00:06:08.940I will say on a side note, I think this is going to be hilarious.
00:06:11.680And it's what we all need as we, you know, watch our democracy slowly keen to one side.
00:06:15.660But I do think it's going to be useful because we often reference certain ideas like gender as a social construct or masculinity or femininity.
00:06:23.120And we've never really spent time to talk about those things.
00:06:25.840So I think that's going to be useful today.
00:07:16.240It's the year that we decide as a country that we do want four more years of George Bush.
00:07:20.660And it is the year that we decide that, no, we do not think Janet Jackson should be given another chance after her nip slip at the Super Bowl.
00:07:27.000So that's the time period that we're moving through.
00:09:04.220Okay, quote, Mr. Rhodes' book is sure to outrage feminists who will most likely, depending on their testosterone levels, throw it across the room with anger or indignation. Yeah, challenge fucking accepted. But he makes an important argument and makes it well. To fight for an androgynous society is to fight human nature. It's a losing battle on all fronts, end quote.1.00
00:09:32.900So androgynous is a word that you're going to see a lot in this book today.
00:10:37.160So, Katie, in this book, the central argument is probably obvious at this point, but I'll just state it plainly.
00:10:42.460The argument is that sex differences are large, they're deeply rooted, they're consequential.
00:10:47.960Women and men still have different natures and, quote, they, generally speaking, have different preferences, talents, and interests.
00:10:54.180Do you have any questions about that thesis?
00:10:56.680My reaction to stuff like this is like, if it were so natural and predetermined, you wouldn't have to spend so much time reinforcing these ideas for people and telling them how they should be behaving, but whatever.
00:11:10.140Whatever. Today's going to be annoying. I can already tell.
00:11:13.540Just you wait until you receive all of my arguments.
00:11:16.620So I should just note at the jump, I won't be referencing or even nodding towards the existence of queerness because Professor Rhodes does not think queer people exist.1.00
00:11:25.400Queer people are like mythical fallacies.
00:11:27.880They're like the fairytale characters in children's books.1.00
00:11:41.840He just like doesn't even address queerness?
00:11:44.420or is it okay that's so fucking weird all right sure doesn't address it at all so katie we're0.76
00:11:48.900going to start at the bottom of page five if you can read the paragraph that starts with the culture0.83
00:11:54.000wars the culture wars are really about the role of women agree but not in the way you think with
00:12:01.040you so far but women are split between a majority who are traditionally feminine and others who are
00:12:07.420more like men than their sisters are the latter group which on average has been exposed to higher
00:12:13.200levels of testosterone, is more interested in the physical side of sex, more independent,
00:12:19.280assertive, and career-oriented, more competitive in sports, and more conflicted about—so,
00:12:25.140so far, he's, like, describing basically every woman I've ever met, so that's kind of funny—and
00:12:29.660more conflicted about children. The tension between the two kinds of women will arise in
00:12:34.480all parts of this book. Oh, goody. Okay.1.00
00:12:38.200So, the book opens by kind of acknowledging how much has changed in the last 50 years,
00:12:42.940And by discussing how much our mainstream conversation does now account for gender, I think that it's kind of up to debate the extent to which the idea of gender as a social construct has impacted the mainstream.
00:12:54.720I do think that the way that we talk about women and men, even in relatively conservative circles, has probably changed dramatically since, you know, the 1940s.
00:13:02.560I'm not necessarily convinced that it's as radical as he thinks it is.
00:13:05.980But Katie, you are a radical left-wing feminist, so can you offer us a broad characterization of what it means to view gender as a social construct?
00:13:13.860To me, the idea that gender is a social construct comes down to the way that we are all, in some ways, performing the sex that we have been assigned.
00:13:27.300So it's more about the idea that these ideas about what women are, or what men are, or what women should be, or what men should be, are fungible.
00:15:02.800Despite what they said about the importance of sharing child-rearing, these male professors, who by all rights should be more egalitarian than most men, were not often taking leave, nor were they doing intensive baby care in the way that the female professors were.
