Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

Something of a companion thread to Feminist Blogs/Communities I Have Known... but less focused on blogs.

Also a space where we can have multi-gendered dialogue from the outset, so we don't have any confusion.

I'm v v confused about gender and what it all means but that's p inherent in the discussion I guess?

Well, yeah - I purposefully phrased the title in a way that allows for those whose identity is not always recognised. I was initially going to include queer theory in the thread concept, as I've recently found myself with groups where feminism and queer politics are completely intertwined, but I don't feel that I should be the person to say whether or not this is a good place to discuss that.

Actually, "completely" is not true. I think that would be impossible. But they work closely together, a lot.

Ha ha no, I understood what you meant in naming the title that, I like the inclusivity of it. I'm mostly confused by mine own gender and ~what it means~ and always have been so I was just pointing out that confusion is inherent in the process for some ppl. (as recognised by the title)

Yes. I've never felt like "I'm really a boy" but performatively I often feel more akin to males. But then, that's based around the socially constructed sides of gender, so it's less confusion, more rejection. I didn't always understand that, mind you.

not to get all graduate seminar on this thread but: do we have a good definition of "gender" that isn't culturally essentialist? I'm sure it's out there but my reading in Feminist/Queer/etc theory is lacking. I don't necessarily have a problem with a culturally essentialist reading of gender, but i'd be interested in alternatives. For instance, where and when does the cultural proscribed notions of gender we have run up against actually being attached to, say, a penis? And how do you talk about this intersection without bogus and lame biological essentialism?

I really want to look at this question, because not having a satisfying answer to it is one reason why I'm really unhappy defining groups of people as 'men' and 'women' and setting policy accordingly.

I certainly know that most working definitions of gender are crude and essentialist and problematic. I get that. But when talking about many of the blunt force issues I have to confront, I know the people who are perpetuating this shit on me are male bodied ppl who identify as male and a huge part of the reason they were doing it to me was because they perceived me as female and had a specific set of assumptions about what that meant, so it's really hard not tp talk about this stuff without using the shorthand no matter how clumsy it is. Otherwise you end up mumbling vague shut about kierarchy (lord knows how my iPhone will render that) and no one outside a graduate program knows what you're on about.

yeah that's a great point. I think one of the challenges in getting people to accept something like cultural determination of gender is that their first line of defense is a reductio ad absurdum like "is my penis [or whatever] culturally constructed?!?"

it's similar to the "well I know my grandpa wasn't a monkey" defense against evolution.

I think, at bottom, there's an enormous amount of anxiety that goes into gender identity (one might even say this is the entire purpose of gender) that's gonna always leads to exactly the kind of hysteria you see in homophobia and the like. so defusing that anxiety remains, i think, a big part of the goal.

Like Deborah Cameron said in a debate I saw, utterly demolishing that Baron-Cohen "male brain" prick with her magnificent logic "The fact that women give birth is not in any way a Societal Construct. But what it ~MEANS~ that women give birth is completely a Societal Construct"

<3 D-Camz so hard, she cuts through so much of that Mars/Venus guff so effectively.

But um yeah, anxiety around gender is so damaging.

I can see that a lot of the time the shorthand is unavoidable, but what I'm afraid of - in myself and others - is letting the shorthand frame the debate. I see so many people embracing these powerful narratives about what it means to be male or female, that exclude people's real experiences in horrible, damaging ways. In a space like this, where we can afford to be nuanced perhaps more than elsewhere, it would be cool if we could approach it with that in mind - and WCC I'd love to hear some of that grad school stuff if you can explain it to a psych graduate with little to no study of sociology under her belt.

I'm too tired to talk properly now, but anyway let it be known that I am very much looking forward to getting into this stuff with ILX0rs and I'm *grateful* for the clusterfuck.

Hey just remember I didn't go to grad school, I'm an art school dropout I picked up much of this stuff in the library and on the web and from a friend who is doing a PhD in feminist linguistics or sociolinguistics or whatever it's called. I sm not an expert.

I get tongue tied up in this bcuz so much of my *need* for feminism comes from not conforming to trad expectations of "woman" and wanting to widen up the definitions of "woman" when maybe I should be getting rid of gender entirely? But back when I was 20 queer theorists didn't want to talk to me (bcuz bisexuality or pansexuality didnt ~exist~ back then as far as those individuals were concerned) but feminist theorists did so that's where I ended up.

I always want to widen the idea of "woman" not narrow it but that has a tension with the desire for a safe space bcuz who defines or owns the idea of woman? It's a recognized tension, we have to work to resolve.

Sorry to go off topic, but I'm so tempted to take this out of context: <3 D-Camz so hard. You love David Cameron! You love David Cameron!

Back on topic, yes, grad-school discussion is more than welcome from my perspective: I know bits and pieces, from A Level Sociology, lit theory, and philosophy, but I could definitely do with more thinkers to pursue and avenues to contemplate.

"A Level Sociology" is one clause there, I progressed some way beyond that in the latter two disciplines, ha. (Not braggin', just sayin')

Deborah Cameron. Don't get over excited.

what I like about that Deborah Cameron quote (i should look her up) is that it nicely points out that yes there is biology and whatnot but that we can't TALK or THINK about this stuff except within the parameters of MEANING...you'd dont get to crawl outside of cultural meaning using a ladder called "biology" or whatever.

so yes there is an "outside" or limit to culture/meaning but we only have access to it as a kind of negative capability.

gender's odd. it's clearly a cultural construct, both in a hazy, general sense that exists outside any specific individual and in the various ways we all individually (re)construct & perceive it. but that's not all it is. unlike "race", there's a substantial biological component to gender. of course, as others itt have pointed out, we can only understand what this might mean at several levels of remove, as filtered through a thicket of complex constructions from which we can't even sensibly hope to extricate our perspectives.

i'm biologically male. for better or worse, i find that my subjective experience of gendered-ness squares pretty well with what my culture seems to describe as generic masculinity. i deviate from what i take to be the "masculine norm" in all sorts of ways, some trivial, some quite dramatic, but i assume that this is true of most everyone (everyone worth knowing, anyway), and i'm pretty happy with the space i've carved out between cultural expectations and the seemingly gendered aspects of my own internal landscape.

unfashionable as it may be to say, it seems to me that biological gender drives a great deal of human behavior and that these drivings do sometimes reciprocate those "dubious" cultural constructs we've inherited. men, for example, seem in general to be more openly and aggressive than women, to the extent that male violence is a serious problem the world over. would say the same with varying degrees of confidence about things like female nurturance and consensus-building, male vs female approaches to competition and "mating behavior", masculine self-sufficiency, etc.

while biological gender is generally self-evident, gender identification can only by known when it is communicated. we know that someone identifies as female when they tell us so. we also know that that the things people say aren't always true. perhaps for this reason, i suspect that many of us would have trouble accepting the presence of an apparently straight-normative biological male in a women's bathroom or domestic violence shelter simply on the basis of her reassurance that it's ok because she "identifies as female". much as we might like to reduce all gender to pliable constructs, it can be very hard to let go of the last shreds of biological essentialism.

i am glad this thread is here.

agreed

Any time that anyone starts going on about the "substantial biological component to gender" I just want to refer them to Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine and Pink Brain Blue Brain by Lise Elliott (sp?) and just carry on repeating - outside the obvious physical documented secondary sexual characteristics (the girl/boy lego) the actual measurable differences in cognition, in brain function, in all that stuff that matters are TINY. Not only that, but even with the DOCUMENTED and measurable differences (for example, height) - the variation WITHIN each gender is often FAR GREATER than the "difference" between genders.

This isn't just one or two outlier studies suggesting this. There are HUGE bodies of work on this. Analysis. Meta-analysis. Meta analysis of meta analysis. The OUTLIER studies which suggest men's and women's brains are from different planets are the ones that get all the attention BECAUSE THEY ARE OUTLIERS. And they are often NOT replicable. Which is your guaranteed sign of being NOT SCIENCE.

I'm not just "deferring to a authority" here. I am saying, there is shitloads of evidence on this one if you even scratch the surface of doing research on it. There is, like, "Climate change is a real thing" levels of evidence on this one. And I'm just saying, in advance, that if anyone is going to continue to insist that gender is a ~biological~ thing, I'm going to treat them like a climate change denier, and just not engage with nonsense.

Gender is a construct. Just because something is a construct does not mean it is not *meaningful* or that it does not have real world consequences. (Money is also a construct, but try doing without that one in western society.) But construct means "we made up the rules" and it also means "other societies or other possible societies can put the rules in different places and in different orders." (Try walking into a shop in England and buying something with an American dollar. Money is a construct that means different things in different places.)

that seems very otm. people who talk about aspects of humanity that are "outside of culture" shd probably point to some examples of humans that exist outside of culture. good luck with that.

I had to get off line to compose the next bit so this is a continuation of the previous bit, rather than a response to you, NV, but here goes:

i find that my subjective experience of gendered-ness squares pretty well with what my culture seems to describe as generic masculinity. i deviate from what i take to be the "masculine norm" in all sorts of ways, some trivial, some quite dramatic, but i assume that this is true of most everyone

This is the problematic bit with the whole "biological" conception of gender. It's not biological at all, it's what your culture says is "masculine."

And if you, as a Western (I think you're North American?) man who conforms fairly well to your culture's expectations of masculinity were suddenly dropped into, e.g. Ancient Sparta, you would be thought of as an effeminate wimp or e.g. 18th Century French Court you would be thought of as a rude uncultured boer (bore? boar?) who needed to sort out a more masculine wig immediately.

For *me* (specific, personal) the problem is not whether someone identifies with their visible biological gender (though I recognise for many, many people this is a completely valid problem and source of oppression) it's how arbitrary the divisions into "masculine" and "feminine" are - how *brutally* they are policed - and policed in the service or protection of *whom*?

But those are conversations you can't really have without the entry of that nebulous concept of kierarchy (which spell check tells me isn't even a word.)

idk i'm kindof with that and not with it.

i know trans guys who have talked about the really visceral physico-psychological feelings of taking testosterone for the first time. and pretty much anyone who has ever been a teenager probably knows that hormones tend to do things to you. and yeah there are varying degrees of testosterone and oestrogen. and the binary of gender is culturally substantiated.

i mean i don't want to be misunderstood, this is not to say that we can understand some set of biological imperatives, primordial urges. i think its closer to what monique wittig meant when somebody asked her if she had a vagina and she said "no." i mean maybe i should explain that monique wittig was a lesbian and concluded that as she was a lesbian, she was not a woman because woman is something that is constructed within heterosexist gender relations. she's not insane, she wasn't denying that physiologically her body corresponds to a female body, but that the the body itself is something that is constructed by language and culture. still though, the matrix of signification is not one that is closed at the level of "culture" but that bodies are *part* of culture. folds of sensations, particular materialities, pleasures, warmth, movements, hormones. its not that these things are anterior to culture but it isn't the other way around either.

yeah sorry i certainly wasn't trying to privilege culture-and-nothing-else, just reflecting that the links are inextricable and not reducible to "this but not that" arguments

<I>"The problem with the word 'vagina' is that vaginas seem to be just straight-out bad luck. Only a masochist would want one, because only awful things happen to them. Vaginas get torn. Vaginas get ‘examined’. Evidence is found in them. Serial killers leave things in them, to taunt Morse . . . No one wants one of those."</I>

Though obviously my inability to click the "Convert Simple HTML to BBcode" button is due to Evolutionary Psychology.

Yeah but that whole "men are just biologically different because: hormones!" ignores the fact that women also have a set of those exact chemicals sloshing around our bodies (except doctors call them androgens we have them) and not to mention the fact that it's even sometimes sold as a pseudo health concern by the kind of behavior police-y magazines all "OMG do you have an interest in maps and systems thinking? You might suffer from too much testosterone giving you ~male brain~ oh noes panic!" (This was an actual article I read in the launderette.)

And how things get interpreted like - I dunno, maybe I have an endocrine malfunction I should get checked out bcuz I totally get very male-coded aggro if I'm driving a car I get v aggressive about defending my territory (one of many reasons I don't drive) but when men do that, they have "testosterone" as their excuse but If I'm being all competitive in that pissing contest sense and male-coded, do I just do it bcuz I missed that particular bit of training in how to be ladylike? Or can I blame my ~androgens~?

I don't buy the "it's hormones" excuse entirely

I type so much less coherently when I'm on an iPhone. Don't know if the little screen makes me male brain or iv it's just the lack of ability to see the whole post to sense check it. That was almost incoherent. Sorry.

that can apply to "personality" across the board tho. western society is increasingly big on medicalising personality in general - "are you like this? maybe the chemicals in your body need readjustment". there are maybe models for personality that rely less on societal norms - we can think about people's personal goals or happiness, ask whether their behaviours are self-limiting or destructive in some way - but a lot of hormonal/brain chemistry/genetic arguments have become standardised ways of looking at humanity and life experience. it's an excuse, as you say, and takes on virulent forms when used against women - lol PMT etc - but personality in general is increasingly policed, i guess, in ways that previously the power structures only sought to police behaviours.

and yeah there are double standards, sometimes we are at the mercy of our internal chemistry and sometimes it makes us who we are

...runs the argument

Yes, all that, too.

What I'm trying to say is, it varies within gender as well as between them. Some women are aggressive and competitive. Some men are warm and nurturing. (Most humans have some mixture of the two.) You can say "it's testosterone" or you can say "it's cultural conditioning" but the important thing is that it varies and that variance is OK.

Hey Emily - Thank you. :)

gonna check in later because this will likely be a thread to learn from, just please do me a favour and explain/link any jargon ( "culturally essentialist" up there threw me, though to be fair it also took me three attempts at processing "climate change denier" before I realised it wasn't talking about sheerer stockings.)

Anyone who takes potshots at the surreal typing lysdexia caused by my iPhone is gonna get a crack on the head for asking. Just saying, like. My spelling is gonna be all over the shop.

Yes I am aware of the hilarity involved in an amateur Li ghost (that was linguist, iPhone - but I'm gonna leave that to show what this thing does to me) who cannot spell but chomski my Sapir-wharf hypothesARSE if u wanna rib me about it. ;-)

^^^^^ha ha this is all a clumsy joke but if you ever can't google something or want a clarification pls say "srs question" and I'll try to de-jargon-ify

It's not so much learning new jargon as learning a new language requires a new way of thinking coz replacing words w/o replacing the thought processes is not progress. It's trying to unlearn so many of the kierarchy's ideas which is often the hard part.

Right, why is why "can't google" isn't necessarily the problem - a lot of this is going to be "but what do you mean by that word / in this context?"

the funniest iphone autocorrect i've seen is changing "sexting" to "destiny" :/

Yeah but there's a difference between "who is Dale Spender" and "what do you mean by kierarchy in this context" - happy to discuss the latter. Not so much the former.

I dunno, "cultural essentialist" seemed to be the opposite/corollary of "biological essentialist" and didn't really need clarification? But I guess maybe we should touch on how there are two (opposing?) schools of thought saying gender difference is the result of nature or nurture. Obv almost all arguments of this kind are at their heart an and/both proposition not an either/or.

But the biggest difference is that the Cultural crew believe that this stuff is nurture - and therefore can be changed and the Biological crew think this is impossible (and maybe even "against nature") to try to strive for gender equality

(see if you can guess which side I'm on, huh?)

if anyone is going to continue to insist that gender is a ~biological~ thing, I'm going to treat them like a climate change denier, and just not engage with nonsense.

biological gender IS a thing, and anyone who continues to insist that it isn't is simply wrong, full stop. in an overall sense, we can measure the differences between men and women any number of ways, not just in terms of the gross architecture of the body, but also in terms of more subtle things like its chemistry and DNA. we don't fully understand what all of this means, of course, and individuals vary greatly, but this doesn't mean that we can't scientifically "perceive" biological gender. we can.

of course and like i very clearly said before, we can only perceive and understand the significance of biological gender at a remove, as filtered through the understandings of gender that we've inherited. that's what makes this subject interesting. we know that we are driven both by biology and by the cultural constructs that compose our understanding, and there's no way to clearly distinguish between the two.

to repeat another thing i said earlier, we can see the workings of gender in male violence as a phenomenon. male violence exists and is a problem in every culture in the world, and this has always been true throughout human history so far as we know. you suggested that if i were dropped into ancient sparta, i would be perceived as a wimp. of course i would. in case you missed it, that was the entire point of the paragraph you were responding to: that gender is, to a substantial extent, a cultural construct. but it's worth noting that ancient sparta was no less dominated by male violence than our world is today. this does not conclusively "prove" that male violence is a product of male biology, of course, but it does incline me to suspect that biology plays a role.

You're not *even* wrong.

You seem to inhabit this weird fantasy world where male power is not prized and rewarded at every turn, and female power is not demonised and punished at every turn. Where male violence is not *fetishised* and portrayed as noble and good and female violence is not denied in order to keep some wonderful "pure" vision of "femininity" as opposed to "masculinity."

This fantasy world where violent women from Boudiccea to Margaret Thatcher can just be handwaved away.

A fantasy world where structural inequality does not codify "male" supremacy over "female" at every step because the rules were written to keep it that way. These ideas are not reinforced with cultural narrative over and again until ppl believe they are true bcuz other views just don't get presented, or are actively derided by those w the most to lose?

And then you want to turn around and talk about this highly contrived and exaggerated version of "masculinity" as being somehow inevitable, even biological?

And I just call: bullshit.

I've been looking for the past half hour to see if I can find any studies that strongly demonstrate even the simple premise that testosterone leads to increased aggression. Can't find anything. And conversely, if you google 'violent women' you get lots of hits about violence against women, a review of a book about Hollywood fetishisation of female violence, and a Daily Mail article about teenage girl gangs.

If the starting assumption for discourse is that men are perpetrators and women are victims, which it seems to be, it excludes from serious consideration the violence women do against men, the violence women do against each other, and the (sexual) violence men inflict on other men. I'll keep looking for biological underpinnings to the assumption, there may well be something, but I'm inclined to think it'll turn out to be by far the lesser factor.

I mean let's get this straight. I'm not denying that there's such a * thing* as male violence, or that male violence especially as used as a method of control against women (hello Chris Brown and domestic violence awareness) is not hugely problematic.

What I'm denying is this idea that violence is something automatically and essentially coded into masculinity from biological sex up - rather than something which is learned, reinforced and rewarded at every step of a man's life.

i think you're responding to an imaginary person in your head, cuz it sure as hell isn't me.

of course male power is prized and rewarded at every turn. or course female power is demonized and punished i don't wave any counter examples away. but the history of human violence, not just in western culture but in every culture ever known, is predominantly the history of male violence. to my mind, in conjunction with what little we do know about male and female biology, this makes it reasonable (not certain, just reasonable) to suppose that male biology plays a role in male violence.

would say the same of many other ostensibly gendered characteristics and behaviors, that biology probably does play some role. again though, it's impossible to clearly distinguish between the urgings of biology and cultural conditioning. but the fact that we can't know exactly what role biology plays does not mean that biology plays no role. in order to understand such things clearly, we have to accept huge amount of uncertainty. i.e., if you align yourself with either "crew", Cultural or Biological, you're missing the larger picture.

