Paste your essay in here…When considering a post-gender society, I think of gender-less, non-binary and the current understandings of masculinity and femininity becoming obsolete. Visualising the demise of the necessity for labelling and categorising people into boxes they do not always fit into exclusively. This question only leads to more questions about the society we exist within, we have never known gender-less, and so this makes it marginally difficult to arrive at something definitive. I would certainly argue that a gender-less society is not as utopic as it may sound, nor does it or could it exist fairly and freely.
Gender and sex are two words that to most mean the same, but in fact refer to two different things. A post-gender society would be a society where the (Unger, R. K, 1979, p. 1085-1094) “characteristics and traits socioculturally considered appropriate to males and females” are a thing of the past. Eradicating in a sense, the connotations attached to masculinity and femininity, or the application of the ideologies all together. However, the term ‘sex’, refers to the biological means of a person, and therefore tends to be about the individual, not a society. Whether it be for an ease of understanding, or whether it be an insight to the truth, I have envisioned gender and sexuality as spectrums. In that, everyone fits on the spectrum somewhere. The spectrum derives from accepting the fact that at present, all we have for genderless, otherwise known as non-binary, is the pronoun ‘they’, that can be neither masculine nor feminine. Our minds are conditioned to the beliefs and ‘norms’ of our societies and our cultures, which in turn means that we find it very hard to break away from these constructs and think in new ways. A solution to the problem is to eradicate what we know as masculine and feminine, however, I am yet to devise a method more attainable than rewiring seven billion minds. It could be said that it’s about as likely that Donald Trump won’t try and start World War III over Twitter, as it is that you can strip the human mind of the categorisation as a method of rationality. The way we see things now is not irrational, only more recently, the world is challenging what it means to be masculine; what it means to be feminine; and why have we had to be either since we can remember.
When it comes to power and structure, gender plays a huge role in the structuring of power. Within any society, problems arise from its sociocultural factors of genders, which usually leads to one exceeding in power or privilege over the other. If you consider our current societal factors, in that there are laws to enable an equality for men and women. We have pro-choice groups, and sexual assault preventions that are in place for many institutions which involve action from the ground up, alongside laws for legal abortions, affirmative action and a current push for legal action against the pay gap. Since sex and gender define different things, the biological aspects of men and women may still exist in a hypothetical post-gender society. And so, if gender were to be eradicated when considering employability, employers could freely acknowledge the fact that they will on average, get more work out of a male who will not need maternity leave or bare children. In first world countries where abortion is legal and easily accessible, this may not become so much of an issue. However, in poorer countries this would present a large imbalance. Since it is a genderless society, laws would not be necessary to protect women, which would mean that there is no law against making a financially-sound decision to not hire, put in replaceable jobs or restrict women from critical job roles. Evidently, with the current structure of society, including a female prime minister, female CEOs and equality laws passed, we simply do not live in a gender-less society.
When analysing the film industry, and the huge impact gender and sexuality have on it, we only scratch the surface of beginning to marginalise the influence. Reese Witherspoon, co-founder of the production company Pacific Standard, gave a speech about women in film and her quest to deliver an increase in strong female leads and a feminine depth into Hollywood. The motif of her speech included the ever-recurring female character’s phrase, “what do we do now?” she claims that the film industry has been tainted with clueless women who have to look to others for guidance. Which endorses the idea of the ownership and power men have over women. More recently, there are a far wider variety of female characters that grace cinema, an interesting couple starring in ‘The Heat’, Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock. This film finds and utilises satirical humour through stereotypes, it allows women to take control of the joke that is directed at them, and direct it light-heartedly at themselves. Much like Margaret Atwood’s work, specifically ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, which is said that;
(Hammer, S.B. (1990), “Atwood’s contribution to [satire as a] subgenre lacks the ironic bite and linguistic imagination of her other … works. And yet, should not female satire by definition make us redefine our traditional male notions as to what constitutes “good satire”?’”
There is a strong sense of satirical yet sincere values within the film and the novel. However, this has been argued to have the potential to lead into such humour being taken too far, as in films like ‘The Heat’ actually hinder the progression of equality by making an audience desensitised to this humour. Personally, the way in which the film was able to show another side to the ideas of femininity and masculinity was immensely impressive, to the point where I barely even noticed them doing it. The film is successful in challenging ideas of gender and sexuality through its openness and breakdown of the taboo of talking about what gender really is. These are both strong and current instances that suggest gender is still very much so in the present, and that if we were existing amongst post-gender companies, people, characters, novels and films like these, they would not be making the necessary points and realisations for the reasons they are today.
