Narcissistic abuse
"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)
With same-sex marriage becoming a legal reality
throughout the world, many more children are going to be raised by homosexual (gay
and lesbian) parents, or even by transgendered
or transsexual ones. How is this going to affect the child’s masculinity or
femininity?
Is being a gay man less manly than being a
heterosexual one? Is a woman who is the outcome of a sex change operation less
feminine than her natural-born sisters? In which sense is a masculine lesbian
less of a man than an effeminate heterosexual or homosexual man? And how should
we classify and treat bisexuals and asexuals?
What about modern she-breadwinners? All those
feminist women in traditional male positions who are as sexually aggressive as
men and prone to the same varieties of misconduct (e.g., cheating on their
spouses)? Are they less womanly? And are their stay-at-home-dad partners not
men enough? How are sex preferences related to gender differentiation? And if
one’s sex and genitalia can be chosen and altered at will – why not one’s
gender, regardless of one’s natural equipment? Can we decouple gender roles
from sexual functions and endowments?
In nature, male and female are distinct.
She-elephants are gregarious, he-elephants solitary. Male zebra finches are
loquacious - the females mute. Female green spoon worms are 200,000 times
larger than their male mates. These striking differences are biological - yet
they lead to differentiation in social roles and skill acquisition.
Alan Pease, author of a book titled "Why
Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps", believes that women are
spatially-challenged compared to men. The British firm, Admiral Insurance,
conducted a study of half a million claims. They found that "women were
almost twice as likely as men to have a collision in a car park, 23 percent
more likely to hit a stationary car, and 15 percent more likely to reverse into
another vehicle" (Reuters).
Yet gender "differences" are often
the outcomes of bad scholarship. Consider Admiral insurance's data. As
Britain's Automobile Association (AA) correctly pointed out - women drivers
tend to make more short journeys around towns and shopping centers and these
involve frequent parking. Hence their ubiquity in certain kinds of claims.
Regarding women's alleged spatial deficiency, in Britain, girls have been
outperforming boys in scholastic aptitude tests - including geometry and maths
- since 1988.
In an Op-Ed published by the New York Times
on January 23, 2005, Olivia Judson cited this example
"Beliefs that men are intrinsically better at this or that have
repeatedly led to discrimination and prejudice, and then they've been proved to
be nonsense. Women were thought not to be world-class musicians. But when
American symphony orchestras introduced blind auditions in the 1970's - the
musician plays behind a screen so that his or her gender is invisible to those
listening - the number of women offered jobs in professional orchestras
increased. Similarly, in science, studies of the ways that grant applications
are evaluated have shown that women are more likely to get financing when those
reading the applications do not know the sex of the applicant."
On the other wing of the divide, Anthony
Clare, a British psychiatrist and author of "On Men" wrote:
"At the beginning of the 21st century it is difficult to avoid
the conclusion that men are in serious trouble. Throughout the world, developed
and developing, antisocial behavior is essentially male. Violence, sexual abuse
of children, illicit drug use, alcohol misuse, gambling, all are overwhelmingly
male activities. The courts and prisons bulge with men. When it comes to
aggression, delinquent behavior, risk taking and social mayhem, men win
gold."
Men also mature later, die earlier, are more
susceptible to infections and most types of cancer, are more likely to be
dyslexic, to suffer from a host of mental health disorders, such as Attention
Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and to commit suicide.
In her book, "Stiffed: The Betrayal of
the American Man", Susan Faludi describes a crisis of masculinity
following the breakdown of manhood models and work and family structures in the
last five decades. In the film "Boys don't Cry", a teenage girl binds
her breasts and acts the male in a caricatural relish of stereotypes of
virility. Being a man is merely a state of mind, the movie implies.
But what does it really mean to be a
"male" or a "female"? Are gender identity and sexual
preferences genetically determined? Can they be reduced to one's sex? Or are
they amalgams of biological, social, and psychological factors in constant
interaction? Are they immutable lifelong features or dynamically evolving
frames of self-reference?
In rural northern Albania, until recently, in
families with no male heir, women could choose to forego sex and childbearing,
alter their external appearance and "become" men and the patriarchs
of their clans, with all the attendant rights and obligations.