What I'm denying is this idea that violence is something automatically and essentially coded into masculinity from biological sex up - rather than something which is learned, reinforced and rewarded at every step of a man's life.

i suspect that both factors play a role, nature & nurture.

Zora there's evidence that testosterone is released by men who are victors *after* the aggression is over but little evidence that testosterone causes violence or aggression. It's complicated, as all hormonal things involving humans tend to be.

If the starting assumption for discourse is that men are perpetrators and women are victims, which it seems to be, it excludes from serious consideration...

i don't think you need a starting assumption. i think it's better to look at the available information and work up from there.

Contenderizer you keep repeating the same things over and over as if you haven't read what I've posted (and certainly none of the books I've referenced) so you are also having a conversation with someone who is not me.

Has anyone else read this? Should I go home and re-read it for this thread?

...and A Passing Spacecadet was right. We opened up a discussion of "women's issues" to well-meaning dudes and in less than 1 day it's become all about dudes and testosterone and male violence and we're not even talking about women at all.

Not even Myra Hindley.

there's evidence that testosterone is released by men who are victors *after* the aggression is over but little evidence that testosterone causes violence or aggression. It's complicated, as all hormonal things involving humans tend to be.

there's also evidence that testosterone inclines humans to competitiveness, and is produced as a "reward" for competing successfully. and violence can be an effective competitive strategy, at least in the sense that beating someone up causes your body to produce more testosterone. violent criminals tend to have elevated testosterone levels relative to the general population, and we can't say for certain that causation is a one-way street in that case.

That looks great, LaureL (ha! My iPhone just tried to change yr name, it's not me!) but I'm still reading Bitch which doesn't deny the possibility of female violence either.

Contenderizer you keep repeating the same things over and over as if you haven't read what I've posted (and certainly none of the books I've referenced) so you are also having a conversation with someone who is not me.

i've read all of your posts closely. i'm familiar with the concepts you're discussing. i repeat myself only because you repeatedly respond not to my arguments, but to a straw man that only tangentially connects with what i've said.

I'm coming in at a tangent right now, because one of the things that's been upsetting me recently is male rape. I've heard reps from NGOs in Africa denying that there is a problem, denying that there is any need to include men in their considerations when setting up services to support victims or even when investigating war crimes. Yes, more women are probably victims. But the numbers of men who've been attacked isn't something anyone even cares to find out about.

This stuff: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-men

I feel like this is a onsequence of stereotypes of both men and women but I accept that's not where this conversation is at right now. I just wanted to get it off my chest.

Contenderizer viz the quote you took out of my statement; your response is exactly the approach I think should be taken - to any subject - I was expressing my frustration that I couldn't find anyone doing that. Everyone writing about this stuff, including policy wonks at the UN, is trotting out the same lazy set of assumptions.

onsequence = consequence, obv

As for discussing testosterone and male violence &c &c, I don't see how these can be things people-identifying-as-women-with-or-without-biological-determinants should ignore.

We opened up a discussion of "women's issues" to well-meaning dudes and in less than 1 day it's become all about dudes and testosterone and male violence and we're not even talking about women at all.

in my OP, i talked about a number of things, not just male violence. when you argued with me (IN ALL CAPS), i narrowed things down to male violence in the hopes that it might provide a generally agreeable example of a gendered behavior with some relation to biology. maybe this is too "controversial" for this thread, i dunno.

anyway, the thread that this primarily expands out from, the feminist blogs & communities thread, was always open to guys, right?

You seem to inhabit this weird fantasy world where male power is not prized and rewarded at every turn, and female power is not demonised and punished at every turn.

This rhetoric may be emotionally accurate, but it is ott when compared to mundane reality. How so? Because it leaves no wiggle room for so much as one neutral male-female interaction at any time.

Let's say I invent a board game where men players take alternating turns with women players who compete for a share of power. To make this fair (though not realistic) at the start of the game both sides will have a million units of power. The rules will be your rules. At every turn men will be rewarded and women will be punished. We will do this by taking away one unit of women's power and giving it to the men.

After exactly a million turns the men will have two million units of power and the women will have zero.

But it wouldn't matter how many units were involved to start, or what tiny fraction of a unit changed hands at every turn, the end result would always be that the men become omnipotently all-powerful and the women will be utterly, completely, nakedly, and absolutely powerless. This may feel true to you, but this is not the world I live in.

Zora it's not that I think ppl should ignore it, it just can veer perilously into "but what about teh mens!!!!" territory.

You're right, that this enforcement of "men as perps, women as victims" is a narrative that is deeply dependent on patriarchal and harmful views of both women and men.

It is worth looking at, in that sexual violence (especially as war crimes) is an everyone problem, not just a woman problem.

But one of my problems is, so often when women gather to talk about their problems and the narratives of their own lives, so often that narrative gets hijacked by men who want to substitute their own narratives about women, and I'm deeply tired of that.

P.S. If the idea is to change how men act or think, then such ott venting is self-defeating, because we're not getting any recognition or reinforcement for right actions or right thinking. Whatever we do could not be enough, so why begin?

Being a tad too literal there Aimy, imho. "At every turn" may be hyperbole, but it's not hard to see that if you replace it with 'frequently' you get a world many of us would recognise.

i suspect that both factors play a role, nature & nurture.

i feel like you're talking in circles, perhaps. I think it's important to examine what's at stake in insisting on a distinction like Nature/Nurture.

in almost every case I'd argue it's about preserving access to "nature" as a privileged or objective point of view. The idea of the distinction itself is something culturally given. Which is to say that the distinction nature/nurture always takes place on the side of nurture.

it's not that "nature" or an "outside" to culture doesn't exist (how could culture exist otherwise?) but that we only have access to it, as I said above, as a kind of negative capability. we can't really climb out of the hole, only dig deeper.

Gendered behaviour with regards to biology is *not* "controversial." it's the absolute ur-narrative most cherished creation myth of all time!

What's deeply controversial is to actually say hey, maybe the similarities outweigh the differences, let's look at the science and numbers and find out how much of this is actual fact (not that much) and how much is narrative?

And that game gets played every day, Aimless. It doesn't end up with men: 2 million women: 0 but it does end up with men: £1 women: £0.70 that we've had to fight and march and claw to even get that high.

Being a tad too literal there Aimy...

It has always been my approach that people ought to be given enough respect to take them at their word, to start out by assuming they said what they meant to say. When this approach leads me to a conclusion that seems, shall we say, off kilter, then my approach is to point out where it veered off kilter, as best I can make out. Then that person has the option of either confirming that they said just what they intended to say, or else rephrase things nearer to their intended meaning.

I know this is weird, but it is the best way I know to get at what people are trying to tell me.

How about this: is the lack of female-on-male violence (or female-on-female violence), or the perceived lack thereof, purely the result of cultural constructs and received culture?

xxxxxpost

OK, Myra Hindley. I can only work up a perspective on violent women by starting with science and building forward, which is why I was looking at testosterone and aggression. I started off by looking for studies on causes of violence so that I could rule biological factors out or in before moving on to social factors. Testosterone is the easy target, being the main biological driver for aggression, according to received wisdom.

Ultimately I would like to understand why this dichotomy of men = x, women = y is what it is, accept I will probably never get there, but I really feel like it has to start off as a gender-blind investigation otherwise it gets too hard (for me) to separate science from conjecture, nature from nurture, and so forth.

Perhaps I need a new thread for Totally Neutral Exploration of Gender Issues.

I've just invoked the 70p rule so I lose bcuz we're back to Feminism 101 again.

The nature/nurture argument is important because it always comes back to "can these structures be changed?" and if you are someone who is getting some benefit from those structures, you see no reason to *have* to change. While if you are someone being oppressed by those structures, you HAVE to believe change is possible otherwise you'd put rocks in yr pockets and walk in a river.

it's not that "nature" or an "outside" to culture doesn't exist (how could culture exist otherwise?) but that we only have access to it, as I said above, as a kind of negative capability. we can't really climb out of the hole, only dig deeper.

― ryan, Monday, February 13, 2012 11:11 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, but i've been saying exactly that all along, only inverted. just because we cannot directly perceive nature, can only see a construction from the constructed position of our own awareness, does not mean that nature is not perceptible, not real, not worth considering.

How about this: is the lack of female-on-male violence (or female-on-female violence), or the perceived lack thereof, purely the result of cultural constructs and received culture?

what counts as violence? can any aggressive or dominance seeking behavior count?

Yes, more women are probably victims. But the numbers of men who've been attacked isn't something anyone even cares to find out about.

why are you bringing this up in this thread though? are you suggesting because sexual violence(primarily towards women by men) has been discussed that we must also acknowledge that men have also been raped? why is this an equivalence that needs stating?

every single time there's a conversation about this topic in a space, this (or something similar) comes up. i used to be on another, much smaller forum, where every time there was a thread about rape or something, the few female participants ended up getting pushed out of the conversation by male participants, who outnumbered them (though that wasn't the determining factor) by a long shot. eventually we just stopped posting in those topics.

if you want male rape to be discussed, then yeah, there's a conversation to be had about that, especially wrt to your point about stereotyping and assumptions. i'm just saying, is this the right place for it?

What lack of female on female violence? Anyone who was ever 12 at an all girl school (I.e. me) will call this statement for the fantasy it is.

But one of my problems is, so often when women gather to talk about their problems and the narratives of their own lives, so often that narrative gets hijacked by men who want to substitute their own narratives about women, and I'm deeply tired of that.

this seems a bit unfair, at least as applied to this thread, which was specifically constructed to be open.

Gendered behaviour with regards to biology is *not* "controversial." it's the absolute ur-narrative most cherished creation myth of all time!

i meant controversial wr2 this thread

WCC, if the game doesn't end up men 2 million and women zero, then the rules are different than you expressed them. Also, if clawing, fighting and marching have yielded an improvement, then at some point somewhere men have ceded some amount of reward to women, as opposed to punishment at every turn.

Again, if men are to be denied any credit for ever taking any positive actions in regard to assisting women to overcome this state of power inequality, or for ever allying themselves with justice for women, or for being anything but right bastards who break women's bones to bake their bread, then... I think you're missing an essential trick in getting where I assume you want to go.

From comments you've made already in this thread, I suspect your reaction will be that, just like a man, I am whining to be patted on the head and given credit for being a good boy, while I ought to be inflamed with anger at the INJUSTICE of it all, and if I'm not 100% with you, and can't do right without appreciation, then to hell with me.

The problem with that line of thinking is simple enough. If I must be 100% with you, and if that means I must necessarily think that all men are nasty, unfeeling, power-hungry dealers of injustice who stand on privilege at every turn, then... sorry. I'm a man and there is something unacceptable in that definition of me. Something of a catch-22 you might say.

But, hey, suit yourself.

Con, this whole "biology is destiny" thing is something that many (maybe most?) women experience, constricting the size and shape of our lives, on an almost daily basis.

It's this hydra-headed thing that no matter how many times you chop off one head, it sprouts another to bite you. So not wanting to engage with that, not wanting to argue it down yet again, is often due to sheer exhaustion rather than a lack of engagement.

Aimless I don't argue with ppl who put words in my mouth. Just carry on having your discussion by yourself coz I don't see where you need me in it, considering you've already decided what I'm gonna say.

What lack of female on female violence?

Well, the relative lack of women convicted of violent crimes would be the obvious reference point.

While if you are someone being oppressed by those structures, you HAVE to believe change is possible..

What's sad is the dialogue involving female-on-male violence in relationships has nearly completely been drowned out by so-called "men's rights" people with claims like "when a woman hits a man it's no big deal, but when a man hits a woman it's domestic violence!" I don't think yelling about where blame is placed is helping anyone.

nasty, unfeeling, power-hungry dealers of injustice who stand on privilege at every turn, then...

I think it's important to realize that men stand on privilege at every turn whether they are nasty, unfeeling, or power-hungry or not. Even ones who are allied with women, working to help women, etc. Like if you can't get that then you will always be having the wrong discussion.

It's a numbers game, mh, and it's difficult to say "yes this exists. But can we please not let the narrative of the one place where women are unfortunately in the majority and men in the minority be written exclusively by that minority?"

Exclusively being the operative word there.

Also let's not even open the can of worms that is male on male violence which doesn't even need to be inside a relationship. Intra-sex violence as a real thing in this world.

WCC, you are steering by your own compass and you are locked on to the course it has set for you. Good luck. Just realize that if you place a chunk of ferrous metal near a compass the needle is attracted to that instead of to magnetic north. If you don't notice this you can get pretty far off track.

WCC, that makes sense, and i'm not trying to get you to engage w it.

fwiw, and i hope this isn't offensive, myths abt "biological masculinity" are another kind of prison. they're a power-granting prison, which may seem like an oxymoron, but they can be brutally rough on men who don't conform. and like i said at the top, we all "fail" to conform (succeed at not conforming!) in various ways.

just so we're clear, i'm NOT in any way, shape or form trying to compare my struggles with supposedly "natural" masculine identity with the awful history of female oppression. i'm very aware that i was born to a position of unfair privilege in this and other respects.

re our differences in this discussion: i'm just kind of a fence-sitter by disposition. i'm the type to try to see merit on both sides of an argument, to find common ground rather than to "take a side". maybe that's annoying to those with more clearly defined positions...

Aimless, Melissa has answered you pretty comprehensively.

It would be cool if people who don't actually want to examine their ideas about gender would do something other than post here, thanks!

Melissa, you are completely right and it makes me feel kind of like crap every time this point is articulated, because it's a privilege that I'd like to escape in some ways, because there are so many things that I'd like to do or change that it doesn't help with.

That and I would like to believe that there is something to meritocracy, but there are some points in my life where I consciously know it's not personal merit but personal privilege that's influencing things.

it's important to realize that men stand on privilege at every turn whether they are nasty, unfeeling, or power-hungry or not.

Yes. I would agree with that. Since the privilege is built into the society, the only way off it is to stand outside society. I do that from time to time, but only because I sometimes go wander around the wilderness where there aren't any other people. As soon as I return, I'm back on privileged ground.

Explain to me how I can alter this state and I will attend well to your words. But if there is nothing I can do, then please do not blame me for doing nothing.

You could stop coming into discussions about sexism and telling women that they're wrong-headed and that you have a clearer view of things?

fwiw 2 all my male-identified brothers, you dont have to post in this thread. the world will be okay if you dont share your take on all of this. you will be okay, too. it can be hard to take a step back and just be quiet for a while but sometimes its really worthwhile.

if you want male rape to be discussed, then yeah, there's a conversation to be had about that, especially wrt to your point about stereotyping and assumptions. i'm just saying, is this the right place for it?

― gyac, Monday, 13 February 2012 19:23 (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I guess you skimmed over the bit where I said "not for this conversation, I just wanted to get it off my chest" and "perhaps I need another thread."

Con I recognise that the myths about biological masculinity are another kind of prison - I keep repeating that patriarchy hurts men, too line and I deeply believe it.

If you're a natural fence sitter, I understand. And so long as your argument is and/both I'm prepared to accept that and/both intersection of nature and nurture is the most likely explanation of most human behaviour. So I think I understand yr viewpoint a bit better now?

But it's unfortunate that "nature" argument is something I get hit in the face with repeatedly while nurture isn't slapping me, I'm likely to be a bit partisan.

I think we should all create socks and have this convo with our gender-identities undisclosed. See what happens.

just to clarify my post upthread i think both/and is as simplistic as either/or.

Dudes who are feeling defensive about yr Privilege, what can you do to help?

1) you can recognise and acknowledge that privilege instead of pretending it doesn't exist or that everyone has it. This is a massively helpful first step.

2) you can check your privilege BEFORE you step in to tell women How The World Works.

3) you can actively work to change the future world by trying to dismantle privilege of all kinds. This is the scariest and hardest bit

(this is also the checklist I try to follow when thinking about mine own race privilege and class privilege so I'm not recommending anything I dont try to do myself. Try being operative word)

Mr Butler maybe you wanna come up with a 300 word essay on the intersectionality of nature and nurture with extra points for each 20th Century French philosopher you can squeeze in a reference to, but for now I'll take and/both as a less simple simplification than either/or?

acknowledging one's own privilege doesn't invalidate your problems or travails. when women (or anyone) argue about privilege with you they're not saying you, yourself, are a terrible awful oppressing human being - it's a structural issue. but the existence of privilege should not be the thing we're arguing over, it's a very basic thing to acknowledge. and fervently denying that it exists or nitpicking when people exaggerate just seems like a deliberate waste of time and is v annoying to women who encounter that sort of thing every day.

That and I would like to believe that there is something to meritocracy, but there are some points in my life where I consciously know it's not personal merit but personal privilege that's influencing things.

working against privilege => working towards genuine meritocracy?

ha just had momentary panic that this was the girls-only thread! phew

fwiw 2 all my male-identified brothers, you dont have to post in this thread. the world will be okay if you dont share your take on all of this. you will be okay, too. it can be hard to take a step back and just be quiet for a while but sometimes its really worthwhile.

okay, touche. point taken. i'm v interested in this stuff, and get carried away. i recognize, though, that my tendency to spout off is perhaps a reflection of masculine entitlement, so i could probably stand to be a bit less assertive in this context...

not really got anything to say but this thread looks interesting and i have 1 pot of tea and 2 eyes to read with. :D

would probably say that your ability to be fence-sitty on this issue is also reflective of privilege - you can afford to be, b/c the consequences of not taking a side don't actually affect you directly

xp

omfg

You could stop coming into discussions about sexism and telling women that they're wrong-headed and that you have a clearer view of things?

I am glad for that question mark. thx.

For clarification, I think there is nothing about being a woman that necessarily stops a woman from seeing things clearly, and if I have ever made any claim to knowing what's correct better than women do, I apologize and retract that claim as not just wrong, but deeply blindly stupid.

I'm not sure your suggestion would be sufficient to eradicate my position of privilege, tho.

Nothing could eradicate your position of privilege. Bar some sort of mass revolution, that is yours to keep. It will only help eradicate people (me) from feeling a deep irritation at the sight of your posts.

