So, my original plan was to take the time to fully respond to all of Malaria's initial statements as well as any new lines of discussion that came into play in the mean time, but that's not going to happen with how much action this thread is getting. Instead, I'm going to try to just cover as much as possible without responding to anything specifically.
Sounds good to me.
First of all, an excellent graphical scale of different hormones and neurotransmitters found in blood samples. Note that the scaling is logarithmic. As you can see, there's a huge difference between Males and Females for testosterone, estradiol, and progesterone. This is the cause of the major stereotypes that men are larger, more muscular, and more emotionally consistent than women, and women have better memory, more "common sense", and are smaller than men. These are accurate claims when looking at modes, medians, and averages; they are well-supported by neuroscience, psychological science, and chemical biology.
Ohmijesus so much science I have no practical grasp of. You'll have to forgive me for deferring to Random's interpretation of the data, because I don't have the knowledge base needed to draw any conclusions.
I'm more able to speak to the danger of turning the average into the expectation, and the power of reinforced expectation. When you tell someone, directly and indirectly throughout their lives, that they will be emotionally consistent, they will work to appear more emotionally consistent. Unless, by chance, they happen to have been raised in an environment that discouraged that sort of social programming, or they are smart and self-aware enough to reject it on their own. In which case, they get looked at strangely by everyone around them that did and does subscribe to that programming, programming which doesn't include tolerance for people outside the norm. Thus, those who aren't exact medical average, and instead exist in the many unacknowledged liminal spaces of sex and gender, suffer from the intolerance of those who have very set ideas of what each sex should do and be like.
When I say people in a liminal space, I don't necessarily mean trans people or genderqueer or intersex people. I mean women who aren't inherently very empathic or men who aren't inherently very muscular. By allowing prejudice based on something as variable as the medical average, we encourage the suffering of those who aren't the medical average, and we give ourselves leave to make assumptions and judgment
That said, it is entirely inappropriate to judge an individual based on an attribute of a population which that individual identifies with,
Glad we're agreed.
but it really can't be prevented,
Of course it can. Widespread social movements in the last twenty years have vastly improved the social acceptability of queer people, when for a long time we had all sorts of “science” that told us they were bad, evil perverts and pedophiles. Knowing that we've made mistakes like that in the past, going forward we can make the conscious choice to judge people based on their individual qualities, rather than depending on science which, as Random pointed out, is unclear at best.
yet there comes a point when stereotyping is widely accepted as bad (generally when the legal system and societal moralities dictate as such).
Just because we think a thing is generally bad doesn't mean we do anything to actively prevent its implementation. Most stereotyping is written write into our psyches by years and years of messaging about what qualities various types and classes of people have.
In the communities in which most of the people involved in this discussion currently exist, that is the case.
See above. We stereotype whether we think it's a good idea or not. You do it, I do it. Only with constant vigilance and critical examination of our judgments of individuals can we discover what stereotypes might be coloring our perception of those individuals.
Certainly, there are other countries and even a few states or small communities here and there where sexism is not considered bad, but most of us operate within environments where it is.
It really, really depends on what you mean by sexism. It's almost never so simple as “women bad, men good,” or “women should be in the kitchen, men should be doing hard labor.” The sort of sexism that we encounter on a day to day basis is passed over as “the way it should be,” like in Griffinclaw Princess's post. Her opinions aren't abnormal. She spoke rather eloquently for the silent majority.
That being the case, activism is really quite counterproductive. By drawing attention to something like that, you make people think about it, and when people think about sexism, well, they're thinking about it.
I think it's great when people are forced to reconsider their underlying assumptions. When people can effectively question themselves, they become more thoughtful and are likely to act more conscientiously.
If they don't think about it, but they subconsciously know it's bad, sexism is gone.
Not thinking about it doesn't mean people aren't encountering, it just means they don't care. You can't call the days before any sort of feminist movement not sexist just because it wasn't a concern for anyone. Ignorance isn't absence.
The fight for sexual equality has made a lot of progress in the last 100 years. Today, organized activism is trivialized in our society.
I sort of agree with you here in the general sense. The combination of emotional distancing and ease of organization through the Internet has made activism easy to the point where people feel as if they've contributed to a cause just by joining a Facebook group.
The fight for equality is, as has been said, never won, but you can't win unless you fight the enemy. Sexism against women, as it exists today, is largely caused by women drawing attention to the fact that they are, in fact, women.
You can't dismiss the sexism I and many others experience in our day to day lives. As I said above, just because you are ignorant of it does not make it absent.
Society teaches us to have a strong emotional attachment to our respective genders, and by becoming attached to our genders, we mold ourselves into the stereotypes we claim to be fighting against. A woman who wear's womens' clothing then complains about being labeled a woman is a hypocrite.
