Building Religions 23: Sex and Gender

In my post on Mary Douglas, I described some of the ways that religious societies create and enforce categories of thought, as well as their reactions to phenomena that transgress the bounds of those categories. My post today, which examines how to approach questions of sexuality as a worldbuilder, is to some degree an extension of that. Obviously, it's an enormous topic, and one that I won't even attempt to cover completely; instead, I'd like to focus on a few basic ideas.

The division of the vast majority of human bodies into male and female makes the duality of sexes one of the most fundamental of categories, if not the most fundamental. From that starting point, human beings can begin to establish the first organizing principles of their world: light and dark, Sun and Moon, fire and water; anything that can be paired can be mapped onto male or female. Some scholars who search for commonalities in the world's religions, as Eliade did, might assume that every culture would identify the same phenomena with the same sex, but this is untrue. What is masculine and what is feminine (and here, I'm switching from questions of sex to questions of gender) are essentially arbitrary cross-culturally, even if they have their own internal logic.

I cannot stress this enough. For an author immersed in Western culture, it can be easy to assume that certain symbols—the idea of the Moon as feminine, for example—are universal instead of the product of centuries of cultural reinforcement. Writing from within that culture, where one is constantly exposed to gendered associations (through literature, visual arts, popular media), it's difficult to step back and question why those associations come so easily to mind. As an exercise, then, you might want to list a dozen or so material things (e.g., light, dark, Sun, Moon, earth, air, fire, water, silver, gold, iron, copper) and divide them up randomly as masculine or feminine. Once you've done that, try to work out the cultural logic that would give rise to that arrangement.

But religion doesn't only organize the material world; it organizes the social one. The gendering of the world can encompass human behaviour, activities, occupations, language, and even ways of thinking. As part of religion's role as a creator of meaning, it includes the question of what it means to be a man or a woman. To put it another way, religion can produce ideas of what an ideal man or woman should be, ideas against which every member of that religion is compared by their co-religionists.

This is where we return to Douglas and the policing of boundaries. When individuals move outside the territory permitted to their gender—by dressing, speaking, or otherwise behaving differently—they can find themselves treated in the same ways that other "unclean" things are. They might be treated as dangerous abominations and expelled completely from society. They might be forced into one category or another, with their ambiguous qualities deliberately ignored. They might even be treated as sacred, although perhaps still dangerous.

To think about the boundaries of gender for the setting you create, try writing a paragraph that describes both the ideal man and the ideal woman. How do those people act? How do they look? How do they speak? What place do they have in their society? From there, you can take individual elements and consider how people who possess atypical traits for their gender would be treated. Are some differences more easily overlooked than others? Are there some lines that absolutely cannot be crossed?

(As a bonus, imagine a character who blends the traits of both. What role would that person have?)

Moving from the human world to the divine, there is one more point that I'd like to make. Gods and goddesses, although they can be represented as the ideals of their gender, can also transcend human categories as part of their sacred nature. I'll discuss some of the ramifications of that statement in a separate post, but the point that's important here is that divine traits don't necessarily map onto human values. To put it another way, the respect that a culture has for a god or goddess doesn't always translate into respect for men or women. The shorthand of using a goddess-centered religion to denote some improved status for women in its culture, especially, is something that has little historical basis.

In my next post—which I promise won't take two months to write—I'll discuss sexuality itself, and how it relates to mysticism, magic, and myth.