The beginning of the month often sees rooms, houses, properties, etc. change hands. And in the house that I am staying in, this followed accordingly. The most obvious (if you had read about my recent scenario involving death) new arrival would be the one filling up Danny's room, since given that it has a personal bathroom and kitchenette, it would provide the greatest amount of extra income to the landlady. Another individual arrived to fill another room and a third room was also on offer that would have prompted a re-shuffle (in terms of various people switching rooms), but for the 'unbelievability of the unknown'.
I don't know the whole story, but the individual who stayed in this room had done so for quite a long time (I've been told for possibly up to four years). He had his share of problems, being a drug addict, and having some very strange behavioural issues in terms of possible 'kleptomania', and there was some animosity towards him from one of the other individuals who had also been there long term. But the landlady told me that she didnt have a problem with him staying because on the one hand his personal issues weren't her business and on the other hand his mother always promptly transferred the full amount of the rent into the proper bank account at the beginning of every month. He was scheduled to arrive last Thursday or Friday to clear out his stuff, but it ended up being that he didnt actually arrive until late on Saturday. I was there at the time sharing a toke with Raymond (Rasta), and I had tried to convince him that we should check out what's happening at the pub, but he kept motioning to me that he was worried about leaving this guy at the house by himself should he decide to take something with him on the way out. But at the end of it all he relented and we left.
The next morning, I woke up to the sound of 'Holy shit! This is really not good!' and thought that perhaps we had made a mistake by leaving him alone and he had made off with something. But when I eventually dragged myself out of bed, one of my other roommates came up to me and said 'Check out the room! It's like Al-Qaeda has been staying there and let a bomb go off!' I thought it couldn't be that bad, since I'm usually fairly untidy when it comes to leaving clothes and stuff strewn about my floor and a mess of papers and books near and in my bed because of the myriad of projects that always seem to pull me this way and that, so I went to check on it and... wow.
There was an almost indescribable mess, with a giant mess of things strewn everywhere in and around the room. A giant pile of wood and plastic and various broken things in one corner, the bed in a disgusting state and covered with garbage, etc. There were also to ropes tied across the middle of the room, I imagine to hang his washing on. And it was a very small room. But that wasn't the most interesting thing.
It always interesting to know what goes on behind the closed doors of people who are very secretive, especially those who have various substance problems. For the first month I had stayed at the house, he seemed a fairly regular guy, though the only sight I ever had of his room was him squeezing the door open as little as possible, squeezing through it, and then when leaving, he would always have a hockey bag containing who knows what (two heads in a duffel bag, for all I knew), but he spent most of the second month apparently staying out with his mom near Bellville to be closer to work, so I hadnt seen him much lately. While I had been there, the landlady had always talked about a lot of things that had gone missing: dishes, a receipt booklet, various odds and ends here and there, but she was always adamant that even though she contained an extra key, she couldnt by law go in to check his room (another thing she told me was that because of recent legislation she couldnt by law kick non-paying tenants out without a long legal procedure, so, as with the things missing, she took the people who had failed to pay over the month of April in stride). So now we were all going to get a peek into this individual's weird little world.
Unsurprisingly, during the cleanup that followed over the coming days, most of the missing dishes were found (and put through a very rigorous washing process), the receipt book had been found, and many other missing things had shown up in the room of an apparent kleptomaniac. But now, surveying the room, the first thing that occurred to me was the overfull ashtray next to the bed. This in itself might not be particularly interesting but for the fact that many of those cigarettes were stained with lipstick. Then my eyes went to the mess on the floor where there sat numerous bottles of makeup products, colognes, perfumes, and who knows what else. You saw condom packages, tampon packages, women's underwear. The landlady had always had a rule 'no sleepovers, male or female' (though this rule was only very loosely adhered to by most of the tenants). So what had been going on there? How often had women been going in and out? How long of the four years had all this stuff been fossilized there?
Well, the speculative answer to a lot of these questions has to do with the the fact that it had already been revealed to me by the landlady that there was an instance when she had surprised him one day by catching him in a dress or some such (perhaps when he had to take a quick bathroom break) and he had immediately taken to his heels to seek the privacy of his room. So it seemed that, to at least some extent, the 'women' who had been visiting him were his effeminate alter egos. Though this could not (and still doesn't) explain what a male who likes to get regularly in touch with his feminine side, and in a rather pro-active way, requires condoms and female hygiene products for. Either there had been women there at various times (though it would be odd for him to keep 'hygiene products' around for her unless she had been there constantly, and no such individual had ever been seen to have entered or exited his room), or he had REALLY allowed his imagination to run wild.
