Gender is Not Binary

he gender binary is the artificial division of the world into things that are "masculine" or "for men" and things that are "feminine" or "for women". One of the starkest ways to think of this is to consider the phrase "opposite sexes/genders" (as opposed to "different sexes/genders"), when both men and women are human beings with fundamentally many more commonalities than differences. The division is artificial in several ways: much of it is very clearly socially constructed. For example,...

 Social Rules that Provide for Fathers

In all human cultures there is some sort of father in the typical family, either the biological father or a male maternal relative, who acts in ways that all societies would agree are paternal.^ ^ Anthropologists suggest that biological fathers in particidar have an important parenting role in societies where family life is strong, women contribute to subsistence, the family is an integrated unit of parents and offspring working for the same goal, and men are not preoccupied with being warrio...

 Ways to Understand Male Sexuality

There are five ways to find out. One is to study modern people directly and describe what they do as the human mating system The answer is usually monogamous marriage. A second way is to look at human history and divine from our past what sexual arrangements are typical of our species. But history teaches a dismal lesson: A common arrangement from our past was that rich and powerful men enslaved concubines in large harems. A third way is to look at people living in simple societies with Ston...