Now, is it ok to disagree with a woman about something that woman said? Or is that off-limits?

interesting to me that some men are so irritated at the notion that they are in a default position of power. guys, power is awesome! i think everyone should be able to enjoy power as much as possible. i mean, not power at the expense of others, though i wonder if there is any other kind when it comes down to it?

not really got anything to say but this thread looks interesting and i have 1 pot of tea and 2 eyes to read with. :D

misread this as "2 eyes to roll with"

i mean, not power at the expense of others, though i wonder if there is any other kind when it comes down to it?

I don't think there is, frankly. power is a relationship, requires a hierarchy etc

Over in one of the other threads, I related the tale of my 6th form women's group and how we eventually let boys in.

A couple of people suggested that it could not have been long before the boyz took over and controlled the debate.

Apart from the fact that this hilariously underestimates the ability of my cohort of 17yo female students to hold their own against said boys, never mind in the majority, we enshrined a priviliging of the female POV in the rules for the group to make sure the boys never got uppity.

1. Boys could only ask or answer questions. They were not there to give unsolicited opinions, ever.
2. Boys could not participate in setting the agenda.
3. Boys could not vote on any motions, though their position was noted.

That was easy to do because they had said they wanted their sense of entitlement to be challenged. Also much easier to manage IRL, with someone chairing.

I didn't think this thread was redress-the-balance space, however if we would *like* to erase Aimless' sense of privilige, is there some way we can set this space up to do that?

hokay, i said i was stepping out, but c'mon...

would probably say that your ability to be fence-sitty on this issue is also reflective of privilege - you can afford to be, b/c the consequences of not taking a side don't actually affect you directly

i sincerely believe that my ability to be fence-sitty on this issue is deeply ingrained into my character. and i've known all sorts of people with whom i share this trait, male and otherwise, white and otherwise, straight and otherwise. imo, it's indicative of a "philosophical" disposition (if i may flatter myself), and perhaps of a certain aspie-ness when it comes to intellectual matters. i am against certainty. i am opposed to absolutes. i do not believe in Truth or Understanding. i'm only ever comfortable with ambiguity and approximation. honestly, i think it's more a product of my constantly feeling like a freak and an outsider than of my privilege...

xpost

Poster's regret, too meta, forget it let's just get on with talking about nature/nurture or whatevs.

actually your rules seem pretty sensible, surfing. not as hard and fast rules for this thread, maybe, but as good mental guidelines for guys (like me) who want to participate in conversations like this.

its just even with a both/and you're positing this distinction. as if the body ended at the surface of the skin, but the body leaves itself in traces, ruffled traces, the warm part on a sofa, the smell of someone sleeping. and in words, the sounds of voices in other rooms, the shape of handwriting. culture and nature are no more distinct than bodies and language. the difference between xx and xy. i mean where is it that these separate influences are being exerted. sexism is the description of a certain terrain maybe. not exactly a pre-coded set of tactics. new sexisms come into being all the time just as new feminisms come into being in order to combat them. new terrains and new means of navigating them. a set of survival strategies. it might be easier to just think of nature itself, how it is produced by culture. if we want to unhinge and dismantle patriarchy then we need to unhinge and dismantle the logics that produce it. the constant need to find a set of anteriors. bodies themselves are processes, movements, materials, sites of inscription. bodies are culture, not just because they are cultured but because the complexity of such assemblages is irreducible. fractures, continuities. its hard to understand where trans people would fit into a world in which gender can only be understood as a construct of culture or language or whatever. why the need to transition, to submit to these particular technologies of the body, vaginaplasty, testosterone injections, bilateral masectomy, brow shaping, etc etc. are these elaborate modes of gender performativity? that seems insulting somehow. how to disconnect these processes from learning how to walk like a woman, changing your name. moving. finding a space to transition. bodies are narrated and they narrate themselves.

i sincerely believe that my ability to be fence-sitty on this issue is deeply ingrained into my character. and i've known all sorts of people with whom i share this trait, male and otherwise, white and otherwise, straight and otherwise. imo, it's indicative of a "philosophical" disposition (if i may flatter myself), and perhaps of a certain aspie-ness when it comes to intellectual matters. i am against certainty. i am opposed to absolutes. i do not believe in Truth or Understanding. i'm only ever comfortable with ambiguity and approximation. honestly, i think it's more a product of my constantly feeling like a freak and an outsider than of my privilege...

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Monday, February 13, 2012 12:31 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes well positions of power are deeply ingrained in all our characters and this doesn't change the fact that you can afford to do this while others can't and that you're basically declaring it a universal value that everyone should be beholden to. when in fact, displaying your uncertainty like a badge on every topic and "exploring the sides" while "remaining above the fray" is a very white, very male appeal to white male ideological power no matter how many otherwise friends you claim think exactly like you do. white-washing appeals to neutrality are ridiculous and stifling and they haven't done anyone any good and they'll continue to (not) do so. so many xps

echoes of ye olde hysterical vs rational dichotomy so often thrown at women who need to make an argument

displaying your uncertainty like a badge on every topic and "exploring the sides" while "remaining above the fray" is a very white, very male appeal to white male ideological power

I agree with this. I don't think it's wrong to attempt to approach these subjects objectively, but one should be aware of how subjective un-attachment is, given one's relationship to the subject. Neutrality is often the luxury of the priveledged.

privileged

1. Boys could only ask or answer questions.

tbh, Socrates managed to ask 'innocent' questions that were so irritating to people that he was condemned to drink hemlock and most Athenians thought it was a pretty good deal to just be rid of him.

Q: if it is accepted that men calling women "girls" is sexist, is it simply a matter of turnabout is fair play for women to call men "boys"?

^^^original post was referring to 17yo, iirc?

letting grown men into a 6th form women's group would've been pretty creepy

It was a "6th form women's group", iirc.

yes, comprised of students usually sixteen to eighteen years of age.

a group of 17 yo females admits 17yo males = boys among women?

Neutrality is often the luxury of the priveledged.

yeah, i question this line of reasoning because certainty is also the language of the privileged. and questioning is used by the marginalized in order to create alternate realities.

i also question it because it's the language of division, "with us or against us", and i reject that categorically, not just in this instance but in (almost) every instance. i do not deny anyone's right to commit to believe as they do, but i defend the validity of my commitment to "objective" distance, to a mode of exploration and testing. i believe that there's real value in this.

d'oh ah I see what you did there Aimless

nm

Yes they were 16-18, on the cusp of manhood, just as we were 16-18 on the cusp of womanhood. Some people were studying sociology and copping onto "women's issues" and we were all for trying to take ourselves seriously. I don't recall what language the actual rules used but I'm sure it wasn't actually 'boys'.

FWIW I have no problem being referred to as a 'girl' by people I like, where the intention is playful rather than condescending, ref. "No boys allowed", "No girls allowed": we do this.

not really got anything to say but this thread looks interesting and i have 1 pot of tea and 2 eyes to read with. :D

misread this as "2 eyes to roll with"

― max buzzword (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, 13 February 2012 20:27 (39 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

did come into some eyerolling practise itt not gonna lie. people strawmanning and strawwomanning like crazy. lol people not reading other people and then arguing with them about points they didn't make.

Dudes who are feeling defensive about yr Privilege, what can you do to help?

1) you can recognise and acknowledge that privilege instead of pretending it doesn't exist or that everyone has it. This is a massively helpful first step.

2) you can check your privilege BEFORE you step in to tell women How The World Works.

3) you can actively work to change the future world by trying to dismantle privilege of all kinds. This is the scariest and hardest bit

(this is also the checklist I try to follow when thinking about mine own race privilege and class privilege so I'm not recommending anything I dont try to do myself. Try being operative word)

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, Monday, February 13, 2012 8:01 PM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

one for the FAQ

xxxxp There are also holes in our language for stuff, though, such that "women's group" means one thing but "girls' group" doesn't suggest the same thing at all, in which case "women" was a more useful word there than "girls."

Thank you, Zora. We are once more as little lambs gambolling in the fields of green.

btw guys this tumblr, curated by a couple of my friends, is v relevant here

http://yumadwhiteboy.tumblr.com/

http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxnb9b6rzF1r9zsizo1_500.jpg

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxe7wpBE3i1r9zsizo1_500.jpg

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lx8ld5fHYf1r9zsizo1_500.jpg

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lx8jzhO4zP1r9zsizo1_400.jpg

ok sorry done with that

I think those are pretty good!

They're great.

like the blog, too, hoos. image by image, i don't always agree w what i take to be the point, and some make me uncomfortable, but that's clearly the point, so well done, blog persons.

Yeah I'll cop to some strawmanning but to be honest that first big post with all the CAPITALS like Molesworth was not so much a reply to Con as me just venting every single argument I've ever had in this subject (which is a fuck of a lot) and just trying to say jeez I do not want to have any of this argument again about biodestiny and neurosexism - but of course even a world weary "I dont wanna talk about this any more" is basically an invitation to discussion to ppl who have not had that argument 5000 times and Con maybe felt unfairly picked on because I was shouting at the previous 500 ppl I'd had the conversation with as much as him.

Hmm, hit and miss imho, that last one is like "why do I want to hear Skrillex' opinion about all this". Former ones are great, yes.

xp

oh my god i only just realised those were dreadlocks in the last one i thought they were like...wall decorations

i am DEAD

I only wish they were wall decorations. Also the rest of that site has some of the most punchable mugs on it I have ever seen.

but of course even a world weary "I dont wanna talk about this any more" is basically an invitation to discussion to ppl who have not had that argument 5000 times and Con maybe felt unfairly picked on because I was shouting at the previous 500 ppl I'd had the conversation with as much as him.

fwiw, i don't blame you at all, WCC. i recognize that my "objective" ambivalence about loaded subjects sometimes verges on socratic trolling.

ambivalence about loaded subjects sometimes verges on socratic trolling.

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Monday, February 13, 2012 9:36 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha

so i am late to the party and no one's even talking anymore but it's worth pointing out that biodeterministic assertions that are necessarily rooted in some dichotomous Testosterone/Estrogen ish betray a fundamental and devastating, argument-wise, misapprehension of some basic endocrine stuff

o sure, but it's still reasonable to draw connections (not necessarily or directly causal, but connections nevertheless) between testosterone production and male competition/aggression

Ernest Hemingway as a child:

http://students.cis.uab.edu/mikehow/dress.jpg

btw, i'm not on board with biodeterminism at all in regard to humans, unless it is framed in terms so general as to become nearly meaningless. As WCC mentioned upthread, variation within sexes is much greater than variation between sexes (nb: I am using 'sexes' to denote the physically-expressed primary sexual characteristics) and I see no reason in my personal experience to disbelieve that assertion.

(cant get caught up here for a minute so XP)

even just basic chemistry tbh, w/r/t what the ~implications~ are of normal reaction-type stuff like concentration gradients, affinities, biochemical pathways, and le chatelier's whatever

in that: genotypically men and women are pumping out estrogens and androgens all the time, but at differing rates and compositions. this is largely (but not entirely) due to having different soft things making different hormonal stews; stews that, in XX/XY or XXY or XYY or w/e, are comprised of hormones shared and produced by literally (almost) everyone and that (surprise) can be chemically induced to act more like what we simplistically believe are their binaries.

which is to say: it might be very likely that if someone's hormonal ecosystem, with its v special concentration ratios, is experiencing a surfeit of testosterone, that that may predispose someone to aggression. or "aggression." and so sure XY "men" are more likely to roiling in that brew.

but that says nothing about the actual, root-causes of violence and violent behavior, what's doing the roiling. many ppl have a genetic predisposition to cancer (and these genes are often ~less~ subtle than the in-yr-face obviousness of X/Y phenotypic difference). and some of these people will, "inevitably," go on to develop cancer. but many of them dramatically increase their risk by engaging in behaviors and exposing themselves to risks (maybe unknowingly!) that also predispose to cancer. would we be right to demur on the topic of "bad behavior" or "social determinants" and make the genetic component the essential one, because it's more "science-y"? because that would be dumb.

so yeah ok i guess retrospectively males are pretty violent and sure if you take steroids (as a man or a woman) you're gonna be more hot-tempered than if you didn't. and criminals have excessive levels of testosterone or something (note the word "excessive"). big fucking deal! PCP, booze, and lust make all ppl violent and criminals also have "excessive levels" of drug addiction, mental illness, minority status, and connections to poverty.

tl;dr even pretending to get serious about the ~hormonal~ roots of gendered relations is roughly equivalent to phrenology, both scientifically and ethically

re hemingway, talk about yer later-life overcompensations.

don't know if i'm saying anything that hasn't already been said here, but i completely appreciate the desire to displace the question of biology from these discussions - no one is so crass as to pretend that there's no connection between the cultural and the biological, but yet the body is so overwritten by culture as to make any worthwhile study of it in these terms virtually impossible. but the problem there is that in displacing the problem of biology you can end up displacing the problem of what a genuine sexual difference could entail, perhaps risk engaging in a monolithic form of cultural critique that can't really do justice to the differences that hold between actual material bodies. how you work through the manner in which these things fold together, how you avoid falling into the particular pitfalls of this approach and avoid its own normative tendencies, well, that is difficult.

o sure, but it's still reasonable to draw connections (not necessarily or directly causal, but connections nevertheless) between testosterone production and male competition/aggression

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Monday, February 13, 2012 7:22 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i was mostly posting to myself there obv but as to this: no, it really really isn't. unless its also reasonable to point out connections between butterflies flapping around in china and a bombing in a public place and then suggesting, humbly, by your leave, that bombings are actually a problem with butterflies and not with people blowing up bombs

i was being kind of a jerk there, soz

yeah, the connections are a bit clearer in the case i suggested than butterflies and bombs. as you said earlier, "males are pretty violent and sure if you take steroids (as a man or a woman) you're gonna be more hot-tempered than if you didn't. and criminals have excessive levels of testosterone or something (note the word "excessive")."

this matters, this is real. acknowledging it doesn't mean we've "answered the question", but ignoring or minimizing it because we are uniformly hostile to any biological interpretation of gender strikes me as foolish. we don't have to throw out biology entirely to recognize that culture is the primary architect of most of what we perceive as "gender", even the ostensibly biological stuff.

i can't throw out biology entirely or else i'm out of a job

at a certain point, i'm not even being "fence-sitty" or "open minded" or w/e. i'm just trying to be as honest as possible about what i perceive as the realities of the situation.

i completely appreciate the desire to displace the question of biology from these discussions - no one is so crass as to pretend that there's no connection between the cultural and the biological, but yet the body is so overwritten by culture as to make any worthwhile study of it in these terms virtually impossible. but the problem there is that in displacing the problem of biology you can end up displacing the problem of what a genuine sexual difference could entail, perhaps risk engaging in a monolithic form of cultural critique that can't really do justice to the differences that hold between actual material bodies. how you work through the manner in which these things fold together, how you avoid falling into the particular pitfalls of this approach and avoid its own normative tendencies, well, that is difficult.

merdeyeux otm. this is very much where i'm coming from.

anyway, my point stands: it isn't that there isn't "biological stuff" that can be correlated to gender, it's that what exists isn't really germane to the conversation (if what you're trying to figure out is why women drive like this or why men are vicious rapers). it is insignificant, and very likely ("provable" even with facts and stuff) approaching totally non-contributory. yes, on an individual, case-by-case basis (which is yr style, con, <3 u tho i do), messed-up* levels of testosterone can make a person more likely to hit a guy. but to even introduce that as a maybe-maybe-not-but-look-see stakeholder in the hunt for why persons hit guys and what we ought to do about it is...irresponsible? or at least naive

dang another xp

ok see
this is very much where i'm coming from.

while i'm pretty sure i 'get' merdeyeux's post, imo talking about 'men' and 'women' necessarily elides and, sure, doesn't "do justice to the differences that hold between actual material bodies." but again that is a p myopic and case-by-case approach to an issue (to be vague) that isn't, can't, be read on a case-by-case basis.

a little confused by that, tbh, gbx. when it comes to this sort of stuff, i'm much less interested in the individual than the general/demographic. the individual is a field of endless variation in which everyone has the opportunity to be or do anything. it's only on the large scale, over time and across cultures, that we begin to see the deep patterns. and i don't think it's by any means absurd to attribute masculine aggression and violence as large-scale, human-species-level problems/phenomena at least in part to human biology.

i don't think that this is naive at all, and it should take nothing away from our understanding that culture is at least as big a driver of human behavior as gender. i mean, just because a human behavior has some basis in human biology doesn't make it in any way "right" or inevitable.

i.e., it wasn't the focus on the individual i was responding to in merdeyeux' post, it was this: displacing the problem of biology you can end up displacing the problem of what a genuine sexual difference could entail. it's elective selective blindness, and i don't see any reason for it.

god, and on reflection, i certainly wouldn't have chosen the word "genuine" there. sub "what a biological sexual difference could entail".

uh, also sub "culture is at least as big a driver of human behavior as biological gender" a couple posts up. moving too fast here, though that's a p telling slip (*ahem*)

yeah certainly, it's an approach that (whatever it ends up looking like) runs the risk of reasserting a male-female binary to the exclusion of trans, asexual, etc issues. and i don't know where the ideal place between that and a systematically ineffectual turn to specific individuals is.

