A review of anthropological concepts reveals that the hunt was considered the motor of culture in human life. New interpretative models in the study of primates [5] have shown that some Australopithecus in Africa ate vegetables, indicating that both genders participated in group production and reproduction.

Anthropologists Marilyn Strathern and Carol McCormack [6] reported that nature is represented as feminine but is subordinate to a culture that is masculine. Reason and mind are related to masculinity but body and nature are related to femininity.

The revolution does not lie in conquering male privilege but in eliminating the distinction, says Marilyn Strathern [7].

Gender anthropology questions the accepted aspects of sexual dimorphism. This includes the difference in height between men and women, which applies neither to the population as a whole nor to all ethnic groups. Not all men are taller than all women, but cultural imperatives exist that give this impression. In numerous societies, couples are formed in accordance with scales of height, creating the impression that women are shorter. This is not true from a biological point of view. Women possess less muscular strength, a smaller breathing capacity, a finer skeleton, and a different weight and fat distribution. However, this does not explain the differences that are currently objectivized in Western societies when we see images of prehistoric women. They are more robust and have much more body hair than seems to exist in a “natural” form in Western women. The latter are increasingly thinner, with less body hair and more infantilized in terms of their genitals, except for their breasts which are increasingly larger.

The impact of Margaret Mead [8] on gender anthropology, the work of Simone de Beauvoir, and the arrival of the contraceptive pill are the three landmarks that marked a change in the twentieth century for women:

I shared the general belief in our culture that there was a natural temperament which corresponds to each sex, which could, in extreme cases, become distorted or distanced from its normal expression. I failed to suspect that the temperaments we consider innate in a sex, could be rather a change, mere variations of the human temperament, which can be approximated by their education, with a greater or lesser success according to the individual, the members of one or both sexes. [8]

In different cultures throughout the world, body care occupies a main space in female identity along with the history of art. The woman’s body and its ornaments are the way to attract the gaze of the opposite sex.

Neck rings are worn in a few African and Asian cultures, usually to create the appearance of a longer neck. Padaung women of the Kayan people begin to wear neck coils as young as 2 years old. The custom of wearing neck rings is related to an ideal of beauty: an elongated neck, giving rise to their name as “giraffe tribes.” This can deform the shoulder blades and have medical consequences; if they are removed, the neck muscles are not strong enough to support the head. Nowadays in Western countries, we have height-increasing surgery, using a head implant to increase attractiveness and acquire the height to become a model, for example.

Foot binding is a custom of applying tight binding to the feet of young girls in order to prevent further growth. Called “lotus foot ancestry,” it became very popular in China because men considered it highly attractive. It still takes place even today in Guangzhou in China. Tiny, narrow feet in women were considered attractive and made their movements more feminine. Nowadays, Western fashion involves women wearing footwear with high heels that deform their feet. In the nineteenth century, most women possessed a permanently deformed rib cage caused by the habitual wearing of corsets that conformed to the fashion for narrow waists.

Mursi women in Ethiopia wear lip plates that deform their lips, while in some parts of Africa and in Asian countries the lower lip of girls is cut by their mothers or by another woman from their settlement. Western women inject silicone into their lips in an attempt to gain attractiveness.

Ablation of the clitoris, feminine genital mutilation, affects 135 million women and children throughout the world, and the increase in immigration has brought the practice to Europe. Ablation is widespread in a large part of Africa for religious reasons. In recent years, the practice has spread to the indigenous tribes of Colombia’s Embera-Chami ethnic group. In Western countries, female genital cosmetic surgery, which includes vaginoplasty, labiaplasty, and hymenoplasty (reconstruction of the hymen to a pre-sexual state) are now more common than years ago. The practice of plastic and cosmetic surgery grows year by year in Western countries.

Muslim women hide their face behind a veil, hijab or a burka, which reveals no more than her eyes and sometimes not even those. The member of a religious order, in order to keep her body hidden from others, must remain in cloister, just as Muslim women must accept similar restriction in daily life. The body experience is the place in which psychic disturbances are expressed. In the words of Sartre [9]: “There are no psychic phenomena that must be linked to a body; there is nothing behind a body, but the body is wholly psychic.”

Motherhood is the principal aspect of female identity in Western culture and this defines women. In Greek mythology, Zeus brought a baby to Hera to suckle on her milk while she was asleep, but she suddenly woke up and pushed the child away. Hera’s spurting milk created the Milky Way, which contains the Solar System.

Upper-class women often did not breastfeed their babies in eighteenth century France, preferring to employ wet-nurses from the poorer classes and reclaim their social lives. Elizabeth Badinter [10] said that this proved that there was no such thing as a maternal instinct. She contends that the politics of the last 40 years have produced three trends affecting the concept of motherhood, and, consequently, women’s independence. The first is what she calls “ecology” and the desire to return to simpler times; second, a behavioral science based on ethology, the study of animal behavior; and lastly, an “essentialist” feminism, which glorifies breastfeeding and the experience of natural childbirth, while disparaging drugs and artificial hormones, such as epidurals and birth control pills.

