VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality

5. Half the UniVerse: A Woman's 2020 Wisdome

Griessel, Loura and Martina Kotze. The Feminine and the Masculine in the Development of the Self in Women – A Post-Jungian Perspective. Women’s Studies. 32/2, 2009. In an extensive essay on Carl Jung’s egalitarian view of women’s individuation, University of the Free State, South Africa, psychologists tour the various dynamic and static gender states of anima and animus, along with their fraught, sequential life course toward wholeness. Whence, might we realize the archetypal cosmic complementarity as incarnate and exemplified in ourselves?

Jung recognizes that the Feminine aspects of the psyche such as nurturance, interrelatedness, immersion in life, and empathy are not inferior to the Masculine elements as autonomy, separateness, and aggressiveness. Rather, the Feminine and the Masculine constitute two halves of a whole, each belonging to every individual. (183)

Grosz, Elizabeth. The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. The Duke University professor of gender, sexuality, feminist, and literature studies is a leading remediative scholar for these vital fields and beyond if we might peaceably survive and abide. Although often aligned with postmodernism, this latest volume over 25 years joins several themes and voices to foster an immaterial essence of life, love and individuation. In regard, she cites guidance from the French philosophers Luce Irigaray (1930- ) for an advocacy of real gender differences, and Gillis Deleuze (1925-1995) for a metaphysical, vitalizing immanence. As a result, the text alludes to a deeply meaningful milieu, if we could just allow, distill, and appreciate.

The book chapters cover precursors from the Stoics, Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) to Deleuze, Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) and Raymond Ruyer (1902-1987), as they each sense an ineffable movement. For Simondon it is the “preindividual,” while Ruyer views an “embryogenesis of the world.” Henri Bergson (1859-1941) would have been included, she notes, whom informed these French scholars, but earlier writings (2011) presented his vision of an elan vital, fertile matter and life’s becomings. While a natural materialism is held to, Grosz makes a distinction and synthesis that it is actually graced by a creative idealist source. To wit, in a February online interview by Kathryn Yusoff in Theory, Culture & Society she offered her lifetime project as a “feminist vision of cosmological proportions.”

I propose here neither a new form of dualism nor a new reductive version of monism in advocating for a materialism that understands its reliance on ideality or an idealism that is committed to the material organization and conditions for ideality. I do not want to privilege ideality over materiality, but to think them together, as fundamentally connected and incapable of each being what it is without the other to direct and support it. Ideality frames, directs, and makes meaning from materiality; materiality carries ideality and is never free of the incorporeal forms that constitute and orient it as material. (12)

With ideality comes the possibility of collective social life, a kind of magical or religious thinking that seeks the orders of connection that regulate the universe itself and the elaboration of increasingly more complex prostheses or technologies that extend and transform materiality exponentially. Without ideality, a plan, a map, a model, an ideal, a direction, or a theme, materiality could not materialize itself. (12)

Guimond, Serge, et al. Culture, Gender, and the Self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 92/6, 2007. Surely the personalities, values, and emotions of women and men vary across different societies. Surprisingly they are more dichotomous in Western cultures, in part because of social comparison stereotypes. But the archetypes of individual agency for men, and relational communion for women remain the standard complements.

Gur, Ruben and Raquel Gur. Complementarity of Sex Differences in Brain and Behavior. Journal of Neuroscience Research. 95/1-2, 2017. As the quotes convey, the University of Pennsylvania behavioral neuro psychologist and psychiatrist write a succinct summary of their lifetime studies in this regard. Visit their websites for hundreds of papers over forty years of dedication. As a result, based on the latest neuroimaging abilities a true masculine – feminine mutual reciprocity can be confirmed.

