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Key points
- Some authors frame gender as only being caused by socially justified roles and ideas about men and women.
- To see gender clearly, we need the concept of mindedness, which refers to animal mental and behavioral patterns.
- There are clear gendered patterns of mental behavior in primates.
A recent article by Olivia Fane, a psychiatric social worker, turned writer who authored the book, Why Sex Does Not Matter, argued that “consciousness has no gender.” To make her case, she cited Descartes as effectively justifying the conceptual split between mind and body. She asked that since consciousness is not physical, “Can the immaterial awareness that makes up the core of our identities have a gender?”
The answer she gave was “no.” She made her case by having people reflect on the following question: If tomorrow you woke up without a body, would you be able to guess what gender you are?
She reported that only two of her five grown-up sons would report that they knew they were male, one saying that they felt “too driven” to be a woman, the other stating that childcare drove him crazy. She also argued that because we frequently cannot tell the gender of an artist or a composer, it seems reasonable to conclude that gender is simply an errant idea we have in our heads for classifying people. She justified this by differentiating gender from biological sex and claiming that: “societies create gender roles and biases” and thus “there is nothing ‘essential’ about gender.”
The author’s concern about gender power imbalances is commendable from my vantage point. However, her essay also revealed some deep-seated confusion about how to properly understand the concept of gender. We can begin by being clear that a strong division between mind and body is generally not considered a viable philosophical position. Rather, we need to shift in how we understand the relationship between body “versus” mind to thinking about how energy, matter, living and mental processes, and sociocultural values operate at different frequencies and come together to form our self-conscious experience of being.
We can obtain a clearer picture of this argument if we use the Unified Theory of psychology lens. As I outline in my soon-to-be-released book, A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology, the Unified Theory shows why we need to stop dividing the concept of gender into the two vectors of biological-based sex differences and socially constructed roles.
Why? Because this analysis misses the entire dimension of psychological behavior, which I refer to as the dimension of "mindedness." What is mindedness? It refers to the sensory-motor looping processes that make animals behave so differently from plants and fungi. It emerged during the Cambrian Explosion approximately 550,000,000 years ago.
I recently explained how to see mindedness in the world by analyzing the show In the Mind of Cats. In that post, I explained that we did not really peer into cats' subjective conscious experience of being in the world. Rather, we saw how cats were functionally aware and responsive and made what the Unified Theory calls “behavioral investments.” That is, we saw how they acted in and on the world toward goals, and, through experiments, the documentary showed how cats make decisions in allocating those efforts.
What does this have to do with gender? First, it means that mindedness (or mental behavior patterns) is not reducible to biology. Rather, it is psychology, where psychology refers to the science of the mental and behavioral patterns of the whole animal. Second, it means that we can ask, scientifically, whether there are gendered patterns of mindedness in the kingdom.
Put simply: Do male animals behave differently than females? Comparative psychologists and ethologists have found that the differences in gendered patterns range from virtually none to enormous differences, such that the two look differently and live almost completely different lives.
With this background that animal behavior is really patterns of mindedness not reducible to biological concepts, we can move more toward understanding gender in humans. To do so, we need to know what kind of animal we are. We are, of course, a kind of primate. More specifically, we are a kind of great ape.
From this, we can ask: Do primates in general and great apes in particular exhibit normative gendered patterns of mindedness? Recently, one of the great primatologists of our time, Frans de Waal, answered this question with an unequivocal “yes.” His book, Different: What Apes Can Teach Us About Gender, reviews the enormous scientific evidence demonstrating that there are masculine and feminine behavioral tendencies in primates. In other words, mindedness is definitely gendered in primates.
Given that gendered mental and behavioral patterns are so obviously present in primates, why is there so much confusion about this issue? Why do so many people errantly think that gendered patterns in humans are reducible to socially constructed roles or “ideas we have in our heads”?
The reason is that we are deeply confused about how to think about the mind and psychology. According to the unified theory, psychological science is about understanding mind or mental, behavioral patterns or mindedness. Indeed, this is the one point I disagree with in de Waal’s analysis.
He refers to animal behavior as “biological.” I think this is a mistake. They are patterns of minded activity, which are different from other organisms' living processes. Mindedness is as different from life as life is from chemistry.
Can we clearly specify what we mean by mindedness? Yes. Using my Tree of Knowledge System, the map of concepts and categories that grounds the Unified Theory, mindedness can be as easily defined as life.
In its full form, mindedness refers to the complex adaptive behavior patterns of animals with complex active bodies and brains. Whereas life refers to the second plane of existence, mind is the third plane and is colored red in the diagram.
When we put on this lens to see behavioral patterns in the world, we can see clearly that humans are not “like” apes any more than we are “like” organisms. We are apes, just as we are organisms. We are also cultured persons.
Because we are organisms, primates, and persons all at the same time, if we are going to talk seriously about gender in humans, at a minimum, we need to understand the concept as it relates to (a) sexual differences in the biological Life plane; (b) masculine versus feminine mindedness patterns of behavioral investment as the animal-into-primate Mind plane; and (c) socially constructed systems of justification that operate at the person Culture plane.
Once we do this, we can start constructing a proper system of understanding human gender that places the biological, psychological, and social forces that shape it in the right relation.
