As a person well versed in modern science, I often find that I look back at the scientists of centuries past in a very unforgiving manner.  Reading how a woman must be pleasured to conceive (what about rape victims who are impregnated, must they live with the stigma that they enjoyed their rape?), or later that women need not feel pleasure at all so its obviously time  to change our entire social views (these men must have been chauvinists) makes it very hard to feel any sympathy for their ignorance.

Laqueur has a very important point when he says that social views of males and females must depend on more than scientific ‘discoveries,’ whether those discoveries are accurate or not.  Much like when science was used to justify racism,  these men used it to justify sexism.  I took an anthropology class freshman year and my professor, when teaching us about gender roles, repeated this line over and over: “Sex is real, gender is a social construct” and these societies, without any clear sense of the anatomy of the sexes, needed to rely solely on their concept of gender, which they could make and revise as they saw fit to, with half baked scientific discoveries and skewed political movements designed to meet an end beneficial to those in charge rather than garner the truth.

The idea of gender as a construct popped out at me in Gallathea when Phillida responds to being told that she must masquerade as a boy by complaining about the way she must act because of it. There were very different social expectations of a boy that she didn’t want to have to fulfill and I got a silly image in my head of her stomping her foot and whining “But boys have cooties!” during those few lines.

Both Phillida and Gallathea seem to think that acting as a man is very unseemly.  They both obviously think themselves members of the better sex, and I’m fairly certain that both of them would rather let the sea monster do what it will with them than spend eternity as a man.  They both seem to be of the belief that being a certain sex means that you have certain specific behavioral attributes. I get the feeling that their society didn’t have much variation in personalities based on these girls beliefs on what their lives must be until Neptune is sated.

Of course, today we still certainly have specific ways that women act today as opposed to how men act. Stereotypes that dictate that women are more timid, ditsier. But overall I don’t think that my behavior would have to change that much were I to need to impersonate a man, which once again leads me to a rather exasperated view of their society.