Sex differences were apparent and consistent in neurocognitive measures, with females performing better on memory and social cognition tasks and males on spatial processing and motor speed. Sex differences were also prominent in all major brain parameters, including higher rates of cerebral blood flow, higher percentage of gray matter tissue, and higher interhemispheric connectivity in females, compared with higher percentage of white matter and greater intrahemispheric connectivity as well as higher glucose metabolism in limbic regions in males. Many of these differences are present in childhood, but they become more prominent with adolescence, perhaps linked to puberty. Overall, they indicate
complementarity between the sexes that would result in greater adaptive diversity. (Abstract)

In summary, behavioral measures linked to brain function indicate significant sex differences in performance that emerge early in development with domain variability that relates to brain maturation. Notably, our findings are in line with a robust literature documenting sex difference in laterality and behavior. These findings support the notion that males and females have complementary neurocognitive abilities, with females being more generalists and outperforming males in memory and social cognition tasks and males being more specialists and performing better than females on spatial and motor tasks. (191)

The studies highlighted in this Review represent more than 3 decades of research examining sex differences in healthy people on parameters of behavior and brain structure and function. These results are consistent and converge to indicate that, against a general background of similarity in behavioral and brain measures, there are distinct differences in major parameters that produce a complementarity between the sexes. These studies have indicated that, structurally, male brains are optimized to process information within hemispheres, whereas in females the predominant connections are interhemispheric. (197)

Hales, Dianne. Just Like a Woman. New York: Bantam Books, 1999. A call for an overdue change in status and appreciation of women from a “second sex” to a “separate sex.” As a basis, Hales contends that the male brain has been attuned by evolution to a more narrow, hunting focus while females employ a wider survey so as to keep track of offspring and resources.

Hawley, Jenny, ed. Why Women Will Save the Planet. London: Zed Books, 2015. As a synopsis, only feminine empathic, relational, peaceful Earth communities for the sake of children can abide and sustain. As our home page quote by Yoko Ono evokes, only a Sophia sapiens life-affirming wisdom can mitigate and turn from the orgies of male tribal and national violence now engulfing us.

This provocative collection gathers essays and interviews from the leading lights of the international environmental and feminist movements to mount a powerful case that gender equality is essential to environmental progress. Up to now, women’s issues have been largely ignored by major environmental and conservation groups, but contributors like Vandana Shiva, Caroline Lucas, and Maria Mies help us see the undeniable links between the two. Using specific case studies, the contributors lay out the ways in which women’s issues intersect with environmental issues, and they detail concrete steps that organizations and campaigners big and small can take to ensure that they are pursuing these goals in tandem. A rallying cry designed to unify—and thus strengthen—two crucial movements in the global fight for social justice, this book will spur action and, crucially, collaboration.

Heilbrun, Carolyn. Toward a Recognition of Androgyny. New York: Harper Colophon, 1973. From three decades ago, a renowned work that defined the aberrant male dominance of our times, which is even more so today. The resolution Heilbrun offers is not to shift to a polar feminine emphasis but to a traditional, mythic integral balance.

Indeed, one might sensibly argue that the patriarchy, whether or not it supplanted a matriarchy, was necessary to human development and has brought many blessings. Yet I believe that it has also brought many curses to our almost dying earth. What is important now is that we free ourselves from the prison of gender and, before it is too late (1973), deliver the world from the almost exclusive control of the masculine impulse. (xiv)

Hill, Gareth. Masculine and Feminine. Boston: Shambhala, 1992. A Jungian psychologist describes the journey of selfhood as it winds and passes through static and dynamic stages of male animus and female anima towards potential salutary union. This is recapitulated in psychohistory by its sequence from a matrivalent to partivalent consciousness, which has yet to be resolved.

Hipolito, Ines, et al. Enactive Artificial Intelligence: Subverting Gender Norms in Robot-Human Interaction. arXiv.2301.08741.. As a multifaceted AI machine learning takes hold, for better or worse, Humboldt University, Uppsala University and Norwegian University of Science and Technology cultural scholars seek to identify and correct at this early point a default tendency to devalue, subvert women so to empower it with vital feminine qualities

As a multifaceted AI machine learning takes hold, for better or worse, Humboldt University, Uppsala University and Norwegian University of Science and Technology cultural scholars seek to identify and correct at this early point a default tendency to devalue, subvert women and ignore feminine qualities.

