Dennis asked:

How to explain embodiment? By embodiment I mean a state of being that is the very basic present
experience of a sense of separateness and unity amidst an unfathomable multiplicity of components
and whose most distinguishing feature is manifest as the very real experience of maleness as
separate from femaleness, man from woman.

Are we doomed to cast a blind eye to the problem of this very real experience? What is the
justification for considering this experience of embodiment, this separation of male and female, to be
primary?

By contrast, consider the possibility that male and female are experienced as one. Isn't there a
potential for this since we are the manifestation of sperm and egg? Wouldn't embodiment necessarily
be replaced with another state of being if the perceiver experienced male and female as one and not
separate? Are we not taking embodiment for granted and ignoring the possibility of another state of
being where male and female are one given our unfathomable multiplicity of components of both
male and female origin?

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I would think that gender identity has very little bearing on our sense of embodiment insofar as it
affects unity or separateness from others. Gender difference is based on physical and hormonal
dissimilarities, but types of emotions, or psychological states caused by hormones, are states
common to each gender. The causes may be different but the range of emotional and psychological
states available to men and women doesn't differ in any way we can talk about meaningfully. I don't
think the primary experience is of being a man or a woman but, rather, it is being a person or simply
bodied, hence separate. This has been a theoretical problem. Freud and Lacan have had difficulties
dealing with women within their mythology of the development of the character, but the Freudian
Melanie Klein used different imagery and managed to evade this.

If the experience of being male or female differs only in respect of physical facts, then if the male and
female were experienced as one, there would be no male or female, but something else: Not male or
female, but an amalgam, as you say, and I don't see why we should aspire to such a condition. What
is the problem of the two separate genders, physically different, but psychically the same?

Rachel Browne