Two weeks ago, the feminist linguist Deborah Cameron died at the age of 67. She left many wonderful works, including 1995’s Verbal Hygiene and the recent The Rise of Dogwhistle Politics, but the one I think of most is 2007’s The Myth of Mars and Venus. It transformed my understanding of gender and power. I’d love even more people to read it today.
The Myth of Mars and Venus was published at a time when the market had been saturated with popular science and psychology books on “why gender stereotypes are valid and not at all anti-feminist, actually”: John Gray’s Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, Barbara and Alan Pease’s Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps, Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Essential Difference, to name a few. Some feminists coined the term “neurosexism” for them.
The first time I encountered a true believer was on a country walk, where I was told I would be better at identifying random berries because of my gatherer heritage (I would also be better at ironing but rubbish at driving, despite the fact I’d driven there). It took me a while to realise the argument we were having wasn’t some weird joke based on the idea that feminism had never happened. It turned out there were lots of people who genuinely thought this. What’s more, it was incredibly different to convince them they were wrong, even if you were right there in front of them, failing to identify berries and holding the keys to drive you both home.
On the face of it, it should have been easy to rebut the claims of neurosexists. Throughout history, women have been told what they are like and what they can and cannot do. The very need for this instruction ought to have been a red flag (“there used to be a feminist slogan”, wrote Cameron, “‘if being a woman is natural, stop telling me how to do it’”). There’s the fact that essentially “female” qualities have varied so much over time (“in the not so far-off days when most people thought women were intellectually inferior to men, they also believed women were linguistically inferior”). Finally, there’s the blindingly obvious fact that writing a book about why women “can’t read maps” or “systemize” doesn’t alter the fact that there are women doing these very things all the time. It seems bizarre to think that, long after women have proven themselves perfectly capable of doing “men’s stuff”, some people will still believe a book saying “those things women are doing? In some deep, fundamental sense, they’re not really doing them, though”.
Yet before the arrival of books such as The Myth of Mars and Venus and Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender, it was genuinely hard to argue against neurosexism. Partly this was because, as feminists have long known, the dominant group isn’t held to the same evidential standards as the subjugated group. Even the more evidence-based Essential Difference includes one chapter, “Boy meets girl”, which is a mother going on about how different her son “Alex” is to her daughter ‘Hannah’ (it’s “cars, football, music and computers” versus “dolls, cuddles, animals and people” – all very Mermaids, one might say). “But of course,” Baron-Cohen adds at the end of the chapter, “these are only one mother’s anecdotes. They in no way prove that there are real sex differences in empathizing and systemizing, but simply hint at them.” He just thought he’d chuck them in anyways (as the mother of three sons who are all very different to one another, I have anecdotes aplenty. Alas, no scientist of sexed brain differences has come knocking at my door).
In addition, it was difficult to argue against claims that women weren’t rational or scientific without this being categorised as an emotional, anti-scientific argument in and of itself — something you wanted to be true because you couldn’t face the cold, hard fact of your innate inability to face cold, hard facts. This was especially the case if being told men can’t do ironing because they’d find it boring, whereas you enjoy dull, repetitive tasks (an argument actually put forward to me by a male relative) made you a bit cross. Getting cross is an emotional response, not a science-y, rational one (NB when men get a bit cross and beat the crap out of each other, that’s to do with status and hierarchy, which is a system thing and hence totally different).
A third reason why it was hard to argue was the “not all ladybrains” get-out clause. Yes, these books had flashy titles and used extreme metaphors which suggested all women were one way, all men were another — “both the Martians and Venusians forgot they were from different planets and were supposed to be different”, warns John Gray, lest any male reader of Men are from Mars accidentally finds himself denying some of his “masculine attributes in order to become more loving and nurturing” — but they didn’t literally mean all men and all women. “I suggest that when you do not relate to something in this book, either ignore it (moving on to something you do relate to) or look deeper inside yourself”, writes Gray. Either you are essentially masculine and not aware of it yet, or … it doesn’t matter, just go to another section or something. Meanwhile, Baron-Cohen — pre-empting the modern-day trans activist — gets around the fact that some women like gadgets and sports statistics while some men’s “interests involve caring for friends” by treating these as alternative ways of measuring sex itself. You might have a penis, but your brain type and sex-typical behaviour might yet be female (according to the quiz at the end of the book, my brain type is male. It couldn’t just be that I’m female and I think and feel these things, ergo these thoughts and feelings are not exclusive to males. That would be far too obvious).
The ultimate challenge when arguing with neurosexism, however, was simply the claim that it wasn’t sexism — sexism had ended sometime around 1975 — but science. Indeed, it was safe to talk about the science of sex difference in 2007 because sexism had been so thoroughly eradicated. In a manner which has parallels with gender identity ideology and the ideas of Judith Butler — despite the fact that many neurosexists are gender conservatives, and would balk at such a suggestion — talking about “the science of sex difference” became a way of discussing gender stereotypes with all the power analysis stripped out. As Cameron pointed out, “the fact that we (still) live in a male-dominated society — a society in which the sexes are unequal as well as different — is like an elephant in the room that everyone pretends not to see”:
Some writers concede that inequalities exist, but resent these as unfortunate result of our failure to ‘value diversity’. […] But when we introduce power into the equation, an alternative possibility presents itself. Rather than being treated unequally because they are different, men and women may become different because they are treated unequally.
