As we did before the Enlightenment
Quite a ratio on this one from yesterday.
Imagine: the world has a 10-second flash blackout and the Sex Binary is erased from everybody's minds. It disappears from their memories, advertisements, jobs, schools … everywhere. Would we face chaos? Or just organize ourselves differently, as we did before the Enlightenment?
— ELLIS CASHMORE (@elliscashmore) June 27, 2019
So…there was no Sex Binary before the Enlightenment? Is that right? Ellis Cashmore is a sociologist, so he must know.
But then how do we explain Queen Elizabeth’s speech to the troops at Tilbury?
I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king.
Looks like Sex Binary to me.
How do we explain all those female characters (played by boys) in Shakespeare’s plays who disguised themselves as men? How do we explain the Wife of Bath? How do we explain Euripides’s Medea? How do we explain her famous speech about how hard it sucks to be a woman?
Of all creatures that have life and reason
we women are the sorriest lot:
first we must at a great expenditure of money
buy a husband and even take on a master
over our body: this evil is more galling than the first.
Here is the most challenging contest, whether we will get a bad man
or a good one. Besides, divorce is unsavory
for a woman and it is not possible to say no to one’s husband.
And when she comes into new customs and rules
a woman must be a prophet of what she could never learn at home:
how best to deal with her marriage partner;
and if we get it worked out well and a husband shares
our life with us, and he bears the yoke without violence,
life is to be envied. Otherwise we are better off dead.
But the man, when he is bored with things at home
he can go out to ease the weariness of his heart.
But we have just one person to look to.
They say that we live a life free of danger
at home while they face battle with the spear.
How wrong they are. I would rather stand three times
in the line of battle than once bear a child.
What can she mean, if there is no Sex Binary? What was Euripides talking about?
What about the first thing Odysseus did on his trip home?
The wind carried me from Ilium to Ismarus, city of the Cicones. I sacked the city and slew the men, and the women and riches we split between us, so that as far as I could determine no man lacked an equal share.
How did they know which to slay and which to split between them, when there was no Sex Binary?
It’s a puzzle.
I’m trying to understand what it would mean for the “ sex binary” to be erased from people’s minds. Does it mean “ ignored?” What then would be left? Gender? We still all understand what it would be like to be a man, or a woman — if there were such things?
It sounds more to me as if the writer is talking about sex stereotypes: men are masculine; women are feminine — they have different roles to play. If that’s what she wants us to forget about, then it seems a reasonable thing to want. People just arrange themselves and make choices without being concerned about living up to a preconceived ideal dictated by body parts. Fair enough. Though it would certainly eliminate trans-anything.
It would still be nonsense though to insist that sex stereotypes were somehow invented in the 18 Th century, and before then it was all lovely and egalitarian. That’s not even the Noble Savage fallacy.
There may actually be a sense in which this idea is true. One of the most important but underappreciated tools scholars brought to bear on the physical universe during the Scientific Revolution is the systematic classification of the objects around us. It’s natural for us to label, categorise and classify the myriad of things we experience, as a survival mechanism; it (generally) only takes one bad experience with, say, a bee, for us to decide that all bees might hurt us and it wouldn’t be sensible to antagonise them. But classifying something usefully is a learned skill, and one based on culture. We can’t do science until we develop the ability to classify things in a scientifically useful way—when we can affix a useful label to a class of things, anything we say scientifically about one thing in that class we say about all of the others. (It could be argued that we’re still not as good at assigning these scientifically useful labels as we need to be in order to do good science.)
It could be argued that during the Enlightenment scholars started to extend these classification tools from objects to people. Until then, each person was a unique individual, embedded in hir own web of history, location and relationship. But in the Enlightenment we began to apply scientific categories to our fellow humans in two ways–by classifying ourselves into, among other things, sexes (as well as races, nations, classes, etc.), and by creating a unitary classification of ‘human’ to which we assigned both descriptive and prescriptive characteristics, developing such concepts as ‘universal human rights’ and ‘equality under the law’.
But this way of understanding how we experience the world is something I’ve thought of myself (and hence it may not be completely understandable in this short blog comment but c’est la vie); it’s highly unlikely that the OP would be able to articulate it.
Maybe we systematized it, but people were being classified long before the Enlightenment. I love Greek and Roman literature, and there is certainly a lot of classifying of people in there – Roman citizen vs non-Roman, for instance. Goths. Barbarians. Men. Women. Lots of ways of determining us vs them. The Other is a concept that appears to have existed throughout human history.
Native Americans knew the differences between their tribe and “the others” – often referring to their own tribe as “human beings”. They also knew the differences between men and women.
So I don’t think even this more limited view of the Enlightenment and categories being developed holds water. We were classifying organisms long before the Enlightenment, it’s just that Linnaeaus systemetized it and developed a standardized classification system. It just gave us a system so that everyone divided things the same way.
But the categories of woman and man were not part of that; they already existed, and most people would have assumed they knew what was what. Shakespeare certainly had those concepts in his per-Enlightenment Elizabethan world. Moliere understood them, in France at the same approximate time. The medieval mystery plays make it very obvious there was a sharp division between men and women. So I think that particular classification had been sharply defined long before the development of systematic classification schemes.
Jeez, male and female he created them. Genesis has two sexes, and one in sorrow bears her children.
How on earth did Cashmore think that societies organised themselves before the “Enlightenment”? Normally with specific sex roles, rights, duties and expected behaviour.
