Carpet Turd

A Brief Justification of My Insecurity

A quick thought on that carpet turd of an idea that gender is a social construct. Since this is a quick thought, and since social constructions are complicated, and since I am also an enneagram 5 which means being seen as competent is more vital to me than my kidneys, it is incumbent upon me to tell you I know social constructs need more attention than this little blurb. I know this. You know this. I need you to know I know this.

Cut to the Chase

If there is no God, everything is a social construct. I mean, what else is there? A bunch of apes gather round the council fire and the strongest decide which silverback will be head poobah, how the village will be zoned and who is humping who – sorry, who is humping whom. When God is removed from the picture, which He has been, and replaced by the assumption we all slithered up the evolutionary ladder, there no longer exists anyone who can arbitrate between what structures are to be left alone and which the Landlord allows us to build on our own. As a result, we are left with the only other explanation available to us, which is some funky Venn diagram of Darwin, Marx, Foucault and Sartre, and maybe Nietzsche if we catch him in one of his manic episodes.

Social Constructionism (does everything have to have an -ism?) is the idea that the knowledge and traditions in a society are invented through social agreements. All societies creates rubrics to organize and understand their shared objective world. These structures represent the temporal values of a society at a certain time and place in history. As these values are passed down generationally they become codified as cultural norms. Social constructs, then, are fossilized values frozen in the historical time and space of their inception. For a social constructionist, the world is invented, not received; truth is manufactured, not revealed. Society is a tautological eddy where man invents society and society forms man.

Ultimately, social constructionists see society as built from so many Lego bricks into the shape and footprint of what benefitted a certain ruling class at a certain time. But these structures are not transcendent; they were built by those who had access to the Legos and the political power to stack them just so. Since they are only bricks, and since those bits of protoplasm who built them then did so arbitrarily, there is no reason why any particular bit of protoplasm ought not have access to build whatever structures gets its flagella spinning. Bricks can be deconstructed and rebuilt to coincide with new values of a different time.

Often cited as the reasoning for the social construction of gender is that masculine and feminine look different in different cultures and at different times. The Maasai must slay a lion to prove their manhood. I have to get a decent paying job with benefits. Since they are different, this is taken to mean that gender is must be derivative of society. But this mistakes the central concepts of gender for the peripheral manifestation in a society.

Take an analogy from athletics. Different sports play defense differently. In basketball, all five players play offense and defense equally. In soccer, all eleven players play both offense and defense, but some positions are more devoted to defense than offense – the goalie being the prime example. Football takes a more extreme divide and have wholly separate teams of offense and defense.

Because the concept of playing defense is vastly different from sport to sport, does it then mean there is no such thing as defense? Of course not. What would happen if an offensive player for the 49ers suddenly started playing defense for the other team. A very surprised quarterback is what you would have.

Masculinity manifests differently in different cultures, just as defense is played differently in certain sports. But defense cannot be offense, nor can we take the broad applications of masculinity to mean that masculinity does not exist. Same with femininity.

Extending from this idea is we find the justification of the disemboweling of gender we have seen over the past decade. The dress of effeminate men, women in combat roles, top surgeries, tucking, men taking home the gold in women’s swimming, puberty blockers, drag queens, false penises fabricated from forearm flesh – all is predicated on this idea that gender is socially constructed. If gender is a social construct, damn if we couldn’t benefit from some more wood shop classes in high school. But that mushroom, my friends, can only grown in the dark, dank, chaotic soil of a society that abandoned God.