00:15:19.320Indeed, there is reason to think that our formal results overstate how much of it the male faculty actually do, okay?
00:15:26.300So you're like, yeah, I've got a bunch of deadbeat dads here, and that must be natural.
00:15:30.440When we debriefed our phone interviewers, they said that the men often seemed embarrassed when they kept answering that their wives always or usually did the specific child care tasks we enumerated.
00:15:41.860It's so funny how close he is to, like, making a good argument.
00:17:24.840I will add, I think a lot of dudes who claim to be liberal or progressive are not as liberal or progressive as they think they are when the rubber hits the road.
00:17:32.040I have a pet theory that men like to help in the home in fun ways.
00:17:37.860And so their form of help is often literally taking care of the children because being with kids is fun.
00:17:43.260You benefit as a father by developing a relationship with your kids.
00:17:46.060There is like a positive reinforcement mechanism.
00:17:47.940And so my kind of hot take is that the real mark of a helpful husband is not how involved he is with being a father, but how involved he is with housework. Housework is the thing that is not appreciated. It is unsexy. It can be emasculating. It is thankless. And so in my view, a husband who is on paternity leave in those early weeks or months of newborn care would largely be a housekeeper. That's like my kind of hot take of like the way that you could help the most, but that's kind of neither here nor there.
00:18:15.160So, the conclusion that Rhodes draws from this that we will see again and again is that this is proof that androgynous parenting works for no one.
00:18:23.220So, moving on to chapter two, masculinity and femininity.
00:18:26.340Katie, can you summarize what those two words mean?
00:18:29.040Am I doing, like, good faith definition?
00:18:31.560The words masculinity and femininity are how we, like, broadly refer to what I would call universal human traits that we have decided to assign to one sex or the other.
00:18:43.940So I think the word assertiveness has already come up.
00:18:47.240That's something that we assign to men and say men are more naturally assertive than women because testosterone or whatever.
00:18:54.460And then femininity is the word that we have come to use to assign to all the like, oh, sensitive, caring, submissive, passive.
00:19:03.880If you let power run roughshod over you, you're being nice and feminine.1.00
00:19:10.220So this is basically the core debate of these conversations between gender theorists and sex scientists is where these traits come from. What is masculinity and what is femininity and where are they coming from? Are they completely socially constructed or are they inherent to our nature or are they both? That is kind of the debate that is still raging.
00:19:28.340Something that I just want to point out is that a lot of the research around negotiation for women is really instructive in this debate because during the kind of girl boss lean in era of the 2010s, there was this real push for women to demand your worth, ask for what you want, directly and aggressively ask for more money, right?
00:19:52.660you're kind of being told to embody these societally masculine traits and essentially
00:19:58.240to behave in a gender incongruous way. And what research found was that women who behave that way0.87
00:20:05.980are penalized in negotiations for it. That a man and a woman that are both asking for like the same1.00
00:20:12.020type of raise in this research, the man was 33% more likely to have success with that approach.0.70
00:20:18.060I know that we can debate what are the origins of this, but the reality is that women who behave in masculine ways and seek masculine goods are punished repeatedly in society for doing so.
00:20:30.140So, to say that none of this has to do with, like, societal reinforcement or penalty is crazy to me.0.61
00:20:38.580Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.
00:20:40.080So, this actually was a relatively interesting chapter to read.
00:20:43.640The way that Rhodes gets into this tension is by highlighting something pretty interesting, which I then researched and found to be true externally, which is that there is a really interesting trend with sex difference researchers in that a lot of them go into the landscape of, like, scientific sex research hoping to disprove it and end up coming away with a more complicated picture.
00:21:04.580So that's not to say that they come away saying gender is not a social construct, but it's that they come away saying this is much more complicated than I originally believed.
00:21:12.580So, Katie, I'm going to have you read page 18.
