Zoomtard

My dear friend Wylie wrote a while ago about gender and rites of passage and sexuality with her customary light touch. She claims that our gender is not expressed fully in sexuality and asks, “What is our masculinity and femininity?” I’ve been thinking about her question on and off for the last few weeks. This has involved an unintentionally loud and therefore embarrassing conversation with a friend in the lobby of the college library where protesting, she exclaimed, “But you have a penis and I have a vagina!”

This is indeed true. Well, I trust it’s true. It was more than a mere social construct that stopped me from rigorously testing her claim.

I should point out, she never came close to the level of reductionism seen in the greatest scene in the history of Extras, where Keith Chegwin plays a vicious homophobic, anti-semitic version of himself. It makes me double over with laughter every time I watch it:

My friend may not be Cheggers-esque but she is on to something though. Sexual difference between the genders is the location of sexuality. If we imagine a world where some very arid science allows us to reproduce asexually through cloning or gene therapy of some kind, then the distinctive between male and female will drip away to nothing. I don’t mean to suggest some kind of biological determinism where the hystera (womb in Greek) of the woman is the source of their imprinted hysteria. In fact I am claiming the opposite. Gender roles are largely (if not entirely) socially constructed and so without the anatomical distinction, man and woman will occupy an only vaguely demarcated continuum.

This is my claim anyway.

Alan Turing is the father of computer science. The Turing Test is a well known test to see if a computer has achieved genuine Artificial Intelligence. If a computer can fool a person in a dialogue through a terminal into thinking that they are a human being and not a chip, then we are bound to call the machine intelligent.

What I never learned in my computer science was that the test was initially conceived by Turing as a way to distinguish between man and woman, not human and machine. This probably speaks something to the misogyny of Turing (yet another area he is influential in computer science spheres) but it allows us a thought experiment.

It was assumed by Turing that if a man could pass as a woman over a computer terminal that this would prove nothing, since an adult can mimic a child as the senior can mimic the junior. So of course men will be able to pull the wool over the eyes of women.

What would be interesting for Turing would be if a woman could manage to convince a man that she was male.

Great scientists can sometimes be fools.

The creation of organisations of symbols to represent complex relationships is what “thinking” is. These language games can never serve as a distinctive between gender. What Turing teaches, the opposite of what he wanted to show us, is that one answer we cannot give to Wylie’s question is that men are smart and women are foolish. Or anything else along those lines.

So here comes the thought experiment. What if the difference between man and woman didn’t lie in our cognitive abilities or our emotional capacities or the fact that I am from Mars and you are from Venus. What if it didn’t even lie in our anatomy. What if the distinction between male and female lies in the fertile tension between the two?

It is not simply that there is a chromosomal difference between male and female, but it is that chromosomal difference is complementary, formally it is almost antagonistic, and in that space between new creation rises. Turing went wayward with his first efforts to use computers and symbolic representations to teach us about the nature of self. But in mis-locating his test in distinguishing the genders, he gives us a glimpse at our negative truth. A humanity without the creative tension of anatomical male and anatomical female would be machine-like. Without the creative tension that creates life between man and woman, we would be relating to each other like machines. Our replicas created in labs and our relationships with each other and our selves ever open to re-definition because it would be social construct all the way down.

Your Correspondent, His timing is off