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Comment by wutbrodo | Hacker News Reader

Exactly, racism is much more of a fully-stable equilibrium than sexism, since full dehumanization of the other sex is always going to be impossible, if only due to adjacency. And adjacency can be critical to rights movements: one of the big successes of the gay rights movement was combating the stereotype of evil deviants through a strategy of positioning gay people as neighbors, brothers, sons, etc; regular people who just happened to have a different sexuality.

By contrast, there's nothing stopping racial groups from tending towards being fully segregated from one another, to the point that people stop thinking of the other race as full humans instead of fuzzy stereotypes.

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> full dehumanization of the other sex is always going to be impossible

<gestures to entire history of sexism> .. I mean, the Saudi king has lots of wives but until recently wouldn't allow any of them to drive?

For a closer example, there are plenty of married Republican politicians who are willing to make statements on abortion that imply they have no idea how the reproductive system works.

> For a closer example, there are plenty of married Republican politicians who are willing to make statements on abortion that imply they have no idea how the reproductive system works.

If you think the abortion issue as simple as men oppressing women, you're horrendously misinformed, in a bubble of ideological ignorance, or both, given that women skew a decent amount less pro-choice than men.

(I say that as someone who's strongly pro-choice and, to my knowledge, has never met someone who's pro-life. I just don't think my bubble comprises the world or even the country)

> <gestures to entire history of sexism>

I'm not even sure where to start with this unsurprisingly unnuanced response to my model. Again, if your model of gender roles throughout history is as simple as "men lording power over women because they were able", you should pick up a history book. This middle-school model of history fails to explain the historical imbalance in torture, mutilation, violence, and early death (with corresponding imbalances on the other side in sexual violence, lack of agency, etc). There's no such two-sidedness inherent to racism, historically or theoretically, no analogue to things like "women and children first" that belie, as I said, "full dehumanization".

(I'm not remotely interested in comparing the levels of gender role oppression, historically or currently, because it doesn't have anything to do with my point, which was that there's no corresponding force pushing towards humanization of the victims of racism)

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/244709/pro-choice-pro-life-2018...

> For a closer example, there are plenty of married Republican politicians who are willing to make statements on abortion that imply they have no idea how the reproductive system works.

Such as?

The "way to shut that down" comment was the one that I was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Akin#Controversial_commen... , but I'm sure people can find others.

That's definitely one, for sure.

One is not plenty, last time I checked.

> full dehumanization of the other sex is always going to be impossible, if only due to adjacency

No surprise, then, that it shows up in the segment of men who are not "adjacent" to any women.

Nor is it a surprise that it shows up in any segment of children not exposed to healthy male influences. That knife cuts both ways.

Why leave out the symmetric case of women who are not "adjacent" to any men?

Right, that's one source of sexism, but not by any means a complete picture. The stereotype of the lothario who thinks of women as inferior is yet another one, as is the feminist who mocks both toxic masculinity and male tears.

You're never going to entirely escape from those who are just shitty people, but at the societal level, sexism is unique in that the groups of potential victims and potential perpetrators are intimately forced together, ij a way that isn't necessarily the case for racism or homophobia (when gay people are forced into the closet).

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