The reasons for this change are various: a series of economic crisis have left women disenchanted with the workplace, while daughters have reacted against the feminism of their mothers. Most of all, we have seen the return of a naturalist ideology not far removed from that of Rousseau, which kept women at home for almost two centuries. Under the pretext of a return to nature, women in our time are being enlisted under the flag of natural child-raising. We decry the materialism and consumerism that made us throw out the timeless wisdom of nature, and we dismiss their offerings as tools of maternal egotism. Today’s ideal of motherhood requires that we give birth in pain, without the benefit of an epidural, since this robs us of our first act as a mother. We are enjoined to nurse for 6 months, a year, or longer, day and night, whenever our child wishes, regardless of the mother’s situation. The good mother who wants the best for her child is urged to forswear processed baby food, which is seen as a health hazard, and to avoid day-care as injurious to her child’s healthy development. With all of its demands, the naturalist ideal of the twenty-first century means that it takes a woman as much time and energy to raise two children as our grandmothers spent raising four. This ideal of the modern mother represents a big change in the condition of women. For some, this new way of life may deliver a kind of joy, allowing women to immerse themselves fully in the act of being a mother, but for others it is a burden, a source of anxiety and isolation. Stuck at home for a year or more, if she decides to quit her job, or equips herself with a breast pump, if she goes back to work, the new mother is forced to choose between renouncing her full adult identity and adopting an expanded and exhausting set of obligations, along with a strong dose of guilt and psychic disturbances.

Nature knows only one way to be a mother. This is not the case for women, who are endowed with consciousness, personal histories, desires, and differing ambitions. What some do well and with pleasure, others do badly or out of duty. By failing to take account of women’s diversity, by imposing a single ideal of motherhood, and by pursuing the notion of a perfect mother, they fall into a trap.

The single-minded focus on the ideal of modern motherhood has even more disastrous consequences, which we are just beginning to observe. Women who choose to reject its excessive constraints now have a nuclear option. They can curb their reproduction. They can refuse to have children, as some are doing in many industrialized countries. From Japan to Germany, wherever the duties of the good mother weigh too heavily on women’s freedom, the birth rate has sunk too low for the species to continue.

Mithu Sanyal [11] reviews the invisibility of the female sex throughout the history of the Western world. In the first texts, the vulva was seen as principally a wound and then a crack by a world that rejected its existence through denial. Female genitals are the point where the interior meets the exterior. Psychoanalyst Harriet Lerner wrote in the 1970s about the difficulties experienced by many women in naming their own genitals and their inability to explore their own body. What they touched lacked a name. Only boys possessed something external; thus, girls could not touch their clitoris and remain a girl. The absence of an explicit recognition and nomenclature for the girl’s genitals had to have pathogenic consequences.

Freud deprives women of a sexuality determined by them and strips them of their creative capacity. To challenge this is to battle a monster, a myth that has taken on a life of its own through two words: penis envy. Sanyal asserts that psychoanalysis has committed matricide by killing the mother and placing the father at the heart of culture. It is odd that Lacan, who created the concept of the “Law of the Father,” displayed a reluctance to exhibit The Origin of the World in his home. Gustav Courbet’s famous painting, which featured a close-up of female genitalia, was kept hidden behind a sliding door created by Surrealist painter, André Masson. The Origin of the World was a woman and may be seen today at the Orsay Museum in Paris.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the terms vulva, clitoris, and labia did not appear in the dictionary; just as the only word for female genitals in the dictionary today is vagina.

With Freud, there is only one libido, the masculine one, from the moment it is identified with the forms of domination. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex [12] criticizes psychoanalysis by stating that the concept of penis envy is symbolic of envy of power. This is a symbol of the privileges that are afforded to boys, the place the father holds in the family, and the universal predominance of boys, with all this reinforcement of masculine superiority. There is poverty in the descriptions of the female libido, the study of which stems from the male libido and not from itself.

There is a permanent relationship between the biological, the cultural, and the construction of what is provided by nature and what is constructed by human beings. It has been variously stated that culture can modify biology by changing meanings and bodies (new technologies enable us to change an individual’s sex).

Sexuality, violence, appropriated bodies, and medicated bodies are often related to women, as Michel Foucault [13] expressed in Histoire de la Folie à l’Ȃge Classique, in which he questioned the medical view from the classical hysteria diagnosed by Charcot.

The twentieth century is considered to have been revolutionary for women in Western culture. Society was deeply transformed in the manner in which male and female conception was perceived. Women could join the workforce and take up further education. In the 1950s, the arrival of the contraceptive pill brought a revolution in reproductive control, significantly changing the life of many Western women.

