In reply to a post about "does feminism have any point?" , one man replied that while he thought feminism was "mostly bullshit" , he also felt that "men can have a biased idea of what logic and feelings are" because, as he wrote, "in a world where women were kept in the home and just doing what the husband says, whatever men considered to be logical was logical".

In other words the man who is at large in the wider world with mostly other men inherits a certain notion of "logic", "feelings": it's not going to occur to him that by these terms he necessarily means "MALE logic", "MALE feelings".

This is SUCH an important insight - that often men may not realize the extent to which its "a man's world", even now, because of this bias they can't help but have - the confusion of a "male perspective" with simply "THE perspective", as if there's some magical gender neutral way of thinking about things and looking at things.

Ironically, "equalitarianism" or liberal feminism makes the same mistake - imagining men are somehow inhabiting a gender-neutral plane. They confuse male dominance in history, culture, politics with men somehow unfairly claiming the special "gender-neutral zone", to which women ought to have access as well. Equalitarian feminism fails to articulate female experience or imagine how it can be made less onerous and more creative ON ITS OWN TERMS. It refers every sort of female suffering to the supposed prohibition of women from this non-existent world where a "human" can be "free from gender".

Radical feminists are suspicious of ""humanity politics" and "humanism not feminism" is because the very idea of "humanity/humanism" is a philosophical notion articulated by men, and generally means: men. The profoundly deeper, more visceral relationship women have to the reproductive function meant that for hundreds of years it was incredibly hard to see women as anything other than ...women. There was only one gender: the female one. I can't think of a single human society where men are primarily seen as baby-makers, but that's what women were seen to be, cross culturally, for centuries. Men, on the other hand, were never first and foremost a "gender" or "a sex".

The reality is that humanity is divided into two sexes. It's a profound division. It goes across all cultures and races - there's men and women. Indeed the male/female binary recurs in animals as well. It's a gendered planet.

Just look how different men and women physiologically. It's obvious to very small children there's a big difference, but before long we're all so immersed in the socially convenient notion of "people". We might continue to notice that some "people" are black, others are white, others are Asian - but from the age of about five years onwards, the PROFOUND division of human beings into male and female is no longer interesting to us in itself. Even when adolescence begins and sex difference becomes fascinating, we're not exactly noticing it just as it is - on the contrary. By that age all the "constructs" of gender - the fantasies imposed upon biology by society- have been well and truly instilled. We are being seduced by a dream of sexual difference, not the crude biological facts .. by then something much more complicated is going on (something beyond the scope of just this post).

Feminists, seeking to liberate women from "gender", sometimes say gender is ENTIRELY a construct. This is ludicrous. Imagine if humans had never evolved languages, cultures, societies, but had remained on the animal level of interaction - even in the absence of such "constructs": wouldn't it still be remarkable how incredibly different men are from women? Even as pure animals, men and women face totally different hazards, are driven to behave in radically different ways, and beyond the perpetuation of the species, have few common objectives or interests.

If one becomes self-conscious of this profound dichotomization of "humanity" into male and female, it's really hard to see how it can even be possibly to speak of "humanity" in a gender-neutral way.

This is why I think it's foolish to deny that the world is "gendered", and unproductive to pursue the ideal of a world where "gender doesn't matter" because it always will, for both men and women.