Not to be "he' or "she"

Gender identification, the social construction of masculinity and femininity. In traditional societies, your gender would shape your work role in life and was not limited to male and female only, but included, and still includes, hijra (South Asia), khanith (Oman), fa'afafine (Polynesia), and kathoey (Thailand), to name just a few of the hundreds of gender categories found worldwide. In Nepal, Pakistan and India, hijras are a recognized third gender. Thailand is considering doing the same for kathoey. In the West, your role in society is less tied to your gender identification, which allows to people to use hundreds of creative expressions to identify their gender role and sexual orientation. Or to not identify (see below). Even the toy retailer, Toys "R" Us, has gone gender neutral online, doing away with categories labeled 'boys' and 'girls.'

BBC News has an interesting article looking into the linguistic challenges to gender and sexual non-identification. The full article is pasted below or you can read the original by clicking Beyond 'he' and 'she': The rise of non-binary pronouns.

Women's Work, Wives for Water

In India, a man marries a third wife to supply house with water during the drought. Patriarchy and social roles bounded by sex undermine gender equality worldwide. Visit the web site at " Drought-hit Indian village looks to 'water wives' to quench thirst."

Drought-hit Indian village looks to 'water wives' to quench thirst

Source: Reuters - Thu, 4 Jun 2015 10:00 GMT

Author: Reuters

By Danish Siddiqui
DENGANMAL, India, June 4 (Reuters) - In the parched village of Denganmal, in western India, there are no taps. The only drinking water comes from two wells at the foot of a nearby rocky hill, a spot so crowded that the sweltering walk and wait can take hours.
For Sakharam Bhagat, as for many others in the hamlet some 140 km (85 miles) from Mumbai, the answer was a 'water wife'.

Bhagat, 66, now has three wives, two of whom he married solely to ensure that his household has water to drink and cook.  "I had to have someone to bring us water, and marrying again was the only option," said Bhagat, who works as a day labourer on a farm in a nearby village.
"My first wife was busy with the kids. When my second wife fell sick and was unable to fetch water, I married a third."

Bhagat and his family are suffering the consequences of a critical shortage of safe drinking water in India's villages, as well as the fallout from the most severe drought that his state, Maharashtra, has faced in a decade. In Maharashtra, India's third-largest state, the government estimated last year that more than 19,000 villages had no access to water. And India is again facing the threat of a drought this year, with monsoon rains expected to be weaker than average.

In Denganmal, a cluster of about 100 thatched houses set on an expanse of barren land, most men work as farm labourers, barely earning the minimum wage. Marrying for water has been the norm here for many years, villagers said. Bhagat's wives all live in the same house with him but have separate rooms and kitchens. Two of them are entrusted with fetching water, while the third manages the cooking.

Polygamy is illegal in India, but, in this village, "water wives" are common. "It is not easy to have a big family when there is no water," Namdeo, another villager who has two wives, said. Bhagat says the women, some of them widows or abandoned, are also happy with the arrangement. "We are like sisters. We help each other. Sometimes we might have problems, but we solve them among ourselves," his first wife, Tuki, said.

(Writing by Shilpa Jamkhandikar; Editing by Clara Ferreira Marques)

Gender Roles, Meet Urban Planning

In the Atlantic Monthly, in a section called, Atlantic Cities section, "Place Matters," Clare Foran explores how urban planners in Vienna, Austria, take into account how men and women use public space differently.  This program began in 1999. City administrators used questionnaires to solicit information on the daily habits of their citizens. They found that "The majority of men reported using either a car or public transit twice a day -- to go to work in the morning and come home at night. Women, on the other hand, used the city’s network of sidewalks, bus routes, subway lines and streetcars more frequently and for a myriad reasons." More probing allowed designers to create an environment that made daily activities convenient for all people, regardless of age and ability. Despite the success of the project, city administrator Ursula Bauer still finds that "Gender can be an emotional issue . . . When you tell people that up until now they haven’t taken the women’s perspective into account they feel attacked. We still have people asking, ‘Is this really necessary?'"

The article is so well done I encourage you to scroll down and read. I would also ask you to consider how the gender division of labor (both at work and at home) and cultural norms regarding male and female safety influence the "social construction of space," and not just in Vienna. That is, how the use of space is shaped by how we live. I think what Vienna is doing is ingenious, humane, feminist. It's just downright smart. 

Gender and the Company We Keep

A recent study cited in the New York Times showed that testosterone in human males dropped after fatherhood. Further, the study noted that the hormone dip accelerated the more time men spent in child-rearing activities. The New York Times editorial mulled over implications of manhood and masculinity as currently debated in these changing times here in America, where more mothers are working and more dads are delving into the diaper-changing, car-pooling, bath-time, bed-time arenas once reserved for stay-at-home moms. But let's take a broader view.

Research conducted by Anna Meigs in the 1970s among the Hua of Papua New Guinea suggest a characterization of masculinity and femininity that mirrors this study of fathers and their changing testosterone levels. I will summarize here, but the whole concept made me think that the Hua, who numbered between 100 and 300 people at the time of the study, were light years ahead of our rigid Western ideas of gender and sex.

The Hua believe that all humans possess a real life-giving force called nu that can be transferred person-to-person. Nu helps people age and mature. As females have lots of nu they are moist and grow fast while males have smaller amounts and are dry and need assistance to grow-up. So one's masculinity and feminity is characterized both by genitalia and by one's amount of nu.

One can get nu from someone's breath, women's bodily secretions, eating particular foods that are high in nu qualities and generally by being married to or hanging around women. Those with little nu include boys getting ready for puberty ceremonies who avoid women and nu rich foods to make themselves dry, hard and fierce. People with high amounts of nu include children of both sexes (because they spend so much time with their mothers), married women with children and - here we hark back to the aforementioned study - old married men! With a lifetime spent having intercourse with women (who are considered polluting) and eating nu rich foods, middle aged and older men become more 'like women.' Conversely, post-menopausal women have lost nu by having children, through menstruation and by handling and preparing food - they are more 'like men,' entitled to live in the men's house. They are no longer a threat.

In thinking of the Hua, I would like to know if pre-menopausal women who spend no time with children, little time with women and more time with men (such as women in corporate or managerial positions with high ratios of men to women) have lower levels of estrogen and progesterone and higher levels of testosterone? I think about women in their thirties and forties who marry then quit their jobs or work part-time in order to start families and then find it difficult to get pregnant. After years of trying, sometimes infertile couples choose to adopt. Once they become mothers, some women then find it possible to have a biological child. Does having a child/hanging around children and other women by participating in play groups, PTO, etc., influence estrogen and progesterone levels? After all, women who cohabit find that their menstrual cycles get somewhat synchronized - maybe hanging around men does the reverse?

I think the Hua are on to something with their concept of nu, just not yet sure how it applies.