(and fair enough on the genuine. although i'm inclined to think that sexual difference is probably better articulated ontologically rather than biologically. don't really know what i mean by that tho.)

well, the appeal to biology is necessarily an appeal to the ontologically "real", that much is unavoidable.

maybe part of the problem is that we want gender to be one thing when it isn't. there's biological gender (female, male, intersex, other, sliding scales, etc) and there's cultural gender and individual gender (both of which come in endless variations). there's perceived gender and identified gender. it's not singular, not as a concept and not in terms of how it applies to any person or group.

i don't think it's by any means absurd to attribute masculine aggression and violence as large-scale, human-species-level problems/phenomena at least in part to human biology.

my point about biology is and has been this (or at least i meant it to be): it's not a very big part (ho ho), at least vis a vis the process by which actual human violence is expressed. and that giving it a seat at the table "well let's not forget about biology, testosterone and such" can and does become a way to crowd out other, more germane explanations

XXXXPOOSSSSSSSSSTSSS

it's not a very big part (ho ho), at least vis a vis the process by which actual human violence is expressed.

see, this is what i quibble with. you present your argument with great certainty, as though you were reporting a value-neutral, easily verifiable fact. but there's no way at this point to quantitatively analyze such a thing. "proportion and/or degree of violent male behavior caused by biological factors vs proportion of the same caused by other factors, in all cultures, through all time: a study"

anyone who claims with any certainty to know the real answer to questions like this is prioritizing assumptions and perhaps politics over scientifically verifiable information, imo. in trying to determine what makes sense and what doesn't, i try not to worry much about how any given conclusion might be employed, whose interests it might seem to serve. i simply look at the best information available and draw only those conclusions that truly seem warranted. only after doing that do i consider what my conclusions might mean in a sociopolitical context.

on that level, i agree that it's vitally important to keep the focus on gender as a cultural construct - but i'm not going to let that prejudice me when evaluating gender as biology. nor will i minimize, distort or ignore what seems to be true about biological gender out of political fealty to gender as a construct. i feel that there's room for both in any sensible consideration of the issue.

well, the appeal to biology is necessarily an appeal to the ontologically "real", that much is unavoidable.

i dont think this has to be the case, but i get that this has underwritten almost everything on this thread

there seems to be a dig in there somewhere, but i'm okay w that. would say the same about appeals to science in any context, chemistry, physics, whatever. agree that we can and probably should interrogate the construction and implications of such claims.

again, apologies to all. every other post iit is by me, and they're largely concerned with crap that most people itt (and, not to put too fine a point on it, most women itt) clearly don't wanna discuss.
i tell myself that i'm only responding because people keep questioning me, but that's horseshit cuz i know i'm working at sore nerves.

putting myself on restriction as of now. i'll confine myself just to reading along, at least for a while. thanks for having me over, sorry about all the busted furniture...

hey plax, i think i am generally a little more conservative or reactionary or something about identity, including gender identity, than you are, but i wanted to say, i really appreciate your point of view and how beautifully you've expressed it in this thread. i think my point of view has some pretty clear limitations, and the experiences of trans individuals wrt gender are a major one.

i don't know much about the trans experience or trans norms at all. i was raised by two cisgender lesbians & a hetero pair of parents, and i feel like i have some sense of what friends mean when they describe themselves as queer, but i haven't known or read of much of the trans experience. does anyone have suggestions on that?

dunno if yr looking for personal narratives or what but this blog has some good oversights on some of the issues generally facing the trans community today: http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/

this is a particularly good post: http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/?p=3865

uh. oversight? insight?

overview?

yes, brainfart

that post you highlighted in particular is really thoughtful & helpful, thanks.

<I>anyone who claims with any certainty to know the real answer to questions like this is prioritizing assumptions and perhaps politics over scientifically verifiable information, imo.</I>

This would be a more serious point if you weren't on the other hand saying "There has been male violence throughout history, and my masculine intuition allows me to infer biology plays a part"

(which one is plax?)

man I hope my photo never shows up on that tumblr

the one of you laughing while eating salad?

http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c151/tiger_man01/weightlossfatmansalad.jpg

weightlossfatmansalad.jpg

so this thread has gone - some interesting points about male privilege - lots of nature vs nurture discussion(mainly about men) - focus on the role of testosterone in (male) aggression - fat man eating salad.

I thought this was going to be about women!

~that's what happens when you open the discussion up to men~

lol jk but no ACTUALLY

Andrew, how about trying to just type the bbcode from the start rather than relying on the 'convert simple html' button? that might help you remember. also, it is judith who is plax.

I recently had a brief conversation with my momz where she said she'd decided to start reading feminist theory again (having been in the women's liberation movement and kind of fallen out of the loop in the eighties) and she really wasn't sure about all this 'sociological, social construction of gender' stuff because they seemed to be totally throwing out the idea of gender being grounded in sexual difference, which she thought was important. and i thought: it is really weird that we have never had this conversation before.

Con, I don't mean to sound nit-picky but. You say that ppl (especially women) itt don't *want* to discuss certain issues - ie biodeterminism wrt "testosterone."

That is a fib. It's also a dangerous fib, because it's often used (not nec by you but by ppl with an agenda) to paint this picture of "oh noes feminists be keeping down the TRUTH."

When what I have explicitly stated is that I'm *tired* of these conversations. I find them not useful, unhelpful, overly reductive and not really backed up by the science in all the ways gbx has pointed out.

I think that gbx's metaphor was a helpful one - sure, there is a genetic component to some cancers. But if you are living on a nuclear waste dump, smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day, eating nothing but processed food sprinkled with saccharine and taking HRT your ~genetic risk~ is probably not the most important thing to be addressing

C# do you mean that it's weird you haven't had that conversation w yr mum or weird that it hasn't played out in media, on ILX all over the world, etc?

Because the former, sure, the latter - it's been constantly played out everywhere since Larry Summers (sp?) made his famous gaffe about women and maths and was famously shown his ass by some very smart women. Or maybe I just follow weird media sources?

weird that i have never had that conversation before with my mother, whose feminism has always been an important part of my upbringing.

also weird to me because my mother fucking loves Shulamith Firestone.

cisgender lesbians

yo hoos what does this mean?

just a quick thing cuz am on deadline (or...past the deadline, gah) but w/r/t nature/nuture...i'm not sure why, even if you think there are certain components of gender that are naturally or genetically imprinted, it has to follow that we're beholden to them and can't change them, or that we "can't help it" that we act in certain ways (as "men" or "women"). isn't the history of civilisation about overcoming genetic instincts? i don't think we have to simply accept that "men are more aggressive" if that aggression is antithetical to civilised society.

Thanks for clarifying C# that's what I thought

I didn't mean to go into the Cher Lloyd "nnnggghhhh!" of frustration quite so hard ha ha

Yeah this is also a thing, Lex!

Like, human beings manage to control and modify all sorts of other "biological" instinctual things - we change our diets in all sorts of weird ways, control our food intake, some ppl even practice breathing control, we manage not to slaughter each other at the grocery shop - but somehow when it comes to gender "oh no, we're biologically programmed, we can't ~help~ ourselves!" #NotBuyingIt

we manage not to slaughter each other at the grocery shop

only fkn just, most of the time :(

Those examples are so confused, I should not try to address srs topics before I've had my tea.

i want to read that shulamith firestone book again c# maybe your mom can be in my book club

so this thread has gone - some interesting points about male privilege - lots of nature vs nurture discussion(mainly about men) - focus on the role of testosterone in (male) aggression - fat man eating salad.

I thought this was going to be about women!

― thomasintrouble, Tuesday, February 14, 2012 4:46 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lmao. its the contenderizer and aimless show!

it is about women, that's all there is to say about us

Can I just say, I didn't bring up testosterone & aggression bc I was interested in men qua men, I'm interested in knowing if there is in fact *any* underlying justification for painting men and women differently wrt violence, or even confidence and approach to power relationships, or is any biological component in fact weak enough to discount in favour of biological factors as WCC indicates. I think it is weak but I wld like to acknowledge differences if they exist, and I have a personal pref for evidence-based argument. Also it's been 15 years since I looked seriously at the research on neurological sex difference and I wanna know what's changed.

It seems there is more or less a consensus here that we shld look at the social construction of gender first and foremost, and that's cool, I'm well up for that & will happily take my brain chemistry 101 stuff off-thread.

MASSIVE POST ALERT. Sorry, and also several x-posts bcuz it took me forever to write it.

I'm gonna try and get off this "violence" thing and try to explain / share personal examples of how this determinist approach to gender gets me down in my daily life. So these things may seen trivial, but they're purposefully trivial rather than the life-changey stuff.

So much of this X = "masculine" and masculinity = BIOLOGICAL is about Identity construction. Carving out space as "masculine" (and excluding women from it) is a kind of ersatz identity politics for men. (I could be snide about that, and say "bcuz of male privilege, men don't have ~real~ identity politics so they resort to this shit" but I don't think that's true. The enforcement of "masculinity" is deeply poisonous. It's just that some men play these "get girls out of the treehouse" games instead of questioning "masculinity.")

1) I got this book out of the library, about walking the London tube lines. Like, this is such WCC-bait I can't even tell you. Maps! Trains! London! Psychogeography! Lost rivers! Guest appearances by Bill Drummond! You could not make a book seem more appealing to me unless you threw in a story about Aphex Twin living in the actual Elephant & Castle roundabout - wait, that was in there, too. Yay!

But right from the start, because the author's wife thought the project was, well, a bit silly (Might that have something to do with the fact that they had a child under 2, and her partner kept disappearing to do massive 2-day walks instead of child-minding?) he decided that MAPS were "masculine" and in fact walking itself was masculine, and producing statistics about how men just travel more (again, this is ~biological~ and nothing to do with circumstance?) which is sounding more and more spurious to a woman who lived on 3 continents by the time she was 10, but, whatever.

It got to the point where I could no longer read the book bcuz I was sick of his identity politicking. Bill Drummond turned up, with this amazing art project about "cake lines" (based on ley lines, but involving Bill Drummond turning up at yr house and making you a cake) and all this author could do was prattle on about how Cartography was so ~male~ - despite the fact that Bill Drummond pointed out that HIS SISTER was actually an IRL cartographer, not him (he's a cake-baking conceptual artist, talk about "feminine" coded activities) and never mind that the A to Z, the apex of London cartography which he is using to plot his "masculine" map-walks, was designed by ~a woman~ - author dude is so invested in his identity politics of "maps = male" that he cannot abandon it.

This did not hurt *me* beyond the irritation of having to abandon a book I thought I would like. But it certainly hurt him, in terms of, it cost him a sale. It cost me going on twitter and ILX and recommending "hey this is an awesome book" and instead me giving him negative publicity of THIS IS A BADLY WRITTEN AND INACCURATE BOOK.

Example 2 is a bit more worrying to me personally, but still fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things.

2) Because I am a massive Aphex Twin phan, I joined a forum dedicated to that artist and similar electronic music. I encountered there a whole group of angry young men engaged in their own Identity construction. Aphex Twin fandom and Electronic Music was a huge part of their self identity. But they had also constructed this in such a way that AFX and EDM was coded as "Masculine" and that fandom as reinforcing their masculinity.

It took me a while to figure out why I was getting *such* bad treatment on that board - above and beyond the usual newbie hazing and aggro-banter. It wasn't even the kind of angry men going into feminist spaces and intimidating them to get women to shut up. (Though it often took the same forms - harassment, intimidation, rape threats)

What it was was this: the idea of AFX TWIN FANDOM IS MASCULINE was so important to their constructed identity both as music fans and as "masculine" that the idea of a *female* Aphex Twin fan threatened their entire identity. They would keep repeating "no women like this music" not as a statement of fact, but as a statement of identity. And would police its borders rigorously, driving off any women who dared to like their masculine-coded music, in order to preserve, even by force, their construction of masculinity. *Creating* it as a statement of biological fact (no women lasted very long on that forum, because rape threats are kind of an icky thing to have to deal with every time you post) to service their ideas of "masculinity." And then presenting it as fact.

So you take those two stories, and you scale them up (to big things, like my career) and repeat them over and again, twice weekly for an entire life, and you start to understand maybe, why I'm so suspicious of the essentialist constructions of gender.

(I think it's particularly weird to me, as a not very gender conforming woman, that gender is so high up on many people's lists of identity signifiers. Not even addressing "femininity" (which is totally unimportant to me) but "being a woman" is not even top 3 of my identity signifiers (in fact, it's so subliminal it's like "being human" it's not even an issue to me until someone else points it out - which, unfortunately, they do, at least once a day.) I'd put things like "artist" and "music fan" and "feminist" way higher than "being a woman" (Yes, I know that last one sounds weird, but I don't believe that "feminist" means "being a woman" so much as it means "pro gender equality") on the big list of Things That Construct WCC's Identity.)

Sorry these examples are so personal and anecdotey - I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but the personal *is* political, as evidenced by how rigorously these men defend their identity politics.

that post demands a longer and more thoughtful response, but i want to hop in while i have a second and say YES I AGREE with so much of it, and that gender-specific responses (per your second anecdote) are often cloaked as 'convention' and 'tradition' b/c it is otherwise uncomfortable w/ a privilaged group to confront its own prejudice.

the whole "IDM (yeuch) is boy's only music" plays as a running trope amongst its detractors, too. but with the same reinforcement of stereotypes i guess?

Not to derail into WCC obsession land but... I get that about IDM coding "male" but - ~Aphex Twin~?!? Really?!?! Dude who appeared on the cover of the NME wearing a bikini and in fact a female body? Dude who addressed the tendering if electronic music with "girl songs" and "boy songs" and "girl/boy songs" - this guy? You're using him to construct an image of "masculinity" that excludes women at the end of a rape threat? Really?

HOW?

the rape threat is disgusting and inexcusable but Aphex Twin is also "difficult music", "collectable", "techie", "beardy" , all do have male associations ( without any tangible reason inherent to any of those attributes except the last ! but the stereotype *is* there)

He's also long haired and slightly effeminate in his beauty and he's a big sappy Celt who writes Satie inspired ballads for his Mum's birthday?

But this isn't "wah watmm sucks" it's about the construction of "male" identity through female-excluding spaces.

And not even in an honest way, like the "no boys thread" is an acknowledgement that yes, boys are sometimes interested in the things girls discuss on their own, but we'd rather be on our own kind. It's this highly gendered exclusion based on ~pretending women are not interested or biologically incapable~ of gender neutral spaces men wish to claim.

And it's often not even about male bonding or identity but about claiming things which bring power, money or acclaim so as to exclude women from all three

On our own / with our own kind. Sorry clumsy construction.

i guess some of Richard's more boneheadedly boyish fans can take the whole "Windowlicker" bikini thing as a playground joke and nothing more disturbing to their libidos.

yeah, i feel like the bikini thing played out as a gross-out joke rather than a feminising, in the discourse i read about it at the time at least. (and by discourse, let's be clear, i mean select magazine)

now to read WCC's post properly!

harbl, we should make that book club happen! (possibly w/o my mum, i am not bringing her to ilx)

Given the context of his other work, I don't read it as gross-out but whatevs, this is not AFX: C or D

It's about how men construct these rules of "X = feminine; Y = masculine" Very actively chase you out of Y, then claim "no women are in Y" as ~proof~ of Y's inherent "masculinity."

It's the same thing as Baron-Cohen (the neuroscientist one not the comedian) claiming that there is "male brain" and "female brain" and then writing a test for "female brain" on which actual women score an average of 40%.

My limited exposure to AFX part seven:

The video to Windowlicker. First part is the lonnng bit where two dudes in a car agressively (well, one of them is, the other is "whoa, be nicer!") hassling two girls to get into their car for specific reason.

Then, just as it's getting boring, Ricky smashes into the car removing it and the 2 MEN!, and seduces the two girls by sort of morphing them into himself and vice versa.

Now, is that a fairly feminine outcome, or am I over-reading?

WCC, I think your first example emphasises one of the funny things about closing things off by gender, which is the use of negative language about [hobby/trait/tendency] as a way of keeping other people out.

there's a lot of "this is a MALE thing that MEN do because we're boring and spoddy and get obsessive about stuff and our wives just don't understand" language used around quite geeky things - and because it sounds like a self-criticism it's considered 'okay', as a way of talking. but e.g. there's a lot of anger among geeky women about the way it's used as a barrier, "women just aren't interested in this" so you specifically as a woman can't be interested in this.

i think the second 'geeky' could have been instead 'women who are into sci-fi', i was kind of specifically thinking of some arguments around the founding of that website The Mary Sue

Most men seem to read it as competitive dickwaving - AFX as bigger pimp than the 2 wannabes / scrubs trying to pick up girls with no cash. But to me, the whole morphing thing and becoming one another was a genderfuck that outweighed the "man performing masculinity in front of bevy of naked girls and the rivals he has bested" because what he was performing was so NOT heteronormativity.

But this is not an AFX thread, are y'all just ignoring everything else I said in that massive post?

Ha x-post w C v much not ignoring.

Sci-Fi is a HUGE one & prob would have been a better example but I haven't been part of any scifi communities in years bcuz electronic music is my scifi. Also the biggest scifi geeks I know are ALL women.

OK, maybe a nother angle:

Stereotypical behaviour: The Man goes off to do his 'hobbieh' while the wife shrugs and goes off shopping with the girls. But on entering the hobbispace, oh noe another girl! Must not make move on her! must not flirt! I know I'll insult her and she will never look like making a move!

I find male-only groups/spaces somewhat alien and would be depressed to think of any of my activities as masculine-coded.

I find sci-fi spaces somewhat alien, but hey.

So women must be excluded from masculine space because their pesky temptress ways mean that men cannot control their sexuality? Oh come off it, that one is Older Than Dirt and it's one of the founding principles of Rape Culture. #NotBuyingIt

i really don't think it's about feeling constrained by yr desire to flirt w/o insulting. but there is certainly a way in which people who conceive of these spaces as 'masculine' do feel constrained if not threatened by a female presence.

and maybe that's a feeling that needs to be patiently worked out if there's ever to be a solution.

i'm sure men only spaces exist in part because some men feel threatened by female sexuality, and that needn't be expressed purely as "away vile temptress"? that inability to relate to women other than in terms of their desirability/undesirability underpins rape culture but it's problematic in plenty of other ways too - libido destroying reason is another classic "the boys can't help it" identity ish and at the same time as it serves to exclude women from swathes of discourse it perma-cripples swathes of men in a permanent adolescence. (which is still a privileged state within the kyriarchy yes)

question tho, isn't there a more general division happening here between, for want of a better phrase, the libido-led and the intellect-led? a division that also cuts across normative gender lines?

Must be (excluded)? No of course not. it all comes down to basic ignorance, of course.

Men are allowed to speak their desire without losing authority but godhelpyou if you as a woman bring sexuality into the ring (your own or anyone else's) because you can be one or the other, never both but that's another kettle of fish.

I understand the desire to take a vacation from sexual temptation but male only spaces have usually been more annoying than relaxing in my experience.

xp

it's a kettle this thread can explore tho?

and yeah huge awful double standards still in play but female sexuality is a little way out of the angels vs whores box by now surely?

I'm not ignoring, I just can't speak w/ much experience about the second scenario – I have such unremittingly terrible taste in music, and such a preference for mid-century melodic drivel that my tastes transgress boundaries far beyond the gender-inflected ones, and kind of fail in a way that preculdes any serious consideration. IOW, you are potentially right, but I wouldn't know, and I don't have an analogue in my own life for comparison.

As to the first example... I think the reactive gendering of activities you cite – the attachment of a gender/sexuality sum to an innately neutral activity – is a very real thing and has as much to do with fear of sissiness or faggotry on behalf of the men themselves, as with an outward directed pressure toward women. This doesn't make the labels less offensive – it reduces the participation of women to an epsilon - but is in significant fashion a construct for power-holding men to elevate their own preferences. Anecdotally, I enjoy growing small potted herb plants and flowers. I was well into my 20s before I acknowledged that (a) I liked this activity and (b) I had avoided participating because I felt it wasn't proper/appropriate/sissyish (c) it had been a favorite childhood hobby to garden with my grandmother that I had stopped as a teenager. What I mean to illustrate is that in the experience of my life, this type of indoor gardening was a feminized activity* in a strictly non-valuative way, but nevertheless one that I felt I could not access for fear of transgressing a strictly described gender stereotype.

