What a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis! Taking its inspiration from Mary Wollstonecraft, Science, Cents & Stereotypes examines hypotheses of gender inequalities, promoted by various wings of the Establishment. Scripts from medical science launch the journey, with economics coming close behind, though religious, political, and legal narratives which script women’s inequality, and keep LGBT people in their place are also in play. The interaction of other narratives of difference - class, race, ethnicity, age, ability - with key sex and gender scripts are never forgotten. As a polemic against polemics, Science, Cents & Stereotypes does not aim to rewrite misogyny as misandry (tellingly a little known word), or to substitute homophobia, transphobia, and biphobia with heterophobia. It is increasingly obvious that differences of sex, gender identity, and sexuality need not always be linked together in a predictable and permanent way, but above all should not be given unequal moral, ethical, political, legal, economic and social weight. Can human beings ever achieve the nonchalance of the lower orders– snails, eels, sea-horses, nudibranchs, water fleas, flatworms, limpets, gobies, clownfish, cuttlefish, some birds, hyenas, and varieties of frogs – to name but a few, who change minds, bodies, partners, and pronouns without a second thought.
Valiant attempts to change prevailing sex and gender scripts, from Suffragettes to Stonewall and beyond, are reviewed here for their successes and shortfalls. Inevitably this account privileges the industrialized world where the ideas of sex, gender and sexuality have long been a major preoccupation, though important events, and outstanding voices elsewhere in the world are recognized throughout. Appropriately, data is drawn from the broadest possible range of sources and media. Science, Cents & Stereotypes proposes the need for constructive script-editing to which all can contribute. Those professionally engaged, as well as engaged amateurs will find something in its pages to interest and provoke. Sex and gender and sexuality, though always popular topics, have recently taken up more than their usual space in public debate. Does the current cacophony indicate that we are on the cusp of a change of scripts? Or does the good old Noah’s Ark model of two of each still broadly seem like Common Sense, with Nature and Nurture knowing their place? Globally we are going through the kind of social, scientific, political, and economic turmoil which makes established narratives obsolete. Amongst other happenings the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, arriving on ground prepared by #MeToo, have further laid bare the many fault lines of income, class, age, race, ethnicity, ability, sex, gender and sexuality, which have been camouflaged, but now demand to be addressed. Everywhere Establishment scripts, or indeed hypotheses , are being seriously shaken, and need to be further stirred.
