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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

women, bachelors, penises, marriage, analyticity, common sense

6 replies

9toenails · 07/04/2022 15:46

Can a woman have a penis? Why does this seem like a silly question? -- Perhaps because it is a silly question.

Can a bachelor be a married man? If we know what 'bachelor' means the question cannot arise. And we do know what 'bachelor' means (those of us who speak English sufficiently well, at least). So the question cannot arise. Of course a bachelor cannot be married! No question about it.

( Of course if 'bachelor' were to mean something completely different ... blah blah ... -- Maybe. But 'bachelor' does not mean something completely different. Let us not change the subject.)

Can a woman have a penis? If we know what 'woman' means the question cannot arise. And we do know what 'woman' means (we English speakers). So the question cannot arise. Of course a woman cannot have a penis! No question about it.

( But if 'woman' were to mean something different ... Oh, please! Why do you want to change the subject? Do not be so silly.)

This 'question cannot arise' thing has a name. Statements like 'bachelors are unmarried' and 'women have no penis' are often known as 'analytic' statements ...analytic statements, the story goes, are true simply in virtue of the meanings of their ingredient words.

I forbear offering references or connections. The point I make is not a technical point about analyticity. It is, I think, just common sense that the question of whether a woman can have a penis like the question of whether a bachelor can be a married man is not a real question at all, and that this, simply, is because of what 'woman' or 'bachelor' means or, which is equivalent, what a woman or a bachelor is.

'Common sense' , I say. Can we have a bit more of this, please?

OP posts:
SamphirethePogoingStickerist · 07/04/2022 16:04

Well, you've found the choir 😋

Triotriotrio · 07/04/2022 20:46

Language is very important. Stonewall and the like are attempting (and nearly managed) to change our language. Thank goodness for Lia Williams!! Never thought I'd say that!!! 🤣

Triotriotrio · 07/04/2022 20:47

Lia Thomas!!! Ffs.... 🤣 🤣

JellySaurus · 08/04/2022 05:04

Why can the question not arise? Surely any question can arise, though it may be nonsensical, or only have any validity as a philosophical discussion point. What is the sound of one hand clapping? Can a cat be a dog?

Your point (if I understand it correctly) makes me think of Monty Python. Much of their humour was about taking impossible or nonsensical statements seriously.

As for whether a woman can have a penis: “The only time that her penis should be used in a sentence is when a woman has castrated her rapist and she’s holding it up.” (Julie Bindel)

9toenails · 08/04/2022 10:23

@JellySaurus

Why can the question not arise? Surely any question can arise, though it may be nonsensical, or only have any validity as a philosophical discussion point. What is the sound of one hand clapping? Can a cat be a dog?

Your point (if I understand it correctly) makes me think of Monty Python. Much of their humour was about taking impossible or nonsensical statements seriously.

As for whether a woman can have a penis: “The only time that her penis should be used in a sentence is when a woman has castrated her rapist and she’s holding it up.” (Julie Bindel)

[ tldr : a-woman-with-a-penis : some philosophical chuntering about why common sense rules OK! Interesting at best only to a few.]

Why can the question not arise? Interesting (only to some, I know).

Of course people disagree. Philosophers like to disagree. Here is one account. (With apologies to students of early Wittgenstein.)

Some questions just make perfect sense. Does the sun go around the earth or vice versa? Is there a southern continent? What is the shape of the DNA molecule, and why? What is the mass of the W boson? Which horse will win the Grand National? What is the gravitational constant? ...

Other questions make no sense, even though there might be a point in asking (/seeming to ask/trying to ask ...) them. What is the sound of one hand clapping? (Asked (or, perhaps 'Asked') to jolt one out of overly-rational thought processes, perhaps, something like that.) Why do colourless green ideas sleep furiously? (Asked ('Asked'?) to make a point about the distinction between syntax and semantics in theoretical linguistics.) Why did the chicken cross the road? (Jokes; Monty Python is to the point, as you say.) ...

OK, now, one characteristic of the first set of questions ( questions with sense ) is that each of them has answers that can be either true or false. There is a getting-it-right and a getting-it-wrong about the answers. (We might expand this thought into talk of possible verifiability or, more popularly these days, falsifiability, as a criterion for a question (and answer) being properly scientific or something like that. But let us not just now.)

The second kind of question ('question'? - I will stop doing this now) does not have true/false answers: they do not have answers at all. (Yes, I know why the chicken crossed the road ... but, well, true/false does not really fit, ... oh, and so on if you like.) These are questions without sense.

OK, so we have questions with two possible (kinds of) answer, true or false; and we have questions with no answer at all. Some questions, now, come right on the dividing line, as it were, between these questions-with-sense and questions-without-sense .

Can a bachelor be an married man? This has an answer, in a way, but it is not an answer that can be true or false. The answer is no, but this answer cannot be false. This question is, we might say, located right on the boundary of sense because to answer yes makes no sense given the meaning of 'bachelor'.

Why might this be important? Here is one reason. The first kind of questions are about the world: if we get the right answer to them, we increase our knowledge about the world. (The thing about falsifiability and science I left dangling above fits here if you like ...) They are 'ampliative', as Immanuel Kant called them; the answers increase or amplify our knowledge about the world. The second set of questions have no real answers, so cannot help us increase our knowledge of the world.

And our on-the-edge-of-sense -questions, these questions with answers whose falsity makes no sense? In a way they are like the first kind of question, in that they do seem to have an answer. However, when we look closely, we see that they share the characteristic of the second, nonsensical kind of question that their answers are non-ampliative: they tell us nothing about the world.

Can a bachelor be a married man? No scientific experiment is needed to answer this: no statistical survey required ... just learn English, including the meaning of 'bachelor'. Once you know English, the question cannot arise.

Analytically true statements, like 'a bachelor is not a married man', although in a way true (there is no sense in which they are false), are not facts about the world.

And, well, 'a woman does not have a penis' is analytically true in the same way. It cannot be false (it makes no sense to say, of a woman, that she has a penis, given what 'woman' means). But it is not a fact about the world in the way 'the gravitational constant is 6.674×10(−11) m3/kg' is. It is a fact, if at all, about what 'woman' means, or equivalently (as I keep saying, but which bears repeating) about what a woman is.

How important is all this? Not very. Not much at all. It may be worthwhile seeing a sense in which nonsense about women with a penis is not really biological or sociological nonsense; it is just plain nonsense. And it may be worthwhile in adding some support, perhaps from an unlikely direction, to the obvious common sense (and complete ) response,

  <strong>'A woman with a penis?!' -- You what? Don't talk nonsense.</strong>
OP posts:
QuinkWashable · 08/04/2022 16:45

As for whether a woman can have a penis: “The only time that her penis should be used in a sentence is when a woman has castrated her rapist and she’s holding it up.” (Julie Bindel)

Ponders... I always thought castration was the testicles, not the penis...

I've grown two penises, and they were even sharing my blood supply until removed/ejected - of course the only reason I could do that was that I was a woman, and we don't have penises of our own, we just grow them for others.

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