The Dialectic of S3x: The Case for Feminist Revolution

9 Dialectics of Cultural History

So far we have treated 'culture' as synonymous with 'arts and letters' or at its broadest, 'humanities'. This is a common enough confusion. But it is startling in this context. For we discover that, while only indirectly related to art, women have been entirely excluded from an equally important half of culture: science. If at least with the arts we could find enough material about the relationship of women to culture – whether indirectly as influence, stimulus, or subject matter, or even occasionally as direct participants – to fill at least a chapter, we can hardly find a relationship of women to science worthy of discussion. Perhaps in the broadest sense our statement that women are the emotional force behind all (male) culture holds true – but we are stretching the case to include modern science, where the empirical method specifically demands the exclusion of the scientist's personality from his research. Satisfaction of his emotional needs through a woman in his off hours may make him more stable, and thus steadier on the job, but this is farfetched.

But if even the indirect relationship of women to science is debatable, that there is no direct one is certainly not. One would have to search to find even one woman who had contributed in a major way to scientific culture. Moreover, the situation of women in science is not improving. Even with the work of discovery shifted from the great comprehensive minds of the past to small pragmatic university research teams, there are remarkably few women scientists.

This absence of women at all levels of the scientific disciplines is so commonplace as to lead many (otherwise intelligent) people to attribute it to some deficiency (logic?) in women themselves. Or to women's own predilections for the emotional and subjective over the practical and rational. But the question cannot be so easily dismissed. It is true that women in science are in foreign territory – but how has this situation evolved? Why are there disciplines or branches of inquiry that demand only a 'male' mind? Why would a woman, to qualify, have to develop an alien psychology? When and why was the female excluded from this type mind? How and why has science come to be defined as, and restricted to, the 'objective'?

I submit that not only were the arts and humanities corrupted by the sex duality, but that modern science has been determined by it. And moreover that culture reflects this polarity in its very organization. C. P. Snow was the first to note what had been becoming increasingly obvious: a deep fissure of culture – the liberal arts and the sciences had become incomprehensible to each other. Again, though the universal man of the Renaissance is widely lamented, specialization only increases. These are some of the modern symptoms of a long cultural disease based on the sex dualism. Let us examine the history of culture according to this hypothesis – that there is an underlying dialectic of sex.

I

THE TWO MODES OF CULTURAL HISTORY

For our analysis we shall define culture in the following way: culture is the attempt by man to realize the conceivable in the possible. Man's consciousness of himself within his environment distinguishes him from the lower animals, and turns him into the only animal capable of culture. This consciousness, his highest faculty, allows him to project mentally states of being that do not exist at the moment. Able to construct a past and future, he becomes a creature of time – a historian and a prophet. More than this, he can imagine objects and states of being that have never existed and may never exist in the real world – he becomes a maker of art. Thus, for example, though the ancient Greeks did not know how to fly, still they could imagine it. The myth of Icarus was the formulation in fantasy of their conception of the state 'flying'.

But man was not only able to project the conceivable into fantasy. He also learned to impose it on reality: by accumulating knowledge, learning experience, about that reality and how to handle it, he could shape it to his liking. This accumulation of skills for controlling the environment, technology, is another means to reaching the same end, the realization of the conceivable in the possible. Thus, in our example, if, in the B.C. era, man could fly on the magic carpet of myth or fantasy, by the twentieth century, his technology, the accumulation of his practical skills, had made it possible for him to fly in actuality – he had invented the aeroplane. Another example: In the Biblical legend, the Jews, an agricultural people stranded for forty years in the desert, were provided by God with Manna, a miraculous substance that could be transformed at will into food of any colour, texture, or taste; modern food processing, especially with the 'green revolution', will probably soon create a totally artificial food production, perhaps with this chameleon attribute. Again, in ancient legend, man could imagine mixed species, e.g., the centaur or the unicorn, or hybrid births, like the birth of an animal from a human, or a virgin birth; the current biological revolution, with its increasing knowledge of the reproductive process, could now – if only the first crude stages – create these 'monstrosities' in reality. Brownies and elves, the Golem of medieval Jewish lore, Mary Shelley's monster in Frankenstein, were the imaginative constructions that preceded by several centuries the corresponding technological acumen. Many other fantastical constructions – ghosts, mental telepathy, Methuselah's age – remain to be realized by modern science.