The argument I've encountered goes more like this: Because there has been historical oppression, we can't easily distinguish the influence of that from biology and should remove the oppression before we come up with biological theories that justify the oppression. That seems reasonable to me.
I completely agree with your original post but it's hard to deny there's a turd in the feminist kool-aid bowl and no one is willing to pull it out.
I am sorry, I don't see how that would be the same as "denying any difference between men and women". Do you really think, or even have proof which shows, that playing with dolls or wearing dresses is biologically, not socially, "male"?
A lot of clothing conventions for males in past centuries would pass as "female" today. Until the late 19th century it was common for small boys to wear dresses, see [1] for an example.
Besides, I myself played with dolls as a small boy and as far as I can tell did take no harm. That might be different if those boys grow up around homophobic people who bully them for playing with dolls or wearing dresses.
[1]: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-did-girls-st...
Personally I am not really sure if there even is something like a predisposition for sexual preference. Does someone have recommended readying about that?
A) Queerness and sexual preference aren't equivalent ideas.
B) Saying something is a predisposition is saying it's a product of nature+environment. There are clear cases of socialization(Greeks, Papua New Guinea). On the other hand the drive to procreate is pervasive, overpowering, and considered nature.
C) I don't downvote. But I imagine it's because this thread is orthogonal to the dialogue.
There isn't a logical conflict there of course, sexuality could be a social construct despite gender not being that simple, ...it just seems odd to me. I suspect that sexuality, like gender, is not that simple.
The concept of sexual orientation is a social construct. Unquestionably. It's an idea that's pretty much unique to our culture (modern western countries primarily). Other cultures throughout history had different concepts that were quite different.
The fact that different people experience sexual or romantic attraction differently, and that not everyone is simply attracted only to the opposite sex, is not a social construct. It's a fact.
So it can be both. Just like gender is both.
Add to that the fact that identity carries with it social constructs offered by society, cognitive and psychological individual factors, etc, and that this does not rule out some biological factors regarding how the individual relates to the rest of these.
So "merely" meaning to the exclusion of other factors, sure. But that doesn't mean that the social constructs might not even be at the forefront.
I belive there were some experiments with babies by Trond Diseth that showed that babies have a natural tedency towards interacting with gender specific toys.
Also, it's a fact of life that men who lose their temper in any he-said-she-said conflict often receive a knee-jerk judgement from those around them, which makes it difficult for onlookers to evaluate their case from first principles. (Such knee-jerk happens to females in other contexts.)
We're still subject to many illusions from the same Victorian age mentality that deemed wolves "bad" and that killing them off was an environmental good.
That's an idealization that's not congruent with the historical culture and behavior of many feminists.
Up until the 80's feminism was heteronormative and transphobic. In fact, transphobia is still a huge problem in the community.[1] These are just the more concrete examples. For most of its history feminism has been a straight white upper middle class movement. The perspective of those not fitting this demographic have been marginalized within feminism at some point.
>I hate that the label itself is gendered and I wish it would be changed, but the principles of "feminism" include "Men's Rights". Breaking "Men's Rights" out as a separate topic only muddies the waters, dilutes the efforts for the same goals, and introduces a divide that shouldn't be there in the first place!
Masculism was started by a group of feminists who were kicked out of National Organization for Women(N.O.W) for advocating equal custody in divorce. Gender Studies is inclusive in theory but not in practice.
Imagine if the History department had an aggregation of white supremacists. They were allowed to have their own department, their own academic journals, and even held positions of power like Dean. Would their more inclusive peers not hold some responsibility in enabling these bigots? I know you're pointing out the good side of gender studies but you're also being apologetic and enabling radicalized feminism.
Every feminist and their mom is quick to point out how feminism is inclusive whenever this discussion comes up. Very few of them actually stand up to transphobia, misandry, and countless other forms of bigotry in their circles.
To be a feminist, one must advocate for women's rights at a bare minimum.
Everything else is completely up to the individual, and the fact is there exist lots of schools with contradictory opinions on major social issues. Sex-positive/sex-negative, pro-traditional femininity (lipstick feminist)/anti-traditional femininity, pro-trans/transphobic (TERF), political lesbian, separatist, postmodernist (the prevailing type of feminism in mainstream journalism and academia today), pro-life/pro-choice, complementarian and so on.
Bottom line is, let's stop treating feminism like some omnibenevolent movement for equal rights, and as if radicals are just "fringes who don't make a difference". This is not true anymore. Feminism got derailed decades ago. Go read any large feminist publication like Feministing or Jezebel, and it embraces the toxicity of postmodern feminism.
This ignores the fact that "feminism" is not a coherent movement.
Bingo.
BTW, anyone who thinks it is a coherent movement needs to read this feminist critique of obstetrics(which expands to a critique of modern medicine and mainstream feminism):
"Birth as an American Rite of Passage" by Robbie Davis-Floyd. Better to read the second edition than the first.
You might not find it as enlightening, but it offers a pretty rational approach.
> I hate that the label itself is gendered and I wish it would be changed, but the principles of "feminism" include "Men's Rights". Breaking "Men's Rights" out as a separate topic only muddies the waters, dilutes the efforts for the same goals, and introduces a divide that shouldn't be there in the first place!
