> Seriously, does anyone really believe that human
> gender relations are totally arbitrary or socially
> determined, that the fact that the brains of men and
> women are swimming in different hormones means
> nothing?
What it means, though, depends on the ontology within which you interpret it.
In Goethe, Hegel and Marx, for instance, it means that the actualization of a "will proper" and a "universal will" will always involve "struggle" with "instincts":
What we find such a state of Nature to be in actual experience, answers exactly to the Idea of a merely natural condition. Freedom as the ideal of that which is original and natural, does not exist as original and natural. Rather must it be first sought out and won; and that by an incalculable medial discipline of the intellectual and moral powers. The state of Nature is, therefore, predominantly that of injustice and violence, of untamed natural impulses, of inhuman deeds and feelings. Limitation is certainty produced by Society and the State, but it is a limitation of the mere brute emotions and rude instincts; as also, in a more advanced stage of culture, of the premeditated self-will of caprice and passion. This kind of constraint is part of the instrumentality by which only, the consciousness of Freedom and the desire for its attainment, in its true - that is Rational and Ideal form - can be obtained. To the Ideal of Freedom, Law and Morality are indispensably requisite: and they are in and for themselves, universal existences, objects and aims; which are discovered only by the activity of thought, separating itself from the merely sensuous, and developing itself, in opposition thereto; and which must on the other hand, be introduced into and incorporated with the originally sensuous will, and that contrarily to its natural inclination." http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/ history4.htm#040
Ted