inspirational source of Marxist doctrine, as utilized in the works of Foucault and his writings on discourse. The work The Blank Slate of Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, demonstrates the existence of socially constructed categories such as "money, tenure, citizenship, decorations for bravery, and the presidency of the United States." which "exist only because people tacitly agree to act as if they exist." However they are not in support of social constructionism as the sole means of understanding reality, rather as a specific context for specific phenomena, and support the consideration of empirical scientific data in our understanding of the nature of human existence. In this manner, Pinker explicitly contradicts social constructionist scholars Marecek, Crawford & Popp in "On the Construction of Gender, Sex, and Sexualities", who argue against the idea that socially organized patterns can emerge from isolated origins and favor instead the theory of Tabula rasa, which states that knowledge and meaning are generated exclusively as a collective effort and that the individual is incapable of doing so independently. In essence, the creation of meaning is a shared effort even when achieved by an individual in solitary conditions, because individuality is an illusion found at the intersection of myriad external influences being filtered through Id, Ego, and Super-ego. Alsop, Fitzsimmons & Lennon also note that the constructionist accounts of gender creation can be divided into two main streams: Materialist theories, which underline the structural aspects of the social environment that are responsible for perpetuating certain gender roles; Discursive theories, which stress the creation, through language and culture, of meanings that are associated with gender. They also argue that both the materialist and discursive theories of social construction of gender can be either essentialist or non-essentialist. This means that some of these theories assume a clear biological division between women and men when considering the social creation of masculinity and femininity, while other contest the assumption of the biological division between the sexes as independent of social construction. Gender Gender is used as a means of describing the distinction between the biological sex and socialized aspects of femininity and masculinity. According to West and Zimmerman, is not a personal trait; it is "an emergent feature of social situations: both as an outcome of and a rationale for various social arrangements, and as a means of legitimating one of the most fundamental divisions of society." As a social construct, gender is