The Sexual Is Political
thephilosophicalsalon.com
thephilosophicalsalon.com
What a bizarre claim.
There's a decent amount of conflict between people advocating "no one is gendered" postgenderism and transgender people going "I'm suffering for my gender identity, get out of here with that nonsense". I'm a bit baffled by the claim that "I am gender A, not gender B" is somehow a call for "abolition of gender".
Honestly, I never had this thought. Am I strange?
However, there's a core premise of the article that I disagree with: it is not more acceptable to emphasize your identity as a minority. People emphasize identity as a white, as male, as part of their class every day. People are OBLIGATED to make an effort to embrace or at least accept and work with minority cultures, but are not restricted from emphasizing or being proud of their own. I certainly know a few Germans and Scandinavian Americans who have no issues celebrating their heritage non-offensively.
I think the same applies to sexuality. Cis people have no issues expressing their identity as cis daily. To draw a parallel to the black lives matter movement, the reason #AllLivesMatter is offensive is not because all lives DONT matter, but because it negates the efforts of other people to raise awareness of minority issues. Similarly, nobody is going to give you shit for being cis unless you do some thing like try to start a heterosexual pride day--that's just the norm, EVERY day is heterosexual pride day. You can be joyful of your sexuality daily and express how much you enjoy it to the world. It's called pop music!
Secondly, there was a lot of talk about a class binary. This isn't really a thing outside of dialectical materialism, to my knowledge, and the rhetoric about the 1% vs the 99%. Neither of those describe a social class structure but certain interesting economic behaviors characteristic of the times in question. A revolution is inherently binary; a class queer economic revolution isn't an idea that makes sense.
Third, the mention of the end of sexual reproduction was... Weird. I'm not sure what that has to do with anything but the end of the male sex thought experiment. Certainly not related to anything happening today.
At this point, I stopped reading. Some sources or building on other material would be helpful to see the conclusions in an incremental manner; this reads as a manic rant by a young student who reads philosophy but neglected anything about the topic in question.
I'm not sure I agree with that wording. To be clear:
* No lives matter outside the narrow scope of humanity.
The universe is an uncaring void. In the context of the
universe, no lives matter.
* Within the context of human society, all lives should
matter. Fairness requires a certain amount of equality
and equity.But nobody has argued that all lives don't matter. Nobody has argued that black lives matter more than any other lives. It is not the statement itself that is offensive, it is the hashtag used to deny systemic racism by shouting over people attempting to raise visibility to a minority cause--often unarmed black men being brutalized or shot and killed by police.
It's like someone gets hurt, and then you start talking about how everyone gets hurt, too, instead of giving the person help. Perhaps there are better ways to communicate the initial half but I haven't been able to figure out a better brand off the top of my head.
Edit: also I think the reason the #AllLivesMatter movement has been so successful is because who wouldn't agree with that statement? You must think not all lives matter! Which is a little silly and, I think, is intended as self-reassurance that these #AllLivesMatter proponents can self-love as the #BlackLivesMatter movement self-loves.
> They seem to only want to be mad at police and not fix things.
Well, having some sort of change is the point of the movement. Cookouts aren't going to discourage the eager use of lethal force, even if they are good at reducing tension in the community.
I can't speak further on that without understanding to which city's movement you're referring.
Also, you don't use lethal force on people you aren't afraid of (somewhat of a generalization here). Cookouts DO help.
Anyway, I'm speaking mostly from headlines and not research or IRL experience. I probably shouldn't do that.
But again, the movement and attitudes vary from city to city and there's a lot of posturing for politics. I think there's a fear that there will be a culture change (which IS positive, I think we can all agree) without changes to the underlying problems that enable police brutality without consequence: lack of civilian oversight, the fraternity order of police, the emphasis of lethal force in split-second decision making. It makes me sick there have been no convictions thus far, and that needs to change before people can trust the police to, well, police themselves.
There's also a huge overlap with gun violence. That's a topic I won't touch here with a ten foot pole due to its complexity.
The speechifying conventioneers of the last several weeks had enough trouble pronouncing "LGBT". A more mellifluous acronym (or, dare one suggest, actual word) would make this an easier topic to discuss, but perhaps that wouldn't do justice to it: is every new letter a new inclusiveness?
