Do You Have a Right to Your Superiority Complex? You Should Think Again!

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In 1904, a Danish philologist, Otto Jesperson (1860-1943) wrote the following passage:

'There is one expression that continually comes to mind whenever I think of the English language and compare it with others; it seems to be positively and expressly masculine, it is the language of a grown-up man and has very little childish or feminine about it...'

Ouch!  What a cunning slur delivered as though it were a piece of carefully thought-out logic.

What biological and cultural issues influence gender? What exactly is gender? The gender feminists would insist that human beings are born 'blank slates' and that the gendering of the human baby has more to do with cultural bias than nature.

The well-known words of Simone de Beauvoir are as follows: 'One is not born but rather becomes a woman.' 

Simone de Beauvoir is saying that there is no innate structure to the brain that defines it as male or female. Women are not made up of specifically female qualities, and concepts of femininity are entirely socially constructed rather than determined biologically.

Steven Pinker on Gender Discrimination

The fact remains that the human being's innate ability to learn suggests that the brain cannot be a blank slate at birth. Culture arises from human desire, and separate cultures arise out of conflicting human desires. 

'Our minds are composed of intricate neural circuits for thinking, feeling and learning, rather than blank slates, amorphous blobs or inscrutable ghosts,' says Pinker.

People can be Different but Equal  

Difference does not necessarily call for a superior/inferior binary opposition. Clearly, people can be different but equal. At first, Simone de Beauvoir claimed she was not actually a feminist, but a socialist who believed that women's oppression should end. (Later, she changed her mind and joined the Women's Liberation Movement.)

Steven Pinker goes even further, strongly opposing the proposition that issues of superiority/inferiority are valid reasons for favouring the behaviour of one group over another. Such differences, in his view, should never be used to support race and gender prejudice. Pinker's stance is that to take a specific trait exhibited by a certain group, gender or race, and then to say this is the only correct behaviour, is clearly illogical.

Discrimination Leads to Social Darwinism

It is morally suspect, says Pinker, to discriminate or to punish people for possessing traits over which they have no control. Such behaviour leads to social Darwinism and the belief that rich and poor (and men and women) deserve their status.

Pinker also refers to the concept of 'Hume's guillotine', which is the argument that no matter how convincingly you show that something is true, it never follows logically that it ought to be true. A conduct may be successful, but that does not make it good. It is illogical to prize male language and the patriarchal literary canon over female language and writing. 

'The point is not that group differences may never be used as a basis for discrimination. The point is that they do not have to be used that way, and sometimes we can decide on moral grounds that they must not be used that way.'

Sources:

Growth and Structure of the English Language, Otto Jesperson, University of Chicago Press, 1938.

The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir, Trans: H.M. Parshley, Gallimard, Paris, 1949.

The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, BCA, London, NY. Sidney, Toronto, 2002.