* Feminized in the sense that I could not participate, and I was masculine, and the container gardeners in my circle were female. The singular experience trumped the larger cultural one that says 'gardening is an obv. gender-neutral activity,' and was directed only inward – I didn't, to the best of my recollection, make any assumption or attach meaning to any male gardeners I encountered.

that post is like an hour old, sorry

remy, what does "reduces... to an epsilon" mean? i've never come across it before and google's not being super helpful.

epsilon is a maths analogy! it's something very very small

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Epsilon.html

just a mathy way of saying 'makes women a trivial sum'

maths analogies! awesome, i am using that one forever.

Wow, this thread. Holy hell. By the way, if you start your argument on the premise that a very very common turn of phrase is actually something to be taken painstakingly literally, you've already lost.

I can't deal with the multitude of points and ideas that have been on this thread since last I checked in, so I'm just gonna...

i don't know much about the trans experience or trans norms at all. i was raised by two cisgender lesbians & a hetero pair of parents, and i feel like i have some sense of what friends mean when they describe themselves as queer, but i haven't known or read of much of the trans experience. does anyone have suggestions on that?

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, February 14, 2012 6:50 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My friend has written a good personal column about it, if you're interested? http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/series/transgender-journey

Also, I saw someone ask for a clarification of 'cisgender' upthread, but not sure if anyone answered? I know wiki's not the best resource, but this sort of covers it. Basically, it's in contrast to 'trans' but without the highly offensive use of terms like 'normal' that people often use without thinking (I'm sure I have done in the past).

cis gay men seem to get especially het up about the word 'cis' ime - like i've seen a few bloggers claim they don't like the word because it sounds like "sissy" and is thus feminizing/demeaning (and yet they're content to fling the word 'tranny' around as if that word isn't extremely problematic either)

i like cis because it's both a good shorthand that dispels the idea of all trans ppl as being 'other' and bcz it's etymologically consistent

huh I've never seen this cisgender term before, interesting.

Any dude, gay or otherwise, who gets het up about "feminising" being inherently "demeaning" can GTFO AFAIC.

I mean I get the negative reductive stereotypes of gay men as effete can be pretty offensive and RONG but that derives its power from an intensely misogynist worldview that sees femininity as naturally tainted as much as reductive ideas about homosexuality.

sure - otoh it isn't really that surprising that some gay men overcompensate in the masculine gender roles dept. defense mechanism etc

"het up" <-- also problematic :)

i like cis as useful & necessary shorthand but i'm also aware of how jargony it can come across to people who haven't heard it before - the influence of academia and academic language on queer/feminist theory is not something i would dismiss but i think it's also helpful (and necessary!) to move away from it if we actually want to effect this change we talk about.

SO MANY gay men i've known have casually flung around "tranny" (and terms like "slut", "slag" too for that matter) and i fucking hate it.

lol mark

SO MANY gay men i've known have casually flung around "tranny" (and terms like "slut", "slag" too for that matter)

lol yeah if anything that's where I've picked it up from. long-running club night called the "Trannyshack" in SF etc

i thought "het up" was derived from "heated up"?

have any transsexual communities attempted to reclaim "tranny" incidentally? i have no idea

well I can tell you from experience that most of the attendees at Trannyshack are uh, cisgendered, I guess

Het up is past tense of heated up, it's punny! Duh!

ooh look there's a website

maybe SFW, I dunno

those angry hets! ;)

re: 'tranny': the impression i have is that, much like 'fag', some ppl are fine with it, others aren't. either way, not cis ppl's place to make that call (and i personally don't feel comfortable using it in just about any context)

Any dude, gay or otherwise, who gets het up about "feminising" being inherently "demeaning" can GTFO AFAIC.

i agree but there's also a thing that i recognise where you feel like someone's treating you like a stereotype of a particularly flaming/feminine gay man and i tend to respond by having to put my foot down and make it clear that's not on

Sorry I forgot, I'm meant to still be participating in the Great Feminist Humour Boycott of 1973 - we will boycott humour until equality is achieved... oh wait.

I understand that, Lex, I just wish that there were a way gay men could resist the stereotype without agreeing with perpetuating the construct that being ~like a woman~ is inherently awful. Say it's incorrect, but no need to say it's demeaning?

gay men tend to have butch/femme and top/bottom dichotomies but no real useful way to describe the in-between stuff, which is why i hate both of those dichotomies

well the thing is it's usually in situations where you can't really spell it out in those exact terms, it's something you have to convey through your own behaviour rather than a calm & sober debate about identity/gender.

which might be something to talk about, actually, b/c how these gender issues affect us in a practical way is often not in a situation like this thread, where it's entirely appropriate to be discussing these things in these terms - most of one's quotidian life isn't like this, and it's navigating those situations where the actual problems come from

or something. don't feel i expressed that quite clearly

gay men tend to have butch/femme and top/bottom dichotomies but no real useful way to describe the in-between stuff, which is why i hate both of those dichotomies

― Prince Rebus (donna rouge), Tuesday, February 14, 2012 5:50 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otmfm

(though i don't want to hijack the feminism thread with gay male talk, ha. btw i have always found it funny how many str8 ilxors lurk on the gay thread!)

late replying to this but couple of xps to NV...

question tho, isn't there a more general division happening here between, for want of a better phrase, the libido-led and the intellect-led? a division that also cuts across normative gender lines?
this interests me greatly because on the one hand you have 'male' logic, reason etc explicitly positioned against 'female' sentimentality, hysteria etc.

Yet with sexuality you see the opposite popular perceptions - men are passionate, sexual, unafraid etc vs women who are "not as sexual", "don't think about sex as much as men", "are more aroused by the mental than the physical" etc.*

why is that?

and yeah huge awful double standards still in play but female sexuality is a little way out of the angels vs whores box by now surely?
irl yes obviously but the public perception really hasn't moved on much; you see this literally every time a rape case hits the news.

*all actual things men have said to me.

Yet with sexuality you see the opposite popular perceptions - men are passionate, sexual, unafraid etc vs women who are "not as sexual", "don't think about sex as much as men", "are more aroused by the mental than the physical" etc.*

i recognize what you're describing but i think associations with female sexuality are way more incoherent than that. women are also viewed as sexually voracious in a way that threatens men, especially women of color in our cultural context.

i am not actually sure the way female sexuality is understood is all the far out of the virgin-whore box, but like i said, i can be reactionary about this stuff.

women are also viewed as sexually voracious in a way that threatens men, especially women of color in our cultural context.

this is news to me. examples?

i guess i'm just talking about the whore pole of the virgin-whore dynamic. "Hottentot Venus" type-stuff.

men are passionate, sexual, unafraid

More reckless, maybe.

xxp definitely true horseshoe.

when i say about it having moved on, I was definitely not referring to the wider societal perception!

i guess i'm just talking about the whore pole of the virgin-whore dynamic. "Hottentot Venus" type-stuff.

right, this seems to comfortably encompass, say, Nicki Minaj or Li'l Kim or whoever. otoh I can't recall too many asian dragon-lady representations lately... and latina women are like a whole other basket of nuances when it comes to the virgin-whore axis.

xp

I shd also re-read this book, but even having not covered this ground in a few years, I can highly recommend it. I think I would get so much more out of it now than I did when I was mostly confused by all the historical ideas.

Beginning with "vamp" Theda Bara's 1915 silent-film debut in A Fool There Was, Dijkstra (Idols of Perversity), writing with passionate feminist scholarship, decodes images of women as predators, destroyers and vultures who deplete civilized males of their creative energies. He unmasks predatory females in Hemingway, H.L. Mencken, Elinor Glyn's bestselling 1907 potboiler Three Weeks, and unravels the sexist assumptions of sociologist Emile Durkheim, sexologist Havelock Ellis and philosopher of love Remy de Gourmont. Shuttling between high and popular culture, Dijkstra argues that antifeminine, racist and imperialist attitudes merge in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned, in Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, in Jung's psychology of unchanging archetypes, in the social Darwinist teachings of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. Finally, he traces a trajectory of fantasies involving men attaining supermale status from Nietzsche to Ezra Pound and Hitler.

sounds interesting

decodes images of women as predators, destroyers and vultures who deplete civilized males of their creative energies.

would read lol debate between her and Dave Sim

yeah i didn't mean that all women of color are viewed as menacingly sexual or that only women of color are--if you were raised in a monotheistic faith surely you recognize what i'm talking about when i talk about women as sexual temptresses who can destroy men. i am being very shorthandy i guess in talking about the mythology surrounding women and sex because there's so much of it and it's so directly contradictory and overdetermined.

this is news to me. examples?

minority ladies like the kind you'd meet in their ~authentic~ cultural setting are freeks/subs/wildcats etc and could ruin your life with their appetites

many xps

xxxp It's all about man as rational being who needs woman and their emotional vampirism in order to have children and have his family taken care of but should resist their appeal at all other times. Because all women crave his hot, hot, male...energy, and will sap him of it until he is a lifeless husk that does their bidding and is pitied by all clean-living, masculine men, everywhere.

also because it bums me out tbh

yeah sure. I was raised Jewish, which has perhaps a more generous view of female sexuality than Islam and Xtianity. (still contains the formative adam/eve myth, obvy)

xxp

the succubus myth

horseshoe otm

I find male-only groups/spaces somewhat alien and would be depressed to think of any of my activities as masculine-coded.

― jaymc, Tuesday, February 14, 2012 8:33 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^this. Sometimes I wish I didn't feel this way, I would like to be able to find camaraderie in a "guy's night", but it just doesn't work out that way.

take it to the guy's thread guys

(if there is one I will complain about sports fyi)

Excerpt from forthcoming book about modern sexuality in the West --> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/20/first-sexual-revolution

The first sexual revolution: lust and liberty in the 18th century

Adulterers and prostitutes could be executed and women were agreed to be more libidinous than men – then in the 18th century attitudes to sex underwent an extraordinary change

Not sure if it's shitty or not, but the excerpt was entertaining at least.

decodes images of women as predators, destroyers and vultures who deplete civilized males of their creative energies.

Baudelaire trafficked in this imagery as did Coleridge. If you mess with sexuality as much as religious anti-fornicators have, you end with highly distorted views, yet the underlying human fascination remains however sublimated or perverted.

and women were agreed to be more libidinous than men

It's funny that to religitimize itself, Christian patriarchy abandoned the Eve myth and Salome, etc., and put sentimental domesticity at its center. Perhaps this is more a Northern/Protestant thing but it's a pretty weird turn-around. Healthy, well-bred men are supposed to be rational and prefer clean male company. It does fairly reek of suppressed homoeroticism.

Hey has anyone read this?

http://thecaptivereader.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/enlightened-sexism-the-seductive-message-that-feminisms-work-is-done.jpg

Read an excerpt online the other day, and it seemed good. I liked Douglas's Where the Girls Are when I read it in college, and the premise of this one kind of reminded me of Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs, which I liked as well.

cisgender lesbians
yo hoos what does this mean?

― a hoy hoy, Tuesday, February 14, 2012 10:07 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook defined "cisgender" as a label for "individuals who have a match between the gender they were assigned at birth, their bodies, and their personal identity", complementing "transgender".[2] A more popular term is "gender normative".[3] However, unlike "cisgender", this term suggests that there is a single, agreed-upon system of gender norms.

don't really know the backstory of "cis" as the prefix tho, haven't done the appropriate reading

The word has its origin in the Latin-derived prefix cis, meaning "to/this the near side," which is antonymous with the Latin-derived prefix "trans." This usage can be seen in the cis-trans distinction in chemistry, or in the ancient Roman term "Cisalpine Gaul", i.e., "Gaul on this side of the Alps". In the case of gender, however, "cis" refers to the alignment of gender identity with assigned gender.

i am making a concerted effort to keep my mouth shut itt btw

ime straight white dudes have a bad habit of loudly disagreeing with (everyone but especially) women about what it is like to be (anything other than a straight white dude but especially) a woman instead of listening to their stories of that experience and i'd rather not play into that

That Guardian excerpt was fascinating, Lechera! I feel like every paragraph needs to be unpacked and supported like 10x more and it would still be interesting.

First thing, though, was story about the man who fell ill and feared his sickness was punishment for once ATTEMPTING to have sex with some young woman, who rebuked his advances, but because he besmirched her, the elders brought her from another town to stand trial and be found guilty of adultery, and hanged along with the failed rapist. The criminal injustice of it and the bottomless pit of his selfishness in pulling her down with him have me just....

i like that discourse is (slowly) starting to incorporate a greater variety of gender-identities and modes of "having" a gender. on the other hand, id like to see more about how gender is (imo) inherently disruptive, for everyone, and that, at best, its something we only have relationship to as a performative or prosthesis (our gender is almost a difference within ourselves) rather than just a multiplicity of possible identities.

Re: cis. It's still used in romance languages, so West Bank becomes Cis-Jordanie in French for example.

Yo HOOS, I did answer that upthread. Bloody straight white dudes, ignoring the wimmins over here. (j/k, but if you missed my earlier post I did also respond to something you said.)

This part broke my heart, and is also why I love to read diaries.

The effects of this sharpened double standard can be seen everywhere in 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century culture. James Boswell's diary records the tragic story of Jean, the brilliant only daughter of Henry Home, Lord Kames, one of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment. In the early 1760s, when she was only 16 or 17 and already married, she embarked on a passionate affair with Boswell, arguing to him that they were doing nothing wrong.
...
A decade later, when her husband divorced her over another affair, she declared "that she hoped that God Almighty would not punish her for the only crime she could charge herself with, which was the gratification of those passions which he himself had implanted in her nature." But her father, the scholar and moral authority, took the conventional view that adultery in a man "may happen occasionally, with little or no alienation of affection", but in a woman was unpardonable. After his daughter's divorce, he and Lady Kames exiled her to France and never saw her again.

Given the context provided by LL's entire excerpt, I am thinking that being "exiled to France" may not have broken this poor woman's heart. What's missing is whether she was reduced to penury, or still maintained her position as a member of the upper class.

Which doesn't mean that her parents and most of those around her were not acting oppressively.

i am making a concerted effort to keep my mouth shut itt btw

ime straight white dudes have a bad habit of loudly disagreeing with (everyone but especially) women about what it is like to be (anything other than a straight white dude but especially) a woman instead of listening to their stories of that experience and I'd rather not play into that

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, February 14, 2012 1:57 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I am doing the same but for different reasons. It often feels like "what it is like to be a woman" is some sort of set experience that all women share and relate to which is most certainly not the case. Unfortunately when women have tried to express that on other ILX threads it's been met with a response that has felt pretty condescending and dismissive at times in a way that has put me (and other posters I've talked to offline) off participating in this discussion entirely. I am reading though and it's pretty interesting. HS on the money as per usual.

Yo HOOS, I did answer that upthread. Bloody straight white dudes, ignoring the wimmins over here. (j/k, but if you missed my earlier post I did also respond to something you said.)

― emil.y, Tuesday, February 14, 2012 7:09 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh i must have missed that. thx!

Btw, despite his excellent patronage, Kames was lamentably a polygenist.

Am sorta feeling ENBB on this... honestly not sure I even know how to join in but I am v interested in what everyone is saying

The first sexual revolution: lust and liberty in the 18th century

Adulterers and prostitutes could be executed and women were agreed to be more libidinous than men – then in the 18th century attitudes to sex underwent an extraordinary change

Not sure if it's shitty or not, but the excerpt was entertaining at least.

― Laura Lucy Lynn (La Lechera), dinsdag 14 februari 2012 19:39 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I just read a lengthy, glowing review in a newspaper of this book the other day! Cut it out and it's on the "need to buy"-pile!

don't really know the backstory of "cis" as the prefix tho, haven't done the appropriate reading

cis- and trans- are common chemical prefixes eg double bonds and "trans- fats"

cis-kel and trans-bert

also i m dum and was ON IPHONE and did not see that this had been covered

I like the word 'cispontine', which means 'on this side of the bridge' and was used in the Victorian era to designate London proper as opposed to the scandalous south of the river.

my gender is racemic

gender politics of this are mindboggling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0vQOnHW0Kc&feature=player_embedded

PETA are pretty well known for ghastly campaigns that go well beyond making any kind of point and just into the realms of rampant misogyny.

Yeah I can't even begin to handle that. I mean seriously, fucking hell.

the mysogyny thing is not something I've noticed about them before, this just seems so extreme

Oh man, you've been missing out. Just a few of the first links that google comes up with for 'peta misogyny':

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/03/04/peta-misogyny-strikes-again/

http://feministlookingglass.com/2010/05/22/peta-strikes-again/

http://bastardlogic.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/peta-misogyny/

http://fengi.livejournal.com/1287486.html

PETA is like the all time worst. "secret fascists" imo.

That's fucking dreadful.

I don't think they're very secret about their fascism!

I mean, I realise their ethos is 'shock tactics', and while I do eat meat I understand where that comes from. But they consistently target, objectify, and demean women and women alone. They are fucking horrible.

I'm a vegetarian and I'm p horrified by PETA most of the time, especially the misogyny. But they wouldn't be the first organisation w progressive (or whatevs) agenda to have appalling gender politics. It's endemic.

just observing the thread, just want to echo WCC, peta's gender politics are wretched and set back animal rights as a srs political issue to boot

I guess I was aware of their "veganism = sexy naked babes" angle before but this just seems next level with the whole sexualized violence thing.

point 1 - thanks people who talked about libidousness and "the feminine", i was posing my questions from a position of genuine ignorance and like so much else on this thread i feel like a world of reading/ideas has just been flagged out for me :)

point 2 - in my opinion the repressive narratives of an org like PETA are reproduced by plenty of "progressive" communities eg Green movements on class and race - this is the point of the idea of kyriarchy, surely i.e. "friendly" power structures still riddled with inequality etc

ENBB, the idea that "what it feels like to be a woman is emphatically NOT something that all women share and relate to, that being a woman is NOT a monolithic entity" is something that's pretty central to most (at least) Third Wave Feminism.

I can understand how, if you walk into a thread where a group of women have had a specific set of negative experiences are talking about them, and you say something like "well, I've never had those experiences (and can't really understand or relate to them)" that could be a pretty alienating experience. For *both* sides. But I do think there's been quite an effort on "the ILX gurl community" (through Jenny's (I think?)) manifesto (which may have got lost on the Sandbox) saying something like "it's valid for women to have these experiences and express them, it's valid for women to not have those experiences and express that, neither invalidates the experiences of the other." I'm sorry if you feel condescended to by that, but I'm not sure what else you want?