TFA takes the bathroom brouhaha as its starting point. ISTM the only tenable long-term solution is to have any number of single-toilet rooms, each of which may be used by whoever wants to use it. In locations that serve many people at once, these could be supplemented by a single many-toilet room, reserved for those who are comfortable eliminating in the presence of other humans. Future generations will laugh at us silly Victorians.
What justifies the limitation to the binary form of marriage? Why not even a marriage with animals? After all we already know about the finesse of animal emotions. Is to exclude marriage with an animal not a clear case of “speciesism,” an unjust privileging of the human species?
This is a question I like to entertain, and was wondering if the HN community had thoughts on the matter.
Most argue that romantic/sexual relationships with animals is wrong because: 1. an animal is incapable of consent. 2. even if the relationship was "consensual", there is a power dynamic that the human enjoys over the pet animal that the animal has little control over, so the relationship is still predicated on some kind of exploitation.
This suggests that we can only seek ethical relationships with intellectual and equally independent entities.
Now replace "animal" with "mentally disabled" or "children". Are they capable of consent? Who are they allowed to have a relationship with?
I am not suggesting that children or the mentally disabled are equivalent to animals - I just find the arguments very similar.
Edit: it's my life objective to maximize HN karma, so my feelings get hurt when I get downvoted. I'd like to hear why you disagree!
There are even camps in the (academic at least) queer community that argued against gay marriage: we should not be opting to include individual minority groups (while excluding others like the poly community, though the benefits and rights with those would be an absolute headache to legislate) in heterosexual norms, but working to remove the recognition heterosexual norms from secular government.
Even just renaming it from "marriage" to "civil union" would ameliorate a lot of the tension surrounding it. There's no reason a religious or personal ceremony should be of any interest to the government; it's only the rights and benefits that matter.
They don't exactly consent to being killed and eaten, either.
Looking for consistency in human ethics, particularly sexual ethics, always seemed a bit foolish to me. We didn't develop them with ethical consistency in mind, nor do our basic biological drives care.
There are cases where our ethical intuition breaks down altogether or gives contradictory answers depending on how you argue, such as the trolley problem, utilitarianism/deontology - and really, many of the great social liberal/conservative arguments are based on different ethical approaches to the same situation. Like the mathematical value of 0/0, it all depends on how you get there.
This is to be expected, since after all, we're social animals. Our ethics, such as the sense that murder is generally wrong, evolved and developed over many thousands of years as value systems (via government, law and religion) that preserved cooperative and successful societies. I expect meta-ethics/attempts to codify our ethics, in general, not to succeed, since they never developed as cohesive, all-encompassing systems in the first place. Our society's code of law is as close as we get, and that's a long way off being ethically coherent.
I don't even know how to approach the weird discourse on Jews....
[EDIT 2:] ...and now it's flagged again. Philosophy on HN casts pearls before swine. If I were illiterate I would call it "ironic". A simple essay that addresses matters of broad public discussion (certainly on HN) in slightly idiosyncratic fashion (not rude, not disrespectful, only a bit out of the rut of banal everyday discourse), is immediately round-filed by the right-thinking brigade? Could there be a more convincing proof of TFA's title?
The reactionary "whew I've made it in now close the bathroom door" position you ascribe to certain "T" people wouldn't be shared by all that many "Q" folk, although it is of a piece with some "G" voices elsewhere in this thread. There is a natural tension in any political coalition, between those who join for ethical reasons and those who are primarily self-interested (and, one supposes, those for whom the whole movement is only a political tool). Do we see some fraying around the edges?
Perhaps TFA is flamewar fodder, but that says more about this forum than about TFA itself, which when taken on its own terms is interesting and imaginative.
To be clear, I only ascribed a lack of uniform belief in "a voluntary abolition of gender, rendered possible by recent scientific progress in biotechnology and reproductive technologies", and thought it strange that the author assumed that trans people shared this vision.
I don't agree w/the article but that's why comments and voting are for, not flagging which feels almost as censoring.
2. Be excellent to each other.