gender-segregated bathrooms

buildings that have gender-segregated bathrooms have an equal number

for women and for men. Where there are crowds, there are always long

lines in front of women’s bathrooms but rarely in front of men’s bathrooms.

The cultural, physiological, and demographic combinations of

clothing, frequency of urination, menstruation, and child care add up to

generally greater bathroom use by women than men. Thus, although an

equal number of bathrooms seems fair, equity would mean more women’s

bathrooms or allowing women to use men’s bathrooms for a certain

amount of time (Molotch 1988).

The bathroom problem is the outcome of the way gendered bodies are

differentially evaluated in Western cultures: Men’s social bodies are the

measure of what is “human.” Gray’s Anatomy, in use for 100 years, well

into the twentieth century, presented the human body as male. The female

body was shown only where it differed from the male (Laqueur 1990, 166–

67). Denise Riley says that if we envisage women’s bodies, men’s bodies,

and human bodies “as a triangle of identifications, then it is rarely an equilateral

triangle in which both sexes are pitched at matching distances from

the apex of the human” (1988, 197). Catharine MacKinnon also contends

that in Western society, universal “humanness” is male because

virtually every quality that distinguishes men from women is already affirmatively

compensated in this society. Men’s physiology defines most sports, their

needs define auto and health insurance coverage, their socially defined biographies

define workplace expectations and successful career patterns, their

perspectives and concerns define quality in scholarship, their experiences and

obsessions define merit, their objectification of life defines art, their military

service defines citizenship, their presence defines family, their inability to get

along with each other — their wars and rulerships — define history, their image

defines god, and their genitals define sex. For each of their differences from

women, what amounts to an affirmative action plan is in effect, otherwise

known as the structure and values of American society. (1987, 36)

The Paradox of Human Nature

Gendered people do not emerge from physiology or hormones but from

the exigencies of the social order, mostly, from the need for a reliable division

of the work of food production and the social (not physical) reproduction

of new members. The moral imperatives of religion and cultural

representations reinforce the boundary lines among genders and ensure

that what is demanded, what is permitted, and what is tabooed for the

people in each gender is well-known and followed by most. Political

power, control of scarce resources, and, if necessary, violence uphold the

gendered social order in the face of resistance and rebellion. Most people,

however, voluntarily go along with their society’s prescriptions for those of

their gender status because the norms and expectations get built into their

14

15

733

sense of worth and identity as a certain kind of human being and because

they believe their society’s way is the natural way. These beliefs emerge

from the imagery that pervades the way we think, the way we see and hear

and speak, the way we fantasize, and the way we feel. There is no core

or bedrock human nature below these endlessly looping processes of the

social production of sex and gender, self and other, identity and psyche,

each of which is a “complex cultural construction” (Butler 1990, 36). The

paradox of “human nature” is that it is always a manifestation of cultural

meanings, social relationships, and power politics — “not biology, but culture,

becomes destiny” (Butler 1990, 8).

Feminist inquiry has long questioned the conventional categories of

social science, but much of the current work in feminist sociology has not

gone beyond adding the universal category “women” to the universal category

“men.” Our current debates over the global assumptions of only two

categories and the insistence that they must be nuanced to include race

and class are steps in the direction I would like to see feminist research go,

but race and class are also global categories (Collins 1990; Spelman 1988).

Deconstructing sex, sexuality, and gender reveals many possible categories

embedded in the social experiences and social practices of what Dorothy

Smith calls the “everyday/everynight world” (1990, 31–57). These emergent

categories group some people together for comparison with other

people without prior assumptions about who is like whom. Categories

can be broken up and people regrouped differently into new categories for

comparison. This process of discovering categories from similarities and

differences in people’s behavior or responses can be more meaningful for

feminist research than discovering similarities and differences between

“females” and “males” or “women” and “men” because the social construction

of the conventional sex and gender categories already assumes differences

between them and similarities among them. When we rely only

on the conventional categories of sex and gender, we end up finding what

we looked for — we see what we believe, whether it is that “females” and

“males” are essentially different or that “women” and “men” are essentially

the same.

references

Birrell, Susan J., and Sheryl L. Cole. 1990. Double fault: Renée Richards and the construction

and naturalization of difference. Sociology of Sport Journal 7:1–21.