In my opinion and based on my own readings, I think that feminists want to maintain a monopoly on philosophy of gender equality. Yes, I said philosophy; feminism is an ideology. And while there is nothing wrong about ideologies, there can be many ideologies about the same subject. Thankfully for feminists, though, ideologies about gender can be divided into:
- Different feminist paradigms - Sexists and homophobes
At least as far as most people are concerned. But maybe somebody wants to create a new philosophy of gender, a philosophy that might be in part mutually exclusive w.r.t some feminist "dogmas"? Well, great; now the feminists can readily shoot down these ideologies because they are "sexist", merely because of the fact that some of their views oppose some of the common feminist views. Hey, if it's not feminism, or it contradicts some feminist viewpoints, then it surely must be sexist, since feminism is the perfect incarnation of egalitarianism... right?
It isn't surprising that some women want to have a wider forum for discussing things that pertain to women in particular (that is; people that identify as women). Gender equality or not, most women probably have experiences that are different from men in some regards, and vice versa. So how about men have something like a Men's Right's movement, or whatever you want to call it? Nope, they say; we already have this thing called feminism. You shouldn't need anything else. OK, so say you give up on having a male community, even though women can have their own female communities, and try to assimilate into some feminist community. Now you have to just hope that they accept you as an equal, not just as a male ally.
But yeah, feminism is all you'd ever need. A real swiss knife for tackling anything related to gender...
Likewise, feminists believe their ideology is based upon the principle of not hating women, therefore disagreement with their ideology amounts to misogyny. But they aren't revealing their interlocutors as misogynists; they're revealing themselves as Ayn Rand.
[1] There is considerable controversy about the lengths to which Ayn Rand would go to condemn people for their irrationality due to personal disagreements, but treat this story as a parable; its literal truth is beside the point.
If that were true, it would be called "humanism".
Is that sufficient?
is that abuse?
I don't think you can really 'force' a child to play, so I discount the part about playing with dolls being potentially 'abusive'.
While I certainly advocate that parents have the right to dress their kids in varied styles, I would highly advise against certain styles. "It doesn't matter" perhaps legally, but it does matter socially. (I work in an inner city school; I'm aware of at least two serious suicide comments by kids whose ages are in the single digits, at least partly due to social status.)
I basically agree with you. But, please do it anyway. It could be interesting.
How do we remove something we can't cleanly delineate? The answer is pragmatically, but while holding to our other principles.
If you wish to find oppression, after following the money, note who is silencing those who are tolerant and sincerely wish to trade in ideas and the truth.
There's a very vocal subset of any group of people that has extreme opinions. Within the feminist movement, the vitriolic anti-male segment has really shrunk since the 1970's, and if anything there is a much bigger subset today that seek to validate and justify traditional gender roles.
In my personal experience, I've encountered a decent number of men who point to innate gender differences to justify the skewed representation of women in engineering. I have also encountered a decent number of feminists who embrace traditional gender roles. I have yet to encounter any feminist of the vitriolic anti-male persuasion, though I read about them in my American Legal History class. In the mainstream media, I've read a few articles along the lines of Susan Patton's regressive letter urging Princeton women to "find a husband" while they had the opportunity to do so at an Ivy League institution, but none of the vitriolic anti-male screeds that people assure me exists.
It's also a tiny and unpopular subsection of the feminist movement. They're outnumbered a hundred to one by dudes who like to use them as strawmen.
> only recently has the value of women in society dropped to that of men.
I don't think that makes any sense. I mean, I literally don't understand what you're trying to say, and none of your assertions seem to be relevant to each other.
Hardly.
Virtually every feminist scandal that attracts any attention whatsoever is about postmodern feminists and their oversensitive antics.
The most popular feminist media, including Feministing and Jezebel, as well as articles on HuffPost and Slate, deal with postmodern radical ideologies.
Academia has also long been dominated by them.
Either they're not some "tiny and unpopular subsection" and actually a majority, or the logically vast majority of "reasonable" (depending on your views) feminists are doing precisely jack shit.
Is this the same viewpoint that says that all Muslims are terrorists because those are the ones that make the news? (Because "Local Mosque-Goers Are Pleasant Neighbors" doesn't sell newspapers.)
Obviously sensationalism sells. But the issue here is that your initial assertion of postmodern feminists being a "tiny and unpopular subsection" is a falsehood. As I said, most popular feminist publications today, both in mainstream journalism and in academia, belong to the former school.
This includes the feminism in the tech industry, the ideology of which is expressed in resources like the Geek Feminism Wiki, perhaps the crown of everything that is wrong with postmodernism summed up into a single anecdotal wiki with virtually no editorial standards beyond "Does it fit in the echo chamber?".
Then, let's face it: when postmodernists and radicals get all the attention, while all the supposed good and moderate feminists receive absolutely none... you have a problem. Your movement is being hijacked. You can underestimate the issue all you want, but the fact is it's the postmodernists who are actually making an influence.
Think about it this way: which sex has historically been unequally represented in the most dangerous jobs? And which sex is STILL the only sex that has to sign up for the draft?
And sure they're relevant.
Well said, but I think you've lowballed this figure.
Is it? Pretty much every discussion here about women in IT is quickly dominated by those voices. See e.g. the recent "bro pages" hate.