As for classifying being something not done before the Enlightenment. No society was more of a classifier than medieval Europe. The classifications may be a little odd to us, but they were there.
““There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.” ” CS Lewis
One of the things that made me stop and think about how we classify was this story, which (now that I’m Googling it again) has just been turned into a movie:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eagle_Huntress
When the news reported it a few years ago the frame was ‘girl defies sexist stereotypes to do something only men do’. But this girl comes from a family of eagle hunters–her connection with this family and its traditions outweighs her classification as a ‘girl’. True, ‘girls’ don’t hunt with eagles, but this is an actual girl, embedded in a specific set of relationships, not an interchangeable and undifferentiated member of the set ‘girl’.
I think I first started thinking about ways of classifying more than a decade ago, at a history research workshop, in which someone presented her work analysing public accounts and government documents describing the state visit of an African king to England in the early seventeenth century. This head of state and his retinue were described in all sorts of ways, but were not specifically identified as ‘black people’, and were treated, as far as she could discern, the same way any other state visitors would have been treated.
Yet at the same time, also the early 17th century, we can find Desdemona’s father saying to Othello:
Which is not to say it’s not an interesting point, about the African king – just that there seem to be warring currents.
I would think that the essentialism fostered in Aquinas ‘ Natural Law was a much more strict and rigid form of classification than the scientific categories of the Enlightenment. Everything is derived from its Perfect Form: those that vary are aberrations or abominations from the primary real. Wasn’t it first used to demonstrate that earrings ( or was it beards?) were contrary to Nature ( or was it God?)
Can’t have been beards, Jesus was beardy, and they had the
photographspaintings to prove it.I’m pretty sure people would rediscover within a few seconds that there are two classes of human bodies. And that one class is larger and stronger than the other.
I took it to mean all knowledge of sex and the stereotypes associated with sex (i.e. gender).
In Ancient Greece, were not women barred from public life? Greek bouncers must have known which was which in order to keep women out of meetings and such.
@7 definitely warring currents–I was originally thinking the trend toward more rigid classifications came out of the axial religions, which were all about separating (kashrut, sacred/profane, male/female) if not necessarily classifying in the way we mean it today.
With respect to your quotation, though, I don’t see the conflict–as far as I can tell, the speaker is describing Othello rather than classifying him (ie not lumping him in with other sooty-bosomed things, or expecting all sooty-bosomed things to resemble each other).
@11 apparently not all women:
https://www.ancient.eu/article/927/women-in-ancient-greece/
Again, I’d suggest that ‘before the Enlightenment’ people general considered each individual person a collection of characteristics, some of which might be more salient than others, rather than a single generic ‘x’ to which characteristics were attached.
Which is not to say I think the OP has any actual point to make at all (and you do have to wonder what possesses someone to post something like that on Twitter under his real name for all the world to see); I’m just doing a little thought experiment to imagine in what universe his statement might possibly make any kind of sense, and while I’m at it airing some ideas of my own.
Maybe there was a secret, pre-historic Enlightenment that Cashmore alone is aware of, one that pre-dates the middle-upper Paleolithic era cave paintings which clearly differentiate men from women, and the ivory ‘Venus’ figurines – very clearly female in form – from the same period.
Othello has many more places where he is referred to in derogatory terms. And not just Othello; there is a black character in Titus Andronicus that is definitely in the stereotyped mode.
And quotes about women abound. Taming of the Shrew is a case in point, though later commentators have done everything they can to make it a feminist work (I’m not convinced, and I don’t know many others who are).
I have repeatedly read the claim that there was no racism before the Enlightenment, but this is a new one.
Also The Merchant of Venice – Portia rejects the Prince of Morocco who apologises for his complexion.
Now it’s not Deep South levels of racism, where of course no Prince of Morocco could approach Portia, but it’s definitely there..
Enter the PRINCE of MOROCCO, a tawny Moor
PRINCE OF Morocco. Mislike me not for my complexion,
The shadowed livery of the burnish’d sun,
To whom I am a neighbour, and near bred…
PORTIA. A gentle riddance. Draw the curtains, go.
Let all of his complexion choose me so. Exeunt
I always have had a strong predeliction for the the idea that the divisions of sex-based roles goes back to the founding of agricultural societies, which both permit and require the specialization of labor. Hunter/gatherers tend to, well, hunt and gather. An individual’s skill at a particular task means they spend more time doing that task, but there’s relatively little room for gross simplifications like “Women are nurturing, men are aggressors”. Divisions tend to be more “us vs. them”, where “them” is anyone outside the tribe. Upper body strength and the ability to give birth are about the only distinctions between the sexes.
But agriculture allows for surplus population (over that needed to provide food). This allows the development of other skills–architecture, writing, formal soldiery, medicine, etc. These often require additional training, however. Because of this surplus, the inaccuracy of categorization can be overwhelmed by the efficiency of quickly sorting who gets to spend time training to do what. Categorization of people is most readily done by instantly visible traits–ie, sex and race. Since most communities at this point were pretty monoracial (with non-homogenous individuals usually being captured slaves), sex was the easiest tool handy to start divvying up preferred roles.
So, yeah, by the time we actually had societies that might’ve written something down, we had the ‘sex binary’ embedded into the system.
Jeremy and I had to discuss this a lot while writing Does God Hate Women? He’s a sociologist and I’m just a rando, so I had to sort of temper my headlong made-up explanations of The Roots of All This. Only a little though. I got away with the rather fiery last pages.