The Gender Knot

The Gender Knot: By Allan G. Johnson

ISBN: 1-56639-519-4

Published by: Temple University Press

Pages 61-62

The obsession with sex and gender revolves around two concepts, femininity and masculinity, that encourages us to think about men and women as different kinds of people. As the patriarchal story goes, women are essentially feminine and men are essentially masculine, and so long as each stays in their own designated territory, life goes on as it’s supposed to. To some feminists, this splitting of the human species is the heart of the gender system and what needs to be changed to improve women’s lot. From this perspective, patriarchy is men acting masculine and women acting feminine, and the freedom to break the bonds of narrowly defined ways of being is the key to women’s liberation (and, some say, men’s liberation as well). In fact, however, femininity and masculinity aren’t what they seem. As cultural ideas that shape how we think about gender, they play a key role in keeping patriarchy going. This occurs primarily because we spend so much time focusing on what are essentially personality issues that we pay no attention to the patriarchy as a system and the gender oppression it produces.

In the simplest sense, masculinity and femininity are cultural ideas about who men and women are and who they’re supposed to be, typically expressed in terms of personality traits that portray women and men as “opposite sexes.” According to patriarchal cultural, for example, men are aggressive, daring, rational, emotionally inexpressive, strong, cool-headed, in control of themselves, independent, active, objective, dominant, decisive, self-confident, and unnurturing. Women are portrayed in opposite terms, such as unaggressive, shy, intuitive, emotionally expressive, weak, hysterical, erratic and lacking in self-control (especially when menstruating), dependent, passive, subjective, submissive, indecisive, lacking in self-confidence, and nurturing. As this shapes how we think about gender it creates a great divide, with men on one side and women on the other. So long as everyone buys into the split, whether or not it actually describes them, all can have a relatively clear and stable sense of who they are and what’s what. The problem, though, is that femininity and masculinity don’t describe most women and men as they actually are.

Part of the problem with masculinity and femininity is that the “trait” approach to describing people is a shaky business with questionable validity even among psychologists. How people feel and behave depends more on the social situation they’re in than it does on some rigid set of underlying traits that define them in every circumstance. A woman might be passive and submissive as a wife in relation to her husband, for example, but very active and totally in charge as a mother in relation to her children. Or a man may be dominating as a husband and father in relation to his wife and children but submissive as an employee in relation to his boss or as a son in relation to his parents. Which is he, then – dominant or submissive? Is she active or passive? The answer depends to a large extent on the social and the facets of the human repertoire they tend to stimulate and evoke. Masculinity and femininity tell us relatively little about who we are, then, in part because we are complicated beings who reveal ourselves differently from one situation to another. We are not self-contained and autonomous “personalities” but relational beings whose feelings and behavior are shaped in an ongoing way through out interactions with other people in particular social environments.

A related problem with femininity and masculinity is that when we split humanity in half we tend to see women and men in polar opposite terms – dualisms such as dominant-submissive – that don’t allow for alternatives. This implies that if you aren’t dominant, then you must be submissive; if you aren’t rational you must be irrational. But there is more than one alternative to being dominant (such as being independent, autonomous, or cooperative), or to being rational (such as being intuitive and nonlinear, which aren’t irrational).

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