A post-gender society could eradicate the negative effects of subordination and exclusion based on gender. Although, it does not make subordination and exclusion due to a person’s sex obsolete. By ousting the terms and implications of masculinity and femininity, do we truly eliminate the discrimination and subordination that arises from the biology of a person? Suppose we are now considering sex as the biology, and gender as the psychology. If we eliminate gender within a society, it could potentially eliminate sexually related crimes, as suggested in an experiment which tested the electrical stimulation of rats (Glickman, S. E, & Schiff, B. B. 1967), “evidence is reviewed which suggests that [reinforcement] sequences are organised in the brain stem of the mammal.” Alongside human trials, for example, convicted paedophiles who undergo treatment, undergo a psychological therapy; suggesting that sexual impulse, including sex offenders, have that impulse from their minds and not through pure stimulation of their anatomy. This is evident in laws passed in the USA, (Freedman, E.B. 1987) “between 1935 and 1965 … if diagnosed as a “sexual psychopath” [one] could receive an indeterminate sentence to a psychiatric, rather than penal, institution.” Furthermore, after considering the laws in place that protect women from discrimination due to biological reasons, it could be possible to prevent sexually related crimes for both men and women in a gender-less society. Since we know that (Rape Statistics, 2016-17), “Approximately 85,000 women and 12,000 men are raped in England and Wales alone every year”, almost 87% of rape victims are women. If we lived in a post-gender society, it could be possible that these statistics would simply not exist. Perhaps post-gendered societies are a utopian idea, and are therefore inaccessible in an imperfect world.
Sexually related crimes could not be more relevant to ideas of power and subordination in connection with gender. This is explored within ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Atwood. Issues within a gendered society are explored greatly within dystopian novels which are (Booker, K. 1994), “concerned with the clash between individual desire and societal demand”; in which women at the bottom of the hierarchy live their lives essentially as human incubators, and are forced into sex with their masters in order to survive (Atwood, M, 1985), “I do not say making love, because this is not what he’s doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved.” The oppression of women in this narrative is so extraordinary, that the protagonist is left unsure what the sex she doesn’t want to have is. The bottom line is that it’s not consensual, but she needs to do it and will, because she wants to live for her daughter; she has to please those at the top of the ladder in every aspect of the phrase, and this is what we have within societies that recognise, or more accurately base their philosophy around gender and sex. This novel, and Margaret Atwood’s work in general, ignited a feminist fire that kept on burning. The oppression and rape of women in a (Hammer, S.B, 1990) “futuristic novel” was jarring to many, that included a future for women that involved a heightened sense of many women’s realities. And so, with the evident existence of sexual assault on both women and men, and these assaults stemming from psychological impulses, it is autonomously suggested that we do not live in a post-gender society where sexual assault impulse and taboo fantasies do become realities, and people within our society do suffer as a result of this.
A final person of interest and most certainly one worthy of recognition in such a debate is Robin Hanson. His book, ‘The Age of Em’ is about a world in which we can upload humans onto brain emulators; in other words, robots. He uses theories from economics, philosophy and physics to explain how this would work and the effects it would have. Its relevance to a post-gender society is that the ems will have no gender, or at least if there are certain characteristics of a gender, that they will essentially be irrelevant in terms of gender. When the brain is uploaded, he suggests that it the emulators take the best part of each brain and put these together in order to make the best version of a human, that isn’t human at all. This would eliminate gender entirely, and would be an example of a post-gender society. However, I would argue that this actually evidences that there must be an elimination of humans, for there to be an eradication of gender. Also, a society we do not live in currently and is not in the foreseeable future.
To conclude, after considering what the societal factors and consequences there would potentially be of a post-gender society, it is evident that we do not currently inhabit one. Since gender and sex are two different things, a post-gender society would eliminate masculinity and femininity, but could not ignore the biological factors of each, for instance natal males and females, appearance and biological structuring which is favourable to men in terms of vulnerability; which are direct causations to a vast amount of inequality and power imbalance within a society. Dystopian fiction like ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (Booker, K, 1994), “focuses on sexuality and relations between the genders as elements of this conflict”, and fundamentally portrays the societal factors as dystopias. Satire inclusive within many films that assess and challenge gender, almost always have a power imbalance for one gender or the other. Sexually related crimes are psychological, and could be eliminated within a post-gender society, which is also evident that we have no experienced one. Finally, the theories of Robin Hanson only conclude that a world without the human brain could be a functioning post-gender society, one that could potentially be in the very distant future, but I doubt will be gracing current affairs in the next few centuries.