Alphabets, goddesses, faulty logic & essentialism

The root of patriarchy is in reading, suggests Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The conflict between word and image. Shlain, a brain surgeon, posits that alphabetic literacy fundamentally rewires the brain. This form of learning privileges the brain’s left hemisphere – center of linear, abstract thinking which Shlain codes “masculine” – over the holistic, image-based, and “feminine” right hemisphere. As a result, cultures new to literacy begin subjugating women.

An enticing premise for a more complicated argument. Unfortunately, Shlain seems to assume that writing a book for popular consumption means ironing out nuance and contradiction – even as he paints his theory in broad strokes across human history in its entirety.

Full disclosure: I get very easily annoyed with biological and evolutionary explanations of gender and sexuality. I think they are often reductive, culturally biased, and tangled in circular reasoning. For example, Shlain’s coding of the right and left hemispheres. He acknowledges that, of course, both men and women draw on both sides – he uses “masculine” and “feminine” in the symbolic sense. But where do these signifiers come from?

The beginning of culture is a blindspot where many arguments try to reach and fail. Shlain’s is no exception. For the origin of definitions for “masculine”/“feminine,” he relies on evolution – which means his book begins with imagined scenes of cavemen and -women scrounging for berries and hunting saber-toothed critters. To survive, early ancestors had to prize the image, holistically incorporating everything going on in their fields of vision (although perhaps sound and oral communication were just as important?).

How then does image-based thinking get relegated to the feminine sphere in terms of culture, and then devalued? And who is responsible? Shlain ascribes the blame to literacy, but leaves muddled the details of this transition from goddess-worshippers to wife-oppressors. Many second-wave feminists also imagined matriarchal societies and pastorals of sisterhood – they also had little evidence for how ubiquitous these pasts supposedly were. In each new, cursory, and varied example, Shlain applies his original neurological, which never becomes more complicated even as he wades through often-conflicting information.

The problem with the words “masculine” and “feminine” is that they can mean anything, because they have meant everything. It depends on where you stand in time, which way you point your face. Shlain’s main argument relegates logic, breaking down information into smaller pieces, to the masculine. But the cultures he uses as examples, from the Greeks to the Mesopotamians to medieval Europe, attached their own values to the sacrosanct male sphere. How can just one reason, literacy, be enough to explain the different forms of oppression toward different women?

My critique is not new. I have to assume that Shlain has heard of post-structuralism – after all, he repeatedly claims that he knows history is more complicated, he just doesn’t have time to explain it all.

His treatment of homosexuality is particularly evocative of this reeeeeally annoying discursive tendency: applying essentialist signifiers to pretty much everything and ironing out contradictions. Interestingly, in the “Sappho/Ganymede” chapter, he tacitly collapses male-male sexual relations with misogyny. And he runs into another blindspot: Where does homosexuality come from?

Discussing homosexuality among Greek men, he writes, “Although the causes of homosexuality remain unknown, increasingly modern scientists consider sexual preferences to be based on genetic predispositions. Whatever are its causes, it is most unusual that the Greeks went against the evolutionary grain – especially when their predilection would have such debilitating consequences for their continuity” (133).

I’m sorry, this is just … so stupid. Shlain writes as if the ancient world was just a giant playscape of homolove and rainbows, as if “gay” relationships looked the same as modern same-sex couples, as if “gay” even existed as a concept of identity.

FYI, these male-male couples were typically composed of an older, more powerful man and a youth. And Shlain thankfully recognizes, at least, that these men still married and sired children (so, no actual threat “for their continuity”) – but these proto-queers’ wives “had to live with the unsettling knowledge that they were not their husband’s only choice. A woman knows in her bones how to compete with another woman for a man’s affection, but she will become demoralized if she must also compete with men” (134). Is this supposed to be a girl power moment?

These passages exemplify how so many people collapse gender and sexual object choice. Let’s think of some complicating factors. The younger, less powerful partner in Greek male love was often praised for his beauty. Love poems to the youth sound like more modern poems to women. What happens to the word “feminine” when what we think of as feminine – softness, beauty, grace – are applied to a male figure? Why were these values prized while Greek wives were still locked away, leading quiet lives at their looms?

One thing is certain: Women have faced subjugation, scorn and shame over millennia, over cultures, in many different ways. But the differences are important. Failure to recognize them have long divided feminists – arguments over use of “we,” over the white, Western slant to what patriarchy looks like and what feminism should look like.

It’s fascinating how words change us. But words themselves change. When we ask questions of femininity/masculinity, the answers are often unsatisfying, revealing more and more contradictions. This suggests constrained thinking – not just on Shlain’s part, but also the poverty of our terms about gender and sexuality. “Masculine” and “feminine” sag with the weight of signifiers. A sharper interrogation, in paring away their layers of meaning, finds an absence of any singular truth.