How about asking women how they feel about men’s behavior towards them, though? If we see things differently does that even play into your views at all?
regarding women. So, yes, women are involved. This isn’t about how men have changed in regards to some non-gendered issue, like their shoes or their choice of cars. It’s about men’s behavior towards women, hence it’s an issue of gender. It’s also about how men think about themselves and their relationship to women.
[ETA] Also, are men somehow magically not a gender? Discussions on gender isn’t just about women, but about men (and everyone on the spectrum of gender identity). Why is it only a gender issue if women are brought into the discussion?
Because men are the default! Gender studies is only ever about the non-default; i.e. women or non-penis havers.
Speaking of gender differences, did you know that women die waiting on the heart transplant list more than men because the artificial hearts designed to keep them alive while they wait for their donor hearts are TOO BIG for most women’s chests? http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-heart-two-sizes-too-big
Its like gender bias is insidious and wound so deeply through our culture or something!
But yes, its better than it was. We got the vote! Go sufferage!
That’s exactly what I’m saying. They’re the same people. Your narrative pretends that hippie attitudes towards getting laid meant that something markedly different happened in the 1980s.
It didn’t. The same sexism existed before AIDS destroyed “free love”, and guess what!
This is an outrage! Nobody has ever dared to say such a thing to me before! XD
Quite the opposite, I would say. The GOP, and other authoritarians, tend to be “essentialists” who insist that their categories and value judgements are not really theirs, but something which exists apart from themselves or their group in “the real world” of their self-identified brand of “common-sense”. But of course, my created category of “GOP” is not the same as the one the GOP themselves use, despite the symbol appearing the same.
I think they are. People strive to institutionalize their subjectivities on a large scale because they imagine that it empowers them. But I think it ultimately creates more subtle perceptual problems in society. Legal and governmental technologies are just as symbolic of the underlying realities as happens in language.
Does it? My guess would be that you find what I am saying disagreeable, and so are deciding to make it about me. I think that we are coming at this from opposite ends. The only reason why people would need to enable equality is if they perceive human relations as defaulting to fundamental inequality. How I see it is that equality is more objective, except that people try to rationalize it away for their own perceived aggrandizement. Nobody has to do anything to achieve social justice, apart from giving up on their irrational egotism.
For example, if there are going to be 7,000,000,000 people on Earth, there is no objective basis to explain why one of them should be me. I am programmed to think that it matters, but it is trivial to demonstrate that it objectively doesn’t. So an infinitude of self-serving biases can rationalize that I am entitled to exist, that I am special because I am ME and you are not. But this is not really based upon anything reasonable. Anybody can say that! And it isn’t any more true for them or for me. It is an unthinking reflex. It doesn’t matter which rationalization I choose to explain why I think “my” organism/family/ideology/genes/country/ethnicity are the ones which deserve to be here rather than others, because these rationalizations are simple extensions of the same process, and work the same way. This is the root cause of all social injustice, and where the solution lies. Arguing about the categories and labels on their own merits is prioritizing the symptom rather than the cause.
I mean that kind of first world problems hate we all know and love, I would hope you don’t truly loathe the students you are around.
I’m 30, so it’s hard for me to say my brother had it any better. I think it’s much easier to find yourself a cozy echo chamber when you are in doubt to reaffirm your beliefs, but it’s also easier to do the reverse. I think the second coming of 80s conservatism in the 00s hurt, and I find white men are particularly openly hostile in a way that scares me sometimes. But I also think that hostility comes from a place of “we must defend the Alamo” much like the ultra-religious. At least, that’s how I see it in others I know personally. I don’t think TV or advertising has changed at all, and when I go into a store there are still embarrassing boy and girl toy sections - add in the freely accessible pornography and there are more expectations involved.
I listened to the “Tell Me I’m Fat” episode of This American Life this week, and it is a prime example of how obvious sexism can be and people refuse to admit its there. I mean, the episode has Elna Baker have a conversation with her newly married husband about how she feels like she sacrificed a significant part of herself to keep thin and successful and her husband mansplains that she is wrong and the real her is the her now - and that’s just a tiny fraction of this episode. I know I’m more sensitive to it now than ever before, but it’s rough and makes me wish I could do more for my wife who sees it constantly.