I watched the ad without sound (I'm at work obv).

but, wha?

isn't whether one has had certain experiences oneself actually...not relevant? what's important is the recognition that in other circumstances they could easily have happened to you.

i was never bullied at school for being gay, i've never been beaten up for being gay, i've never experienced homophobia in the workplace, marriage is something that i personally can take or leave, but those are all crucial to any discussion of gay rights and i recognise that. i certainly don't feel alienated when people talk about issues i haven't experienced. alter my circumstances or character slightly and it could easily have been me. i mean, all of that is why i'm in a thread about women's issues (along with several other dudes) even though we *can't* have experienced the things described here.

I haven't watched the PETA video partly because, no bandwidth, partly because I know it's something that will upset and offend me and I don't want to expose myself to that when I already know what PETA's tactics can be like.

But that idea behind kierarchy? kyriarchy? (that word seems to be spelled about half a dozen different ways over the blogosphere - it's from the same Greek as Kyrie as Kyrie Eleison (sp?) that some of us sung in church choirs meaning lord or master, but in a more gender neutral way than "patriarch.")

So many progressive movements have been riddled with both inequality and a kind of refusal to admit or acknowledge oppressions other than the one they have come together to fight. It is ironic that late 19th C First Wave Feminism (at least in the States) was partially born out of dissatisfaction with the amount of outright sexism in the Anti-Slavery movement. (And likewise Second Wave feminism being born out of sexism in the 60s Anti-War and Civil Liberty movements.) Only for the Feminist Movement(s) itself to fall prey to huge amounts of endemic racism and classism.

I'm still trying to get my head around kyriarchy. It seems like this way of trying to acknowledge that oppressions don't cancel each other out, they intersect - often in multiplying or exponential ways, rather than merely additive - and often come from the same root, no matter what the expression. That the privileging of male over female, white over black, light-skinned over dark-skinned, straight over gay, cis over trans, middle class over working class, upper class over all - that all of these things, rather than being separate systems are part of the same interlocking system designed with the idea of keeping the same few kinds of people bobbing up to the top every time. So that no, switching the straight white dude at the top with Margaret Thatcher OR Barack Obama, although symbolically powerful, does not make THAT much of a structural difference, UNLESS you start to dismantle the entire systemic structure of privilege that props it up. (Which, clearly Thatcher did not do, and Obama, the jury is still out on.)

It's hard, because there are some systems of privilege I instinctively grok, and others that I don't, that I have to try to imagine or project or extrapolate based on the experiences of others (and the Othered.) But one of the first steps is acknowledging that the experiences of others are real, are meaningful, even when they don't align with your own. Still working on that one. Trying, at least.

isn't whether one has had certain experiences oneself actually...not relevant? what's important is the recognition that in other circumstances they could easily have happened to you.

I think that bolded bit is important.

Anything I say that follows, it would be very easy to interpret as having a go at ENBB - it genuinely is not. I don't know ENBB that well, I can't say whether this applies to her or not. Any attempt to say that would be projection, and that *would* be condescending.

This is a thing, that I have seen many times, in women I do know well:

1) Women who do conform to their culture's expectations of "femininity" (and indeed women who can) - either through nature (they are just naturally pretty and chipper and people-pleasing!) or through carefully controlling their appearance and behaviour - these women often get an easier or simpler or less complicated ride through society. Conform to The Rules, you don't feel Patriarchy's teeth quite so hard. This is the way it works, this is why it's so effective.

(This also doesn't go into the hidden cost to some of these women - as we talked about on the Girl Thread, that maintaining ~nice-face~ can come at the emotional cost of suppressing one's true emotions and reactions, which *hurts*, and also that maintaining the right physical appearance leads to huge costs in terms of self esteem, image problems, body dysmorphic disorder. Some women are naturally thin, pretty and smiley. Some maintain this pose at huge costs to themselves.)

2) Some of these women draw conclusions from their experiences that either a) all women surely get this easier ride, and anyone who doesn't is moaning or making it up, or, somewhat worse b) that women who don't or *can't* conform to society's expectations of femininity are bringing it on themselves, whether that's harassment, bullying, rape or not just getting the promotion because someone mistook your assertiveness for being a bitch.

It is very hard for me, personally, as a non-conforming woman not to do the automatic cringe - when I encounter a woman who seems to be like paragraph 1, I expect paragraph 2 to be in the post, shortly behind. I'm sure that is unfair, because not all paragraph 1 women go on to paragraph 2, many of them are able to recognise there but for the grace of god go I when they see me get shit. But enough of them don't, that it's a natural defensiveness to expect 2 to follow 1.

I don't know if this applies to the women that feel alienated from these discussions. But that is what goes through my head, so if that's what's reading as being condescending or dismissive, I'm sorry it comes across that way. But it's bad enough going through negative experiences without it being implied it's your own fault for being yourself, and not like someone else.

ENBB, the idea that "what it feels like to be a woman is emphatically NOT something that all women share and relate to, that being a woman is NOT a monolithic entity" is something that's pretty central to most (at least) Third Wave Feminism.

Yes, I know that. I know quite more than you'd probably expect about feminism in general and particularly Third Wave Feminism. I was saying that it often *feels* that way on ILX discussions though. That said, I don't feel like you were really having a go at me but thanks anyway for the disclaimer.

You raised some really interesting points and I think that you've definitely hit the nail on the head in some respects and not so much in others but I need to get my ass in gear and get ready as I'm already late. Will respond later from work or tonight once I've had time to think about it some.

I am also sorry if I come across as preachy or 'splainy - I didnt go to school for this stuff, it was pieced together thru experience and research so I never know what's common knowledge and what's obscure to the point of requiring explanation.

I also get that the nature of ILX is such that the same experience can feel different ways to participants in the same thread. Like when I said on the blog thread that I *felt* like ppl were trying to tell me that my emotions were invalid - and in the process of ppl trying to say "but we didn't *mean* it like that!" some bloke came along and did *exactly* what I was afeared of, thus totally justifying the feeling.

Feelings and intentions don't always align; we need to recognise both. (this is a note to self as much as anything else.)

hey folks. a few things:

1) the first sexual revolution: lust and liberty in the 18th century souns v. interesting, so thanks, LL, for the tip

2) peta r vile

3) while i'd love to further discuss the impact biological gender has (and/or doesn't have) on human behavior, it seems that this probably isn't the best place for it. aok.

there's been a lot of talk on the thread about men being unable to escape their own privilege, or being unable in most cases to really understand what certain experiences are like for a woman.

I feel like both of these stances, while almost always true, are more counterproductive because they smuggle in through the backdoor exactly the kind of thinking I'd want to avoid. there's nothing theoretically impossible about someone gendered as a man understanding someone gendered as a woman's experience. there's nothing necessary in either experience. again, i dont think there's any such thing as a gender identity, and i neither do i think anyone has a transparent relationship to their privilege OR their oppression. it's not as if there's a group of privileged people on one side and oppressed on the other.

now is it almost always true? again, yes. but i feel like there's something at stake in making this (very fine) distinction.

I could very well be wrong about this, so I'd love to be schooled on it.

I don't really see the point of saying in 3000 different ways that not all men have benefited equally from privilege and not all women suffered equally from the lack of it. If we couldn't talk about THE EXISTENCE of the phenomenon just because it wasn't applied equally to every person ON THE FUCKING EARTH, we couldn't talk about it at all, ever. So what is your point?

acutally i'll revise a bit. what I'm worried about above is an essentialist "Men = priviledged, Women/Other = oppressed" dichotomy that basically repeats the gender binary that I'd want to avoid in a Utopia.

maybe NOT being in utopia means that dichotomy has some pragmatic value in certain circumstances, though not all.

I think it's important to realize that men stand on privilege at every turn whether they are nasty, unfeeling, or power-hungry or not. Even ones who are allied with women, working to help women, etc. Like if you can't get that then you will always be having the wrong discussion.

― Melissa W, Monday, February 13, 2012 2:39 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

certain circumstances = basically all of the circumstances you're likely to experience throughout the rest of your life, yes.

saying men have privilege in a patriarchal society is not essentialist.

i think the discussion you want to have, ryan, about ensuring that men still try to understand these things, is not blocked, but rather facilitated by acknowledging the workings of privilege

no of course. i wasn't try to get rid of the idea of privilege! i apologize if that came across. and trying to see your OWN privilege is always a hard and constant task i think. and yes of course being humble and shutting up sometimes and hearing others is often the best way.

if i rephrase it as a question, i asked: is making this distinction worthwhile? Thread (sensibly) answers no.

i'm not sure if i understand your post. i admit to being a little dissatisfied with discussions of privilege, too; it doesn't seem a full enough rendering of *inequality in the world* or whatever you want to call it. i think it's understood to be shorthand, though, and it's better than anything i can come up with. sometimes discussions about privilege do seem counterproductive to me, but that usually seems to stem from people not understanding what it is and thinking the point of these conversations is that privileged people should stay out of them/stop thinking about economic inequality/racism/sexism.

xp Not in the context of this thread or things we're likely to discuss here, I would venture to say. Because give butthurt dudes on the internet an inch and they'll take over your whole thread tbrr.

haha Laurel that's true. i apologize if i did that in any way.

i don't think there's anything wrong with saying 'i suffered/experienced this (x) too – or one of its analogues - and i want to engage in a substantive discussion about it' that reduces or flattens the experience of the OP or initial topic, even if it is about a gendered experience.

I think it's best for the thread to drop this discussion, but i remembered the essay that got me thinking about this. It's called "The Unquiet Judge" by Barbara Herrnstein Smith. therein she talks about the uses of "Objectivism" for both privileged and oppressed groups.

i've been thinking abt the kyriarchical approach to power relationships discussed upthread. though it arises from feminist thought, approach seems intended to shift the focus from any one specific power imbalance (such as male vs. female) onto a complex system of interconnected power relationship in which most people are simultaneously "the privileged" and "the oppressed".

privileged positions = white, male, heterosexual, cisgender, wealthy, upper or middle class, able-bodied, "attractive"/thin, lots of other positions relative to local culture (think hutu v tutsi).

oppressed positions = nonwhite, female, non-heterosexual, transgender, poor, lower or working class, disabled, "ugly"/fat, old, other positions relative to local culture.

this approach makes good sense to me, and i like the term, but what do we see as the primary implications of this approach?

WCC - I'm not going to respond as in-depth to what you said earlier as I'd like to becasue I feel like I could really only do so on a personal level and don't want to take this in that direction. That said, while I understand why you might think the way you do about the people you've described, it sounds like you're operating under of a lot unfair assumptions about the experiences of what you see as "paragraph 1" women and their "easier or simpler or less complicated" rides through society. I just think it's really important to bear in mind that no woman has it easy in regards to this stuff and just because their experiences in life may not mirror your own it doesn't mean for a second that they've necessarily been any less trying.

Just reading everything itt, and w/r/t WCC's categories:

Those categories you listed are exactly why I am too intimidated to weigh in here. It's like the thread is being constantly weighed and vetted for correctness of thought, and there's no room to just *try* to understand, *try* to discuss, because if you're not on point with terminology references & the "right" experience, you're dismissed, or categorized.

I dunno. It just grated on me. I'm not trying to start something. Just trying to speak as one of the "meek", idk

3) while i'd love to further discuss the impact biological gender has (and/or doesn't have) on human behavior, it seems that this probably isn't the best place for it. aok.

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Wednesday, 15 February 2012 15:37 (4 hours ago)

If you start a thread on this I will join in with it.

you're operating under of a lot unfair assumptions about the experiences of what you see as "paragraph 1" women and their "easier or simpler or less complicated" rides through society. I just think it's really important to bear in mind that no woman has it easy in regards to this stuff and just because their experiences in life may not mirror your own it doesn't mean for a second that they've necessarily been any less trying.

I'm pretty sure no one wants to do this, but there have definitely been posts by...some people that have taken the tack "I've never experienced misogyny/etc in this way so I don't think the philosophy/theory/substantiated thing you're talking about is true or I don't like how you're talking about it."

That's def putting lived experience over ideas that are an accepted and solid part of the general discourse. If you want to know what the terms, ideas, etc are about, either listen in or ask questions or google things or read up. I'm completely stupid on theory, I don't know shit about shit on transgender ish or anything, but I do notice when logical fallacies are being all flounced around about.

If you start a thread on this I will join in with it.

been thinking about it, tbh. expect it'll just be on gender in general, though (to honor the pattern of gradual widening that's been going on in these threads over the last week or so).

Hey, I am trying to describe my experiences, and why I have emotionally loaded reactions to certain patterns of behaviour. Of course because it is so subjective, it may read as judgemental. I have no right to draw any judgemental conclusions about Paragraph 1, but when it gets into Paragraph 2, those women are *vetting me* for correctness of presentation which is very unpleasant - I'm already feeling how you're describing and my judgement is a reaction against feeling vetted and found wanting.

I'm really being throw by this use of the term "biological gender."

Because my understanding is that the ~biological~ stuff is sex. Like, it's obvious that biological sex has some bearing on gender, but saying "biological gender" is like saying "biological personality." Of course all mental functions are ultimately reducible to biology bcuz we are just chemical bonebags. But it's such a reductive way of looking at what we think of as ~personality~ as to be almost useless.

If you can find some hard science on how biological sex interfaces with gender - by all means, talk about it - that's why I lent you a whole book full of it, Z. I'm just not interested in any more not-backed-up opinions on why "men are the adjective gender because: testosterone."

http://cache2.artprintimages.com/lrg/30/3005/P9GBF00Z.jpg

xpost

Yes WCC, I really appreciate the book loan. I'm through the intro and the 1st chapter and it's completely fascinating. Also I'm really enjoying it because it supports my own most cherished beliefs about the need to sweep away all forms of assumption w/r/t gender whilst at the same time somewhat frightened by the apparent extent of our malleability.

I would love a thread where I can just chew over the topics in that book with people, and hopefully some more books like it, and I think Con's thread will serve nicely?

lol Latham that's an amazing photo what is it!

its Zoe from Dr Who!

I'd love to do a reading group on that book (and also Pink Brain Blue Brain) involving ground up rebuilding from Evidence Based stuff!

ah - my Dr. Who knowledge doesn't go back that far

I would love a thread where I can just chew over the topics in that book with people, and hopefully some more books like it, and I think Con's thread will serve nicely?

― Also unknown as Zora (Surfing At Work), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 12:21 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

as it turns out, i think there's already an appropriate thread for this kind of discussion. i posted in it here. it's a generic "gender" thread, max started it a year ago, and it starts off discussing determinism (in a rather lolzy way, but whatever). open invite to anyone who's interested in talking abt that or any other gender-related stuff there.

I apologize for thread derail to Dr WHo companions

I'm pretty sure no one wants to do this, but there have definitely been posts by...some people that have taken the tack "I've never experienced misogyny/etc in this way so I don't think the philosophy/theory/substantiated thing you're talking about is true or I don't like how you're talking about it."

I think that because these are sensitive topics, posts sometimes get read incorrectly. I know that I am definitely guilty of this myself. I don't know if the ". . . some people" was meant to mean me but if it was then I once again apologize for having done this in the past. Also, if I've said that I haven't experienced misogyny in the way that someone on board was describing, I didn't mean to invalidate their experience but do understand how it can often feel that way. My not sharing a particular experience, however, doesn’t mean that I haven’t battled related issues of my own including harassment, domestic violence, and rape. I mention these things, which I generally don't talk about very much, to emphasize my point earlier about the importance of not making assumptions about people, esp ones that conclude they've had easier rides.

That's def putting lived experience over ideas that are an accepted and solid part of the general discourse

Isn't lived experience pretty damn important when it comes to these discussions? Theory is great and necessary but I'm way more interested in hearing people's actual stories/experiences than listening to people rehash things they've read in a book or learned in a lecture hall. Not that those are crucial or don't have their place, mind. It's just that they're just way less interesting to me than people's actual experiences esp in the context of a thread on a discussion-based message board.

So that other thread is gonna be "I can't be bothered to read thd book but do I ever have PINIONS about what it all means" which is p much my gender theory nightmare.

This is why I don't discuss gender with men any more. Failed experiment, tears before bedtime.

I'm gonna try and make them read the book and if they don't I'm gonna tie them to a chair and feed them the book one piece at a time. Until I get tired. I get that you've been round this course too many times but I haven't - outside of the sociology of gaming at least - and I'm excited about it, at least for now.

I'm not doing this any more. I'm going back to threads about trees and coastline and Cornish grammar and Radiohead records. :-(

idk u got sniffy w me for quoting monique wittig. its like also there is not one single syllabus for doing womens studies. there are feminisms.

I must've missed it: what book are we talking about?

"The 100 Greatest Action Films of All Time"

LOL

I like that this and that are the two threads I have posted on today.

Thom Yorke's hair is really kinda attractive in a so wrong it's right way.

LOLOL.

There's more than one pertinent book but I'm starting with "Delusions of Gender".

<3 Thom Yorke's hair

I haven't looked at the Action Films thread b/c I don't generally like action films.

You don't? What kind of man are you?!

Exactly.

I refuse to read that thread after seeing Con Air anywhere except #1

NO one has the BALLS to mix action films with PR)N!

I come back in here and you're talking about Thom Yorke's hair and I'm not even responsible for it.

Thom Yorke's hair is a constant fascination to me for 18-odd years now. Talk about a guy who has been some interesting places in relation to redefining masculinity. I love Yorke's version of masculinity.

where do you stand on jonny's version

I refuse to read that thread after seeing Con Air anywhere except #1

i did my bit :(

I can't deal w his colour blindness - I always forget that's the deep reason for my disinterest. We're incompatible at a DNA level. (hey maybe my colourblindness is indicative of some deep gender incongruence rather than a double dose of genetic bad luck.)

I'm still feeling really really angry about this, like there is no discussion that men cannot take away, change the parameters of, and then dominate. While insulting you and blaming you for the schism. This is just so enraging. And then you get blamed and demonised for being made angry by it. There is this huge well of anger over this stuff, and every discussion of it that goes this way ends up really reinforcing that anger.

I'd had such a great day, I saw this amazing art show, had a great conversation and then something like this happens to make me feel disempowered. And I know that no one can make you feel this bad without your permission, but, like, as a woman, it's like there's really only one subject that you're ~allowed~ to be an expert on, that is your own womanhood, and they gotta wrench that away from you too.

And now the splainers will turn up to tell me "that's not what happened" but my god, that's what it feels like. This is where that deep rage comes from. And fuck that.

Talk about a guy who has been some interesting places in relation to redefining masculinity. I love Yorke's version of masculinity.

I'm not really aware of any of this! What makes him different from any number of other rock frontmen?

hey WCC. just wanted to talk abt gender, sex and biology in general terms. got the impression that this thread wasn't the place for it. wasn't intending to hijack the discussion, and the other discussion didn't really go where i'd hoped anyway :/

That's a good question but I think I'm actually still too angry and now slightly too drunk to even talk about my favourite subject of Thomosexuality. (my phone recognises Thomosexual as a word?)

