I am the woman of an ancient master
to whom I swore eternal devotion
I am a woman of coloured glass
through whom passes every changing with colours
I am the woman of No One
and perhaps I am not even a woman.
Matilde Jonas
I read a chapter in one of my favourite books today .. Thomas Moore’s “Original Self: living with paradox and authenticity” … about gender. Which I intend to share here because it relates to another theme that has been running through my head lately … androgyny.
First – let’s get the definition of androgyny out of the way. Some people get the terms “adrogynous” and “hermaphrodite” mixed up. They are not the same. “Hermaphrodite” refers specifically to reproductive organs. To the physical. “Androgyny” has nothing to do with the physical. Neither is it to be confused or related to bisexuality.
Definitions of androgyny:
- refers to the individual who has achieved masculine/feminine, yin/yang balance within their psychology. (iamuniversity.org/glossary/cv_glossarylist.php)
- Androgyny refers to two concepts. The first is the mixing of masculine and feminine characteristics, be it for example in the loud fashion statements of musicians like Ziggy Stardust or the balance of “anima” and “animus” in Jungian psychoanalytic theory. Secondly it describes something that is neither masculine nor feminine, for example the Hijras of India who are often described as “neither man nor woman”. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgyny)
- Technically referring to the union of both sexes in one individual. Androgyny is sometimes celebrated as a liberating vision of wholeness through the blurring or break down of false gender categories.
I refer back to my previous blog post “Why and how does this fuckup fuck up” and in particular one of the articles referred to, Gifted Women: Identity and Expression which talks about androgyny and it’s prevalance in gifted people. From that article:
One aspect of identity often related to giftedness is androgyny, a concept developed by Stanford University psychologist Sandra Bem. She does not view femininity and masculinity as opposite poles of a single continuum, but rather as parallel sets of traits. An androgynous person will have high levels of both so-called masculine traits (e.g. independence, autonomy, dominance) and feminine traits (warmth, awareness of others’ feelings, expressiveness).
In her book “The Lenses of Gender” Bem argues that gender polarization can be very destructive personally and socially, and that there are many more variations of masculinity and femininity than society usually considers.
Given that calling a trait “masculine” or “feminine” is a bias, a number of psychologists and others have commented that creative people and gifted women tend to be more androgynous.
In her book “Revolution From Within” Gloria Steinem writes, “..females who are more ‘androgynous’ – that is, who incorporate more ‘masculine’ qualities along with their gender-appropriate ones – have considerably higher self-esteem than those who rate as exclusively ‘feminine.’ … “Studies of creativity make the point: creative people have both higher-than-average self-esteem and higher-than-average degrees of androgyny.”
Psychologist Ellen Winner speculates in her book on the topic of exceptional children and prodigies, “Perhaps because gifted children reject mainstream values, they reject gender-stereotyped traits as well.” She refers to a study of gifted teens by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, who found that “talented females scored highly on achievement motivation and dominance, two traits typically associated with males, and rejected traditional feminine values such as neatness.”
Barbara Kerr notes “Although gifted girls were more like gifted boys in many ways, they nonetheless maintained attitudes, values and social behaviors expected of girls, perhaps to keep themselves from seeming markedly different from the norm.” This kind of protective stance is perhaps a reason some gifted girls and women may downplay their androgyny. Prof. Constance Hollinger has noted it may be anxiety producing for female adolescents to be told they can “be anything they want to be” in terms of career choices, and to face the ambiguity that they can be “both masculine and feminine.”
I’ve never given much thought to andogyny before. I am very aware that I am not a girly-girl, and in fact when I am around other women I often feel uncomfortably non-feminine. I’m one of those women who can so read maps! I could never understand women not being able to read maps because I’ve always been able to. Spatial ability is supposedly a more masculine domain. I’m just not your normal, average girl. I would love to be a normal girl. A girly-girl. I admire the feminine but just can’t seem to get there myself 🙂
As for androgyny in males – ah there is a horse of a different colour. I don’t know about other women or whether it is just yet another of my particular quirks but I find androgyny in men utterly intriguing. Intoxicating even – incredibly sexy. Magnetic to me.
Through reading those articles and doing some thinking via the keyboard (and privately), and reading the chapter from the book I mentioned, I am coming to see that my own androgyny is not necessarily a bad thing. I’ll never be a girly-girl and that is ok. Maybe coming into this knowledge about myself will help me fit better in my own skin. Be comfortable with my duality. But I am beginning to embrace it.
So now I want to share the chapter I mentioned earlier in this post. Not really about androgyny, about about the subtlety of gender – what is ‘feminine’ and what is ‘masculine’. A beautiful chapter that leaves you feeling warm.
Gender is infinitely more subtle than biological difference and is never static.
Generally our thinking moves directly from anatomical difference to pyschological differentiation and we assume that there are two genders, just as there are two biological sexes. But a human being is never reducible to biology. To make that reduction is to enter the fallacy of physicalism – the idea that a human being can be defined and then treated as a material body. This fallacy overlooks a world of emotion, memory, fantasy, and meaning, all of which more directly define a human being than the body pictured on a doctor’s skeleton chart of bone and organs.
Gender is a state of mind, a product of the imagination. One man experiences masculinity in a way entirely different from another. The femininity of a particular woman is unique, an aspect of her personality or, even deeper, a manisfetation of her soul. The many images of woman we find in mythology from the battle-ready Athena to the adorned and perfumed Aphrodite to the woodswoman Artemis, are not mere accidental qualities of womanood; they are radically unique ways in which femininity shows itself and is experienced. The same applies to the male figures of myth and fiction, each of which shows how gender is woven into the thick fabric of personality.
Gender is archetypal, and I can think of no better way to deepen the liberation of women and the feminine spirit, both of which could save our society from self-destructive violence, than to pore over great mythological, religious and literary images of men and women, discovering what it means to be human and how our humanity finds shimmering nuance through the sheer radiance of our gender.
In my adolescence I lived in a religious order dedicated to the Virgin Mary in her sorrow. Mater Dolorosa was the name of my high school. In the purple atmosphere of this image I became intimate with the feminine coloring of depression. The sad mother lives profoundly and actively in me. She is behind my thoughts about depression and is my tutor in psychology. She is a melancholy, sophisticated aspect of the Artemis woman – the feminine spirit of integrity, solitude and chastity. Unlike the modern person who rushes to drug his depression, she owns up to her sadness and allows it to penetrate her thoroughly and then define her.
We could explore the stories of the Virgin Mary, Artemis, Venus, Psyche, Penelope, Hera, Judith, Lilith, Madame Bovary, Candy, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Fuller, and many, many others to deepen our sense of what a woman is and what femininity means, without ever arriving at a conclusions, but all the way being inspired to honor and treasure the image that emerges. We might learn how precious this feminine spirit is, how wonderful to have it in our lives.
Gender is an aspect of our individuality. I am a man as no one else is man. My masculinity is like my American spirit, a defining facet. The variations of gender are infinite, and so it is absurd to reduce gender to two categories and insist that everyone fit into one or the other. Besides, all dualisms doom us to division and conflict. They are simplistic descriptions of experience and tend toward easy literalism. Paradoxically, to become less certain about one’s own gender may be the turning point at which one begins to discover the richness of one’s masculinity and femininity.
(from Thomas Moore’s “Original Self: Living with paradox and authenticity“)
So, however you identify yourself, embrace it, enjoy it and learn to love it.