I don’t really see it as a question of perception. Whether you believe it’s the default or not, there are undeniably fundamental inequalities in human relations today, which can be measured empirically.
You might be right that this would all go away if we all just decided to stop categorizing the world (although I think you are conflating “categorization” and “assigning value” a bit - a dollar bill and four quarters have equal value, but there are lots of situations where it still makes sense to categorize them differently). I’d suggest that there is a large body of research into things like Game Theory, not to mention pretty much all of human history, that suggests this is not likely to suddenly happen on it’s own.
Given that reality, “enabling equality” seems like a fairly noble pursuit to me.
Humans for good and ill are inherently categorical.
Anyone who claims to not participate in this passively to actively is a liar, really. Pretending to not be a racist doesn’t make you not programmed with racist thoughts and ideas.
Self honesty is required, and that will never ever be possible in a “race blind” person. They’ll just pretend to be better with no hard decisions to ever affect their sense of self and how they view others.
Categorization doesn’t have to assign value, but it does in most cases. Sadly, again the issue is that you need to break down the existing structure and categories, you can’t fucking opt-out.
Well, white guys don’t “see categories” so much as eat and breathe them, and no self-ascripted feminism will change that until they take the blinders off.
Saying that any attempts to correct systemic inequalities through targeted actions will only lead to perpetuating them further, and that all we need to do is change our perception, sure seems like a convenient way to avoid actually doing anything. Especially without putting forth any plan on how we might actually change those perceptions.
Doesn’t this still suggest an a priori presumption that some people are somehow “better”? It is subjective. I can be demonstrably better AT SOMETHING if we agree to choose a metric, such as making lime mousse or running a 100 yard dash. But without first establishing some shared criteria, better or worse are labels which don’t refer to anything specific. Saying that race is arbitrary is not the same as saying that it doesn’t exist. Is an Irish person “white”? Does a person who claims to be “white” have African ancestry? Is your race your genetics or your culture? And is this balance between them the same for you as it is for me? How many distinct races are there? For something which seems to have very real effects - there is not a lot of consensus here, and what consensus there is changes over time.
Perhaps even having a “sense of self” is taking the easy way out, of clinging to a symbolic identity which is largely a fabrication.
Whether or not to “opt-out” is hardly the issue. The values people associate with their categories are subjective. This is what I mean when I say “take responsibility for your categories” - if people are going to use them instead of be used by them, they need to create and evaluate them consciously. There is no default of which categories matter and which don’t. It depends upon who you ask. But when people methodically make a barest minimum of presumptions, then bigots need to speak up for their value judgements and can no longer pass them off as “defaults” for others. In practice, I find that this means needing to ask what being “men”, “millennial”, or “human” means to you, specifically. How does each participant in the discussion formulate those categories? And what are the assumptions nested in them? How can we get all of these explicit and air them out on the negotiating table, rather implicitly trying to sneak them under each others perceptual radar?
Are you not yourself pretending to be “better than those who ‘see race and gender’”?
We see them as constructs, sometimes even useful ones. We also need the eyes to see what others see in order to understand the forces in the world around us.
Usually they’re passed on and inscribed in our psyche. Ignoring programming just makes it subconscious and all the more harmful, because you can’t DO racist things or SAY anything racist or hateful, because you can’t see how that would ever be possible! After all, you have purged yourself of the very possibility.
I’m having some trouble following how your point actually applies to real world examples.
Sure, any time you categorize a person, you are arbitrarily choosing criteria with which to group them with others. When you say that there is a wage gap between men and women, for example, you are choosing to define men and women in a specific way, which may be different from the way someone else chooses to define them.
But quibbling over the specifics of how you chose to define a category ignores the reality that a wage gap exists between genders, and detracts from any conversation about what might be causing the gap, or how we might address the problem. Taken to its extreme, I would have to assume that you don’t think there is ever value in analyzing large data sets for trends, because each data point is unique. I think that is a very misguided view of things.
This seems to me to be a lot like countering #BlackLivesMatter with #AllLivesMatter. It doesn’t really add anything to the conversation about how to address the problem being discussed, and is ultimately counterproductive.
