Gender Polarization
Gender polarization – a factor that organizes social life around differences between men and women, creating a cultural link between sex and almost every other aspect of human experience, including manner of dress, social roles, and even ways of expressing emotions and experiencing sexual desire (Bem, 2004, p. 261).
According to theorists of androgyny, Sandra Bem in particular, the division of human experience into masculine and feminine narrows human potential in at least three interrelated ways.
First, gender polarization represents men and women as homogeneous groups.
Second, gender polarization divides not only people, but also their ways of relating to the world, into masculine and feminine. In this way, it leaves outside definition and outside conceptualization not only the androgynous type of person, to which feminists have paid considerable attention, but also an androgynous way of relating to the world, which captures the very essence of human existence. One example is the gender-polarized division between male rationality and female emotionality. Although the human psyche is organized in such a way that a person is both rational and emotional, no concept in a gender-polarized culture reflects this fact.
Third, gender polarization so greatly intensifies the meaning of being a woman or a man that it produces a paradoxical cultural concept: the idea of being a “real” man or a “real” woman, as opposed to the purely biological concept of male and female.
In essence, gender polarization turns men and women into caricatures and thereby denies them the possibility of fully using their human potential.
At the institutional level, gender polarization contributes to the social reproduction of male power by dividing the social world into the masculine domain of paid work and the feminine domain of home and child care. In this way, it supports a division of labour based on sex differences and diminishes the perceived necessity of such social institutions as paid child care, which would allow everyone to participate both in paid employment and in caring for the home and children.
At the psychological level, gender polarization contributes to the social reproduction of male power by dividing personality into masculine and feminine categories. It thereby provides the concepts of psychological masculinity and femininity, to which culture readily attaches androcentric concepts of power and powerlessness. The alliance between androcentrism and gender polarization assumes that men are identified with dominance and women with subordination, while those who are unwilling to accept these mutually exclusive identifications are defined by culture as deviant.
At the ideological level, gender polarization contributes to the social reproduction of male power by suggesting a false way of viewing even the most glaring examples of sex inequality, presenting them merely as sex differences. In other words, gender polarization enables religion, science, law, the mass media, and other institutions to rationalize the sexual status quo in such a way that its androcentric basis becomes invisible (Bem, 2004, pp. 262–264).
Reference:
Bem, S. L. (2004). Linzy gendera: Transformatsiia vzgliadov na problemu neravenstva polov [The lenses of gender: Transforming the debate on sexual inequality]. Moscow: Rossiiskaia politicheskaia entsiklopediia (ROSSPEN). [in Russian].
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