The notion of gender has very interesting ontological connotations. Just like we might say that humans are such because of certain physiological or genotypical traits, so one might make the same assessment of gender. You are male if you have certain hormones, a Y-chromosome, certain anatomical essentials, etc. Similarly, you are female if you have certain hormones, two X chromosomes (and therefore polar bodies), certain anatomical essentials, etc. Then there are those that are often lumped into 'gender neutral' groups, such as those with Klinefelter's syndrome, those that have under-developed sex organs of both genders, various hormonal 'imbalances', etc. But just as we might say that to define a human being as 'a bag of bones' or 'a bag of DNA' is not particularly useful, so it might be said of gender. How are males and/or females 'normally' 'supposed to' or 'not supposed to' conduct themselves?
In my MA philosophy thesis, I wrote about how political notions of 'human freedom' are often defined by looking at the ontological definitions of 'humanness' as depicted by the theorist in question. What, aside from physiologically or genealogically speaking defines people as being human? Is it based on 'thinking'? 'Consciousness'? 'Productive capilities'? 'Hierarchical structure'? 'Socio-political structure'? Different answers imply different notions of political notions of freedom (so I have argued anyway).
But I believe a similar approach could be used to see what is behind gender stereotypes. If we talk about humanity in terms of its procreative needs, it leads to notions of 'heterosexuality', 'homosexuality', and 'bisexuality'. If we talk about humans in terms of 'thinking' or 'consciousness', which is the mark of the 'classic' and 'early modern philosophy', it turns into the perpetuation of stereotypes of women as intellectual socialites due to the egregious declarations that the patriarchy made about the general 'inability' of women to critical engage with and critically assess epistemic and intellectual pursuits. Note how women were basically treated during those times, and note that the hierarchical implications of these assessments are then sneaked in the back door to imply that women are fundamentally 'lower' because of their inability to engage with 'higher' forms of learning, as well as their biological 'closeness' to the children that they carry with them through the nine-month gestation period implying that their role is to 'create and maintain the family'.
But then a reassessment started to take place during the Romantic period when women started to show their intellectual worth through their ability to write many very important and very deeply insightful and philosophically relevant novels. The notion of the intellectual inferiority of women then took on a different tact that it was restricted to 'female' perceptions of the world, and was explained by the romanticization of women as storytellers and artists, etc. Eliot summarized it in 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' by repeatedly referring to 'the women who come and go talking of Michelangelo'. But still they were largely excluded from 'real' male pursuits like philosophy and the sciences. And still the bias became about a woman's productive capabilities: stereotyped as being more 'delicate' (and lacking the required levels of testosterone, apparently), they were restricted to 'light labour' if they were to be loosed from their traditional banishment to household labour in terms of 'the woman's place in the kitchen', etc.
When Marx arrived on the scene, and reinvented human ontology as being based on production in the physical realm rather than thinking in the intellectual realm. He spoke of the importance of female labour and, largely, the end of gender stereotypes with respect to production: we are now a species-being and we should further our species-capabilities through whatever means possible and quit squabbling about individual roles. And it has been this ontological modernization, in my opinion, that has been at the heart of gender modernization; I do not think that it is any secret that women who wish to be 'very' progressive in terms of gender must also be ontologically progressive, and, transitively, politically progressive, in terms of 'leaning more to the left', in some way or another (for example, my thesis speaks of Hannah Arendt's philosophy as being 'progressive' in this way, even though she always largely pooh-poohed socialism).
And so I believe we can take this lesson from history and ontology to define human beings first as human beings before we say that, being this or that gender, they must act in this or that manner. If this individual is curious about what it might be to live as a woman, then I believe he should be encouraged to do so, just as I believe John Howard Griffin made a bold and important move to live as a black.
And it just underlines what is the central tenet of my social-political theory, which has been derived from my numerous travels and engagements in countries around the world and could be at the heart of so much socio-political progress in terms of race, gender, and economic class, if only it could be universally adapted:
We must look at, see, and accept each other as human beings before we allow notions of ethnicity, gender, and other visual cues to creep in and corrupt our judgments.
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