Rights, Habits, and Bodies

From the texts of written laws to the rhetoric of the law courts, from the speeches in political assemblies to the lessons in the schools, from the prescriptions of doctors to the spectacular representations of the theatre, ideas, principles, and theories of gender resound everywhere.

But gender is the social construction of something: it is the construction of a certain use of the body. The power of gender norms ultimately derives from that: from a body supposed to work in ways that are allegedly intangible and natural, and, crucially, interconnected. Andreia, courage, depends on thumos, spiritedness, but the actual performance of thumos depends on vital heat: that physical quality which, from its source in the heart,5 travels in the blood that nourishes the flesh, and finally transforms blood into sperm.

The virility of a manly man in bed depends on the abundance of his semen, a frothy fluid full of hot air, pneuma, and the product of the perfect concoction of his blood. Blood can change into semen only thanks to a great deal of vital heat (which female bodies fail to provide).6 The virility of a manly man on the battlefield, in a political meeting or in a law court depends on his ability to get excited, in anger or in nerve, for or against something. This excitement originates, again, from his blood, when it starts to boil and overheat, in the region of his heart.7 Ill-endowed with animal heat - as their failure to produce sperm and the regular overflowing of menstrual blood demonstrate - women will be more liable to the chills of fear, cowardice or, as History of Animals 9 describes, futile contentiousness.

Sexually and politically, manliness irradiates from a man’s heart, seat of his thumos, it flows into his ebullient blood, it waters his dense, warm, strong muscles, and, finally, it animates his bubbly semen. The predominance of heat over cold generates a complete gendered identity, psychosomatic as well as social. Once again, Aristotle’s profile of the young man, compared to the adult and the elderly, offers the most eloquent compendium of such naturalistic views of masculinity. Young men are hot and humid, full of fluids as well as of vital heat: this is why they are erotically passionate, but also courageous and irascible, disinterested and hopeful. Take it as a portrait of, say, Alcibiades. An old man, on the contrary, is still warm, but dry: greedy, uncertain about everything, reluctant to fight, disenchanted. A moody skeptic. A man in his prime will merge the virtues of both (Arist. Rhet. 2.10).

Characters are consistent with bodies. Women are cowardly because they are cold and moist; they are unmanly because they are soft, above all in a material sense. Their flesh is watery, spongy, phlegmatic (they are hugrosarkotera: Hist. an. 4.11);8 they are prone to dysentery and to that physiological hemorrhage which is menstruation.9 In societies in which mild weather and a comfortable environment make men soft (like the women), the natural dimorphism of the sexes tends to fade: all individuals look like each other, and share the same tame, peaceful character (Hippoc. Aer. 10, 19-20). In such a climate, they all become submissive.

A gendered individual, in sum, is a cluster of anatomy, physiology, and behavior. A body, and a set of habits that relate to his character.10 This is what we have to reconcile with the normative voice of exclusions and rights. Even from the most skeptical standpoint, can we reckon that in ancient societies, as in our own cultural circumstances, words and thoughts about sex extended far beyond people’s erotic lives, and prescribed their movements, limited their activity, dictated their dress code, influenced their diet, impregnated their language. Political fitness is only a sample of the multilayered associations of thoughts, mostly organized by binary oppositions (be they made of open or implicit connections), that define womanly and manly characters.

It would be a mistake to isolate the factoids of gendered politics from a larger picture of gendered life, as much as it would be misleading to minimize the ramifications of sex. Those ramifications created a disorder, a noise, that we have to explain, not ignore. Gender affected people’s lives in so many details, I will argue, because arguments about sex in its physical understanding (and its many complicated consequences) created a permanent muddling of the three levels I have mentioned: rights, habits, and bodies. This confusion was constraining for everyone, but for women it was crippling.

Our job is to unravel that confusion. And this for two orders of reasons. The first order of reasons is intellectual. Rights, habits, and bodies: this is a heuristic model because, in the most variously intricate combinations, these three things make up a human life for any individual living in society. They are inseparable. When we try to understand the texture of a culture, we can’t fail to see their intertwining. And only if we take the whole picture, from laws to mores to anatomy, can we make sense ofhow a society thinks - and make people live. For instance: women can’t vote because they are soft. Is softness relevant to politics? Well, this is exactly what we have to recognize: that a given society did establish that knot of relevance.

But if we think that softness should have nothing to do with political fitness, then it means that, for us, we must keep those three loops clearly distinct. We must consider them as well-defined dimensions of a complex fact, for instance gender, and we have to sort out the universal claims of human rights, the local reasons of culture, and the pleasures and pains of singular bodies. Better than a knot, we may think of a system of mental checks and balances. I cannot forget rights when I consider cultural patterns, because those patterns might be exploitative or humiliating; I cannot forget cultural norms when I look at rights, because this might make me insensitive and provincial; I can never forget the body, because this is what ultimately suffers the consequences of discrimination. This is why the second order of reasons for using this heuristic model is ethical.

I am writing this chapter from the standpoint of our sense of equality and emancipation. I think that we should be careful not to conflate human rights, cultural habits, and corporeal experience, as citizens (because that conflation is the matrix of prejudices) but also as scholars (because the same conflation might lead us to underestimate pain, on behalf of culture; or to extol rights with no attention to mores). It is now unsavory, for instance, to claim that women are soft and craven and made for domestic life - but only because we finally think that the right to vote is compatible with, say, breast-feeding; because we know that the ability to manage a household does not prevent a person from being an effective president; because we see that one can make tough decisions and wear pearls, etc. We must not underestimate the intricateness of that knot: we have to understand how it worked.