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York

and London: Routledge&Kegan Paul.

Carlson, Alison. 1991. When is a woman not a woman? Women’s Sport and Fitness

March:24–29.

Cockburn, Cynthia. 1983. Brothers: Male dominance and technological change. London:

Pluto.

———. 1985. Machinery of dominance: Women, men, and technical know-how. London:

Pluto.

16

Lorber    From Believing Is See ing

734 CHAPTER 16 Biology

Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the

politics of empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman.

Donato, Katharine M. 1990. Programming for change? The growing demand for women

systems analysts. In Job queues, gender queues: Explaining women’s inroads into

male occupations, written and edited by Barbara F. Reskin and Patricia A. Roos.

Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs. 1988. Deceptive distinctions: Sex, gender, and the social order.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 1985. Myths of gender: Biological theories about women and men.

New York: Basic Books.

Foucault, Michel. 1978. The history of sexuality: An introduction. Translated by Robert

Hurley. New York: Pantheon.

Gelman, Susan A., Pamela Collman, and Eleanor E. Maccoby, 1986. Inferring properties

from categories versus inferring categories from properties: The case of gender.

Child Development 57:396–404.

Gilbert, Sandra M. 1983. Soldier’s heart: Literary men, literary women, and the Great

War. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 8:422–50.

Hartmann, Heidi I., ed. 1987. Computer chips and paper clips: Technology and women’s

employment. Vol. 2. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Hartmann, Heidi I., Robert E. Kraut, and Louise A. Tilly, eds. 1986. Computer chips and

paper clips: Technology and women’s employment. Vol. 1. Washington, DC: National

Academy Press.

Haskell, Molly. 1989. Hers: He drives me crazy. New York Times Magazine, 24 September,

6, 28.

Hyde, Janet Shibley. 1990. Meta-analysis and the psychology of gender differences.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16:55–73.

Jaggar, Alison M. 1983. Feminist politics and human nature. Totowa, NJ: Rowman&

Allanheld.

Kessler, Suzanne J. 1990. The medical construction of gender: Case management of

intersexed infants. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16:3–26.

Kessler, Suzanne J., and Wendy McKenna.[1978] 1985. Gender: An ethnomethodological

approach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kolata, Gina. 1992. Track federation urges end to gene test for femaleness. New York

Times, 12 February.

Kramer, Pamela E., and Sheila Lehman. 1990. Mismeasuring women: A critique of

research on computer ability and avoidance. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture

and Society 16:158–72.

Laqueur, Thomas. 1990. Making sex: Body and gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press.

Levesque-Lopman, Louise. 1988. Claiming reality: Phenomenology and women’s experience.

Totowa, NJ: Rowman& Littlefield.

MacKinnon, Catharine. 1987. Feminism unmodified. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.

Molotch, Harvey. 1988. The restroom and equal opportunity. Sociological Forum 3:128–

32.

Money, John, and Anke A. Ehrhardt. 1972. Man & woman, boy & girl. Baltimore, MD:

Johns Hopkins University Press.

Naftolin, F., and E. Butz, eds. 1981.Sexual dimorphism. Science 211:1263–1324.

Perry, Ruth, and Lisa Greber. 1990. Women and computers: An introduction. Signs: Journal

of Women in Culture and Society 16:74–101.

Richards, Renée, with Jack Ames. 1983. Second serve. New York: Stein and Day.

735

Riley, Denise. 1988. Am I that name? Feminism and the category of women in history.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Scharff, Virginia. 1991. Taking the wheel: Women and the coming of the motor age. New

York: Free Press.

Smith, Dorothy E. 1990. The conceptual practices of power: A feminist sociology of knowledge.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Spelman, Elizabeth. 1988. Inessential woman: Problems of exclusion in feminist thought.

Boston: Beacon Press.

Wright, Barbara Drygulski, et al., eds. 1987. Women, work, and technology: Transformations.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Yoder, Janice D. 1989. Women at West Point: Lessons for token women in maledominated

occupations. In Women: A feminist perspective, edited by Jo Freeman.

4th ed. Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield.

Zimmerman, Jan, ed. 1983. The technological woman: Interfacing with tomorrow. New

York: Praeger.