Thinking, Feeling, and Gender

So Mr. Evolution was wondering about gender and emotion: “I see a lot of people speaking about how women as a general rule are more emotional and “feeling”, whereas men are more logical or practical. As a man, I'm not sure if I buy that over all.” Then he started talking about Myers-Briggs stuff which got me all excited!

I responded, “I'm a T (INTP), and I almost never cry. I'm logical and thick-skinned. And because I'm female, that all translates to "cold-hearted bitch". Cool”

Another commenter claimed that women cry once a month on average, and guys cry once every five years. Once again, I seem to be a guy. Or, as a student recently suggested, maybe I'm a hermaphrodite and my parents picked the wrong genitals to keep. Rarely crying is not to say I don’t feel things poignantly; I just don’t express my feelings externally. And it could all be hormonal. There’s stress hormones, prolactin for one, that are released through tears, and the average woman has much more of them than the average man. But many of us aren’t very average.

When I was taking a course on Jungian psychology, I rolled my eyes at being given a Myers-Briggs test. That’s the kind of crap you get in a chick-mag, not grad school! Why would we want to pigeon-hole people into sixteen specific categories? But I came to realize that knowing and understanding the categories can actually help us understand and appreciate ourselves and others. The problem is not in categorizing, but in stereotyping and in valuing one type over the other.

Whenever anyone says men do x and women do y, I’m always on the male side of the fence. And typology has helped me understand why. The thinking/feeling (T/F) continuum measures how task-oriented or people-oriented we are. But really, the description of each is a description of what we typically label as masculine and feminine (see the end for descriptions). So when we discuss masculine and feminine, which usually assume male and female by association, we are really discussing thinking and feeling temperaments, which do not assume a gender – as much. And the stats are really interesting on this one: 61% of men and 39% of women are Ts, and 68% of women and 32% of men are Fs. So, for a good number of us, biology isn’t destiny, so stop shoving us in the wrong box already. Or any box for that matter, as we all move back and forth on this continuum. We just tend to feel (slightly to much) more comfortable at one side.

We get the stereotypes of masculine and feminine by looking at the majority (65%) of men and women. And that majority simply doesn’t include me. But because the masculine tends to be valued over the feminine these days, I didn’t fair too poorly. Yes, I’m seen as cold and heartless, and people shake their heads at my lack of any feminine graces, but I’m also applauded for my efficiency and capability with tools and tasks. I’m not much of a people-person, but boy can I get stuff done!

The men who fall into the F camp, however, may have more issues to deal with. I was a tom-boy as a child which suited me just fine, but can you think of a single word to describe a feminine man that doesn’t have a negative connotation?

Being in the minority can have benefits. For instance, if someone who has a predisposition to certain attitudes is instigated by society to create a good show of opposing attitudes, the person may end up nicely well-rounded and able to handle any situation. But it can be devastating if someone feels a need to hide preferences, ideas or feelings because society can’t cope with difference.

I lean towards nature as the basis of personality (or James Hillman’s “daimon”). Culture and parenting don’t create the tendency to be thinking-type (masc) or feeling-type (fem), but do affect our attitude towards those tendencies in others and in ourselves. Society may strengthen the outward appearance of traits deemed preferable, but the ego’s preference towards thinking or feeling is there before society has a chance to have an impact. As someone who never felt quite right as a woman, I believe the gender of the body we live in affects our psyche less than it affects others’ expectations due to the mistaken labels of masculine/feminine for thinking/feeling.

I harp on typology sometimes and become a big drag at parties because I think that recognizing that our bodies do not define our personalities and that, like the yin/yang symbol embedded in my ankle, we all contain a piece of the masculine in our feminine and a piece of the feminine in our masculine no matter which dominates our consciousness, can lead to a more accepting society. Once we can believe, down to our bones, that masculine/feminine or thinking/feeling are two sides of the same coin, the concepts of comparison, competition, and judgment might dissolve.

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Below is a list of words associated with feminine/feeling and with masculine/thinking from descriptions written by Jung and several Jungians. It works better in a table, but this will have to do:

Feminine or Feeling-Type: sympathetic, assess impact on people, guided by personal values, tender-hearted, strive for harmony, compassionate, accepting, subjective, value-based decisions, connection, mediation, relatedness, sentimentality, moods, passivity, dependency, soft, participate, interior, developing the center, surviving, co-operate, depth, extremes, primitive passions, matter, earth, darkness, instinct, emotional, imaginative, fantasy, play, concrete, profane, receptive, near, cyclical, containing, both-and, enmeshed, yielding, gullible, flighty, child, innocence, helpless, fearful, empathetic, nurturing, listening, ecstatic, dauntless suffering, intoxication, community, matter, tact, flexibility, hysteria…

Masculine or Thinking-Type: analytical, logical problem-solvers, cause and effect reasoning, tough-minded and efficient, strive for impersonal truth, reasonable, fair, objective, analytical decisions, deliberation, self-knowledge, opinionated, ruler, activity, independence, hard, instigate, exterior, protecting the borders, winning, compete, surface, moderation, civilized ideas, spirit, air, light, reason, logic, intellectual, focused, facts, work, transcendent, sacred, penetrating, distant, linear, moving, either-or, separate, forcing, skeptical, solid, adult, wisdom, capable, reckless, oblivious, achieving, speaking, esthetic, philosophical calm, soothsaying, individual, spirit, truth, honesty, reserve…

You can also add in Nietzsche’s whole Apollo/Dionysus thing. And even he sees how the Apollonian (masc.) model the Greeks favoured was tilting the world to one side. He figured out that we need a fusion between the two principles these gods represent and embody because they mutually augment one another. Or, as Lao-Tzu said centuries earlier, “All things have their backs to the female and stand facing the male. When male and female combine, all things achieve harmony.” I personally like Nietzsche’s personification (godification?) of this duality through two males. It furthers the argument against biological determinism. Dionysus was born out of Zeus’ thigh. He encouraged men to wear garlands instead of helmets, and when taken off course, instead of fighting the ship’s crew, he pretends to weep. When this proved fruitless, he turned the crew into creatures and drove them mad. He was “a boy, as pretty as a girl” (in Ovid’s Metamorphoses). This god represents the discovery that the feminine is to be celebrated as useful and necessary. The feminine is something, not just the absence of something.

Reading over the two disparate lists, I get a sense of the earth with the feminine, and I think of how many goddesses were named as the earth itself. And the masculine list is the gods of the sky, or God Himself. That duality goes back over three thousand years. At some point in human history, people revered the earth (cults following Inanna, Ishtar, Gaia, Demeter…). Once they mastered the ground through irrigation and crop rotation, then pesticides, they turned their reverence to the sky. Now the earth has been mastered to death and is in need of a good mistress to nurture it back to health. Aren’t we just about totally bored with the sky yet?