I dunno, he's talked a bit in interviews about trying to find ways to express masculinity without lapsing into rock star cliches of aggression. He comes across as someone who lets himself be very vulnerable but in an open way, not an emo way or a wet, weedy way. The finding other ways to be sexy that don't involve thrusting domination. I'm too drunk / angry to be articulate about this.

i just keep thinking how when i read judith butler, judith halberstam and eve sedwick for the first time, it seemed to be about something incredibly important and personal to me. a lesbian, a tranny and probably most shockingly a woman who is married to a man. butler and sedgwick especially went beyond a sensitive deference to the different subjects they wrote about in some of their texts but i'm not the only homo who saw himself and was empowered by epistemology of the closet or bodies that matter. i think it has to go beyond typing about how you feel in ALL CAPS. and also to remind yourself that this idea that "gender is a social construct" is most often attributed to a the chapter in gender studies where she's writing about drag balls. i mean, i think this can be a problem with identity politics in general. to fetishise the subject position. there have to be ways of moving beyond this. undoing the subject position instead of endlessly rewriting it.

chapter in gender trouble

I've never read Judith Butler. I've read a bunch of books on neuroscience and anthropology and sociolinguistics and lots of analysis of scientific studies of the biological differences and overwhelming similarities between women and men. So that "lay off *these things you have never read*" is a bit of a wrong piece of advice. I don't want opinion and theory about what people think gender is. I'm interested in science and in personal experience of the constraints gender creates.

If ppl want to go create another thread, fine. But to carry on bitching about "omg blowback" bcuz a dude got asked for citation or gtfo on a wild assertion about the link between testosterone and violence? That's just insults.

I mean, this is yr gender role subversion right here, that it's the man wants to go on about his ~feelings~ about gender while the woman is saying "show me the science."

no one insulted you

Judith that's a great post and the idea of "undoing the subject position instead of endlessly rewriting it" is perfectly stated I think.

i guess i'm about as skeptical of science as being any more helpful or insightful.

When someone's going "but testosterone is proof of X" actual science regarding the chemical is very useful for proving that wrong and overly reductive.

But that discussion has moved to a different thread.

but the condition of science is doubt, it is only in certain contexts that scientific language ever affects certainty.

that is a good post like all your posts on this have been plax

But to carry on bitching about "omg blowback" bcuz a dude got asked for citation or gtfo on a wild assertion about the link between testosterone and violence? That's just insults.

hey WCC. i wouldn't describe my response as "bitching", and i've explained the science behind the link i'm drawing pretty clearly, both in this thread and the other. if you'd like to talk to me about it, i'd be happy to. fwiw, i don't believe i've directly insulted you at any point here. if i may, however, your language towards me has been moving quickly in that direction (asshole, butthurt, bitching, etc).

but the condition of science is doubt, it is only in certain contexts that scientific language ever affects certainty.

Hence Forster's (?) assertion of the 'factual' supremacy of fiction

butthurt, bitching, etc

was kind of lol'ing at the ironies of the choice of words there myself

those kinds of books are not anti-science or non-science either, i am a sciency person and i think judith butler et al are tremendously valuable. they help your brain grow.

lots xposts

Contenderizer has now posted some links (assuming you're staying out of the thread WCC, anyone else who is staying out of it) sadly I have to go to bed now as I'm up early again tomorrow, hopefully someone will check them out before too long...

Hate it when people feel angry btw, it always bothers me at a gut level when people I like and respect are angry. If it's directed at me I *might* react aggressively, but mostly I want to *make it better* and I can't help wondering if this is something other women-flavoured (and men-flavoured I guess) ILXors get too - it it just me? Is it something I've been taught to feel because I'm female and women are supposed to be social facilitators? Or is it universal, more or less?

(PS I do not have a problem wrt anger; I am in no way asking anyone not to be angry. Anger can be really positive. Or not; it's not for me to say how anyone should feel. I am in control of this urge to fix things, I think.)

The only thing to fight faux-science bollocks being spouted as truth is the actual scientific method.

I don't really have much time for Butler and other writers who use language to obfuscate. It makes no sense to me. Not in the way that ppl like Cordelia Fine and Deborah Cameron make sense. Sure, there's a place for both in the world, but I distrust theory without experimental data.

no Zora i agree and was about to suggest people leave the argumentative side of this alone for a bit until heads have cooled

The word "bitching" was chosen very carefully Contenderizer. I have found your tone from the start of that thread towards me snide and sarcastic - you want blowback, well you've made me angry so you've got what you were accusing me of.

Hate it when people feel angry btw, it always bothers me at a gut level when people I like and respect are angry. If it's directed at me I *might* react aggressively, but mostly I want to *make it better* and I can't help wondering if this is something other women-flavoured (and men-flavoured I guess) ILXors get too - it it just me?

I definitely don't like seeing people angry or making people angry & try to talk people down from it or make the conversation less serious usually. I am sad that a lot of people can't argue about things they are passionate about without getting angry! Especially those who have excellent insights!

Hate it when people feel angry btw, it always bothers me at a gut level when people I like and respect are angry. If it's directed at me I *might* react aggressively, but mostly I want to *make it better* and I can't help wondering if this is something other women-flavoured (and men-flavoured I guess) ILXors get too - it it just me?

nah I totally get this. mostly it just bums me out.

aw man ilx ate my post :(

xps okay but it isn't relevant to the point i was trying to make whether or not you care about judith butler. the point is that *I* do, and that many others do. the fact that her interrogations of gender and sexuality were important to many gay men and trannies, that is people who were not also lesbians like judith butler.

Pretty common social animal behavior right there, I'd say, Zora.

The only thing to fight faux-science bollocks being spouted as truth is the actual scientific method.

Without philosophy the scientific method would fail to question itself rigorously. In order to isolate cause from correlation you need the ability to understand the world philosophically.

I don't really have much time for Butler and other writers who use language to obfuscate. It makes no sense to me.

Butler doesn't use language to obfuscate. It's fairly simple to pick up how to read this sort of text. There's no need to be defensive about it. Just because it doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean it doesn't make sense to anybody.

Ah, I'm not sure I want to ask anyone to moderate their behaviour right now NV b/c I don't feel like the spatting has got to the point where the conversations are not working.

Everyone can judge that for themselves ofc. I can tolerate some discomfort. Very interested in all people have to say. Going to bed in any case. nn ILX x

No and it's such bullshit saying to people -especially a woman "don't be angry" when someone has gone poke, poke, poke at something that is the bone and blood if their life. It's Privilege, to be able to consider this stuff dispassionately "just theory man" and I'm sick of losing my authority when I become angry - because that is a classic double standard that gets thrown at women. Especially considering how much we have to angry about.

Fuck that.

knew you were gonna say that

Most people get their gender theories from stand-up comedians.

I do agree that if you're discussing biology, you absolutely need scientific research. However, a lot of what we are talking about is the social construction of gender, and for that you absolutely need sociology and theory and phenomenology and history.

and phrenelogy

and those little caliper things for measuring skull sizes

Well, you would need those caliper things for phrenology, yes. Are either of you actually making any kind of point?

I don't really have much time for Butler and other writers who use language to obfuscate. It makes no sense to me. Not in the way that ppl like Cordelia Fine and Deborah Cameron make sense. Sure, there's a place for both in the world, but I distrust theory without experimental data.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, donderdag 16 februari 2012 0:45 (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Excuse me, but you've been kicking a stir about how people here have opinions without having reads books you have read, or backing it up with statistics or research. But when Judith Butler comes up, you first say you haven't read her, followed immediately by a judgement, saying you "don't have time for her", as if you know her work?

The reason Con took his interests to another thread is because in this one people have to follow your view on things, or agree with you, or else you give them a hard time. People have to play by you rules and opinions here, or else...

These gender discussions online are just so pointless, they achieve nothing except bad blood and bad faith. I should have stuck to Yhom Torke's hair, but anger eats you up inside, and now there's this whole ~disapproval~ of the fact I said I was angry. Learn To Keep Your Mouth Shut, WCC.

Jesus fucking Christ. That's right "don't make assertions about testosterone without a citation" is a matter of ~following my opinion~. Yup, that's right.

science is a social construct

If I went on a thread and said "hey I think climate change is caused by dragon breath" without a citation, I'd expect to be given a hard time.

xxxxxxp

i was just list-building tbh. i completely agree about philosophy's place within scientific method, and wd have argued that privileging experimental data above other methods of sense-making feels kinda kierarchical in itself?

WCC for what it's worth i wasn't disapproving of you or anybody being angry and i wasn't just talking about you when i said i hoped people cd take a step back. i just hate to see anger becoming something that hurts the bearer rather than a righteous venting

so is gender theory xp

WCC, I am saying you called people out on their opinion while not having read certain books. You say you aren't familiar with Butler's work yet immediately dismiss it as if she "uses language to obsfucate"...

Science is just a social construct. True. But batshit opinions about ~testosterone~ are the gods honest truth. Also dragons.

WCC for what it's worth i wasn't disapproving of you or anybody being angry and i wasn't just talking about you when i said i hoped people cd take a step back. i just hate to see anger becoming something that hurts the bearer rather than a righteous venting

― dayove cool (Noodle Vague), donderdag 16 februari 2012 1:01 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and this, yes.

I knew I should have gone to bed - WCC if you think my post was a sideways attack on you for being angry, it totally wasn't.

I think people should refrain from insulting one another if at all possible, should certainly not throw kettles at each other's heads or stab with knives, but neither should they refrain from expressing anger whilst simmering in bitter fury until their guts are all twisted up and all their relationships have soured, or suppress their anger so deep that they become passive little lettuce leaves floating along on a tide of other people's opinions. Anger is an honest and valid emotion, it can be harmful and it can be constructive.

I just had a moment's curiosity as to whether my discomfort was another gender-related social construct because I have often felt at a disadvantage in situations where other people, usually men, have *appeared* to handle angry conflict situations in a less... self-compromising...? way than I do.

I have read enough Butler to know that I find her style immensely off-putting. You can get that from an online abstract.

if it helps this is something that i feel and think about on an incredibly emotional and visceral way. when you bat away things that i've just said have effected me in important ways as irrelevant i don't understand how that is any different from what you've been accusing people of doing on this thread.

I have read enough Butler to know that I find her style immensely off-putting. You can get that from an online abstract.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, donderdag 16 februari 2012 1:05 (31 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

...

If you had said that you found Butler's style immensely off-putting I don't think anyone would have argued with you. But you didn't. You directly accused her of intending to use language to obfuscate.

also butler's writing now is somewhat different to what it was twenty years ago

and regardless of whether or not you've read butler, she is incredibly influential. someone recently told me that she was the most cited living writer.

Ok sorry Plax, I'm not batting it away as irrelevant. It's that your post came across as "lay off thd Judith Butler" which just seemed so off base to me as her work is not the foundation of my views on gender.

I don't like her style, that's not to say that others can't find meaning in it. But I'm drunk and angry and annoyed that I'm being accused of holding or misusing a position I don't follow, so I hit out at the position.

Jesus fucking Christ. That's right "don't make assertions about testosterone without a citation" is a matter of ~following my opinion~. Yup, that's right.

well, i mentioned that i was responding to research itt thread days ago, and posted some stuff in the other thread recently. you call me "snide", but i think i've tried very hard to engage you not just civilly, but with some hope of real accord. which isn't to say that i don't get "butthurt" from time to time, but i honestly don't think i'm the one driving this [whatever it is] at this point.

chomsky iirc xp

where is this because i've tried googling it!

most cited is... a potentially dubious distinction.

well, i mentioned that i was responding to research itt thread days ago, and posted some stuff in the other thread recently. you call me "snide", but i think i've tried very hard to engage you not just civilly, but with some hope of real accord. which isn't to say that i don't get "butthurt" from time to time, but i honestly don't think i'm the one driving this [whatever it is] at this point.

well you do keep coming back over and over again to 'it's just, like, my opinion maaaan' all over this thread so

most cited is a pretty good indication of influence though

Hate it when people feel angry btw, it always bothers me at a gut level when people I like and respect are angry. If it's directed at me I *might* react aggressively, but mostly I want to *make it better* and I can't help wondering if this is something other women-flavoured (and men-flavoured I guess) ILXors get too - it it just me? Is it something I've been taught to feel because I'm female and women are supposed to be social facilitators? Or is it universal, more or less?

― Also unknown as Zora (Surfing At Work), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 3:44 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark

oh yeah, i definitely get this. suspect it's a fairly universal human thing. and the "like and respect" bit is key. it's why the disapproval of your parents can be so devastating when you're a kid. i find that if i think someone's a jerk, their anger is much easier to handle.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1992/citation-0415.html

i've seen the bible cited a lot tbh

I *am* suspicious of Butler's style. I do find it obfuscating, that whole school of philosophy which makes complicated things even more complicated. My taste in philosophers runs more towards Mary Midgley and people who are able to render complicated subjects in such a way that they actually seem easy. But this is me as a data analyst, and a number cruncher by trade. These are the things that important to me.

well you do keep coming back over and over again to 'it's just, like, my opinion maaaan' all over this thread so

― gyac, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 4:14 PM (55 seconds ago) Bookmark

maybe, but that's not all i've said.

Is it Chomsky? Linguistics FTW!

(that is probably the most "obsessed Radiohead fan" thing I've ever said so shoot me in the fucking face now)

the only one i could find chomsky was fourth and butler third

here's a ranking only within the humanities where she does do quite well:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=405956

science is a social construct

― judith

its interesting you used phrenology as an example, as its an intersection of science (well, it's quantitative anyway) and the social world. "science is a social construct", yes, but it seems to me that we get into particularly sticky territory when we're using science to make conclusions about social issues (say, gender and sexuality) as opposed to natural ones (say, celestial mechanics)

@WCC, You didn't even *know* Butler until 15 minutes ago, yet you claim to know her style, place it into a "school of philosophy" no less, because of an extract online somewhere...

Ah well, the joke's on me I suppose, talking to a person who says she's drunk and angry. On the internet. A lol forum. I'm out.

But complicated things are complicated. I much prefer to open up those complicated things to further questioning, to put pressure on them and to discover how they work by investigating it for myself, than to be given an answer and go 'yes, that sounds about right, and it's by a scientist so they must know'.

Also, Chomsky's linguistics are pretty much entirely discredited, right? I have time for the dude, but... well.

yeah but tbh it's all very circular, especially with a lot of different topics itt.

em: yes.

to discover how they work by investigating it for myself, than to be given an answer and go 'yes, that sounds about right, and it's by a scientist so they must know'.

And by none of this do I mean anything close to 'well, it's just our differing opinions, maaaan'.

LBI. Let me spell this out for you. I know who Butler is. I have seen her referenced in many places, intersecting with the things I read about in gender, sociolinguistics etc. I checked out a couple of articles that were online, and found them impenetrable.

When Plax tells me "lay off the Butler" this is an absurd proposition, because Butler is not the foundation of my ideas about gender. I have read enough about Butler to find her impenetrable. I have seen her mentioned enough to know approximately which school of thought she belongs to. I have not read enough of her to have her theories be so much at the base of my ideas about gender that I need to lay off them. Can you understand that, or do you need me to draw you a map?

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

what's hard about that

i never said "lay off the butler" just so we're clear. i said that you were repeatedly using a trope that was strongly associated with her work. i was saying her work has formed identifications with a lot of people who are not women and that it has been taken up and used and identified with and become a canon text for groups that judith butler does not belong to. i never literally said "lay off the butler" or anything similar.

anyone who thinks butler is hard should give spivak a go. or laruelle.

lol iatee

isn't butler's impenetrability, like, a widely discussed thing? iirc she's pretty much admitted to it.

(i found her writing style completely obfuscatory when i tried her at university, but then i also find deleuze incomprehensible too)

deleuze and guattari is tough but deleuze solo is pretty clear.

WCC, you said I've never read Judith Butler. Which is what I went by. Plus, Plaxico never said "lay off the Butler"?

It's just a shame that you tell other people off for not having read certain books or gathered information that you have - like Con, who seems genuinely interested in a lot of things mentioned here. Yet you dismiss Butler, a hugely prolific writer on this matter, without having read a single thing by her.

No need to "draw me a map", save those pencils for your artwork.

even anti oedipus is pretty straightforward.

there is a certain performative difficulty in butlers work, the complexity of the text as a set of entanglements in order to mirror the complex social configurations she is writing about. yes.

difficult and deliberately difficult aren't the same as trying to be obscure or confusing.

there is a jargon to a lot of this stuff that becomes "familiar" with time but i think it's okay that difficult ideas are difficult. i couldn't pick up a quantum physics text and just breeze thru it until i understood the universe either.

i'm sorry if this is too much fanboyism

what's hard about that

took me longer to comprehend than to read, but igi, and i don't even know who Althuss is. hegemonic structures are not fixed things, they exist over time, in the way they are repeated and reasserted. style is a bit lol bullshit academic obfuscation, but i figure that goes with the subject.

OK, your actual post has disappeared behind the cut, Plax, but that was the general gist I got "this idea comes from Butler, Butler said it only in one place and moved beyond it" when it's an idea that has been debated back and forth in other places and I've been talking about those other places so much - it would make more sense if you'd said "lay off the Dale Spender" or "lay off the Cordelia Fine" so I didn't really understand why you were getting Butler from what I was saying.

Le Bateau Ivre, go boil your head.

and for one person deleuze and guattari = difficult another person loves the playfulness and texture of the work

Le Bateau Ivre, go boil your head.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, donderdag 16 februari 2012 1:31 (3 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

...

Stay classy.

oh i guess it was deleuze & guattari that i read (or tried to read, don't think i got to the end, certainly didn't understand enough of it to take anything from it)

there is a certain performative difficulty in butlers work, the complexity of the text as a set of entanglements in order to mirror the complex social configurations she is writing about. yes.

This I have no time for. Maybe it comes from reading too much about maths and physics, and wanting things to be elegant, that the mark of a brilliant mathematician is someone who takes a big mess of complicated stuff and renders it down to an elegant beautiful equation.

