Sex and Gender: An Interpretation by S. Mareev

The author offers an analysis of S. Mareev’s article “Sex and Culture” in the context of historical and intellectual circumstances of its writing. It is shown that Mareev’s concept of “psychological sex” only at first glance coincides with the concept of “gender” in modern gender studies. In the light of S. Mareev’s article, two versions of the sociocultural interpretation of sex are distinguished – on the basis of Marxism and on the basis of social constructivism. The Marxist version fits into the methodological strategy coming from classical culture and classical philosophy, while the version based on social constructivism comes from the methodological guidelines of positive science. As Mareev shows, where the sociocultural interpretation of sex gravitates toward a strictly scientific methodology, modern gender relativism is certainly the norm. But where we proceed from the coordinate system set by classical culture, gender relativism is a perversion. It is within classical culture that images of femininity and masculinity were formed, which are distinct from representations of masculinity and femininity in gender studies. In his article “Sex and Culture,” Mareev characterizes femininity not within the framework of the opposition of domination and subordination, but, following H. Ortega y Gasset, on the basis of the dialectic of the material and the ideal, which receives additional meanings in the context of E. V. Ilyenkov’s treatment of the ideal. Mareev’s analysis of the problem of sex is inseparable from the study of the nature of love, in which physiology is a form of expression of spiritual communication, where man is always an end and never a means for man. In the light of Mareev’s later article on the problem of sex in Silver Age culture, an analysis of the idea of androgyne in N. Berdyaev and V. Soloviev is proposed. Soloviev, radically different from this concept in gender studies. The dialectic of the corporeal and spiritual in the understanding of love is able to bring the Christian thinker V. Soloviev and the Marxist S. Mareev.