Mead's Male and Female

[*****]

Margaret Mead's Male and Female is a masterpiece of anthropological writing, focusing on how different cultures approach gender, deal with naturally occurring biological differences in gender, and manufacture there own gender differences to go on top of the naturally occurring ones. This is already reason enough to take note of the book as something worth reading. Mead explains how most of what we think of as gender is a social construct (and proves it by giving examples of societies that treat it differently) without resorting to the normal post-modern failure mode of treating legitimately real things as though they were socially constructed. Gender does have a very strong biological basis which puts quite a few constraints on what additional constructs a society will manufacture on top of purely biological differences. Mead does a remarkable job of acknowledging the existence of both factors, keeping the two concepts isolated from each other, and talking about how they are related.

Male and Female is from 1949, so Mead is able to start with relatively simple definitions of gender. Females are people with the organs and glands required to gestate and nurse children, and males are people who lack the biological hardware for doing these things regardless of how functional their other relevant body parts are. Most of her descriptions of gender indicate that she would classify hermaphrodites as more-female-than-male for the purposes of her discussion, and classify transgender and transsexual people by their cis-gender for the purposes of her discussion. She does talk quite a bit about cultures which had a tradition of people taking up the opposite gender role as their cis-gender, and she doesn't treat a culture's inclusion of this culture as a deviance, though she does discuss the decision of people who behave in a manner that is not approved for their gender in a culture that does not tolerate that departure from gender roles as engaging in deviant behavior. Because she had lived among peoples who accepted some amount of transsexualism within their culture and studied cultures with these kinds of practices, she avoided discussing transsexualism in a way that insinuated that it was inherently offensive to nature or particularly deviant, even though she did discuss it in a way that suggested that it was incompatible with Western sensibilities (with which she did not appear to sympathize particularly strongly). In contrast, Mead does not appear to have lived among or extensively studied any group that was very accepting of homosexuality. The contrast of the book's willingness to accept transsexual practices with its treatment of homosexuality as something inherently degenerate is the only thing that really dates this book. Practically everything Mead discusses was informed, enlightened, and progressive by the standards of 1949. Most of it is still all of those things by today's standards, but a handful of comments mostly about preventing homosexuality will be off-putting to many modern readers, and odd-to-say-the-least to most others. (She doesn't say anything particularly negative about homosexualite. She simply writes with the assumption that her reader's will believe that it is something to be prevented whenever preventing it is possible.)

If I can't find anything worse to say about a book than that a few of the moral sensibilities with which it has written have since gone out of fashion, I'm going to call that book an excellent book. I'd prefer a book that somehow managed to steer clear of saying anything that reflected the moral sensibilities of the author, but on a topic as intensely steeped in moralistic discussion as gender and sex, the fact that most of the book could survive the past 66 years without seeming grossly obsolete on the basis of moralistic considerations alone is itself remarkable. It is all the more remarkable when you consider that most of the things she says would have likewise avoided being morally scandalous 66 years ago. Given how completely ideas about sexuality and gender have changed in the last half century threading the needle through the subject carefully enough to only have one or two snags is in itself worthy of commendation.

Mead divides her book into two parts, but the first three are similar to each other and the fourth is quite different, so I'll write about her book as if she had divided it into two parts (I-III as the first, and IV as the second). The first part describes eight cultures in which she has lived and which she has studied. They range from hunter-gatherer to third world semi-industrialized. She subdivides her discussion of these cultures into a topics, and talks about each culture when it suits the subject she has picked to discuss rather than giving a culture-by-culture account of each group of people. All of this was fascinating and informative. I occasionally wondered while I was reading it how much cherry-picking she was doing to support her points and how much of what she said was actually true. When I reached her discussion of American culture in the second part, I became pretty convinced she had a brutal devotion to accuracy that she would not compromise to suit her agenda.

Her account of modern American culture is breathtaking. It is the only description of a culture I understand that I have read that I think could have been plausibly written by an intelligent non-human observer. She makes no attempts to sympathize or even much of an attempt to understand. Simply to see and describe. She makes endlessly many observations that you and I ordinarily refuse to think. She describes a culture haphazardly strung together in such a way that keeps both males and females trapped in a double bind related to their gender roles setting members of both genders up for repeated failures in their pursuit of a meaningful life within the confines of the identity that their society hands them when they are children, forcing girls to choose between renouncing their dreams (and related parts of their identity) or unsexing themselves and psychologically emasculating boys, especially young boys.

I can't do the book justice in my attempts to describe it. If you can find a copy and read the part entitled "The Two Sexes in Contemporary American Culture," I'd strongly recommend doing so. I recommend the whole book, but if you only have time for a third of it, that section is good enough that I would almost consider it indespensible reading.

I'm updating this post a couple years after writing it originally. After writing it, I've seen criticism of this book that claim that Mead claims that the pain of childbirth is mostly socially constructed. I don't remember her saying that. I remember her saying that the amount of pain women in a particular culture say they experience during childbirth is strongly correlated with the amount of pain that men in their culture expect them to feel, and talking about socially-constructed sympathetic pain that men say they feel when their wife is in labor with their child in at least one culture. However, she also describes many reasons that one culture would have completely different ideas of pain from another, and does talk about ways that environment and culture shape the perception of pain in general. For instance, a culture where a coming of age ritual is stuffing nettles into a girl when she has her first period is going to have a very different relationship with the concept of pain than most other cultures do. I've read a lot of anthropological commentaries before I read this book, and it was the first one that I've read that talked about the existence of excruciating coming of age rituals for girls becoming women in some tribal cultures. Mead doesn't deny the existence of physical realities, but she does talk about the way that different societies approach the subject of pain and the subject of gender and how these things relate to how people perceive the physical realities of their bodies.