[btipling]

This "essentialism" applies to gender as well. Not just gender but sexual orientation and even biological sex which some sociologists and anthropologists distinguish as different from gender. These are not binary, but actually gradients. We like to classify people as either male or female, and have that mapped perfectly to the biological sex they were born with, and likewise mapped to their sexual orientation, but it hides a subtler reality.

This goes with sexual orientation as well. We want to map people into straight or gay, but that is also a gradient where, like gender, people fall in in various parts of the gradient.

When I brought this up with a friend, we were talking about the new women.com yc startup and how they only accepted "women", he responded with that there are two distinct peaks in this gradient, like if you mapped this as a graph. I think you can actually blame these peaks not in small part on the immense social pressure to conform to either being male or female (which bathroom do you go into?), or even being straight or gay. It doesn't have to be that way, and there are ways other cultures solved this problem, like some Native American groups actually had a third gender[1].

I find the concept of "essentialism" interesting and intuitive to think about, including its flaws, which as Dawkins points out can be quite destructive.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender

[jiggy2011]

I don't know, if this were the case you would expect more sexual experimentation than you see. A majority of straight men never have sex with other men or watch gay porn, just as a majority of gay men have no interest in sex with a woman. Anything in between we call "bisexual" which is an imprecise definition.

For this to be true you would need to believe that most straight men have repressed homosexual desires and most gay men have repressed heterosexual desires.

[btipling]

It would still be a gradient even if the distribution of where people fit into it isn't even. The way my sociologist professor explained it in school was that the gradient is for "attraction" and like some appreciate the attractive qualities of one gender while not actually having any desires attached to that appreciation.

[jiggy2011]

But doesn't that commit the same fallacy of trying to fit your data to a specific model such as a "gradient" view rather than a binary view, when in fact it fits neither , both of these views are "essentialist" in that sense. Besides there's certainly a different between an aesthetic appreciation and a sexual desire, someone might have an aesthetic appreciation for a car or mobile phone for example.

[btipling]

Sure, you could think of it as one gradient (gender) mapped to another (sexual orientation). The whole desire of us to classify these things into neat little labels falls apart though when you look at research and ethnographies of different cultures that did things differently.

[smsm42]

Most societies I am aware of still have males and females. There are various exceptions - e.g. various groups that perceived to be "outside" of the binary structure - but these would be still defined groups and there still would be labels. Could you give examples - more than one - of cultures that really perceived gender as a gradient?

For sexuality it is more complex since not all cultures have western fixation on sexuality and thus the question of who rubs which part of their body on which part of whose other body may not be as prominent as in our culture. I.e. they may have a concept of "gay" but it would be as big part of one's identity as "coffee drinker" or "likes to wear jeans" is in ours.

[jiggy2011]

But does a gradient really provide a clear picture if ~90% of your data points stick to one side or the other? To me this seems to be just as clumsy as a gay straight/gay/bi classification system. Either way risks warping your thinking as described in the article.

[btipling]

We are talking about people. So I think this kind of research and distinction makes for a powerful reminder of why tolerance for diversity is so important. Were those young people who do not happen to fit so nicely into these categories encouraged to be themselves rather than conform with 90% of the other data points, maybe they could live happier, stress free lives.

[adventured]

Or your sociologist professor is wrong, and the majority of the human population only orients to one sexual attraction or the other in binary, which makes a lot more sense from an evolutionary point of view.

[btipling]

The sociologist professor was discussing research. Though she agrees with the idea, it wasn't a claim made by her, it was a discussion.

[nextw33k]

What you are describing is the Kinsey scale:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinsey_scale

[ricardobeat]

All evidence points to that being the case, until a hundred institutions started putting constraints on 'morals' and behaviour.

[smsm42]

I wonder from where do we have so much evidence about what happened before "hundred institutions" existed. Cultural institutions predate writing and probably predate oral history, in fact many animals have some kind of social institutions. So if there was an "ideal man", uncorrupted by "institutions" (Dawkins would, I suppose, dislike that idea very much), certainly we have very little evidence about how that man could behave. But I think such man never existed - social institutions are part of what humans are, and always have been. That could be different - as many other aspects of humanity are varied and diverse - but they always exist.

[ricardobeat]

I'm not in the mood for googling, so forgive my lack of sources, but by institutions I mean the catholic church, islam and others. We have plenty of documentation showing homosexuality to be common in ancient Rome and Egypt, and it is said that a word describing homosexual acts didn't even exist until the 19th century.