When Butler writes of wanting “a proliferation of genders”, or Baron-Cohen of those with “female brains” naturally gravitating towards lower-status jobs, they are making the same manoeuvre — stripping gender of its relationship to sex-based power and oppression. But as Cameron notes, one cannot simply decide to view gender solely in terms of difference, with all the dominance taken out: “gender as a social system is both simultaneously”. Indeed, for all the claims that feminists have been difference-deniers driven by wishful thinking, it’s hard to think of a more obvious example of wishful thinking than deciding — just coincidentally, at a point when women have proven the falseness of so many beliefs about gender, yet remain structurally held back by systems that still support these beliefs — that gender isn’t about power after all.
Cameron’s book was vital, not just because it reassured women who knew they could “systemise” with the best of them that they were neither out of touch with their Venusian feminine nature nor possessors of a male brain. It was vital not just because it reassured us that yes, if this stuff sounded sexist, that’s because it was — it wasn’t because you were some anti-scientific ladybrain who couldn’t handle the truth. Cameron provided evidence that disproved many well-known “scientific claims” — such as the one that women spoke 20,000 words a day to men’s 7,000 — which are still trotted out to justify stereotypes about male and female communication. More importantly, she situated the way in which these claims were made, and the real differences that do exist, in the context of men and women’s differing social, economic and political positions. A depoliticised analysis of gender serves the interests of those who wish to retain the benefits of gender without acknowledging the costs; it facilitates the exploitation of one group (the carers, the empathizers, the Venusians) by another (the rationalists, the systemisers, the Martians) “when older justifications will no longer wash”.
When I first read the book, it was a revelation. Cameron highlights similar behaviours which are read differently in men and women, and different behaviours women have to adopt to achieve the same objectives as men (one example that captures both at once is the way in which girls’ “preoccupation with ‘being liked’” has been portrayed as the opposite of “boys’ concern with status”). Unlike the typical edgelord feminist, she sticks to everyday examples when explaining how, for instance, stereotypes about who is best at communicating might seem flattering to women, but can actually excuse men from having to treat women as equal human beings. “Some ‘misunderstandings’”, she writes, “are tactical rather than real”:
Pretending not to understand what someone wants you to do is one way to avoid doing it. This may be what is really going on when a man claims not to have recognized a woman’s ‘could you empty the trash?’ or ‘the groceries are in the car’ as a request. The ‘real’ conflict is not about what was meant, it is about who is entitled to expect what services from whom.
Myths about male communicative incompetence are especially dangerous, she notes, when it comes to matters of consent:
Research on conversational patterns shows that in everyday contexts, refusing is never done by ‘just saying no’. Most refusals do not even contain the word ‘no’. Yet in non-sexual situations, no one seems to have trouble understanding them […] In fact, the evidence suggests that people can tell a refusal is coming as soon as they register the initial hesitation. And when I say ‘people’, I mean people of both sexes.
19 years on, in the age of online porn and dramas such as Adolescence, I find this particularly interesting in relation to the handwringing over young men simply not knowing not to hurt young women. Isn’t one question we should be asking, are they really that confused? Or is it a way of avoiding admitting something darker — that men do these things because they want to? (And will continue to do so, as long as we keep making excuses.)
Contrary to the claims of today’s gender conservatives, currently laying all the blame for gender identity ideology on “blank slatist” feminists, Cameron does not claim that men and women necessarily think and communicate in the same way. “Whether or not women have any underlying disposition to behave differently from men, they are often obliged to be different because of other people’s expectations,” she writes:
These ways of behaving are problem-solving strategies which women adopt in particular circumstances. They have nothing to do with the way women ‘are’, and everything to do with the position women are put in.
I don’t think this should be controversial. Nonetheless, the current surge in gender stereotyping on both sides of the political spectrum makes The Myth of Mars and Venus more relevant than ever. We are beyond “why women can’t read maps” and onto “why women are passive tradwives” (the right) and “why women are blank-eyed porn dolls” (the left). The justifications are, yet again, “science”, mixed with moralising. Yet again, gender itself is separated from any power analysis (while “denying gender” — whether that means denying right-wing conservatism or “progressive” porn stereotyping — is equated with denying reality).
Feminism is not about denying reality. The clarity of Cameron’s writing — contrasted, for instance, with the opacity of Butler’s — reveals someone with nothing to hide (it is impossible to imagine Butler writing something as brilliant as Cameron’s final blog post, “Do we really need to talk about tits?” without getting stuck on what a tit even is). While her loss is terrible and far too soon, Cameron leaves so much ammunition for women seeking to counter all those arguments we know are bullshit, but which we can lack the vocabulary and structural knowledge to pull apart. Words matter for feminism — we all know that. I recommend that we read, and re-read, more of hers.