I don't know if you haven't noticed, but the stereotypes for what women are and do are expansive. More than any woman could really be. A lot of women want people to stop expecting them to fit those stereotypes and instead allow them to be whatever it is they are that isn't “womanly”: hate children, be childfree, be aggressive, be sloppy, be loud, love sports, focus on their careers, be perfectly happy without a man in their lives, suck at cleaning and all the rest of the things that women are regularly told that they shouldn't be, aren't, won't ever be. My skirt doesn't mean I want to have children, that I'm emotionally comforting, that I want to have sex. It means I like my skirt. The stifling and narrowing of women's self-expression, such that they have to be constantly vigilant of what messages they're sending because there's so much wrapped up in every move a woman makes, is one of the reasons I am such an activist. It sucks living that way. I don't like, and I don't want it for anyone else. There's nothing hypocritical about wanting to be taken for an individual, rather than a set of stereotypes. There's no hypocrisy, just a bunch of loaded assumptions being made by everyone who isn't the individual in question.
As Ghandi said, "Be the change you wish to see in others." Stop trying to change the whole world and just change yourself. Exist within your own appropriate world and the world will change itself upon observing your wellness.
As much as I can be, I am the change I wish to see in others. But it's really hard to lead by example when the example is a ruthless second-guessing of every impression I form of a person, evaluating for irrational judgments made based on inculcated stereotypes of which I don't know the full depth or breadth.
This philosophy is lovely but doesn't apply to my situation or that of any other woman. I don't have the option of existing in my own appropriate world. It doesn't exist.
The concept of rape culture is something I really want to address, because it's really something that the feminist movement took and tried to use, and it's been terribly counterproductive.
Except for all those victims who've been empowered to report their rapists, get help for any psychological trauma and counter-victim blaming advocacy.
I fear rape and sexual predation.
Hey, me too! Doesn't change the fact that it's disproportionately a cis man-on-cis woman crime.
While I won't divulge details since it's not something I'm really comfortable discussing publicly, I will say that I have been sexually violated in the past by both women and men, and I can say with utmost confidence that the correspondence of rape and gender has nothing to do with sexual inequality.
Your experience, for which you have my sympathy, is extraordinary. However, we have attitudes about what constitutes consent, specifically about women, that do make it an issue for and about women. Women are perceived as “asking for it” and inherently consenting when exhibiting any number of behaviors. Things like being dressed attractively, (the standards for which vary pretty wildly) flirting (or being perceived as flirting), being drunk high or otherwise impaired are all taken as “implied” consent. Women who are raped while dressed well, not sober or after talking to a guy for a while are often perceived as somehow complicit in their own rapes. Men who date rape women who were too drunk to consent get off scot free all the time, just because we have set beliefs about how women should respond to men's sexual advances. In worse cases, where it's impossible for wives to accuse husbands of rape, it becomes an issue of consistently valuing the wants and needs of men over that of women in something so basic as what we do with our bodies. In that situation, women exist at least partially to attend to the needs of their (male) partner at their own expense, because as a society, we value the sexual needs of men more than the safety and security of women.
Almost all rape is a declaration of false superiority, used by people who are insecure about their value, and wish to enhance their image of self-worth by expressing sexual dominance over another person.
Or, as in a lot of cases, a declaration by the rapist that their wants and needs come before those of their victim.
Some posted at some point that rape rates are 1 in 3 for women, and 1 and 10 for men. Those are wrong. Those might be reported rates, but those are absolutely wrong. Most rapists threaten their victims to keep them quiet. Most victims are children. Most people have mysterious holes in their childhood where there seems to be no memories.
1 in 3 is the largest estimate I see, 1 in 6 the most conservative. Just fyi. Haven't seen anything other than 1 in 10 for men, though. And those statistics do take into account the frequency of unreported rapes. I don't know the formula for it, so I can't comment on its validity.
Rape is a disturbing sociopathic act which violates every law and moral imaginable. It occurs an act of theft, assault, adultery, murder, gluttony, envy, extortion, blackmail, and so much more. By accusing men, many--if not most--of whom have been sexually abused at some point in their lifetime (whether they're willing to remember it or not) that they are guilty of cultivating rape culture is incredibly destructive to self esteem. That brings us right back to the actual cause of rape: our society is frequently demoralizing to people who haven't actually done anything wrong, and feminism is a big finger-pointer.
They'll stop being accused when they stop cultivating it. Every time a man chooses to see a woman as an object rather than as a whole person, and shares that choice with the men around him, the value of women as a whole is diminished. The less men value women, the more likely they are to put their desires ahead of those of the woman, and hey, suddenly we get our rate of rape, which is stunningly high in comparison to other industrialized nations.
