The Geometry of Gender Relations

Examining a tensegrity of values held between the first sex and the one sex

As readers will know, I am very interested in the ways that the development of children mimics aspects of the development of our species (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny). Likewise I try to avoid topics that lend themselves to politics. Firstly there are more than enough of those takes elsewhere on the internet. Secondly I take as a general guiding principle that everything I write on this blog should be in the spirit of resisting fear, and political discourse almost never aligns with this mission.

It is hard to talk about sexual difference without treading on the points of political discourse and the inequality of the sexes. But I am going to assume that my readers can separate qualitative differences in character from the concept of equality.

We may keep in mind the one and the many at the same time.

“When thinking leads to the unthinkable, it is time to return to simple life. What thinking cannot solve life solves.” - Jung, The Red Book

This weekend I was walking through the park when I saw a boy struggling with his bike. The child looked very tired and ready to give up on the day. His dad, noticing the same thing, stooped down and took the boy in his arms. He then picked up the little bike in the other hand and set off for what I assumed to be home. The boy relaxed into his new situation, resting his neck on his dad’s shoulder, grateful for the relief.

When you are a child your parents have larger, more capable bodies. Your father more so than your mother, exemplifies this difference (this is probable of course, but that spectrum is interesting). Meanwhile, you yourself are busy growing toward this larger, stronger state. You’re also encouraged in this direction by parents, who will let you struggle—like with heavy bikes—when it is helpful for you to do so.

It seems to follow in the context of this ontogenetic trajectory, with the arrow of time pointed in the direction that it is, that strength would be abstracted into a higher and universal value: a good that must be achieved. A good that is more fully expressed through men.

After the child’s period of maturation, when one begins to enter into the larger social context of political life, it feels given that this trait would then be valued at a societal level. And that men, being a greater physical exemplar of the root-source of this metaphor, would claim its value and identify with the concept, specifically in contrast to women. However, as society becomes more complex, and the demands for strength extend well outside the reach of the physical, it also makes sense that women would move towards more readily accepted expressions of this value.

But is strength valuable? It is. But strangely, it does not therefore follow that the absence of it is not valuable.

All of this of course depends on how you wish to intervene in the world. Many spiritual disciplines practice states of vulnerability & non-action, and find in them new types of merit in the realized expression of this different value. You see this logic explored by game theorists conception of “Game B”.

Looking back at what I have hypothesized as the originating conditions for the valuation of strength: the exaggerated difference of that physical trait, between child & parents combined with the motion of our physical development from a state of physical smallness and weakness to greater size and strength. We can see that this narrative assumes a first person perspective in the child, who while growing in strength is also realizing its value in the world. Childhood is a state all people know. So the valuation of strength is easy to apprehend from the moment of our most formative thinking: It makes sense, its causality is apparent and its utility is direct.

It makes sense, and so that sense is extended culturally through generational exchange, and each new youth—towards which the collective future drives—can stand easily and confidently on this value. Traditions tell the story of strength’s good deeds, complexifying the notion to include its non-physical faces.

But let’s take a less common perspective: that of the elderly. Not all people make it to this state in life, it is a privilege to see your grandchildren, it also requires a collective that is able to care for those who may struggle to provide for themselves. In a similar way that the state of an animal's liver will tell you something about the health of the terrain on which it grazes, the state of a society’s elderly will shine light on the health of all the stages of life before it.

So what if we view this same process, the scene of a father picking up his child and taking him home from the perspective of a grandmother who is near to death.

She has the best perspective to understand the wealth of value that comes from the birth of an almost-helpless child. She was here before its birth, and before the birth of its parents. She can see the transformation that occurs in the new parents, the way the entire family draws closer together, especially when the child is the first of its generation. The child is in no way able to see this power and grace, endowed by its own weakness: the ways the child’s helplessness changes the society of which it is apart. But to a grandmother—the value of having something to care for may be realized, and perhaps even seen as more powerful and effective than that of physical strength: something which motivates purpose is primarily a part of the means of executing it, because often the means is developed along the way, only in response to purpose.

The thing about the value of weakness is that its utility isn’t directly applicable. The power of weakness is realized not causally but retro-causally. It requires human’s most subtle technologies—collective memory and storytelling—before it can even be seen. If we are always rushing forward, with the current of time, we won’t see it. We have to look back, to pay respect, we have to interpret.