Nowadays, we all know that the revolution has not meant that women have entered the workforce and into social life in the same way as men. The shift from private to public life has not guaranteed a real transformation in real life for women throughout the world. Modern conceptions remain traditional.

In today’s world, communication and the market, including the pharmaceutical one, are at the core of women’s bodies. The same relates to the female sexual organs, for which a large market has grown, such as the selling of creams to protect women from their own malodorousness. This does not happen in the case of men. As the philosopher, Pierre Bourdieu [14], affirmed: “There is a symbolic violence against women that leaves them moving from one space to another.” The body’s increasing power as the identity of the human being turns women into objects. Objects are more easily manipulated economically and symbolically. Anthropology has demonstrated the importance of psychosomatic factors in the construction of diseases [15].

Medical knowledge is very important in producing a reality of the body and the power of social speech in the construction of illness. Nature is understood to be a social construction. The symbolic violence suggested by Bourdieu implies that the androcentric world is presented as neutral. Because of this, most women are trapped inside, trying to do what should be done, while receiving a message that inequality does not exist and that they are to blame for not reaching a certain position. To a certain extent, this resembles the learned helplessness described by Seligman.

Heidegger [16] recognized that the entire evolution of Western philosophy and science, from the Greek philosophers onward, was based on descriptions of the world as a human observer would see it from God’s position. But every human being lives in the world as a part of it, not apart from it. If we fail to take the initial step of creating a state of separation between subject and object, between the human being who does the describing and the world that is described, what different view will we provide of our experience of life? Who am I as an individual? Do I take charge of my life or do others take charge for me?

Heidegger [16] sensed that the evidence was based on the sea of language in which we are immersed from birth. This knowledge is transmitted by two difference mediums: isolated words, as they are pronounced, and the diverse forms of language, teaching, bias, traditions, rituals, and customers that shape culture. People do not create language, but are created by it. “Language is the house of being. In its home, Man dwells,” Heidegger said [17].

This vision of language underlines, among other things, that it is impossible to understand language if it is separated from the bodily act of speech. It presents language as the most important way in which a person can indicate to others his/her real world. It demonstrates that language exists in the social space between people within which our sense of being is created in all its aspects: corporal, mental, and spiritual. As Heidegger said in 1971 [16]:

If we take language directly in the sense of something that is present, we find it in the act of speech, the activation of the organs of speech, the mouth, lips, tongue. Language is reflected in speech as a phenomenon that occurs in Man. It is demonstrated by the names that Western languages have given to it themselves: glossa, lingua, langue, language, lenguaje. Language is the tongue. (p. 96)

We can contrast this vision of language with the concept grounded in the twentieth century in which language is a form of communication [18].

Maturana and Varela [19] have called this perspective “the metaphor of the tube” for communication in that language resembles a tube by which a person sends an idea to another person who receives it. However, contained in Heidegger’s analysis is the fundamental way in which human beings are physically present, some with others. Language is a form of being. Heidegger’s work underlines the critical importance of the ways in which language governs the experience that people have of their bodies and the actions of those who surround them.

Merleau-Ponty, a disciple of Heidegger, believed that our experience of the body comes from the sensations of feeling and being felt. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty believed that an understanding of language was inseparable from the bodily act of speaking. Language does not exist within individuals but in the social intermediate space. This matrix of language (languages, traditions, custom, and other social uses) creates the identity of each individual. His work on philosophical hermeneutics showed that the division between the mind and the body, upon which modern medicine is based, is an interpretation generated socially and imposed on life as human beings experience it, rather than a reflection of an objective reality situated beyond human experience [20]. From this perspective, biomedical science has continued largely unaware of its own condition; it is neither the only valid tradition nor the mirror of reality but a tradition among others [18].

The perspective of language seen from the cognitive sciences throws new light on the relationship among ideas, language, and the body. The perspectives of philosophical hermeneutics and cognitive science locate language in the interactions between people and not within the mind of each individual. More than a vehicle that transports abstract communications between individual minds, it is coordination of bodily states between members of a social group that preserves the integrity of the group and of each individual [18].

People do not select the history that makes up their personality; nor can they relinquish it easily when its consequences are undesirable. This personal narrative chooses us as much as we choose it; it forms part of the sea of language within which all of us as human beings are born.

Hence, Robin Lakoff argues that language uses us as much as we use it. This means that, just as the thoughts we wish to express guide our choice of forms of expression, the way in which we perceive the real world dominates our form of expressing ourselves on the same things. The relationships among the language, mentality, and social behavior of each human group raise anthropological concerns.

