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Here's an idea. For both you and your Sims, gender is a performance. Before we get started, I just want to say a few things about this episode, because it's about gender identity and politics. And I am a dude who identifies as dude. Lots of the stuff we're going to talk about, I have no embodied experience of. Coming at this having done our research, having talked with people who have had the relevant experience, but for a million reasons, it's impossible for us to capture every nuance of everyone's embodied experience of gender. That being said, we have a platform with Idea Channel. And I think using it for this kind of conversation is important. So I want to have that conversation. But I also want to acknowledge our shortcomings before we do. We're coming at this from a place of wanting to be entertaining, but also responsible and respectful. So yeah. Preamble over. On with the episode about the Sims and gender identity. OK, so you've just sat down to play Sims 4 for the first time. And you've got to make a new Sim. You make a dude, Dirk Strongarm, let's call him. Tall, broad, olive skin, clean haircut. You give him cargo pants and a plaid shirt. [KOOL & THE GANG, "LADIES NIGHT"] You send Dirk to Willow Creek, where he finds a loving wife, gets a nice house, and maybe, some day, before he meets the big Sim in the sky, he will become director of the local symphony orchestra. Now post-structuralist philosopher Judith Butler, who as far as I know, has never played the Sims, so I'm totally putting words in her mouth right now, might describe Dirk as highly coherent, that is his biological sex, or I guess what we'd assume is his biological sex, since Dirk is just pixels. Though, seeing as how only heterosexual couples in the Sims can woohoo and try for baby unless you install a mod, that's a pretty strong indication that biological sex is what's intended here. His biological sex aligns with ideas about what his gender should be, which in turn align with ideas about his sexuality. Coherent. In her book "Gender Trouble," Butler describes these things as coherent, because as far as modern culture in the west is concerned, this collection of characteristics, male body, male gender, attracted to women appear to be based on some kind of natural coherence, that each follows naturally from the last, at least as far as common language and understanding would have it. But is it natural? How much of what appears to be natural is really an effect of how we live or act in or even describe the world? This is a big question of "Gender Trouble" and really of the last 30 years of gender politics. What does it mean to be a gender? Is sex or gender something you are? Butler says no in no uncertain terms. Being a sex or a gender is fundamentally impossible, she writes. How so? It's going to take us a little bit to get there. So first, let's go back to the Sims character creator and remake Dirk Strongarm. But this time, instead of cargo pants and a plaid shirt, what if we want to give him eyeshadow and a sun dress? They're not there. We can give him, I think this is baseball paint, and swim trunks. But if we change Dirk to Diana, aha, here we go, a beautiful dress for a beautiful day outside. One of Butler's starting points for asking questions about gender was Simone de Beauvoir's pronouncement from "The Second Sex" that one is not born a woman but rather becomes one. What does that mean? Well, lots. For starters, in many ways, male is the default. Not the default biological sex, both genetics and the Sims character creator seem to agree on an even distribution there, but rather the default gender. Think about how the default pronoun is he. And I will hear no arguments to the contrary, because we all know that it's true, or how most major market media protagonists are guys, or how we use this perfectly unadorned general human to shape not as a symbol for person but for dude. As a quick aside, the reason there are models and male models or nurses and male nurses, things where the default isn't male, is because the male default is seen to conflict with professions regarded as feminine. So qualification feels necessary. That is a whole other can of worms. So if male is always the default, then it must be through some kind of action that other genders come to be. When you think about it, it kind of makes sense, like, girls who aren't interested in girly things, no makeup, dresses, not interested in princesses, are considered tomboys. But boys who aren't interested in fire trucks, sports, or video games are intellectual? Just different? Through uninterest alone, we certainly don't think of them as referencing another gender. Butler uses Beauvoir's pronouncement to arrive at the idea that, quote, "woman itself is a term in process." Biological sex can be a determining factor. But really, it's some set of actions constantly being taken that create gender, both the idea and the attribute. And given what we just talked about, Butler sees this as being especially true for people who identify as women. Butler talks about gender as a kind of performance. For some people, that performance is intimately linked with their biology. For some people, it's not. In her own words, gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid, regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance of a natural sort of being. To many people, including the Sims 4 character creator, Dirk in a dress or Diana in a tuxedo are mismatched body stylizations, mismatched performances, not allowed. From the standpoint that one's gender must match what's expected based upon their biological sex, this noncoherence transgresses that highly rigid, regulatory frame. Many people see it as dishonest or worthy of scorn and even violence. And to be very clear, we're not just talking about two genders. We're talking about many along a continuum. But our highly codified set of expectations makes certain combinations of bodies and genders, most of them in fact, seem absurd. Butler describes this by saying that the cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain identities cannot exist. How telling is it that in a video game where I can build a house almost instantly or come back from the dead as a ghost to mess with my neighbors, it's not possible for my Sims' identities to exist along that continuum, only at two distinct binary poles. It says something about the rigidity, or