Leading Youth Humanist on Gender, Masculinity, and Femininity
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/07/24
Marieke Prien is the President of the International Humanist and Ethical Youth Organisation. I am in the Americas Working Group and an editor and contributor to its publication Humanist Voices. Here we discuss gender and sex.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Gender and sex get mixed up. What is sex, and gender, to you?
Mariek Prien: Just the regular definition: sex is something anatomical, gender is social and a personal identification. Unfortunately, many people do not make this distinction, even though not only does it make sense and is needed, it also makes it so much easier to understand people and their identity.
Jacobsen: You are the President of the International Humanist and Ethical Youth Organisation (IHEYO) of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). IHEYO is part of IHEU. Religions have ideals, archetypes, figures, gods, metaphors, allegories, to define gender. The roles, responsibilities, and rightness of an image for masculinity and femininity. Humanism may have them too, but do not have a text or holy scripture. Is there a conception of masculinity and femininity in humanism?
Prien: First I must make a distinction between gender and masculinity/femininity. Gender is an identity as described above. Masculinity/femininity are, in my understanding, terms used to say that something, like a character trait or facial feature, is “male” or “female”.
Regarding gender roles, my answer is that no, we don’t really have that. Humanism is about freedom, including that your way of life should not be restricted by guidelines and rules of society (as long as no one gets hurt, obviously). The humanist community is very diverse and everybody is encouraged to choose their role, choose how they want to live, and that nobody gets judged for that choice.
When it comes to masculinity and femininity, most of us probably have some concept of that and the opinions can differ. But I think you could say that these concepts just don’t mean so much, they don’t really matter. To use an obvious example, a woman is not expected to dress in a way that would be described as “feminine”. Obviously, people have different personal taste, but it is just that: a personal taste. Not a rule others need to follow.
Jacobsen: How much does this differ from religious definitions?
Prien: Most religious definitions are very strict in that they divide people into two sexes, equalize them with genders, and appoint roles to those groups. Women must do this, men must do that. If somebody does not live according to this, that’s frowned upon. I am not saying that all religious people tightly follow that, but these are the rules stated in many scriptures, archetypes etc. as you mentioned before.
This division and appointment of roles are what does not happen in the humanist definition.
Jacobsen: If it does, should humanism even have conceptions of masculinity and femininity and good or bad versions of them?
Prien: This is a hard question for me because I am not sure of what to think of these conceptions. They don’t make so much sense to me because I find it hard to make that distinction between masculine and feminine, and I don’t really know what benefits people have from using these terms over others. To me they sound kind of harsh and as if things could be 100% male or 100% female, which they are not. But if we use the words in a different way, to express that, for example, something is more common in males, but recognizing that it doesn’t mean it’s wrong for a female to have that trait, then that’s fine.
So I would say that we do not need the concepts, but I don’t want to go so far as to say that we should actively get rid of them.
Jacobsen: How can a modern scientific view of sex and gender update our views, and so expectations about men and women – scientific because of the humanistic principles and values as the framework?
Prien: If we look at the distinction we made about sex and gender, and recognize that gender roles are for the most part a social construct, then what this view does is take away the expectations we have.
There are some differences between the sexes, simply because of the biology. But the important thing is that these differences don’t exclusively define us, and they don’t make one group better than another. They don’t influence a person’s rights and responsibilities and must not be allowed to dictate our ways of life – a maxim that we are still struggling to live by. We must look at the individual, not at the group we think this individual belongs to. And that’s the humanist principle.
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