Sex and Gender: Male and Female Advantage/Liberation

Wilber's View

This section is the closest the book comes to explaining its own title, and Wilber frames it as a truce between competing feminisms. Liberal feminism holds that men and women are fundamentally equivalent in capacity; radical feminism holds that they represent genuinely different value spheres — the male sphere agentic and autonomy-oriented, the female sphere communal and nurturance-oriented. Wilber's move is to relocate this disagreement onto his own architecture: what if radical feminists are right about the biospheric component of sexual difference (physical strength and mobility on one hand, gestation and lactation on the other — brute biological "constants" he traces back to hominid hunting-band divisions of labor), while liberal feminists are right about the noospheric component (once mind differentiates from body, sex-linked roles are no longer biologically compelled, and equality before the law becomes both possible and correct)? On his account these biological constants started out as a fairly neutral differentiation of function — his worked example is the shift from hoe-based horticulture (largely female labor) to plow-based agriculture (which favored male strength and triggered a wholesale shift from Great-Mother to Great-Father deity figures) — that historically hardened into dissociation and status inequality, exactly the differentiation/dissociation pattern he applies everywhere else in the book.

The genuinely careful part of this argument is the refusal to treat "biology" and "oppression" as opposites: Wilber insists a difference of function only became a difference of status through historical developments, not biological necessity, which lets him affirm real average sex differences without licensing the conclusion that any resulting inequality was natural or justified. What he explicitly defers, though, is the actual reckoning: this chapter promises that a fuller review of the status of men and women at each historical stage, and detailed engagement with liberal, radical, and social feminist scholarship, will come in the announced but (at the time of this book's writing) unpublished second volume of the series — so what's presented here is the scaffolding for an argument about gender, not the argument's payoff.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

At this early point, this differentiation or asymmetry does not appear to have been strongly evaluative—that is, one sphere was not particularly more important or more valued than the other. It appears to have been mostly a simple differentiation of function, not a massive differentiation of status.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5, "The Emergence of Human Nature" (section "Male Advantage and Female Advantage")

My claim is that the structures of human consciousness that I will be presenting in the rest of this volume are in fact gender neutral, that there is no fundamental gender bias in the deep structures themselves. However, in the course of historical development, these gender-neutral structures… became loaded with various factors… that biased some of these structures in an often specifically subjugating and certainly polarizing (or dissociating) fashion.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5, "The Emergence of Human Nature" (section "Male Advantage and Female Advantage")

…one of the conclusions of volume 2 is that where women work the fields with a hoe, God is a Woman; where men work the fields with a plow, God is a Man.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5, "The Emergence of Human Nature" (section "Male Advantage and Female Advantage")

That initial differentiation of function, however, could be (and in many cases was) parlayed into a difference in status, with males dominating the public/productive sphere and women relegated to the private/reproductive sphere.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5, "The Emergence of Human Nature" (section "Male Advantage and Female Advantage")

But what if the radical feminists are right when it comes to the biospheric component of human beings, and the liberal feminists are right when it comes to the noospheric component? If this integration could be effected in a genuine fashion… we could simultaneously honor some of the important differences in sexual being—so emphasized by the radical feminists—and yet also insist on, and maintain, equality before the law.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5, "The Emergence of Human Nature" (section "Male and Female Liberation")

The point now is that, with the differentiation of the noosphere and the biosphere, the roles of men and women were no longer necessarily or automatically determined (or largely influenced) by biological factors (such as physical strength/mobility and birthing/nursing), factors that, one way or another, had largely dominated not only the relation of men to women but also of men to men, up to that point in history.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5, "The Emergence of Human Nature" (section "Male and Female Liberation")

See Also

• The Dignity and Disaster of Modernity — the noosphere/biosphere differentiation this section credits with making sex-role equality even conceivable
• repression — the same differentiation/dissociation vocabulary applied to the individual psyche rather than to gender roles
• waves-and-streams — gender, on this account, is a factor loaded onto gender-neutral waves rather than a wave itself
• Jürgen Habermas — the source of the hominid hunting-band/family argument Wilber builds the "male advantage/female advantage" account on