Gender competition is pronounced in our species due to our unique socially symbolic performative features. There is a gendered endowment of a conflicting reproductive strategy between women and men or female and male; transgender borrows from both female and male and perhaps outside an ancient sexually reproductive gender binary and dimorphism. The ancient male reproductive strategy is sexual polygamy to relieve paternal angst whereas the ancient female reproductive strategy is emotional polygamy to enlist male cognitive and athletic power to help raise her offspring.
Paternal angst is the angst experienced by men, or males of other species, that eventuates from the uncertainty that a female sexual partner’s offspring is from their sperm and not another man’s. Human males have a high paternal angst because ovulation in females of reproductive age, now being trumped socially by legal age for sexual intercourse, is not visible nor discernible to a male sexual partner or partners. This is in contrast to chimpanzee females, for example, which have their buttocks become swollen and grow redder when ovulating – an overt display and signal to the males. Thus, sexual polygamy was a gaming strategy of males to solicit the most reproductively successful sexual intercourse as a way to mitigate their paternal angst. Contrastingly, a female of reproductive age carries her offspring when pregnant, and thus knows with much greater certainty than a male partner that it is hers – from her biogenetic lineage. It is worth noting, that men would like to know for certain when a woman is ovulating both if trying to solicit an impregnation/fertilisation or equally trying to avoid a pregnancy from purely intended non-reproductive recreational sex.
It follows that the only reconciliation to this gender-impasse between these two ancient conflicting reproductive strategies is a culture of monogamy and sexually regulated / moderated polyamory. Monogamy is at its strongest when reified and consecrated in loyal marriage. Herein, the woman attains emotional connection loyalty from a man, a man attains sexual loyalty from a woman. A further secondary humane progression and impetus is where a woman also enjoys sexual loyalty from a man and a man also enjoys emotional loyalty from a woman, as actuating from the precondition of fulfillment of the primary reproductive strategy of each. This latter phenomenon can be understood as mutual enjoyment of the other’s dimorphic opposite reproductive strategies. I have written on a reconciled template for a workable polyamory at https://henrywilloughbyssocialjusticeblog.com/2021/02/03/the-ideal-of-monogamy-the-ideal-of-polyamory-the-choice-is-yours-rejecting-polygamy/. In a nutshell, phallic penetrative sex could best be enjoyed, I contend, with the protection and prerogative of monogamous emotional and sexual loyalty. This is informed by the archetype of reproductive sex which is phallic penetrative, as being close to genetic reproduction of the self and thus highly charged emotionally and sexually.
Currently there is strong intra-gender competition as well. We have not transcended the mammalian tendency to establish preferential mating rights to the opposite reproductive sex as far as women and men go. We can see capitalism as a somewhat type of reactionary socially symbolic extension of this mammalian impetus in intra-species competition, which is really a form of hyper-competition severely fracturing our species along class disparity lines. As we technologically and socially free ourselves from this animalistic gender-practice, which has already become more socially symbolic under capitalism as compared with other mammals who are less socially symbolic. Symbolism is a feature of human sociality due to our species’ penchant for language and technology.
As intra-gender consciousness increases through feminism, transism, and masculinism, cooperation within the genders will slowly replace intra-gender competition – i.e. replacing men competing against men and women competing against women, with women and men competing with each other as groups with differing sex-class commonalities across these sex-categories. Greater gender reflexivity entails increasing intra-gender alliance. Accordingly, we must carefully select for cooperative behaviour(s) between the genders in relations which will pay the greatest social dividends: mutual emancipation, not gender enslavement.