In the aforementioned New York Times Op-Ed,
Olivia Judson opines:
"Many sex differences are not, therefore, the result of his
having one gene while she has another. Rather, they are attributable to the way
particular genes behave when they find themselves in him instead of her. The
magnificent difference between male and female green spoon worms, for example,
has nothing to do with their having different genes: each green spoon worm
larva could go either way. Which sex it becomes depends on whether it meets a
female during its first three weeks of life. If it meets a female, it becomes
male and prepares to regurgitate; if it doesn't, it becomes female and settles
into a crack on the sea floor."
Yet, certain traits attributed to one's sex
are surely better accounted for by the demands of one's environment, by
cultural factors, the process of socialization, gender roles, and what George
Devereux called "ethnopsychiatry" in "Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry"
(University of Chicago Press, 1980). He suggested to divide the unconscious
into the id (the part that was always instinctual and unconscious) and the
"ethnic unconscious" (repressed material that was once
conscious). The latter is mostly molded by prevailing cultural mores and
includes all our defense mechanisms and most of the superego.
So, how can we tell whether our sexual role
is mostly in our blood or in our brains?
The scrutiny of borderline cases of human sexuality
- notably the transgendered or intersexed - can yield clues as to the
distribution and relative weights of biological, social, and psychological
determinants of gender identity formation.
The results of a study conducted by Uwe
Hartmann, Hinnerk Becker, and Claudia Rueffer-Hesse in 1997 and titled
"Self and Gender: Narcissistic Pathology and Personality Factors in Gender
Dysphoric Patients", published in the "International Journal of
Transgenderism", "indicate significant psychopathological aspects and
narcissistic dysregulation in a substantial proportion of patients." Are
these "psychopathological aspects" merely reactions to underlying
physiological realities and changes? Could social ostracism and labeling have
induced them in the "patients"?
The authors conclude:
"The cumulative evidence of our
study ... is consistent with the view that gender dysphoria is a disorder of
the sense of self as has been proposed by Beitel (1985) or Pfäfflin (1993). The
central problem in our patients is about identity and the self in general and
the transsexual wish seems to be an attempt at reassuring and stabilizing the
self-coherence which in turn can lead to a further destabilization if the self
is already too fragile. In this view the body is instrumentalized to create a
sense of identity and the splitting symbolized in the hiatus between the
rejected body-self and other parts of the self is more between good and bad
objects than between masculine and feminine."
Freud, Kraft-Ebbing, and Fliess suggested
that we are all bisexual to a certain degree. As early as 1910, Dr. Magnus
Hirschfeld argued, in Berlin, that absolute genders are "abstractions,
invented extremes". The consensus today is that one's sexuality is,
mostly, a psychological construct which reflects gender role orientation.
Joanne Meyerowitz, a professor of history at
Indiana University and the editor of The Journal of American History observes,
in her recently published tome, "How Sex Changed: A History of
Transsexuality in the United States", that the very meaning of masculinity
and femininity is in constant flux.
Transgender activists, says Meyerowitz,
insist that gender and sexuality represent "distinct analytical
categories". The New York Times wrote in its review of the book:
"Some male-to-female transsexuals have sex with men and call themselves
homosexuals. Some female-to-male transsexuals have sex with women and call
themselves lesbians. Some transsexuals call themselves asexual."
So, it is all in the mind, you see.
This would be taking it too far. A large body
of scientific evidence points to the genetic and biological underpinnings of
sexual behavior and preferences.
The German science magazine, "Geo",
reported recently that the males of the fruit fly "drosophila
melanogaster" switched from heterosexuality to homosexuality as the
temperature in the lab was increased from 19 to 30 degrees Celsius. They
reverted to chasing females as it was lowered.
The brain structures of homosexual sheep are
different to those of straight sheep, a study conducted recently by the Oregon
Health & Science University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Sheep
Experiment Station in Dubois, Idaho, revealed. Similar differences were found
between gay men and straight ones in 1995 in Holland and elsewhere. The preoptic
area of the hypothalamus was larger in heterosexual men than in both homosexual
men and straight women.
According an article, titled "When
Sexual Development Goes Awry", by Suzanne Miller, published in the
September 2000 issue of the "World and I", various medical conditions
give rise to sexual ambiguity. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), involving
excessive androgen production by the adrenal cortex, results in mixed
genitalia. A person with the complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) has
a vagina, external female genitalia and functioning, androgen-producing, testes
- but no uterus or fallopian tubes.