Language, as a symbolic system, is not neutral with regard to gender, just as it is not neutral with regard to ethnicity or social class. Therefore, these categories have a clear impact on individuals. Girls and boys learn to symbolize when they are still young, when they are barely aware of the meaning of their words. Linguistic transformations can influence the form of understanding and interpreting the world. One of the key criticisms by feminists of Foucault’s work is precisely the lack of gender perspective in his analysis of language [21].

One of the expressions of sexism in most European languages, especially those of Latin origin, consists of the use of the generic male form to talk of both women and men, giving rise to phrases in which it is impossible to tell whether the speaker is referring exclusively to men in particular or to human beings in general. For example, there are derechos humanos in Spain, human rights in the UK, and droits de l’homme in France.

Women are traditionally labeled as talkers, when ethnographic evidence shows that men speak more than women in conversations between men and women. This contradiction connects to the fact that women are not compared with men in terms of their capacity of communication. Rather, the parallelism established is that of silence, so that any expression is interpreted as “talking too much.” Not only do men talk more, they also interrupt more frequently, providing another example of male domination. The stereotype of silence as a quality that is highly valued in women was forged today by reinforcing the negative image of the woman who dares to speak in public, an image that continues to form part of the collective imagination in the contemporary world [1].

For the anthropology of gender, of great interest are Foucault’s ideas on the role of language in constructing the body and sexual identities with regard to the distribution of power between men and women. In his view [22], there are normative discourses that transmit the “truth.” This implies that certain forms of knowledge are considered truthful and group thinking may be controlled through the discourses that carry the norm. Such discourses would create categories of identity that are closely linked to what is considered to be normal or abnormal in societies, maintaining relationships of domination and power. This exerts a powerful influence on the idea that people possess their identity. The problem is that when Foucault speaks of the sexed body he is speaking of the male body as normative. He does not analyze the attitudes and behavior of women with regard to the social expectations of how their bodies should be.

If de Beauvoir’s assertion [12] that “one is not born a woman but rather becomes one” is correct, it follows that woman is in itself a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to begin or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification. This is the notion of body not as an available surface that awaits signification but as a set of individual and social limits that remain and acquire meaning politically. Referring to an original or authentic femininity is in opposition to the present need to analyze gender as a complex cultural construct [23].

De Beauvoir’s theory had radical consequences that she did not initially consider. If sex and gender are radically different, then there is no evidence that a specific sex is the same as a specific gender; in other words, woman is not necessarily the cultural construct of the female body and the same is true of man. This assertion about the sex/gender division reveals that sexed bodies may be of many different genders. If sex is not limited to gender, it follows perhaps that there are genders, forms of culturally interpreting the sexed body that are not limited to the apparent duality of sex. Another consequence is that gender is a type of transformation or activity.

Monica Wittig is aware of the power of language to subordinate and exclude women. She believes that language is another order of materiality, an institution that can be modified. Clearly influenced by Simone de Beauvoir through the criticism she makes of the female myth in The Second Sex, Wittig says: “there is no female writing”.

As Wittig asserts, language throws bundles of reality onto the social body. This involves redescribing the options that already exist within the cultural fields that are deemed unintelligible and impossible. The human being, from what it is, accesses reality through language, in a medium “obstructed by words.” To describe a man as a Don Juan we resort to literature, but in the case of a woman we use psychiatric vocabulary: nymphomaniac. Why has male sexuality been constructed culturally as promiscuous but not its female equivalent? Up to what point is the construction of sexuality related to the survival of the species?

The development of a language that represents women fully and adequately has been necessary to promote their political visibility. This has been of great importance when taking into account the underlying cultural situation, in which the life of women is inadequately represented or not at all.

The new term transgender refers to individuals, behaviors, and groups that diverge from the most traditional dual gender roles and cross accepted limits. It includes a varied group of androgynous or transsexual people, in which the desire for surgical reassignment of genitals is not determinant. The term is employed as a synonym to express the third and fourth gender and encompasses the hijras of India and Pakistan [24] and eunuchs of eastern harems [25]. It is used to mean other in the sense that generic duality is broken [1].

In practice, the expression queer, which originally meant strange or unusual, is employed to define a wide group of people: lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender, transsexuals, homosexuals, and intersexuals. Basically, these are people, behaviors or groups that transgress normativity. As indicated by the philosopher, Beatriz Preciado [26], in her Contrasexual Manifesto, if a woman wants she can become of neither female nor male gender: neither woman nor man.

Gender is the cultural construct created by society as a whole with regard to anatomical sex. According to the era and culture involved, it will determine the destiny of the person. Gender is one of the taboos that is most difficult to break in our culture. It is impossible to separate gender from the political and cultural intersections in which it is constantly produced and maintained. One of the problems faced is that the term “women” indicates a common identity [23].

John Waters’ film Female Troubles, which stars Divine, proposes implicitly that gender is a type of persistent characterization that passes as reality. This is precisely because female does not now seem to be a stable notion; its meaning is as vague as woman.