As a foregrounding, it is incumbent to map out some of the relevant features to this blog post of an ‘anarcho’-socialist economy – predominantly decentralized political power but with a small socialist state to uphold truly moral law(s) and private property (including freehold and indefeasible land ownership). This will need domestic police forces within and given executive powers by nation states, as nation states must become the genuine sites of proletariat power. Under small state ‘anarcho’-socialism there is no money: money invariably leads to centralisation of political power through capitalisation and hence results in social corruption instead of selecting for genuine liberty and equality. Furthermore, acting as a break on any form of potential centralisation of political power is the right to bear (small) arms for mature adults 25 years of age and older, through strict licencing acquisition protocols, in ‘anarcho’-socialism. All work is voluntary, utilizing intrinsic motivators and cooperative generalist and specialist knowledge and labour in individually assigning socially relevant work in demand enriching the resource (non-monetary) based economy. This assigning responsibility of work, befalling on an individual in reflexively making informed choice of their own kinds of contributory labour, is to negotiate a specialisation demanded by consumer and citizen needs and wants in terms of knowledge, goods and services. For theory supporting the untapped power of intrinsic motivation as backbone of a resource based economy, see Dan Pink’s pertinent work in the following YouTube video:
And the RSA Animate embellishment YouTube video:
Under anarcho-socialist relations of production, to ensure ongoing egalitarian cooperation between the genders, we must carefully craft decentralized security agencies comprised of volunteers with equal representation of women and men within these institutions. This can be facilitated by enacting gender quotas, ensuring an equal number of women and men as workers within these institutions. Transgender workers could comprise a workers’ membership reflecting their proportion of the total populace – region by region. These workers – in mixed-gender teams – would conduct regular consumption and labour audits to ensure workers are not accruing nor developing weapons which could be used to intimidate large populations of people, such as nuclear weaponry, nanotech weaponry or bioweapons such as woman/man-made viruses. Records of details of consumption choices could be kept electronically through a barcode system and a store entry system for all personally acquired products, and receipts for services rendered to individuals. Individual proof of labour can be actuated similar to pay-slips and tax-returns like we are familiar with in liberal capitalist economy. This would entail hours of work and details of the social benefit(s) of the specifically undertaken specialised labour. This proof of type of labour can actuate and have efficacy in the form of personally generated and peer-reviewed reports thereon: individual, interpersonal and social authentication of these documents.
This form of gender security in anarcho-socialism means we all share in the best possible cooperative gendered relations. This entails strong positive externalities and a strong social and solidarity dividend paid to all its social members / agents.
From a masculinist perspective let us examine whether a male individual or all males collectively used military grade weapons to enslave femininity. I allege this would be in contradiction with the innermost masculine gender ideal, which is in service of the neo-utilitarian imperative – maxiimizing the net positive aspects of sentience in the world, as a kind of power consolidation, through individual rights. Thus, one makes self-sacrifices for this ideal. For the feminine ideal, she can adopt and be nourished by or reject this utilitarian ideal, on her power-quest, at any given time or moment – her capacity for what Žižek terms her radical negativity. She can also adopt this kind of utilitarian power-ethos in a partial way and a partial rejection thereof also. For women, power is contextual – not governed wholly by a universal morality – not solely substantiated by adherence to a universal morality unless a woman has faith-based piety and following God’s law in fear of punishment and reward for stipulated ‘good’ behaviour. In explanation Žižek argues against sex as a free-field where people can continually renegotiate identities. Žižek disagrees (‘a bit’) with Butler (Judith) that “questions of feminine identity…[and masculine identity]…or sexual difference can be solved simply by a different positioning or by a restructuring of your identity” (Žižek in Olson and Worsham 2001, p. 252). Identity can be restructured to an extent, yet reflects an embodied gendered truth: women’s and men’s bodies and brains are biologically different in many ways. This restructuring of identity is bounded by biological sex, but we should also eschew crude biological determinism / essentialism where it is not subtly reconciled. An example of crude biological determinism is that ‘due to women’s differing biological form as compared with men would mean women’s labour should be confined to the home’ – Aristotelian functionalism on women. However, there is much humane difference and diversity between the genders: an old friend believes that women and men are so radically different so as to constitute different species from each other. Žižek explains his theory of gendered radical negativity as a a dimension of femininity. This could be because we experience truth in the terms of the other – the other gender here- as fleeting states of consciousness. These fleeting states of consciousness are where one’s own ideal becomes a mask to itself, due to the power of the other which may become truthfully overwhelming at a given point in time. A corollary is that the feminine may, in fleeting states of consciousness, experience masculine truth in the terms of masculinity, thus disrupting and causing their truth to be dimensional as a result. This would seem to support Žižek’s thesis on the dimensionality of the radical negativity embodied in femininity. Women can radically negate utilitarian reason of males, without experiencing alienation from their expansive gendered ideal, to the degree to which this male reason is not comprehensively reconciled and advanced, through women’s emotional and/or sexual power. Thinking and formulating detachedly and objectively, it is incumbent upon us to conceive of and appraise women’s gendered ideal, as not being constrained by neo-utilitarianism, as being a power-quest beyond good and evil, in a quasi-Nietzschian synthesis. This extra (expansive) capacity for radical negativity is an ultimate compliment to women, and respect for their difference in gendered ideal is absolutely integral and paramount.