People with the rare 5-alpha reductase
deficiency syndrome are born with ambiguous genitalia. They appear at first to
be girls. At puberty, such a person develops testicles and his clitoris swells
and becomes a penis. Hermaphrodites possess both ovaries and testicles (both,
in most cases, rather undeveloped). Sometimes the ovaries and testicles
are combined into a chimera called ovotestis.
Most of these individuals have the
chromosomal composition of a woman together with traces of the Y, male,
chromosome. All hermaphrodites have a sizable penis, though rarely
generate sperm. Some hermaphrodites develop breasts during puberty and menstruate.
Very few even get pregnant and give birth.
Anne Fausto-Sterling, a developmental
geneticist, professor of medical science at Brown University, and author of
"Sexing the Body", postulated, in 1993, a continuum of 5 sexes to
supplant the current dimorphism: males, merms (male pseudohermaphrodites),
herms (true hermaphrodites), ferms (female pseudohermaphrodites), and females.
Intersexuality (hermpahroditism) is a natural
human state. We are all conceived with the potential to develop into either
sex. The embryonic developmental default is female. A series of triggers during
the first weeks of pregnancy places the fetus on the path to maleness.
In rare cases, some women have a male's
genetic makeup (XY chromosomes) and vice versa. But, in the vast majority of cases,
one of the sexes is clearly selected. Relics of the stifled sex remain, though.
Women have the clitoris as a kind of symbolic penis. Men have breasts (mammary
glands) and nipples.
The Encyclopedia Britannica 2003 edition
describes the formation of ovaries and testes thus:
"In the young embryo a pair of gonads develop that are
indifferent or neutral, showing no indication whether they are destined to
develop into testes or ovaries. There are also two different duct systems, one
of which can develop into the female system of oviducts and related apparatus
and the other into the male sperm duct system. As development of the embryo
proceeds, either the male or the female reproductive tissue differentiates in
the originally neutral gonad of the mammal."
Yet, sexual preferences, genitalia and even
secondary sex characteristics, such as facial and pubic hair are first order
phenomena. Can genetics and biology account for male and female behavior
patterns and social interactions ("gender identity")? Can the multi-tiered
complexity and richness of human masculinity and femininity arise from simpler,
deterministic, building blocks?
Sociobiologists would have us think so.
For instance: the fact that we are mammals is
astonishingly often overlooked. Most mammalian families are composed of mother
and offspring. Males are peripatetic absentees. Arguably, high rates of divorce
and birth out of wedlock coupled with rising promiscuity merely reinstate this
natural "default mode", observes Lionel Tiger, a professor of anthropology
at Rutgers University in New Jersey. That three quarters of all divorces are
initiated by women tends to support this view.
Furthermore, gender identity is determined
during gestation, claim some scholars.
Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii
and Dr. Keith Sigmundson, a practicing psychiatrist, studied the
much-celebrated John/Joan case. An accidentally castrated normal male was
surgically modified to look female, and raised as a girl but to no avail. He
reverted to being a male at puberty.
His gender identity seems to have been inborn
(assuming he was not subjected to conflicting cues from his human environment).
The case is extensively described in John Colapinto's tome "As Nature Made
Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl".
HealthScoutNews cited a study published in
the November 2002 issue of "Child Development". The researchers, from
City University of London, found that the level of maternal testosterone during
pregnancy affects the behavior of neonatal girls and renders it more masculine.
"High testosterone" girls "enjoy activities typically considered
male behavior, like playing with trucks or guns". Boys' behavior remains
unaltered, according to the study.
Yet, other scholars, like John Money, insist
that newborns are a "blank slate" as far as their gender identity is
concerned. This is also the prevailing view. Gender and sex-role identities, we
are taught, are fully formed in a process of socialization which ends by the
third year of life. The Encyclopedia Britannica 2003 edition sums it up thus:
"Like an individual's concept of
his or her sex role, gender identity develops by means of parental example,
social reinforcement, and language. Parents teach sex-appropriate behavior to
their children from an early age, and this behavior is reinforced as the child
grows older and enters a wider social world. As the child acquires language, he
also learns very early the distinction between "he" and
"she" and understands which pertains to him- or herself."
So, which is it - nature or nurture? There is
no disputing the fact that our sexual physiology and, in all probability, our
sexual preferences are determined in the womb. Men and women are different -
physiologically and, as a result, also psychologically.
