Dear Editor,
In Roy Wilkes' reply to Andy Kilmister's letter (SO 13), there is a sentence which raises doubts as to Wilkes' interpretation either of dialectics or of nature. Wilkes states that throughout nature, the driving force for all change is a unity and struggle of opposites, which he characterises as 'positive and negative; matter ands [sic] antimatter; wave and particle; male and female'.
Male and female are not opposites, any more than are blue and brown-eyed people. Sexual division, as in man/woman, only exists because of the gender division, a social construct which informs sexual division. There is no difference between men and women...anymore than there is between black and white skinned people, except of course, that there is: the difference is one of power, of dominance, of exploitation.
None of these differences are natural, although scientists, among others, have sometimes claimed they are. When Wilkes' pairs are aligned: positive, matter, wave (movement), male on the one hand; and negative, antimatter, particle (stasis), female, there is an added twist, because the linking looks like bias.
Comradely greetings,
Rene Gimpel, 26 September 2007
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Roy Wilkes replies:
I wasn't referring to the sexual division of labour in human society but to the existence of male and female in sexual reproduction, in both plant and animal life. But to avoid the connotations of bias which Rene Gimpel quite correctly draws to our attention I will in future refer not to 'male and female' but to 'female and male'.