| Summary: | This three-year ethnography scrutinises what drives culture in intentionally made anonymous communities. It is found that the biggest driver is “sexmentality”, the notion whereby communities fundamentally function according to concerns over sex (the term is applied throughout the manuscript to refer to the male–female categorisation). These communities sexualise the unsexual through histories of sex complexes and assign sex-directed thoughts excessive weight. They transform sex-driven preoccupations into power over the members’ habitus, ensuring that they react to sexually figured worlds that are overfed with reminders of one’s sex. They reinforce sexually configured geographic arrangements. They sexualise space and solidify sex-determined perspectives, making them reproducible and conveyable across generations. Although sex-rooted considerations exist in all human communities, what differentiates the communities being researched is the conversion of sex-driven judgements into managerial systems (“sexarchies”) that inculcate members into sex-defined realities. Sexmentalism entails realms of interpretation wherein one’s entire existence is reduced to male–female cataloguing. Like “racementality” (whereby communities are run via race-based configurations), sexmentality entails biology-based compartmentalisation. While the general literature has explored the personal and microlevel impacts of sex fixation, this article goes beyond this to examine structural and macrolevel influences of such a fixation on cultural systems.
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