ordinarily reducible to biology . The essential traits of gender are not difficult to capture in Aristotle ’ s Athenian culture . As Thomas Cahill described : “ For the strutting aristoi of the symposia , the nature of life was obvious : you gave it or you got it . […] It was a militarized society that saw everything in terms of active and passive , swords and wounds , phalloi and gashes .” As we will see , one of UnREAL ’ s most central characters , Rachel , is “ both a weapon and a wound ,” and this plays a part in the show ’ s efforts to undermine gender essentialism , if not the hierarchical norms of patriarchy .
Opponents of this essentialist view of gender hold that gender is socially constructed , such that conventional gender categories are in fact “ culturally mediated assumptions about gender .” For instance , a constructionist does not equate the conventional notion of ‘ care-giver ’ or the conventional description of women as ‘ relational beings ’ with biological femaleness . Rather , these categories are outcomes of conventional habits of practice and social customs , which change over time and place . The constructionist , however , is not necessarily an anti-realist . A constructionist can hold that there are real differences in the world , but we cut up nature , not at its ontological joints , but according to conceptual categories of our own making , that is , the making of our social contexts and practices . If social institutions and practices , such as those of reality TV and the entertainment industry are sufficiently patriarchal , then the power dynamics of domination and subordination will be inscribed onto gender roles that are interpreted as natural and inevitable by the essentialist .
An example from jurisprudence may be helpful . Catherine MacKinnon argued that the legal concept of equality derived from Aristotle ’ s notion that like things needed to be treated alike and different things differently . But Aristotle ’ s understanding of sameness and difference tacitly relied on something being selfsame , that is , men , ( male , Athenian citizens ) were centered and taken as the norm by which others could be compared as same or different . Thus , women , if not sufficiently the same as the selfsame male standard , could not achieve equality . As MacKinnon put it , women “ have to first have [ equality ] before [ they ] can get it .” Rather , she suggested that the opposite of equality was hierarchy — her “ dominance theory .” What we see in Season 2 is not so much MacKinnon ’ s hopes for a new theory of equality but the realization that women can embrace the dominant role and perform the culturally mediated functions of maleness , including autonomy , stoicism , independence , dominance , and hedonism , even if this means battling the gender roles that others try to force upon them and that they want to be free to embrace when it suits them .
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