What's the connection between gender and meta-rationality?

Rationality is stereotypically masculine. What about meta-rationality?

Transcript:

Charlie: What’s the connection between gender and meta-rationality?

David: I had never thought to ask that!

The systematic mode of being, or the rational mode of being, is male-coded, or masculine-coded. Meta-rationality involves an openness that surrounds systematicity, or rationality; or may just completely transcend it. And that is possibly feminine-coded? Or at any rate, it’s either feminine or non-gendered.

Charlie: Mm-hmm.

David: I’m thinking actually now, in Vajrayana, how there’s often a sequence of: female-coded, male-coded, non-dual.

Charlie: Mmm.

David: And meta-rationality is analogous in some ways to non-duality in Buddhism. So maybe it is also… it is a little farfetched, but could be analogized to transcending gender; or being— I really don’t like the word “non-binary,” but we haven’t got a better one.

Charlie: Mm.

David: One of the things that is important in Vajrayana is practicing a yidam of the opposite sex. Not exclusively, but that is part of the path: to step into a new alien possibility that shakes up your attachment to the fixed identity that you have.

So, female is analogized with emptiness, and you go from emptiness to form, which is analogized with male, and then to the—

Charlie: Right, so,

David: —non-duality that is—

Charlie: Yeah, so I wanted to pick up on that, and say that you’re starting with the feminine, in Buddhist tantra you’re starting with emptiness, and that is connected to wisdom. And then the male aspect: you’re connecting to form, to compassion. And then the non-duality: to the inseparability of both of those.

And interestingly, in our culture, fluidity is more female-coded. And I wonder now whether the move into meta-systematicity, and beyond highly systematized thinking, is actually difficult, and one of the ways that it’s prevented, possibly, is that for men, moving out of that rigidly defined, very easily legible way of being looks and feels like a move toward “more feminine.” And because things are so clearly segmented culturally and socially, it’s very difficult for guys to do that.

David: Yeah. It’s not a coincidence, presumably, that the tech industry has an awful lot of—a preponderance of—male participants.

Charlie: Mm-hmm.

David: Because this is basic gender psychology: that men are systematizers.

Charlie: Say more about meta-rationality, in terms of our social circumstances, and gender.

David: Well, I mean, before you can move into meta-rationality, you have to have mastered rationality. And to the extent that that is seen as masculine-coded, that could be an obstacle for women.

Empirically, in the research done in the 1970s and '80s, many more men moved into what