00:21:42.580sex differences. In Eagley's view, they draw on feminist research of the 1970s, which, in order
00:21:49.480to eliminate stereotypes hindering women from fulfilling their potential, highlighted the idea
00:21:54.620that sex differences were ephemeral. According to Eagley, however, new research indicates that
00:21:59.820women and men really do conform to some of these stereotypes. Women, for example, do tend to
00:22:05.180manifest behaviors that can be described as socially sensitive, friendly, and concerned
00:22:09.740with others' welfare, whereas men tend to manifest behaviors that can be described as
00:22:13.840dominant, controlling, and independent. In other words, ordinary people's gender stereotypes are,
00:22:18.820as Eagly says, fairly accurate. And most people do recognize that men and women occupy
00:22:23.260partially overlapping groups possessing different average levels of various attributes.
00:22:28.220Eagly concludes that scientists currently studying men and women have begun to realize
00:22:32.120that they have shattered not cultural stereotypes, but the scientific consensus forged in the
00:22:37.180feminist movement of the 1970s. Okay, but, like, I guess we just haven't gotten to this part yet,
00:22:41.420but I still don't feel like this is going any further to convince me that any of this is natural
00:22:47.020or innate. And this is where I think the fact that there is no acknowledgement of queerness
00:22:52.160is so critical, because none of this holds up if you acknowledge that some people don't—you're
00:22:58.900basically saying, yeah, there are this, what, 10 to 15, maybe 20 percent of the population that
00:23:04.420completely upends this paradigm. We are just not even going to address the fact that those people
00:23:10.440exist and we are only going to look at the ones who most closely mirror the things that we are
00:23:16.960claiming are true. Does he answer this question? Does he actually proffer any research that like
00:23:23.120goes the distance in justifying the idea that any of this is innate? He does not at any point.
00:23:29.400It is just not discussed. What's actually amazing to me, there's like a sleight of hand that he does that's really interesting when you read the book from start to finish, or actually, frankly, when you take the class, which is that he does not do what other conservatives similar to him would do, which is that he doesn't reference the 1950s ever.
00:23:48.300There is never like an explicit reference. Like even the front page of this book that you showed, which is 1950s images, is the closest that we get to ever having like an actual reference. This whole argument that he makes essentially floats in the ether in a way that I think really benefits him. He doesn't ever nod to like, well, things were better X. He basically is just constantly arguing for this is how we are.
00:24:15.060He's essentially arguing for something that is immutable. It's not about any one time period. That's how we've always been. But I want to get back to Alice Eagley because she's very interesting and he very much mischaracterizes her in this paragraph.
00:24:27.700So Alice Eagley does think that certain biological factors impact our behaviors, but she believes in
00:24:34.460biosocial theory, which essentially argues for like a hybrid of both biology and culture to
00:24:39.880explain our gender differences. I will share some of her studies because biosocial theory is very
00:24:45.780complicated and they essentially are studying the very intricate relationship between biology and
00:24:51.120how our culture plays with that over time. And their argument is it's not just nature and it's
00:24:56.420not just nurture, it is always both. So what are we talking about when we talk about that?
00:25:02.620Steven Rose will constantly reference testosterone. They will talk about eyesight. Like one of the
00:25:07.760studies I remember reading when I was in that class was a study that argued that men actually
00:25:12.680can't see socks when they're on the ground. They're not being lazy. They can't see them.
00:25:18.960And so they can't pick them up. You just have different eyesight, housewives. Anyways, so1.00
00:25:25.620One organ that I do want to talk about is the brain, okay?
00:25:29.300So we're going to read how Stephen Rhodes talks about this,
00:25:31.660and then I'm going to talk to you about, like,
00:25:33.200actually what people are doing with this.
00:25:35.160So, Katie, I want you to read page 27.0.99
00:25:38.060Brain research also reveals inherent sex differences.
00:25:41.800For example, neuroscientists have determined that men
00:25:45.000have fewer neurons connecting the left and right hemispheres of the brain.1.00
00:25:49.940This difference may help to explain why women are better1.00