Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [54]
Lots of people confuse gender and sex. They think that a male just is masculine, and that a female just is feminine. If there’s anything that Tobias shows us, it’s that this just isn’t so. One’s sex doesn’t determine one’s gender. I can be a very masculine female, or a very feminine male. What determines my gender is just how I act. What determines my sex is brute biology.
The Man Inside Him
Tobias’s gender appears ambiguous for a few reasons. First, people believe (often very strongly) that men must be masculine. Tobias certainly doesn’t usually exhibit the traits we’d put in the normal spectrum of masculinity, although he appears to perceive himself as masculine. In “Good Grief!” when Maeby asks Tobias whether it bothers him that Lindsay is pursuing Ice (a muscular, black man), Tobias replies, “Oh no. I am surprised, though, that she’s going after someone so similar to my own type. Although I suppose we all do expose our inner desires, don’t we?” He also glorifies masculine traits in the advice he dispenses. Tobias claims that self-esteem shouldn’t be tied up in how you look or what others think of you, using himself as a model. In the episode “Top Banana,” he states that as an actor, he faces rejection every day but that “in this business of show you have to have the heart of an angel and the hide of an elephant.” Yet, Tobias, in a moment of despair over a nude shower scene, states, “Yes, I’m the doctor. The perfect husband, the big manly man. The big strong daddy.” He worries that he’s not living up to this image (“Marta Complex”).
Despite Tobias’s frequent attempts to assert his masculinity (in “Burning Love” he tells Michael he must prove himself as a “man’s man”), he spends more time pursuing and acting on traditionally feminine traits and behaviors. When confronted with rejection, Tobias often excuses himself to cry in the shower (usually while huddled in the fetal position, biting on a washcloth) something often associated with the feminine.2 Likewise, we’re quick to think he’s being feminine when he’s knitting on the couch, engaging in crafts,3 or dressing in women’s clothes (both as Tobias and his Falidia Featherbottom persona),4 or cooking and cleaning as Mrs. Featherbottom, or identifying himself with female actresses such as Katherine Hepburn, Jada Pinkett-Smith, and Barbra Streisand.5 Of course, there’s nothing about women that indicates a superior ability to knit, to clean, or to cook. Even associating women’s clothing with the feminine shows how closely we link sex and gender. What do chromosomes have to do with knitting, or with the style of clothing I wear, or with cleaning? Nothing whatsoever.
Our confusion of sex and gender leads to our confusion about Tobias. Because Tobias fluctuates between two sets of expectations about gender and sex, we might say that his gender is ambiguous. He’s biologically male, but he “acts like a girl” more often than not. We expect women, and not men, to act in a feminine way—even though we shouldn’t!—and so we’re confused by Tobias’s behavior. We wonder what someone with a penis is doing behaving like that!
But our confusion goes even deeper. We tend to associate a man “acting like a girl” with being gay. Again, sexual orientation has nothing to do with gender. The ancient Athenians commonly engaged in same-sex relations (older men were often involved with younger boys), but they were also hyper-masculine (let’s kill some Spartans!). The genitals one likes one’s partners to have (one’s sexual orientation) have nothing to do with gender (the cultural behaviors we associate with women and men). Boy, do we make huge mistakes!
Mister Gay
Arrested Development encourages the stereotypical interpretation that there