In an almost schematic way, the rhetoric uses standardized catalogs for virtues and vices.
Because this is the only way to "amplify," it refrains from any reference to individual data and biographies. Historical personalities, for example Alexander, are presented, completely de-individualized, as mere Patterns.
Each individual is thus called upon to assess himself and others at a distance from the exemplary. Transverse to this distinction is the distinction between gentlemen and ladies (of course: the upper class, because the lower class, which has to work, is neither capable of virtue nor vice). Normally, tracts, like education itself, are separated for gentlemen and for ladies. L'honneste homme and l'honneste femme are different objects, each with specific manifestations of the virtue and vice schema.
"Morality" is thus differentiated into a male and a female version. One can virtually recognize a "hiérarchie bidimensionelle" in the sense of Dumont. Inequality can then flow into this equality unnoticed in the form of a differentiation of the requirements. But are women discriminated against, is Asymmetrization achieved, and how?
That there is a realistic, salacious literature about women is beyond question, but that is not the mode of operation of rhetorical morality. It works just the other way around by driving up requirements from which one can read reality as deviation without having to say so.
The praise of women can then be used as a scheme of discrimination, together with well-meaning knowledge of their particular dangers and weaknesses. Here, too, a possibility to come to the asymmetrization of a distinction without the asymmetry having to be thickened to unequal valuations. It need not be said at all that women are worse than men, and this cannot reasonably be said at all if both receive their souls from God. It results only from a reverse conclusion, in the comparison of ideal and reality.
The literature that alludes to sexual events shows a clearly dominant role for the man. At best, the woman (when violence is not involved) controls the pace at which she engages in proposals. After all, love is stylized for the ideal as a mutual desire. In general, however, the woman is considered less perfect than the man. This results quasi automatically from the nobility evaluations: the women are weak and soft and cold, the men strong, hard and hot. Also the women themselves are this opinion, mean Pietro Andrea Canonhiero, because they bring, as well-known, rather male than female offspring on the wide. However here must be blocked then fast an error conclusion lying on the hand. If one takes over so directly the nobility evaluations, this would have the consequence that only the men, but not the women could be noble. This is of course not the case. Nobility cannot depend on robustness, otherwise "i fachini piu nobili de Gentilhuomini, el le bestie de gl'huomini" (Canonhiero 1606: 25f.). One can see here the ambivalence of representation: if in society it is incumbent on the nobility because of its natural qualities: how can it be attributed to men and not to women because of the same qualification scheme, even though nobility is based on endogamy and pure descent?
Already here it becomes apparent (and we will encounter this problem more intensively when it is no longer about stratification but about functional differentiation) that the distinction between man and woman is difficult to combine with the respective scheme of social differentiation. This would require more detailed historical research, for which only a kind of reading guide can be fixed here. We will consider only one special case: a comparison of ladies and gentlemen written by a lady, the tract by Lucretia Marinella, Le nobilità et eccellenze delle donne: e i diffetti, e mancamenti de gli huomini, Venetia 1600.
Here, ladies and gentlemen are juxtaposed in a tract, and the schema woman/man is brought to congruence by a woman with the moral schema of virtue/vice. The ladies are presented as virtuous, the men as vicious. One might suspect that the opposition hiérarchique has simply been reversed and women are now thought to represent the moral order of the world. We do not know whether the author thought this way. If so, she has fallen for the male logic of asymmetrical distinction. For this virtue/vice rhetoric is only a mirror (and is not infrequently called such) held up to the world. And in this mirror one will then quickly recognize that the ladies are not as virtuous as they should be, while the gentlemen are not as vicious as they could be. The one disappoint unpleasantly, the other disappoint pleasantly. No wonder then that the ladies allow themselves to be seduced, and the gentlemen tend to dissolve their ties again soon.
Thus, a doctrine becomes understandable which says that it is easier for a woman to find a good man than vice versa for a man to find a good woman. One sees: the asymmetry can work also to the advantage of the disadvantaged side: The woman is rather pleasantly surprised by the marriage, the man rather unpleasantly. Whether it was really like that? In any case, another asymmetry follows from this: "Vir mulierem non mulier virum corrigit". (Patricius 1518: Fol. LVII).
