Stereotypes and imperfect knowledge

Thinking again about the question of gender difference, I keep being driven back into stereotypes drawn from salient experience. Quantity and intensity both matter to the codified memory that is predicted onto people of particular types. Predictive-memory (as per Jeff Hawkins) means the world we perceive is continually being primed for recognition as things we're familiar with it. If I meet a person I haven't met before, I* am able to divine an incredible amount about them ('brief glimpses' research) because we are all trading in types all the time. We don't just fall into types, we clothe ourselves in them.

So stereotypes are not simply self-protective defences of the authoritarian mind; they are massively information-rich guides to convention and behaviour. That's not the safe, independent thing it sounds like though - you are your world existingly, and if this is your map of the world, its also you. When it seems inaccurate, your very self becomes and feels unstable. You are plunged into disconnectedness - shame, world-collapse.

Sometimes that needs to happen. Your stereotypes of winning and losing need to be transformed from those you formed in childhood, because they're wrong, whether you think it doesn't matter or it does. But your stereotypes of male and female aren't (entirely) like that. They've accumulated to manage differences between the sexes and here I would go a little way with Freud and say that the structure of mother and father is formatively important. These stereotypes pre-exist the self. Indeed, I think given the amount of evidence linking sensitivities to dna, they pre-exist the individual person (phylogenetic more than ontogenetic).

So I think the bible uses stereotypes as part of its 'now but not yet' structure of things demonstrated and achieved at the cross, but not universally accomplished. We know that 'in christ(ianity) there is neither male nor female' and in heaven there is no marriage, but here on earth, and even in church, both still matter. So I read the proscriptions on women teaching as something like the forbidding to eat meat offered to idols if that's difficult for anyone. Unless everyone is conditioned to tolerate it, it will be very threatening without being productive. There isn't a stereotype-free mode of 'being' that we could shift to. (This assumes that the patriarchy is pretty universal (which it was in the world of the new testament), but it isn't. I think it might be something like a Nash equilibrium though, that societies flourish (or at least grow aggressively) by playing it and it spreads by competition-contagion. Maybe the promise of 'neither male nor female' is coming to fruition in our time in the liberal refusal to impose on anyone's self-definition.)

I doubt anyone is very impressed by this. It certainly has some weaknesses. When my little brother was about three, he was with my mother in the street when something happened that caused a total meltdown - a bus went by, driven by a woman. One of the few things he felt sure of had given way, and he was enraged. So there's an amusing story as compensation.

*actually not so much me as everyone.

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