An interesting quote from Nietzsche is in point. Some commentators will say his formulations on gender were a product of the times he was philosophising in. Even if these observations on gender by Nietzsche were historically placed and not immutable, there still exists some carry over into today’s world where gender sub-optimality is still running rife on our social worlds (but with real progress in places):
“420. Who suffers more? – After a quarrel between a man and a woman one suffers most at the idea of having hurt the other, while the other suffers most at the idea of not having hurt the other enough, from which the heart of the other is to be made heavy even after the quarrel is over.” (Nietzsche 1996, pp. 155-156).
Here Nietzsche is getting at a ruthless capacity of women to be emotionally aggressive (in his opinion and experience), and uses this in her arsenal expedient to her will to power. Emotions and their regulation in females tend to be more flexible and adaptive than in males due to empathic streamlining of the female brain (see Saniotis and Hennebergy 2016, p. 130). Specifically, a larger and more active anterior cingulate gyrus in the female brain may account for the discrepancy in empathy between females and males in the human species with women / females having more empathy than men or males (Saniotis and Henneberg 2016, p. 130). Here we should take care to divorce and disentangle the phenomenon of empathy with the phenomenon of compassion.
Men on the other hand, in the realm of empathy, have less than in women since the male brain is more developed for processing fight and flight responses from evolving around hunting in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation. This stems from the ‘larger amygdala embedded in the limbic system’ (Saniotis and Henneberg 2016, p. 131).
How did I, Žižek, and Nietzsche seemingly randomly or arbitrarily manifest this gender difference in ideals? Well, it is rather unverifiable. But take for instance women’s courting gaming strategy – she will generally seek to be with wealthy men who split masculinity through exploiting male workers. That’s only one observation, probably unconvincing on its own. And, better explained by and attributed to insidious avarice in capitalist social relations? From observation, there’s the feminine ability to swiftly switch between logical type (Bateson 1972, p. 180) and subverted meanings in human communication, using her streamlined empathic brain powers (Saniotis and Henneberg 2016, p. 130) and virtues exerting power over men – often exploiting men through these evolved and socially honed abilities. They deploy and use their emotional agility to increase their power, congruent with their reproductive strategy and its now more symbolic attributes, in their own interests, naturally. Whereas, it is alleged, men are too weak to radically negate their anti-flexist uni-morality (Žižek in Olson and Worshom 2001, p. 252) even if they may alienate themselves from it. In short, male alienation from their morality is self-flagellation for them.
So, it would seem we have a gendered split in differing capacities for physical aggression and emotional aggression. Indeed, emotional manipulation is more difficult to detect, at least initially. Where is this emotional agility socially directed? Whilst women irrevocably have being-for-men (see Sartre 2003, p. 658), as a part of their being-for-others, they have more altruism, when non-alienated from their ideal, with other members of their own gender.
Do women want to enslave men? If so, what would this look like?
Do men want to enslave women? If so, what would this look like?
Gendered food for thought! Let me know if you agree or disagree with any points I and others have made, and why!
I propose a new genre – gender dystopian fiction!
The presence of a different ideal in women is based on observation and reflexive of interaction with them in daily life. Arriving at this truth phenomena, Nietzsche, Žižek and I concur on this theory of a different embodied feminine ideal. What are your thoughts and experiences in relation to this? Are they resonating with your thoughts and experiences on the matter, or do you think this ideal is more mythic than truthful?
One thing is for sure: the genders have a lot of positive virtues to offer each other in the right environments.
There is a dire need for the creation and sustaining of masculinist collectives, along with the feminist collectives. All the genders have the prerogative for a collective identity based on their sex/gender taxonomic belongings, and to advance it within their own interests and in negotiation with each other. This increase in the collective power of masculinity, femininity, and trans-gender will enhance social relations through a strengthening of all the genders.
I have a number of books published with humane gender mind-technologies therein if I have whetted your appetite for further syntheses on gender.
Cheers!
Bibliography
Bateson, G 1972, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, p. 180.
Henneberg, M and Saniotis, A 2016, The Dynamic Human, Bentham Books, Sharjah, pp. 130-131.
Nietzsche, F 1996, Human. All too Human, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 155-156.
Olson, G and Worshom, L 2001, ‘Slavoj Žižek: Philosopher, Cultural Critic, and Cyber-Communist’, JAC, Spring, Vol. 12, No. 2, p. 252.
Sartre, J-P 2003, Being and Nothingness, Routledge, London and New York, p. 650.
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