Hofstede, Geert, ed. Masculinity and Feminity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998. The Dutch sociologist here shows how national societies can be quantified based on gender archetypes. The United States, e.g., is very masculine in kind while Denmark is more feminine. While men value material acquisition, personal relationships are important to women. The tacit implication is that if these polar qualities of individual assertion or integral nurturance could be admitted and properly understood, a better world guided by their beneficial reciprocity would result.

Ingalhalikar, Madhura, et al. Sex Differences in the Structural Connectome of the Human Brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 111/823, 2014. After years of disparate study upon this subject, a nine member team of University of Pennsylvania Medicine School and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia researchers, aided by the latest neuroimage abilities, can say that a definitive result has been achieved. As the quotes convey, distinct complementary qualities do distinguish male and female cerebral hemispheres, which indeed quantitatively confirm perennial archetypes and theories. While men have more intra-hemisphere connectivity for fine detail perception and fast motor response, women have enhanced inter-hemisphere communication which avails an integral synthesis of dot, relation and contextual field. A commentary by neuroscientist Larry Cahill in the same issue lauds the project as a sophisticated affirmation of an actual gender complementarity, See also a later note Yes, There is a Female and Male Brain by Marek Glezerman in this journal (113/E1971, 2016) that supports these findings.

Sex differences in human behavior show adaptive complementarity: Males have better motor and spatial abilities, whereas females have superior memory and social cognition skills. In this work, we modeled the structural connectome using diffusion tensor imaging in a sample of 949 youths (aged 8–22 y, 428 males and 521 females) and discovered unique sex differences in brain connectivity during the course of development. Connection-wise statistical analysis, as well as analysis of regional and global network measures, presented a comprehensive description of network characteristics. In all supratentorial regions, males had greater within-hemispheric connectivity, as well as enhanced modularity and transitivity, whereas between-hemispheric connectivity and cross-module participation predominated in females. However, this effect was reversed in the cerebellar connections. Analysis of these changes developmentally demonstrated differences in trajectory between males and females mainly in adolescence and in adulthood. Overall, the results suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes. (Abstract)

Sex differences are of high scientific and societal interest because of their prominence in behavior of humans and nonhuman species. This work is highly significant because it studies a very large population using the diffusion-based structural connectome of the brain, identifying novel sex differences. The results establish that male brains are optimized for intrahemispheric and female brains for interhemispheric communication. The developmental trajectories of males and females separate at a young age, demonstrating wide differences during adolescence and adulthood. The observations suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes. (Significance)

Taken together, these results reveal fundamental sex differences in the structural architecture of the human brain. Male brains during development are structured to facilitate within-lobe and within-hemisphere connectivity, with networks that are transitive, modular, and discrete, whereas female brains have greater interhemispheric connectivity and greater cross-hemispheric participation. Within-hemispheric cortical processing along the posterior-anterior dimension involves the linking of perception to action, and motor action is mediated ipsilaterally by the cerebellum. Greater within-hemispheric supratentorial connectivity combined with greater cross-hemispheric cerebellar connectivity would confer an efficient system for coordinated action in males. Greater interhemispheric connectivity in females would facilitate integration of the analytical and sequential reasoning modes of the left hemisphere with the spatial, intuitive processing of information of the right hemisphere. A behavioral study on the entire sample, of which this imaging study is a subset, demonstrated pronounced sex differences, with the females outperforming males on attention, word and face memory, and social cognition tests and males performing better on spatial processing and motor and sensorimotor speed. (826)

Johnson, Elizabeth. Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints. New York: Continuum, 2003. The Fordham University theologian argues in part that the dualistic reign of men as superior to women need be replaced by an egalitarian anthropology which respects relationships and nurture but is wary defining roles and polarities.

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