, hold Gender as an artificial extension of emergent phenotypes related to sex and sexual behaviour. It is something that does not divide all created beings (I would even say that it does not divide all humans). Gender is nifty but, like the decimal system, it is ultimately a convention.
With that said, I’m sure it can be defined as real if it is integrated into Christian beliefs (Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t there a train of thought that says we all have a feminine relationship with Christ that is absolute/Real).