I was reading about autism and the theory that it is caused by a ‘hypermasculine’ brain. Typical symptoms include ‘impaired socialisation’, meaning difficulty in relating to people and the world around you in a personal way. Then I began to wonder about the postmodernist idea that people and the Earth are ‘non-real’ and reducible to language. It makes sense to say that God is not real, because he is a product of the human imagination or poetic genius. But I see no reason to extend this ‘non-realism’ to people and things in the world, which we did not create. In any human relationship it is essential to realise that the other person is not me and to respect that. In relating to things on Earth it is essential to be aware that, say, a window, is not imaginary or you might crash into it and not live very long. Could postmodernist non-realism about people and things on Earth be described as a kind of philosophical hypermasculinity?
First, I thought, men have greater opportunities to distance themselves from material reality. A man can spend ten minutes with a woman, go abroad and nine months later become a father. Technology which distances the bomber from the target is also regarded as ‘masculine’. So is it ‘feminine’ to relate more closely to people and be more closly associated with matter? Today in England women still do most of the housework.
But what about all those skilled manual jobs men do – the carpenters and roofers I so much admire? ‘Masculine’ here is to get physical. (And they quite often refer to the things they are working with as ‘she’: ‘Up she goes.’) Men doing manual jobs cannot treat their tools and materials as non-real or they would soon have an accident.
But perhaps it is hyper-masculine to dream of dominating these intractable materials to the point where they lose any reality of their own, in order to move on to ‘higher’ things. Women and working men have both been regarded as ‘low’.
Philosophers usually belong to a higher class and are thus in a better position to distance themselves from the material world (through servants, wives etc). From that intellectual eminence it must be easier to mistake people and the Earth as ‘non-real’. So just a thought. Can autism tell us anything about non-realism? Is such non-realism hypermasculine?