at the very least, pervasiveness of that regulatory frame. Right? It's maybe extra telling in light of the fact that the Sims has consistently been one of the most socially forward thinking video games. Since the very first Sims game, every Sim created is, quote, "technically bisexual." It's how you play the game that determines their primary attraction. Not so with your Sims gender, which is especially dissonant given Butler's answer, which we've finally reached, to the question if sex and gender is not being, then what is it? Gender is not a noun but neither is it a free floating set of attributes, Butler wrote. One cannot be a gender, because, in her words, gender is always a doing. It's a performance. But it's also the way culture at large, capital C culture, coerces biological sex into a natural seeming frame for conducting that performance. Gender is how one presents. But it is also the internal and deeply personal state that inspires that presentation, a state which might build on widely understood signs, like dresses mean female and a shirt and tie means male but which equally might not. Gender happens on a body by body basis not en masse across all bodies. And so, while gender is the way we all as a community agree on this continuum, it's also how we individually construct ourselves and others. And while the framework in which we do that is certainly rigid, it is by no means natural. For all of the problems that we have, we are, at the very least, lucky that we don't have to choose our gender performance from a menu that is literally hard coded. What do you think? Is gender something people do? Let us know in the comments. I spent the whole train ride on the way to shoot today looking at my phone. So I didn't actually think of a introduction for comments. Let's see what you guys had to say about bored Americans using teleporters. Exileman talks about their attitude that only boring people are bored. And this is a thing that I say to Molly a lot that she doesn't appreciate. But it also reminds me of that Louis CK bit where he tells his daughters that they are not allowed to be bored, that they-- there is no situation in which a modern person is allowed to be bored. And I just-- I like that attitude. Daniel Varreo writes a really thought provoking comment about the way Americans are seen by citizens of other countries and talks about how maybe this American sensitivity, in so far as it exists, has, perhaps, a connection to our position in the world and our foreign policy, which is something that I didn't even consider. And I think might, like, holds a little bit of water, that there is maybe a bit of defensiveness that comes with the position that America has put itself in with regards to the rest of the world. But yeah, this was a great comment. Thank you so much for writing us. Sam Martin writes that the dichotomy that I developed as an answer to the transportation paradox is perhaps a false one, and that there is maybe a third option and provides his dissertation as proof. And it looks so good, so excited. Thank you for sharing this, Sam. Hedonis writes that Americans might be sensitive because of our history of treating social groups really poorly. And I think that that makes sense. But I don't think it's the whole truth, because, you know, there are a lot of countries that have a history of treating social groups really, really, poorly. And they don't exhibit the same kind of concern for identity politics that has become sort of stereotypical in the American left. So yeah, I think part of it, definitely not the whole part. Rizip writes that they would consider their teleporter copy a version of themself until the very moment at which the copy experienced new things. And at that point, just all bets are off. They are then a new entity. And Kram1032 actually brings up, and a couple other people brought up, how this sort of changes the way that I considered leaving this law, that the state of matter means that things are changing and that those things, after a certain amount of time, are not identical even a little bit. And that is also a very great point. Ivy Lee writes that it is maybe not that we are bored less but that we are a different kind of bored now that we have mobile technology. And I would be curious whether or not, like, a brain scan of someone who is bored with a phone in their hand and a brain scan of someone who is bored without a phone in their hand is different, whether or not those are different types of bored. I don't-- I-- I don't even really have a gut feeling. If anybody has any expertise in this kind of thing, I would love to know about it. Zxjacko, unfortunately Marquee Moon is gone forever. If you want it back on the wall, you're gonna have to send it to us. Just today, we received Godspeed you! Black Emperor's F # A # Infinity, which is one of my favorite records. I love this record so much. If you want to send us a record to put on the now slightly bigger Idea Channel wall, please do. Information in the doobly doo. We're accepting them for the next couple weeks. And there are, of course, some restrictions that apply. We're gonna keep all your things. This week's episode was brought to you by the hard work of these reticulated splines. We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit, links in the doobly doo. And the tweets of the week come from Mary Hamer, who points us towards a report about Google ranking pages based upon their truthiness and from SM Linarchik, who points us towards an interview with Dan Deacon talking about how one must be bored to be creative. Love me some Dan Deacon. And hey, in case you were wondering, this episode of Idea Channel was brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is an easy way to create a website, blog, or online store for you and your ideas. Squarespace features a user friendly interface, custom templates, and 24/7 customer support. Try Squarespace at Squarespace.com/ideachannel for a special offer. Squarespace. Build it beautiful. And one more thing. This week's episode is actually part of a really big collab that we're doing with a bunch of channels about gender roles, gender politics, gender identity. So we'll throw-- there's going to be an end card up right after I'm done yapping. And you should check out those videos, because they're all gonna be super rad. [MUSIC PLAYING] TINY TIM (SINGING): Living in the sunlight, loving in the moonlight, having a wonderful time.