/lit/ - Literature

>>7962855
I agree with him. Just because something is tied to human social behaviors doesn't mean it's necessarily social *by nature*, or that its only purpose is for human cooperation. Nor does it mean that it's realistically reversible when widely adopted.

Gender in a linguistic sense is an expression of the animus and anima, two antipodal extremities of a spectrum. The animus (male aspect) embodies positive qualities, and the anima (female aspect) embodies negative qualities. For instance, compare extroversion and introversion, excitation and calm, brute force and grace, the penis goes in the vagina. Ultimately these concepts can become even more abstract: for instance, light compared to dark. Hence we arrive in many Indo-European languages with seemingly senseless gender assignments to animal species and objects, for instance referring to a table with the female gender (la tavola).

These dual concepts assert no preference for one extremity or the other. It was never expected that, for instance, a man remain excited all his life. There is a lot of granularity interwoven into how humans were supposed to interact with these extremities. The Taijitu, for instance, depicted a "contamination" of the white in the black and vice versa to represent the inexorable lack of absolute perfection in both extremities, and likewise their complementary and mutually dependent nature. These aspects were extremes in a spectrum, most likely not, as many critics have claimed, a "binary" relation.

The focus on the male/female gender as opposed to the animus/anima aspects likely arose for cultural/biological reasons (read: proliferation of the species). Nevertheless, it would be far easier to change the textbooks to refer to the animus and anima than to totally restructure the language for a convoluted acceptance of some 60-odd gender affiliations, complete with an original set of pronouns for each. For the most part, yes, these are archaic, seemingly needless references to one's genitals, but they are also ancient monuments to a way of life and human reasoning that, in essence, remains with us today, and is frankly something we will never fully escape until we cease to be a species.

For this reason it makes sense to generally ask a person which one of those extremities they are closer to. For those who fall directly in the center, they are neither like one or like the other, so either is appropriate.