I'd argue that it takes a certain amount of confidence to rape someone. You have to feel as if you are more powerful than them to begin with, that you can get away with it, that it's okay for you to do so, even that it's your right. It makes sense that the consistent privileging of men over women carries over into sex, too.
I also want to address the issue of perception here. I'm not victimized by sexism against women, since I'm not one and have a pretty huge moustache which declares me not one, but I am the victim of sexism, and what I see is something that happens on a very individual level.
The patriarchy hurts everyone, it's true. Expectations of behavior go both ways, and are equally harmful to all people who try to function outside the norm. However, the status quo gets men all sorts of nice things to with their social taboos. Assumptions about emotional reliability and clarity, suitability to positions of authority, all these things are yours just for having a penis!
Re: acting individually. No one acts in a vacuum. Individual actions are influenced by social norms are influenced by individual actions.
The sexism that happens isn't universally held, and therefor it's a personal, case-by-case situation, not something that needs to be addressed to society.
When the personal sexism is endemic to the whole society, then it should be addressed by the society and the individual.
If a population of men is sexist against a woman, that woman should absolutely call them out on it, and since our legal system's bogus, a lot of the time it won't work out too great, such as in goatchild's story. However, a bogus legal system doesn't equate to sexism. It equates to a bogus legal system that doesn't always give enough of a damn to uphold law and liberty. Women get shafted; so do men. Back to goatchild's story, yeah, her family encountered some sexism in the medical field. Then they managed to find a place where sexism wasn't an issue.
A legal system that doesn't pursue the claims of women because it assumes that the claims are always frivolous is totally sexist. The point is that women get shafted differently just because they're women.
The sexism in Goatchild's story shouldn't have been happening at all. We shouldn't dismiss it just because her mother succeeded in finding better conditions for herself. We should be enraged that it happened in the first place, because no one deserves to have their skills and their experience undervalued just because of their sex or gender.
Again, sexism exists, but it's far from universal. Equality for women in most industries is pretty balanced. In the few were it isn't, look at who's running them. Old white men. So old white men are sexist.
Old white men are sexist, but so are the rest of us. You and me and everyone else who was raised in our sexist society.
Equality for women in most industries isn't balanced at all. Hard sciences, especially, struggle to recruit a parity of men and women, because women are often discouraged from going into science, math or engineering. Not as much as before, but still a problem. Corporate management is still dominated by men, too.
Well that's nothing new. The good news is they'll die/retire/get replaced soon, and eventually everyone running everything in the US will have lived their entire lives in societies where sexism was universally considered a bad thing, same with racism, or if you want an example of something that would have gotten me excluded from almost all aspects of society and possibly murdered a few hundred years ago, left-handedness. Society finds really stupid reasons to exclude people, but would you take me seriously if I started pushing for equal rights for lefties? I wouldn't take me seriously.
The people who benefit from the discrimination of old white guys, the slightly younger white male successors, aren't going to give up all the privilege they get from discrimination. I mean, maybe it'll be better. But as far as I'm concerned, it's never better fast enough. It's never enough until we are actually judging people based on who they really are, rather than the stereotypes we've decided they represent.
… Did you just try to say that racism isn't an issue anymore? Because that is straight up not true. This isn't my area of expertise, but just a quick look at the rates of poverty by ethnicity will tell you there is something very wrong with how our wealth is distributed, even generations after we supposedly ended all discrimination on the basis of race.
I just consulted with a couple lefties, (critical types, sensitive to inculcated biases) and according to my extremely shotgun poll, lots of people are apparently kind of jerks to lefties, intolerant of an inherent difference that is part of their lives. Since we live in a right-handed oriented world, lefties are expected to cope with industries that almost uniformly produce instruments, such as scissors, that don't suit how they function at all. Those concerns are dismissed with a casual “use your non-dominant hand, it's no big deal,” but I can attest from many a stupid, bored experiment that using your non-dominant hand is hard. If we can put ramps in sidewalks so alter-abled people can use our streets, we can give lefties scissors they can use properly. So we should stop being jerks to lefties and give them their scissors.
All that, right there? Perfectly serious. No one should
ever have to suffer
at all because of intolerance or apathy countenanced by privilege.
With the exception of a few very backwards states, women in the US have full equal rights.
On paper. I'm more interested in the subtle discriminations that shape the lives of women.