Your father more so than your mother, exemplifies the value of direct and causal forces, such as strength. A mother, though stronger than a child, lives in a middle ground when it comes to the extension of physical strength. She may learn, in a complex world, to exemplify other strengths; perhaps she becomes a person whose resistance to non-physical threat is very great; someone whose capacity to bear great psychological burden is exceptional; we have no other word for this than strength because strength is the experience that gives us access to these articulations and their affordances.

So what is it that, unlike your father, your mother might exemplify?

I believe that the past has things to teach us, I don’t think that anachronistic understandings of womanhood are innately injurious to my subjectivity as a modern woman (although, in my youth, I very much felt that way).

Traditionally femininity is associated with weakness and fragility, but looking at these contrasted with the added dimension of time and the ontogenetic unfolding that it begets; weakness, to me, seems most readily exemplified by children than by women.

I am reminded of reading Beauvoir’s second sex, something I would like to recommend to so many contemporary ‘feminists’. The conclusion of second wave feminism is that these qualitative associations are culturally constructed, and not real nor natural. But it is the predilection of this blog that nature and culture cannot be entirely separate. That signs and language are not entirely conditioned by an arbitrarily endowed system of correspondences. I am after all someone trying to understand and value herself—while avoiding the impulses of self effacement, inauthenticity, and self-exploitation—to do so in the context of my weakness and my passivity and my relationships with other men and women.

I remember after reading the second sex, which I found to be a really helpful and healing complex of ideas to go through, that we were not in fact the second sex. That sequence didn’t make sense as a schemata for comparing the feminine and the masculine. First comes the first sex, the gold metal sex, the first to cross the finish line, the #1. And then after some time, comes the second sex, the silver medalist in a two person race, the #2, and consequently the last place sex.

Rather I thought it made more sense to say that men may be the first sex, while women should be known as the one sex. Masculinity as a sex guided by the virtues presented in first person, and femininity as that guided by the virtues of oneness.

There is an expression of the infinite that the masculine accorded with, and this type of infinity could be measured as a magnitude of their accretive vectoral efforts: The masculine reaches out for infinity, and this motivation develops the means of strength and other masculine qualities; those better suited to traversing the Res Extensa. But for women, the type of infinity which our feminine nature seeks is more analogous to the equilibrium reached by the modulation of direction; it is achieved as a harmony of interconnection; it is the infinity of unity, the craft of relation. A feat of force, versus a feat of form: extensive completion versus intensive completion. The first sex, and the one sex.

Like weakness, as exemplified by the child, the virtue of social integrity may be more or less visible depending on what perspective you take. And as discussed above, the perspective from which something is most legible, will determine how its recognition is carried culturally. Furthermore, as society complexifies, and social integrity begins to mean more than just nurturing a nuclear family, men may rise up as exemplifying this virtue at more abstracted levels of expression, like delicately arranging an international relations agreement, nurturing the youth through education, or nourishing a crowd gathering together people for a charity dinner.

Inside this metaphor, gender relations when done well, will sort of resemble a symbolic tensegrity structure. Where some members bear individually great loads, allowing the structure to reach outwards, while others pull them all together, holding them in place, giving the whole stability and hoisting some members to positions where they extend farther than their own magnitude. It makes no sense for tension members to attempt compressive feats. And the tension elements, at first glance may feel invisible, but a free body diagram, drawn from the all seeing perspective, I believe would see everyone has their place.

However, out of alignment no one looks particularly useful. A string can seem excessively soft if it has nothing to pull between, just like a stick becomes needlessly inflexible without something worthwhile to push against.

You hear a lot of complaining about these dynamics online. Typically in the form of, “these members of the opposite sex have nothing to offer me.” And of course they do not, that value is relative and ogranismically generated. It will never be realized until we take up the task of composing greater structures together, and again, society is complexifying, strong women and unifying men are multiplying the geometries of relation. There are many ways to build society, and this offers more rather than less opportunities. It's just one example of a thought process: from what perspective do we naturalize the worth of our values? The productive members will not ask what the other’s can offer them and will instead figure out where they themselves can be exploited.