With how the site is, now's a good a time as ever, right?

Recently met up with and had a conversation with an old acquaintance (who I respect in some ways more than others), noticed a few things.

It is easy for a man to have contempt for what culture and society claims are the follies of women: they are emotional, they do not know what they want, they play mindgames, they are petty. A woman's anger is considered hysterical. A woman's interest in fashion is a mark of her vapidity. A woman without a father has "daddy issues." These are reinforced and internalized over and over again, from an essentialist view, as 'irrational' behavior.

But when a man does not know what he wants, it is "him finding himself." When a man plays mindgames, he is smart and devious and a "magnificent bastard." When a man is petty and one-ups someone, it is an "alpha move." A man's anger is considered to be just, righteous, and awe-inspiring. A man's interest in fashion is a mark of his class. A man without a father is a noble tragedy.

People hate in others what they hate in themselves, as they say.

When girls write love letters to murderers in prison, society gasps collectively. How dare they! But when boys commit murder, we shrug and say... why wouldn't they?

It's easy to say you're a feminist or ally or whatever you want. But remember the society you came from sank its hooks in deep, and its fallacious appeals to nature ("Women just want to be mothers, and this is clear by how we pressure them to be mothers!") are persistent. Remember a lot of psychological and sociological research was performed on specific populations that aren't universally representative. Remember that sexual dimorphism and differences in brain structure are not the end-all. Don't ever stop being self-critical.

One of the rightists' greatest weaknesses is their inability to see the potential in half of the world population. Women hold up half the sky, and you're doomed to failure if you entertain ideas to the contrary.

  • sailorfish [she/her]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Let me give u what u crave bb :)

    Strong Sapir-Whorf is debunked and weak Sapir-Whorf is weak. The two results I always remember is that 1) Russian speakers can tell shades of blue apart sliiiiiightly better than other people because Russian basic colour terms differentiates between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy), and 2) speakers of some Australian aboriginal languages are better at knowing where north is because instead of using left-right, their language always uses cardinal directions (“The pen is to the west” instead of “The pen is to your left”). And the second one is kinda iffy anyway because there’s counter evidence that if an Australian aboriginal speaker moves to a different region, it’ll take them a while to learn to orient themselves properly - suggesting they go more by landmarks than knowing where north is like a bird or whatever.

    In regard to gender and languages specifically, I suppose there's some evidence that languages with grammatical gender influences how people perceive objects. In one experiment, when asked to describe a bridge, German speakers (die Brücke, feminine) called up adjectives like dainty, elegant, etc. while Spanish speakers (el puente, masculine) preferred adjectives like strong, sturdy. But crucially, this experiment is more about social perceptions and stereotypes and stuff, not that Spanish and German speakers have a different mental capabilities.

    Altogether, I think that this idea that language determines thought is uncomfortable for linguists because it slips into insane racism so quickly. "Chinese does not have morphological tense markings, the Chinese do not understand time the way we Westerners do!! The Ancient Greeks used the word typically translated as 'wine-coloured' to describe the sea, they were all colour-blind!! It is no wonder Indo-Europeans invented logical thinking, the subject-verb-object construction is uniquely suited to logic in a way those filthy foreigners with their verb-subject-object thinking are not!!"