#there’s a lot of blogs recently who have been pointed out to be gender essentialist in ideology

[contemporarysex-blog]

What Gender Studies is about

I had a fun debate on Twitter recently about whether "academia" is "increasingly dogmatically Blank Slatist" (i.e. denying biological influences on e.g. gender relations), which soon narrowed down to an argument about whether most contemporary feminist theory is built on Blank Slatist assumptions. Long story short, I'm not convinced that Blank Slatism is on the rise, let alone dogmatically adhered to even in academic feminism. I'm also not convinced that all insights from feminist theory are useless as a result of being based on Blank Slatism or postmodernist constructivism, mostly for reasons of supervenience. (That is, you can arrive at useful conclusions about society by studying social processes rather than their biological prerequisites; just as you can arrive at useful conclusions about biological systems by studying biological processes rather than the particles these are made up of.)

Still, this debate was useful to me in that it made me think hard about the scope and subject matter of Gender Studies.

Let's start by burning down two classic strawmen:

Biological Essentialist Strawman: "All gender differences are necessary and inevitable outcomes of biological facts, and are best understood at the level of (evolutionary) biology." This is obviously stupid and easily refuted by a looking at those differences between men and women that have shifted historically and are different across cultures (e.g. clothing, courtship, relative agency, etc.).

Postmodern Blankslatist Strawman: "All gender differences are socially constructed, and are best understood without taking biology into account in any way." This, too, is obviously stupid and easily refuted by looking at those differences between men and women that are stable in the mean across times and cultures (e.g. physiology, morbidity, childcare, etc.)

Historically, Gender Studies has been flirting with the second strawman for three obvious reasons: 1) The subject of Gender Studies is gender, i.e. the social dimension that is added to the biological one. (You could say that the foundational insight of Gender Studies is that there is a social aspect to relations between men and women, over and above what is "required" by biology.) Overstating the importance of one's own field while downplaying the relevance of others is something that should sound familiar to scholars of all fields (including biology). 2) The academic field of Gender Studies is an outgrowth of feminism, which is a political movement with the explicit goal of changing gender relations. If you want to change something, you'll be more interested in the moving (and movable) parts (here: the social construction of gender roles) than in the static and unchangeable ones (here: the biological prerequisites). 3) Before Gender Studies, the biological essentialist position was the dominant mode of thinking about men and women. Gender Studies set out to change this, and overcorrected in a predictable way. Just as predictably, this was exacerbated by other scholars and pundits doubling down on biological essentialism in order to defend the status quo of gender relations (for extreme examples, look to the homosexuality debates of the 1970s-1990s).

This explains, as a first approximation, how Gender Studies got to where it is now. The more interesting question, however, is: where should it go from here?

There are two answers to this, an obvious and a less obvious one. The obvious one is that Gender Studies needs to become more empirical. This is not at all the same as saying that we need to just roll over and accept everything that people in other fields (such as behavioral genetics or evolutionary psychology) are telling us. The principal domain of Gender Studies is society, and society is still best studied at the level of society, with methods developed explicitly for studying society, rather than at the level of sciences that believe themselves to be more "fundamental". (Note the critique of Gender Studies offered above under point 1 applies just as much to scholars from any other field, such as biologists who hold that there is nothing about human society that is not best explained by biological means, and who ridicule those working in the 'soft sciences' for using 'squishy' methods that are adapted to their particular domain.) That said, we do need to make sure that our specific models actually correspond to something in the real world in a useful and provable way. To do that, we need to derive testable predictions from our models and then test them, adapting the tools used by empirical sociologists to our own uses, and bearing in mind all the difficulties of establishing construct validity highlighted by the reproducibility crisis. If we are confident in our models of reality, we need to put them to the test in a rigorous and transparent way -- which also means that we need to be ready to revise them, for example by accounting for confounders that other sciences tell us we should expect. Sociologists can produce useful sociological results while accounting for genetic confounds; there is no reason to expect that Gender Studies cannot do the same. (I will write more about the intersection of qualitative methods such as ethnography and case studies with more easily falsifiable quantitative methods in a separate blog post -- suffice it to say here that qualitative methods can prove their value by informing models from which quantitative predictions can be derived and falsified.)

The less obvious answer, perhaps, is that the central mission of Gender Studies is orthogonal to the epistemological problems outlined above. Gender Studies is not merely an empirical science, concerned with understanding the world; it is also an inextricable part of the broader movement of feminism (or whatever you want to call it) that is concerned with improving the world. Some critics see this as a damning assessment and claim that such a "mission" is incompatible with scientific rigor, as science's only concern should be arriving at the truth. That seems like a noble aspiration, but it would equally exclude all of medical science (concerned with finding out the truth about human health in order to improve it), educational science (concerned with finding out what works in education in order to improve it), all engineering disciplines and most of sociology and psychology from the halls of True Science -- and frankly, if it ever came to a split like that, I for one know which company I would prefer. Of course there is a danger, in our eagerness to improve things, to ignore reality for the sake of convenient fictions. This, too, is not unique to Gender Studies; to avoid it requires the realization that you can only act effectively once you have a sufficiently realistic model of the world that you want to influence with your actions. This realization, in turn, reaffirms our focus on the social aspects of gender relations: what we want to change is society, so we need to study how society works. Human biology is only interesting to us insofar as it makes changing society harder in some ways and easier in others; it is a factor in our model, but can never be a replacement for the model itself. We do not set out to change biology, and neither do we fall prey to the fallacy (as some of our detractors seem to do) that the shape and organization of human society is necessarily determined by human biology. (This is the "is/ought" fallacy, and to be fair most evolutionary psychologists understand it extremely well -- quite unlike many of their fans and interpreters in the media and online.)

This insight into the function of Gender Studies, then, tells us exactly what we need to model, and what models we urgently need to validate. We are interested in the moving and movable parts; we need to understand how society can be arranged so that the current state of gender relations can be improved. Starting from the uncontroversial observation that both men and women face plenty of gender-specific problems, we need to ask: how can we contribute to improving all of our lots? Saying "we need to go back to the 'natural' way of doing things" is as unhelpful there as simply saying "smash the patriarchy!" Sure, let's go smash the patriarchy; but before we do, let's find out if our model of the patriarchy is a) correct and b) operable, and what parts of it we need to smash in what order and what ways so things can get better.