These are also cases of asymmetrization with possibilities of inversion, cases of distinction, indication and crossing. At the same time, the necessity of an inversion in the operationally employed distinction between ideality and reality obscures the direction of asymmetry. It functions at the level of the ideal in one direction, but realistically in the other. Historically, this may be related to the fact that the rhetoric of ladies' praise survived the decline of chivalric culture (lamentation about which begins as early as the 14th century) better than the rhetoric of gentlemen's praise. But even this explanation would only show that the masculine logic of asymmetrizing distinction operates, as it were, behind the back of official semantics and sets the relations like that in the direction of a superiority of the man.
But this arrangement, too, then disappears with the collapse of rhetoric, at the latest in the 18th century, at the latest with the novel (*Roman*). The virtue schema is now, especially since Richardson's "Pamela," presented in such a way that the reader can decode it and decode it not only in the direction of deviation, but also in the direction of individuality. The asymmetry now had to refer to individuals, and specifically to individuals who can be observed by the reader in the way they observe themselves and others, in the way they write letters and diaries. But if now this observing of the observer, this "second order cybernetics" (Heinz von Foerster) becomes the normal case of reality presentation: how can distinguishing still be asymmetrized? As distinguishing observers by observers? As differentiation of women and men by the feminist movement? And if so, will women's studies then be able to distinguish itself from the feminist movement?
V.
As society shifts from stratificational to functional differentiation, an old paradox becomes obsolete and a new one takes its place. The old paradox is: how a system could occur again in itself, and it was resolved by the concept of representation. The asymmetries caused by it are criticized today against the background of a norm of equality. But this norm in turn invisibilizes a paradox, namely the paradox of the indistinguishability of the distinguished. With the paradoxes the semantics resolving them change, and at the same time the now convincing solutions are adapted to a more dynamic society. Asymmetries are conceived as relics of an older society, and equality accordingly becomes the goal of reform. Their paradox is outsourced to the future, which is not yet the problem of the present effort (and in this, too, there is an affinity with the time-considering logic of Spencer Brown). The feminist movement takes off, seeking bliss. In doing so, it uses the distinction between women and men to observe reality, with the goal of eliminating asymmetries. But if it is true that asymmetries constitute the usefulness of a distinction in the first place: what does the feminist movement observe by mea
We had started from the fact of a conspicuous self-reference of Women's Studies and might have found an explanation here, if women's studies can be attributed without circumstance to feminism. But this is only an assumption for the time being, and we have to go out for a more careful analysis, because this variant of the semantics of asymmetrical distinctions, which aims at resymmetrization, is much richer than all the antecedents we have had in mind so far.ns of its guiding distinction? Itself?
The solution offered by Spencer Brown (under the pseudonym James Keys) consists only of stories and poems that hint at a deeper understanding without providing the key to it. The central category of a love that can only be won in pairs opposes logical analysis without being able to absorb and include it. The distinction of man and woman is thus stripped of its character as a distinction in the sense of Spencer Brown's logic – hence probably the pseudonym! without its theoretical place being determined. Behind this seems to be the idea that there is this one distinction that eludes the operational logic of "draw a distinction!". A distinction that does not distinguish but merges? A paradox? If women's studies wanted to connect here, it would take the ground out of their rather loveless practice, without it being immediately obvious where this would lead.
A variant that is already clearly recognizable is: to reject any orientation to man, be it positive or negative, and thus also to give up the distinction between man and woman. Then it is obvious to gain the female identity not through this distinction but through the female body. Such a retreat to the body, however, leads into all the embarrassments it must cause a woman when she finds herself called upon to compare herself with other women from this point of view; and to what end, if not in view of the man? In any case, it will be only a selection that will be exposed on the beach. One will have to veil just the comprehensible by an incomprehensible semiotics, or one will have to accept sharp discriminations under points of view like young, beautiful, presentable.
Further efforts in this direction should neither be cut off nor discouraged in advance. For the time being, however, the difficulties and the danger of slipping again and again into a physicality that is no longer socially tangible or into a flat opposition of (male) intellect and (female) feeling are most impressive. Moreover, if one does not want to accept either hierarchization or asymmetrization in the direction of men: what is left of functionally and structurally equivalent possibilities?