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  • Added June 7th, 2013
  • Filed under 'All Sorts'
  • Viewed 1931 times

Two Camps

By Helen Watson White in All Sorts

what makes us think as though things are only either black or white?

Two camps
When I was at primary school, we were taught about opposites: right and left, top and bottom, good and bad. Everything (we were told) has its opposite. But this is not taught any
more, and has not been for some time. Why?
One of the great gifts feminist theory has made to our culture is to point out that binary thinking has polarized everybody who thinks into one camp and another camp, diametrically opposed.
Binary thinking is the idea that we have two options: black and white, and there is nothing in-between. Of course we talk all the time about the grey areas, but I am speaking of the origins of our popular philosophy, of our religious thinking, and particularly of our ideas about sexuality. They are very old, and they have entered the language several times, as different languages have contributed to English.
Take, for instance, the oppositeness of mind and body and the extreme difference between them. It probably comes from Greek concepts, and not (I understand) from Hebrew ones, as we meet them in language. Now that we know that the brain is attached to the spinal column and really depends on a system that goes right down the backbone, we can stop opposing head and body. We are one being, with a brain that affects everything (even sexual function -- it is supposed to be the most sensitive and influential body part!).
Another opposition is head and heart, as if only reason existed in the brain and only instinct and feeling in the body. We know that is certainly not true, if you think about the feelingness of poetry, invented in the brain. Follow your head, not your heart, they would say: perhaps they meant the conscience was in the head, too. I will not argue that the conscience is in the body, but you will see what I mean.
The dividing goes further: there are two sexes when God creates Adam and Eve, and they perfectly complement each other. They are unquestionably different, however, and that difference has been accentuated over the centuries until only now are we seeing that there is a great deal in common. Girls are educated to the hilt now, although they never were when education began in England - or anywhere, as far as I know.
It was thought that women's business was the body (and the heart, and sometimes also the conscience) and man's business was the mind, which could stretch as far as the stars in its aspirations.
Of course this was a perfect way of thinking in the nineteenth century, to enable men to pursue a course of action without conscience (for instance following prostitutes) while the dutiful wife kept everything nice at home, arranging or cooking meals for the body, caring for children and the sick, helping them say their prayers, and praying herself -- that her husband would come home... There is a great deal of evidence for well-off males leading double lives for years, even without the story of Jekyll and Hyde.
The difference between expectations of males and females was correspondingly stressed in the matter of child-rearing, so that in the past men had very little to do with the day-to-day caring for young children and babies, at least in the middle-class -- poor people being so shoved into small spaces that the men might have been forced to hold a baby or two in the course of their lives.
Jobs were separated of course, women's work being what you have always heard: bringing up or teaching or nursing children, typing letters invented by great minds...you know the list. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, and females have entered the military, proving they are as capable of killing other human beings as the males. Many thought they should not be there, because women's job is to nurture, etc. but the chilling realization has come through the last decade or so that women are just as vicious and brutal as men in war, and in politics. Both men and women have many sides to their nature: a nurturing as well as an aggressive side, brains as well as brawn, the capacity to do all kinds of good and all kinds of evil.
When we are split into two camps by language or by other people's assumptions, it makes it very difficult to change. If you are a little way along the spectrum between heterosexuality and homosexuality, you may go one way or the other in your lifetime. People have to be fixed by society, however, they have to have a name that stays the same on their bank account, a sex specified in their passport, and so on.
It is a cause of a great deal of misery in just about all spheres of life that we have decided, many centuries ago, that there are only two options for everything we are or do.
-- Helen Watson White