Society, through its agents - foremost amongst
which are family, peers, and teachers - represses or encourages these genetic
propensities. It does so by propagating "gender roles" -
gender-specific lists of alleged traits, permissible behavior patterns, and
prescriptive morals and norms. Our "gender identity" or "sex
role" is shorthand for the way we make use of our natural
genotypic-phenotypic endowments in conformity with social-cultural "gender
roles".
Inevitably as the composition and bias of
these lists change, so does the meaning of being "male" or
"female". Gender roles are constantly redefined by tectonic shifts in
the definition and functioning of basic social units, such as the nuclear
family and the workplace. The cross-fertilization of gender-related cultural
memes renders "masculinity" and "femininity" fluid
concepts.
One's sex equals one's bodily equipment, an
objective, finite, and, usually, immutable inventory. But our endowments can be
put to many uses, in different cognitive and affective contexts, and subject to
varying exegetic frameworks. As opposed to "sex" - "gender"
is, therefore, a socio-cultural narrative. Both heterosexual and homosexual men
ejaculate. Both straight and lesbian women climax. What distinguishes them from
each other are subjective introjects of socio-cultural conventions, not
objective, immutable "facts".
In "The New Gender Wars", published
in the November/December 2000 issue of "Psychology Today", Sarah
Blustain sums up the "bio-social" model proposed by Mice Eagly, a professor of psychology at
Northwestern University and a former student of his, Wendy Wood, now a
professor at the Texas A&M University:
"Like (the evolutionary psychologists),
Eagly and Wood reject social constructionist notions that all gender
differences are created by culture. But to the question of where they come
from, they answer differently: not our genes but our roles in society. This
narrative focuses on how societies respond to the basic biological differences
- men's strength and women's reproductive capabilities - and how they encourage
men and women to follow certain patterns.
'If you're spending a lot of time nursing
your kid', explains Wood, 'then you don't have the opportunity to devote large
amounts of time to developing specialized skills and engaging tasks outside of
the home'. And, adds Eagly, 'if women are charged with caring for infants, what
happens is that women are more nurturing. Societies have to make the adult
system work [so] socialization of girls is arranged to give them experience in
nurturing'.
According to this interpretation, as the
environment changes, so will the range and texture of gender differences. At a
time in Western countries when female reproduction is extremely low, nursing is
totally optional, childcare alternatives are many, and mechanization lessens
the importance of male size and strength, women are no longer restricted as
much by their smaller size and by child-bearing. That means, argue Eagly and
Wood, that role structures for men and women will change and, not surprisingly,
the way we socialize people in these new roles will change too. (Indeed, says
Wood, 'sex differences seem to be reduced in societies where men and women have
similar status,' she says. If you're looking to live in more gender-neutral
environment, try Scandinavia.)"
Film Review: "What to Expect When You
Are Expecting" (2012)
Modern pop culture bombards us with gender
stereotypes, which by now have become truisms: women are always sensitive,
misunderstood, in touch with their emotions and neglected; men are
commitment-phobic, confused, narcissistic, hypersexed, and hell-bent on
frustrating the opposite number.
It was, therefore, refreshing to watch the
four female protagonists of the film "What to Expect When You Are
Expecting" reduce these caricatures to smithereens. The womenfolk in the
film are self-centered, dread intimacy and commitment, two of them are
workaholics, and all four are rank narcissists.
The men in this otherwise middling movie are
romantic, in touch with their emotions, committed, and largely selfless. The
only exception is the dysfunctional father of one of them, a throwback to the
1960s when men were still machos and sex meant everything. His youthful wife
makes up for his shortcomings, though: she is clear-headed, no-nonsense,
determined, sharp-witted, and a strict disciplinarian when needed. But this
incongruous couple is the only exception to an otherwise coherent message: men
have matured, women should get their act together.
The women are the ones who - not so secretly
- abhor the thought of what bearing children would do to their bodies and to
their lives (in this order.) The men encourage them to be fruitful and multiply
as the ultimate fad in self-fulfillment and self-gratification.
Another striking feature of this film is the
fact that none of the women, despite being all over the place, feels the need
to seek advice. They live alone and cope in solitude: gone are the
tips-dispensing mother; the supportive female soulmate; The effeminate or gay
male friend; the recurring old flame; the motherly colleague or avuncular
co-worker. It's every woman for herself now. And they are botching the job,
says the film, as thoroughly as men ever did.
