Frank Browning - The Fate of Gender: Nature, Nurture, and the Human Future

For Neil Chudgar, without whom this book could not have happened

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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Next to cutting and hanging tobacco, tomato canning (my current activity as I write these introductory notes) was about the most unpleasant summer work I remember from my childhood in Kentucky. Late August and the outdoor temperature always burned past ninety matched by a humidity even higher. Indoors the kettles of boiling water pushed it over one hundred. Sweat dripped from every pore. Canned the same day they were picked from muddy, prickly vines, the fresh tomatoes were first washed, then skinned by plunging them briefly into the boiling water, then packed into quart jars before being lowered in a rack into the pressure canner, a sealed stovetop container that if not properly closed could explode, permanently scarring anyone who happened to be nearby. Tempers in the kitchen were seldom lower than the temperature.

Canning in my childhood was womens work, like mopping and laundering and bathing the baby. Today, canning is a nearly forgotten art. Of the few people who do still can, most I know these days are men. Very few women have either the time or the inclination to undergo this annual punitive exercise no matter how much better the end result may taste when compared to tins of flavorless red stuff sold on supermarket shelves. Men, however, seem to find it a fascinating test of their culinary skills and a demonstration of how flexibly fluid they can show themselves to be in todays gender-diffuse times, when the lead breadwinners in half the households in America are women and baby bathing and diaper changing are about equally divided. None of which was really imaginable during my early adolescence at the peak of Beatles and Rolling Stones fame a generation ago. Males in rural Georgia or Kansas or Virginia or Ohio would in those days have been banned from the poker club or shunned at the pickup basketball court had their fingernails betrayed the traces of peach and tomato flesh.

I was lucky, I suppose, to have grown up in Kentucky, officially a border state, a locution that derives from the Civil War when slaveholding sons bayonetted their Yankee cousins on the battlefields. But Kentuckys border mentality extended much farther into the psyches of men and women, boys and girls I grew up with. To be passionately both and neither and ready to talk about it across the table over a shot of bourbon was, if not a norm, an idealjust as the Baptist preachers would hedge their Sabbath rules by coming to buy our apples on Sundays promising to return on Monday to pay the IOU they had left. Race remains a ragged and volatile piece of the border fabric, but in odd ways, gender borders were always more porouseven if the men kept far away from the house during canning time. Older menmen in the 1960s when I was fifteenregularly called young guys honey. Any family with six or more children most always had one who was well hes just Uncle Jack (or Aunt Frances), meaning everyone early on understood that that one wouldnt marry or carry on the line (which, we will see later, is a natural statistical distribution in large families); out of a dozen cousins one normally would be the florist or take up nursing, or among the girls one would handle the tractor and the hay baler more expertly than any of her brothers. So long as they declared nothing about their privacies and embarrassed no one at Thanksgiving dinner, they were welcome and even encouraged to shred some conventional gender borderlines. The perennial bachelors could even bake cakesat least sturdy chocolate if never fluffy angel cakes.

Today all of these roles and behaviors that once defined what and how men and women could be and do seem terribly antiquated, detritus on the cultural battlefield of what has for the last half century been labeled the gender revolution. The term itselfgenderwould have baffled most everyone in the first years after World War II when legions of women known collectively as Rosie the Riveter returned to the kitchen after running tobacco farms and serving in wartime factories building tanks and B-52 bombers. While the boys had shipped away to Dunquerque and Yokohama, expediency transferred women onto the shop floor to replace them, even as they kept canning beans and tomatoes by night. No one then saw it as a gender revolution. It wouldnt be until the late 1950s that the term itself began to seep into academic discourse, not least concerning many of those women who had discovered that they liked working for their own out-of-house independence. Even early frontline feminists like Betty Friedan or the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir made sparse distinction between sex and gender. Beauvoirs most famous book, remember, was entitled Le deuxime sexe (and in English translation The Second Sex). Only with the arrival of the Baby Boom generation did activists, sociologists, and philosophers, most notably the Berkeley theoretician Judith Butler and her followers, begin to separate the two terms. Sex referred to biology and, to a larger degree, to nature. Gender came to be seen as learned social behavior distinguishing male and female rolesor nurture. Women canned. Men harvested. (At least in America, though those roles were always much muddier in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.)

When I was a twelve-year-old visiting one of my spinster aunts in the city, she took it upon herself to educate me in proper male comportment: I was always to stand up and offer my seat on a public bus when a lady entered, always to hold the door for a lady, always to pass the plate at Thanksgiving dinner first to the ladies at the table. Generally I still do those actions though frequently young women on crowded subways stand up to make room for me when I enter. These are gestures of politeness, of course, but as many angry feminists argued at the height of the womens movement in the early 1970s, they are also enacted statements about power and who holds it. A much younger woman who cedes her place to me now both pleases me and reminds me that I have become less vigorous, less forceful, or simply less than those people who are thirty years younger than I. To offer your arm to a girlfriend similarly indicated protection as well as a public demonstration of affection, but at the same time the gesture servedand still servesas a statement of ownership: She is mine; dont touch. Now when in major American and European cities young men similarly link their arms, that too is a performancean act intended to declare both affection between the two and pride in their affectionwhereas two women linking arms indicates nothing more than friendship. Physical gestures far more subtle than these fill volumes of anthropological historyfrom Romans who quietly signaled their availability to one another by lightly scratching their heads with a middle finger to portions of New Guinea where pointed lips are still more often used than pointed fingers to signal directions. Smart phones and near universal Internet access, even in the remote forests of New Guinea, may have mixed and blended these steadily evolving forms of bodily gesture, but gestures do remain. Likely they will always remain with us as powerful signals of power, attachment, and personhood, regardless of how we accept or challenge gender conventions. Moreover, these essential gender expressions, whether they signal forms of personal relations or indicate structures of authority and submission in a symphony orchestra, call us to reconsider still further what we believe is natural in the greater realm of Nature.