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.
I notice this in leftist circles when men will rail against AOC for doing something or saying anything that is even a little soc-demy. Meanwhile the same men won't say shit about Bernie ever, even though when it comes to words and deeds you'd be hard-pressed to find two politicians more similar than AOC and Bernie.
Bernie endorsed a rapist after decades seeing the shit Biden has done, whereas at least AOC is a young and relatively inexperienced person on the demsoc to democrat pipeline.
Nice post I want to add that the united state of america is the single most effective propaganda machine and a quote: Trans-misogyny is steeped in the assumption that femaleness and femininity are inferior to, and exist primarily for the benefit of, maleness and masculinity
That's actually something that's useful in explaining how America is a sexist society to people who claim it isn't, or that it's "separate but equal."
If America isn't sexist, why is women jumping into the roles of men considered to be brave and noble (as long as they give it up when the 'real' men show up), but when men jump into the role of women, it's laughed at or seen as horrible? Even for the so-called traditionalists who claim that women run the household and therefore hold equal power, why is "women's work" so terrible if it's so damn important?
The contradictions of the profiteering capitalist class' propaganda are clear when scrutinized from an intersectional perspective. To keep the ruling class from using their means to divide the working class so that the disparity in material conditions can continue.
One of the things I found odd is, even when it became more acceptable for upper-class women to enter more prestigious jobs (for women have always worked, as any historian can tell you), there was still the expectation of homemaking, despite now doing twice the labor of a man. A woman who fails to complete this double duty is then a bad mother or bad wife, while the "incompetent husband and father who gets kids ice cream for dinner" is considered charming.
While American culture has always been tied to capitalism, this shows one of the cases where capitalism is always moving faster than the culture, and the society struggles to keep up and make sense of a less socially sustainable world.
some have said "women be shopping," but i have observed them doing other things as well
This is a very serious claim, please take this to the womanology department of the anthropology department of the academy
yeah but were we shopping WHILE we did those things? like, im posting here, but I'm browsing etsy on my phone, and you had no way of knowing that unless you're the NSA or their chinese counterpart.
be careful your science isn't tainted with bad metrics.
I think I notice this a lot in any kind of media with female characters who do anything villainous or even just morally grey. I feel like there's an innate assumption (among men) that women must be "good" (within a very narrow definition) and any deviance from that is a terrible act far and away from anything men can do.
The harrassment towards the actress who played Skyler in Breaking Bad seems a perfect example of this, especially given Walter is celebrated as some kind of media folk hero.
Anyway, appreciate the in-depth post, especially since it's a problem I'm trying to be more actively aware of and push back within myself.
Man that stuff is so gross. Like you are grown adult, you know this is an actor. I remember seeing a video where some grown person snubbed the lady that played cersei Lannister for an autograph and got one from like every body else smh.
That's just a convoluted way of admitting Lena Headey's performance was brilliant and got under their skin. It has that level of petulance and childishness that confirms its from a maladjusted adult and not an actual child.
It's not just "good," if we look at more media. If a woman is an active driver of events, rather than a passive observer, she is going to be held to a higher standard and scrutinized more closely because she is actively defying cultural norms.
You can see this whenever women pirates or women warriors are brought up: suddenly, rightists care very deeply about how immoral it is to be a pirate, or the war crimes committed by people in Medieval times. The kind of things that they would either ignore or celebrate if it was a man doing it.
You can see this in how the term Mary Sue is (mis)applied. It describes an actual problem (characters who are so invincible and perfect that they're boring), but if you look at which characters are actually described as Mary Sues, the threshold for women tends to be much lower than the threshold for men.
I believe that's at least in part because it started out as a fanfic term to describe a self-insert who functioned like a black hole (derailing plots and upstaging characters, etc) and then later made the jump to just generically referring to boringly overpowered characters. However, I still agree with your overall point - particularly given how that that is how the term is used now, it is especially egregious that female characters get the extra scrutiny since there have to be at least ten Marty/Gary Stus for every Mary Sue in pop culture, at least by my reckoning.
sexual dimorphism and differences in brain structure are not the end-all
Something that blew my mind when I realized it was that, because our brains are plastic (they change their shape in response to their environment and the demands placed on them, especially when we're young), even definitive structural differences between different populations' brains can be a social construct.
Epigenetic changes, including those caused by poverty, can cause issues two generations down the line as well.
When I first learned about that, the rage I feel about poverty in general increased measurably.
It's so insidious too, because your decision making is often completely fucked by the immense stress of having limited stability
This is especially the case when it comes to language. The linguistic system you use affects how you store memories and subjectively perceive the world.
eh sapir-whorf is still pretty controversial no? There are a few empirical examples but nothing definitive. Personally I believe it, but I would use caution before making grand statements like you just did
The strong version (where language determines and potentially limits how you think) is highly controversial; the weak version (where language only influences thinking) is pretty much accepted.
This is the struggle session I was born for! Critical support for unproven linguistic theories that I personally agree with!
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!!"
Fuck Noam Chomsky! All my homies accept the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis uncritically.
even definitive structural differences between different populations’ brains can be a social construct.
to make matters even more complicated, our brain isn't fully developed until the mid-20s
and everything we do before then has an influence on how it's gonna look
im critical of the idea the brain is ever 'finished'. not until you get anterograde amnesia. if you look at what the mid twenties represents in 'western' culture, it seems awfully coincidental.
ending college (or choosing an academic carreer or studying one way of thinking and specific slice of a system of knowledge really in depth), settling into one job and way of life and doing the same fucking thing every fucking day until you fucking die. or settling into shit and slowing down on the drugs and adventure and probably spawning.
[CW for internalised misogyny and rape culture]
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
Honestly this is the shit that drives me mad the most. I've been one of those angry feminists since I was a teenager. And yet. One time as an undergrad I was walking through a nightclub hallway, and a guy grabbed my arm and started dragging me towards an elevator. I hadn't even made eye contact with him, he just grabbed me. I struggled, and I think his friend yelled at him to let go and then he did, the whole thing lasted like 30 seconds. Fine, whatever. What bothers me is that my first fucking thought was "Well what did I expect, I am wearing a short skirt and heels." (And then a while later I told a (male) counselor about the incident and how I wasn't into wearing high heels since then, and he was so disturbed about it that I ended up comforting him and telling him I'll work on being comfortable in high heels again lmao.)
The same week, one of my friends (also an angry feminist) went to a party, and two dudes complimented her on her appearance by telling her that they'd totally rape her if her bf wasn't there. Fucked up in and of itself, but her first thought was "Damn, I'm not drunk enough to find that funny/flattering, my mistake."
Like Jesus, what a waste of time arguing with friends and family that victim blaming is wrong, apparently when push comes to shove our automatic response is patriarchal sexist bullshit anyway. Get this shit out of me, please.
considered hysterical
I mean that word's rooted in misogyny. Folks here use it unironically sometimes and it's just cringe af
That's right. Fell into the everyday lexicon pretty easily, didn't it?
I agree with this but as a man without a father let's not pretend that society sees me as complete.
Have you seen that twitter account "women posting their Ls online"? Half of the stuff there are obvious self-deprecating jokes, and the other half is not funny.
I think this is a fascinating topic, does anyone here know of any good literature that points out how deeply sexism pervades American culture, ideally from a Marxist perspective but I suppose it doesn't have to?