Far moreso than gays, transexuals, asexuals, hermaphrodites, Latinos, muslims, and other populations. Women are discriminated against. That's a real shame, which is why I choose not to discriminate against women, and I'm in full support of anyone else who chooses not to discriminate against women. If I witness discrimination against a woman, I call the offender out on it if it's something significant, because I'm not okay with discrimination, and I do the exact same thing when I see anyone being discriminated against.
That's very noble of you. That doesn't mean you know what the real time extent of sexism is in our society. It's okay if you don't really want to think about it, or don't like the way it's framed, but it'd be cool if you respected the need for those who are suffering from it to identify and address those concerns as they saw necessary in order to improve their own standard of living.
Slightly more concretely, when endemic sexism is limiting access to healthcare, both reproductive and otherwise, women get knocked down to the second level of Maslow's pyramid. You might not think of the attitudes underlying these problems as problematic in and of themselves, because you seem to believe that medical averages justify the stereotyping of women's emotional stability, which feeds into a societal perception of the lack of reliability re: women's own medical decisions and judgments, but reducing the quality of life for whole swaths of people like that is just not cool.
Jews, Christians, Canadians; some people grow up thinking bigotry's alright and all you have to do is tell them personally: "That's not okay." Usually that's all it takes. Feminism, as most often observed, is impersonal. It's a population addressing the public. That was great in the 40's and 50's when legal rights were really being established, and it worked fine for 30 years prior and after, but now it's not the way to go about it.
That's what it takes to get them to stop one particular behavior when they're in your presence specifically. Doesn't change underlying damaging attitudes.
I find feminism very personal. It's my way of seeking a greater standard of living.
As I said above, it's not so much about legal rights anymore. It's about assumptions and stereotypes that underpin consistent mistreatment of women.
Also, you should really leave it to the activists themselves to decide how to go about their causes. Seeing as they're the ones working at them constantly, seeing what works and what doesn't.
Malaria, maybe you're a personal feminist. Maybe you don't go to rallies and watch Oprah; maybe you're like me and just call people out when you see discrimination which I'm totally chill with, but then why do you declare yourself a feminist? Why not just say "I fight for equal rights and to end discrimination"? If you see unjust discrimination against a Moslem, do you call the offending party out on it? Do you believe that Women are entitled to certain rights that others who suffer from discrimination just as much or more are not entitled to? Because that is what I see when I see feminism; I see people who are too busy supporting the rights of one population to give proper attention to others more in need.
Oprah really isn't my brand of feminism. She does good work, but I don't find anything particularly interesting about her show or her empire. Thinking about it, I don't know any self-identified feminists that look to Oprah as a feminist touchstone. She ain't no Gloria Steinem.
In terms of causes outside feminism, I am better read, more critical and more capable of commenting on daily discriminations oriented around sexism than I am of any other -ism. So I am
primarily a feminist. But then we stumble on something known in feminist circles as intersectionality, where the rights of women intersect with eco justice, reproductive rights, racism, ableism, look-ism, access to education, access to basic material needs and a thousand other issues. I care about all of it, but feminist issues are where I am most able to act, and it makes the most sense for me to dedicate my energy where I can act most effectively. Everyone has a niche cause, and that's much better than everyone trying to push for some general, overly broad set of changes. Depth is more important than breadth, when it comes to individuals trying to instigate radical social change. As has been discussed previously in the thread, there is a whole complex of -isms that need to be addressed in the world and everyone does what they can so that in the end everyone can get as much of what they need in terms of an end to discrimination and an increase in social and economic justice. Feminists aren't suggesting that we should privilege an end to discrimination for women above that of others, especially since a lot of feminists also happen to be women of color who would like to see an end to the racism in their lives. All activists act concurrently, sometimes counter-productively, as effectively as they can.
I will not pansy out and fail to say that I am a feminist, because that ignores the stigmatization of that word. This is what a feminist looks like: I am not a stereotype of a bulldyke or a bra burner or a misandrist. There is nothing wrong with clearly stating my intention to fight for equality of sexes and genders. Just because I say I'm a feminist doesn't mean I'm not also a humanist, but failure to address issues specifically is a failure to act effectively.
I am a feminist because I put energy, thought and consideration into how to make my world less sexist specifically. I don't just “call people out” when I notice something wrong. Negative enforcement can only do so much. Forward motion and progress are needed to resolve the issues associated with sexism and every other -ism. The sort of behavior that you're advocating is pretty passive. It only addresses problems when they're obvious. I want to eliminate root causes. I want the media to stop brandishing girl and boy children with caricatures of who they are and who they should be, because I don't want them to grow up thinking they should be a particular way just because of their genitalia. I want companies to stop underpaying their women employees. I want to stop hearing terrible, nonsense generalizations about what women are or what men are and what they should be. So I'm a feminist.
