Is Female To Male as Nature is to Culture?

I thought that this was an interesting comparison between how males and females are perceived and treated and how that compares to the way that society acts towards nature and culture. It was something I had never thought about before but it seemed to make sense. What Ortner says throughout this article is that the way our culture and cultures all over the world think of women is all very similar and it is all in a subordinate (and negative) way. In the beginning of the article she talks about how in China the Yin-Yang is supposed to represent men and women in an equal way but the culture itself focus on patrilineal descent

One of the main points that she makes in this article is when she talks about nature and culture. She says that in almost every society people think of culture as being superior to nature. People believe that they can “socialize” and “culturize” nature. She then goes on to compare women to nature and men to culture. She says that women are more natural because women are involved in more activities that are natural such as giving birth and developing and baby inside of them. Because of this, in some cultures women are not allowed to do certain things during menstruation, because they are looked down upon at that time, whereas men do nothing comparable to that. Ortner also talked about one culture that placed special value and pride a doll that was not allowed to be handled or even looked at by women. Another way she said that women were more like nature was because they were involved in only very low levels of culture such as raising young children and maybe even formally teaching them up until a point. Something interesting that was mentioned was when she said that most teachers in younger grades like kindergarten and say… though elementary school are mostly always women but when you get to the college level they are almost always men. The same thing goes for cooking. Women are perceived to be the ones that stay home cook meals for the family because they are already home taking care of the kids, so its more convenient for them to do it, but when you get to the level of cooking in 5 star restaurants the top chef’s are almost always men. Women are involved in only low level cultural activities. Women are more “rooted” and they spend most of their lives involved in tasks that are really meant to benefit other people and not themselves.
She says that men are more involved in culture because they do not have the same ties to production of future generations or the rearing of children that women do. Because they are so free men they can be “generating and sustaining systems of meaningful forms by means of which humanity transcends the givens of natural existence, bends them to purpose, controls them with interest.”
She talks about how Chodorow says that men and women’s relationships are like nature and culture. Chodorow says that “woman’s relationahisp tend to be, like nature, relatively unmediated, more direct, whereas man not only tends to relate in a more mediated way, but in fact ultimately often relates more consistently and strongly to the mediating categories and forms than to the persons or objects themselves.
At the end of the article Ortner says that she thinks that men are women are equally as much like nature. Women aren’t more “natural” then men but she does agree that there are ways that women appear that way. She says that there needs to be social change from both men, women, and our institutions and society. Big changes need to be made not just little things here and there will clear up the inequality that women face in society today.