Taking complicated stuff and making it more complicated, to prove that the subject is complicated? That's obfuscation as far as I'm concerned.

i couldn't pick up a quantum physics text and just breeze thru it until i understood the universe either

pretty sure you wouldn't understand the universe afterwards either fwiw

continually mystified/bummed that these threads seem to inevitably devolve into CWW hostility tbh

pretty sure you wouldn't understand the universe afterwards either fwiw

that's the joek!

chomsky is a chill bro and all but yes, structural linguistics, a bit passe.

never found butler anything but dense yet clear tbh, never sure where these ideas of her being such a terrible writer come from.

most philosophy texts are not good at telling you what the secret true state and meaning of the world is tho, this is true

ha, hadn't seen this martha nussbaum quote before

Nussbaum's "The Professor Parody" essay also raised the issue of Butler's style, calling it "ponderous and obscure" and "dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions...It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding."[54]

she kind of goes in on butler and does not stop in this essay http://www.akad.se/Nussbaum.pdf

i couldn't pick up a quantum physics text and just breeze thru it until i understood the universe either.

There are writers (whose exact names escape me because I'm drunk - Barrow, Penrose spring to mind) who do *exactly this*. They write about quantum physics in such a way to make it accessible. People like this, I have respect for as writers and thinkers.

tbh i hate the kind of academic that is afraid they are being tricked by texts they don't understand

continually mystified/bummed that these threads seem to inevitably devolve into CWW hostility tbh

Hey, I've got some yapping assholes buzzing round me telling me how ~hostile~ I am, before I've even got hostile, and then get all preachy when they manage to poke and prod me into anger - hey, you might get a bit fucking cranky after a while of that, too, you know.

Yes, but they don't actually give anybody any skills to handle quantum physics. And anyone who reads them will be reading ideas based on scientific testing but filtered through theory.

xxpost

there is a jargon to a lot of this stuff that becomes "familiar" with time but i think it's okay that difficult ideas are difficult. i couldn't pick up a quantum physics text and just breeze thru it until i understood the universe either.

― dayove cool (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 4:30 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is totally changing the subject, but i have absolutely zero tolerance for obfuscatory overwriting in an academic critical/theoretical context. that shit is the biggest, most transparent load of horseshit in the world. if any of the people posting in this thread are academic type people, i really, really hope you don't write like that.

I'm not an academic. I never pretended to be. I'm an autodidact in pretty much everything. I see how a lot of people use walls of academia to keep the riffraff like me out, and hey, I'm suspicious of it.

they don't use it to keep you out, they use it to justify their having a job

they don't really care about you

since i know you're not an academic i wasn't criticising you there either.

put it another way - what makes people so angry about text they don't "understand"?

ha, this topic has given us surprise WCC/contenderizer agreement

because you can spout untruths half-truths and platitudes in transparent orderly prose too

Academia is pretty much my family business and has been for generations, they kinda do care about me ha ha, at least I hope so.

what makes people so angry about text they don't "understand"?

it annoys me in the same way that most bad writing annoys me.

eh it is not something that concerns me much these days as i live in my own little world (cept when i tried to explain deleuze to someone doing a phd in philosophy of science the other night, drunkenly. didn't go v well), but it just strikes me as odd that we're still in a place where people think that the sole inviolable rule of serious academic/theoretical writing is to be clear precise and to the point. (um, i think i'm xposting terribly here, should learn to type more quickly.)

Well, obviously as an academic I'm not welcome in this thread any more. So I'll see myself out. Bye, guys.

it's down to the privileging of certain forms of logic and truth i think

I've been following this thread with interest, though my knowledge/experience here is slight and I don't have much to add to the debate. The analogy with science writing made me think of a question though: what are the equivalent of good "popular science" books wrt feminism? I don't have the training (or the time, tbh) to jump into Judith Butler and get much out of it but I would like to read a good accessible introduction to the issues she and her peers discuss.

put it another way - what makes people so angry about text they don't "understand"?

It doesn't make me angry. It does make me think that they're *hiding* something - like, maybe they don't understand their subject quite as well as they represent themselves if they can't come up with a usable metaphor for it.

Like, I don't understand a popular science book to enable me to walk into the Hadron Supercollider and switch on all the buttons, but understanding what they theories are about, and what they are for - they can accomplish that in a clear and straightforward way, even about something as confusing and brain-bending as the weirdness of quantum physics. But, like, Butler, she doesn't want to come up with a helpful metaphor to make you understand. She wraps everything in allusions to references with subclauses chock full of namedrops of disciplines she hopes you haven't heard of.

privileging good writing in the humanities should be the same thing as privileging 'good math' in science.

what makes people so angry about text they don't "understand"?

it annoys me in the same way that most bad writing annoys me.

― first period don't give a fuck, second period gon get cut (lex pretend), donderdag 16 februari 2012 1:42 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

SO text you don't understand annoys you like bad writing? I think NV has a very good point here tbh. The annoyance really isn't with that with which you don't understand, rather with you yourself not understanding it. I get that so many times tbh

there is a certain performative difficulty in butlers work, the complexity of the text as a set of entanglements in order to mirror the complex social configurations she is writing about. yes.

― judith, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 4:30 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

i love most of what you've said itt, judith, but i can't get on board w this. making complicated things seem complicated is dead easy. any hack can do it. hell, it's easy to do it even with simple things. making complicated things seem clear, however, is very, very hard.

there's a complex relationship between intellectual competition, narcissism and defensiveness that is just painfully obvious in a lot of "sophisticated" academic/critical/philosophical writing. no matter how much i sympathize with the forces that motivate it (it's their job to seem smart and someone else is always after the same grant money), i simply cannot abide it.

lol, WCC and i are on the same side now. go team philistine!

I'm still kinda scarred from 2 years of Crit Theory...Heidegger was pretty much where I threw in the towel, as far as impenetrability goes.

But I think it's a lot to do with patience, and being invested in the subject. I have mad respect for people who can parse Butler, for academics as well... I guess if anything the impenetrability makes me hate myself more than the subject. Like 'ugh, brain, WORK dammit'

i was merely pointing out that she was influential. her influence had permeated a lot of stuff you do like even if you don't dig her specifically. this was a sidenote to my main point which was really about who is and isn't allowed to speak about things. you keep mentioning how important and viscerally you feel these things. but other people feel and care about them too. people who aren't women. i don't think i should have to apologise for pointing that out. i mention butler more as somebody who isn't a gay man but whose work has been really influential for a lot of gay men. i was thinking more about overlapping identifications, etc. the trickiness of positionality.

roland barthes really could have used an interlocutor is what i mean

^ but at least he's kind of funny and charming about the impenetrability

she is writing for a different audience then. not everybody has to be a populariser? and i think it's an unsupported assumption that there must be sleight of hand or dishonesty because a writer isn't writing what you want to read.

Like, I don't understand a popular science book to enable me to walk into the Hadron Supercollider and switch on all the buttons, but understanding what they theories are about, and what they are for - they can accomplish that in a clear and straightforward way, even about something as confusing and brain-bending as the weirdness of quantum physics. But, like, Butler, she doesn't want to come up with a helpful metaphor to make you understand. She wraps everything in allusions to references with subclauses chock full of namedrops of disciplines she hopes you haven't heard of.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, Thursday, February 16, 2012 12:46 AM (55 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Okay, one last thing before I do fuck off out of here. THIS IS BECAUSE THE WORK OF PHILOSOPHY IS NOT IN A LABORATORY, IT IS IN WRITING. What you are looking for is a primer guide. What Butler provides IS THE RESEARCH.

what are the equivalent of good "popular science" books wrt feminism?

Like popular science, maybe you should pick a specific discipline that you want to concentrate on, because it's hard to give you a book that's gonna take on Biology, Chemistry, Relativity, Quantum Physics and Newtonian Physics all in one handy little pamphlet?

I haven't read the recent crop of overviews (Full Frontal Feminism, How To Be A Woman come up in conversations) because I'm a little beyond that so I'm probably useless to ask.

I guess if anything the impenetrability makes me hate myself more than the subject. Like 'ugh, brain, WORK dammit'

― Janet Snakehole (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, February 16, 2012 12:48 AM (21 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what makes me angry is when shitty writing makes perfectly smart people feel like this about themselves. it used to make me feel thick as well, can't remember what finally clicked and made me realise it wasn't me, it was the writers

the standard that some of you want to hold philosophical writing to seems to be the exact unexamined norm that much of the writing you're antagonistic to is setting out to unravel, which might account for a problem with it not being the thing you think it has to be

My Crit Theory hangups/hangover is probably another part of why I hang back in gender discussions. It's like watching people play double-dutch jump rope...I gotta get the mental hang of gender-speak before I climb on board. It takes me a while to get over my natural inclination to just recoil at the language, more than anything. Which is not on anyone but me, because you guys are all *really* good jump-ropers, fyi

yeah i've gotten so dumb, i'm gonna go back and reread all my books

oof man i'm out of here

privileging good writing in the humanities should be the same thing as privileging 'good math' in science.

― iatee, Thursday, 16 February 2012 00:46 (3 minutes ago)

it's more like privileging elegant maths in science though.

maybe i'm misremembering, but didn't you say something way upthread about the importance of changing patterns of thought in these matters rather than just having a 'case' heard? and isn't that exactly what seemingly obscurantist writing is often trying to do, in a v fundamental way?

harbl you are intimidatingly smart

only to my cat
are you my cat?!?!!

one thing that helped me feel less threatened by/defensive about whatever were talking about here, 'poststructuralism' or what have you, is to consider the texts in the same terms you might consider poetry or fiction, rather than say popular philosophy or science, i.e. reading through them for concepts and ideas and patterns that resonate or echo w/ me rather than for 'explanations' or 'directives' or whatever

consider too that 'gender trouble' isnt exactly a book for 'gender amateurs' or whatever. in the sense that these texts are rooted very deeply in specific academic concepts ie in the midst of 'important' academic battles, responding to or anticipating their own reception, etc.

this isnt to say that "derrida is just poetry man" or whatever but i think a lot of time its easy to get frustrated when something doesnt just unwrap itself for you. also for whatever reasons 'poststructuralism' seems to have a sort of totemic value among too-cool assholes in college so i think that turns people off. oh well. the nazis loved nietzsche so.

this is like 1m xps so sorry if im repeating someone

like does yeats or whatever make you feel "dumb"? i doubt it. but you wouldnt argue you necc understand all of it, either.

no I think that's good advice, max

max otm

but can we plz clear up if plax is harbl's cat? I like this idea

this was a sidenote to my main point which was really about who is and isn't allowed to speak about things. you keep mentioning how important and viscerally you feel these things. but other people feel and care about them too. people who aren't women. i don't think i should have to apologise for pointing that out. i mention butler more as somebody who isn't a gay man but whose work has been really influential for a lot of gay men. i was thinking more about overlapping identifications, etc. the trickiness of positionality.

I never said that men were not allowed to speak about gender - or even about "women's issues". A lot of people had these conversations with themselves, where they represented me as saying that, when I was saying things like:

-no batshit theories about testosterone without citations
-women should define being a woman, rather than ~patriarchy~
-often, when men join conversations about women those conversations tend to get very dominated by men and the women's voices disappear
-if you are a man who wants to speak about women's issues, you should check your privilege before speaking

^^^^^somehow all of this got translated into "WCC does not want men to speak at all, ever" - this kind of misrepresentation makes WCC very, very angry.

imo those writers aren't writing to lay audiences though or even MA students - it's hard to read because a) they're writing for themselves, writing as work itself, and b) they're writing to their peers because they're all doing research in a similar area and attempting to move the dialogue forward/around.

so no one should feel stupid reading those texts - they are difficult and require a certain level of education/knowledge rather than a certain level of intelligence. as with science, it takes an interpreter/another writer/media/etc to translate the meat of the text so that everyone can understand it and see how it fits in everyday life (which it may or may not do...)

so many xps

i totally approach this stuff like max, the pleasure of the text is an important part of the experience of it. pleasure not being dependent on parsing every word in one run through. different kind of reading etc.

oh max said what i said in a way too before i said it

sometimes you have to enjoy the struggle of the text

if you're worth your academic salt

max that doesn't rule out the fact that the big concepts inside those books could have been expressed more clearly if that were really an important goal or something that was rewarded within the discipline

the standard that some of you want to hold philosophical writing to seems to be the exact unexamined norm that much of the writing you're antagonistic to is setting out to unravel, which might account for a problem with it not being the thing you think it has to be

― dayove cool (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 4:51 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

eh, i don't think it's that at all. i don't object to complex ideas or sentences, so long as they're the best way to get an idea across. i do get annoyed by shitty, lazy writing. and i hate shitty lazy writing that bends over backwards in to convey really simple ideas in a hideously complex fashion, especially when the motive is so obviously a form of intellectual self-aggrandizement. how do you know whether or not your "brilliant" idea has to be conveyed in a complex fashion? you try to convey it as simply as possible and go with what works best. what you DON'T do is arrange it into endlessly looping unbroken chunks generously larded w jargon, redundancy and vague references to other texts. that's a ploy, and everybody knows it.

Max that is a wonderful post, it perfectly illustrates the pleasure and search for meaning, understanding without having to know every single thing that has been said about a certain subject before, without having to know the 'canon'.

many xps

i think the idea that "big concepts" are sitting there outside language waiting for a nice clean signpost is one of the problems "poststructuralist" philosophers are wrestling with

i was just gonna add but i see you did already rrrobyn that i see that highblown stuff the way i see medical journal articles. the cramped, tediously precise language of a clinical trial or w/e is not at all the way anyone, even a medico, would speak with clarity about the subject---it's just how you go around splaining it

^ this!
and it's okay and i don't think it limits the information to the realm of the "experts" either

i don't know, if you think philosophy is trying to bring about new concepts and ideas as a way of tactically engaging with the world, then those concepts are going to be unrecognisable at first. things to be grappled with.

that's a ploy, and everybody knows it.

"everybody" is working so hard here i feel sorry for it

it's one level of the information, and then it gets talked about at another level and so on (in class, in the media, in another discipline, by other people who use different words to express their ideas, etc etc)
xp

I think it's definitely a zen/patience thing. And honestly, I think I was maybe a little young, myself, to really be able to critically read Derrida or Deleuze or whoever 'successfully', you know? I honestly didn't entirely understand the COURSE when I took it, lol.

Maybe I could do with circling back to some of this stuff and actually reading it with more context now than I had back then.

Fwiw, Butler has actually copped to deliberately using language in a non-straightforward way, viz. the preface to the 10th-anniversary edition of Gender Trouble:

It would be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints that grammar imposes upon thought, indeed, upon the thinkable itself. But formulations that twist grammar or that implicitly call into question the subject-verb requirements of propositional sense are clearly irritating for some. They produce more work for their readers, and sometimes their readers are offended by such demands. Are those who are offended making a legitimate request for “plain speaking” or does their complaint emerge from a consumer expectation of intellectual life? Is there, perhaps, a value to be derived from such experiences of linguistic difficulty?

It's not that the concepts are unrecognisable, it's that they are dressed up in clothes to make them look more out-there, more unrecognisable than they really are. And that's when I get a real case of the Emperor's New Footnotes about it.

albeit a completely unsubstantiated one

'gender trouble' isnt exactly a book for 'gender amateurs'

lol

i was just gonna add but i see you did already rrrobyn that i see that highblown stuff the way i see medical journal articles. the cramped, tediously precise language of a clinical trial or w/e is not at all the way anyone, even a medico, would speak with clarity about the subject---it's just how you go around splaining it

― i love pinfold cricket (gbx), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 5:03 PM (35 seconds ago) Bookmark

"tedious precision" is by no means the problem that i and (i think) others are objecting to. some tedious, hard-science-style precision would be great. careful building and clarifying of concepts. frequent summaries. would be awesome. the problem is the endless, airy abstractions that clearly take pleasure in adding a few hundred extra words wherever possible.

ooh I like that quote, jaymc..

'consumer expectations of intellectual life' lmao

xp

yeah jaymc, this is why i said that "difficult" writing can have purposes other than "to make you, the hard-working reader on the street, feel bad"

tautologies were my biggest problem. when the paragraph becomes part of a chapter long ourobourous that you need a flowchart to parse...

but I was a rube, to be honest. probably still am.

It's not that the concepts are unrecognisable, it's that they are dressed up in clothes to make them look more out-there, more unrecognisable than they really are. And that's when I get a real case of the Emperor's New Footnotes about it.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, Thursday, February 16, 2012 1:07 AM (30 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it seems to me that the language is intended to place such-and-such in an ongoing ~discourse~; it's not that the ideas are intended to be unrecognizable, it's that the writer is in conversation with ideas that have a history, and the work is an attempt to become a properly contextualized part of that history.

love that butler

hoos otm

well i'm just paraphrasing deleuze.

the problem is the endless, airy abstractions that clearly take pleasure in adding a few hundred extra words wherever possible.

when this is done, it seems to me to be more in the vein of what max was saying re: poetic texts - working through the ideas through writing, writing as conversation with previous texts, writing as process, etc

here is my consumer expectations for intellectual life: 'if you want many people to read and understand what you say, you should attempt to make your language as readable and understandable as possible.'

i think the idea that "big concepts" are sitting there outside language waiting for a nice clean signpost is one of the problems "poststructuralist" philosophers are wrestling with

― dayove cool (Noodle Vague), donderdag 16 februari 2012 2:02 (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM, and not just for "poststructuralists". It's a problem for most philosophers now (though in a way all philosophers are poststructuralists now in this day and age). The desire from the reading audience (students, media) and even institutions like universities, right now is focused so much on popularised philosophy, the kind that borders on sociology, that it leaves no room for "hardcore" philosophy. Another subject and future thread all together, but still.

lol judith butler is pretty well cited so i'd saying she is doing as well as she wants to in that regard.

xp

the plain reader be damned imo.

out.

if you think philosophy is trying to bring about new concepts and ideas as a way of tactically engaging with the world, then those concepts are going to be unrecognisable at first. things to be grappled with.

― judith, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 5:05 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is simply untrue. i reject this thinking entirely. it's what causes these people to dress up their perfectly ordinary ideas (and that's the crux) in ridiculously overblown language. new ideas can easily be communicated clearly. perfect example in that quote from upthread. the point boiled down to: "the structures of oppression are not fixed. rather, they exist in time. consequently, they must be reasserted." but this basic and easily grasped concept was dressed up in piles of gibberish in order to make it seem more serious, difficult and "academic-y".

i don't think most academics want some kind of consumer majority to read and understand what they say!
if they did, they'd be journalists or romance novelists or something!
xps

eh, i don't think it's that at all. i don't object to complex ideas or sentences, so long as they're the best way to get an idea across. i do get annoyed by shitty, lazy writing. and i hate shitty lazy writing that bends over backwards in to convey really simple ideas in a hideously complex fashion, especially when the motive is so obviously a form of intellectual self-aggrandizement. how do you know whether or not your "brilliant" idea has to be conveyed in a complex fashion? you try to convey it as simply as possible and go with what works best. what you DON'T do is arrange it into endlessly looping unbroken chunks generously larded w jargon, redundancy and vague references to other texts. that's a ploy, and everybody knows it.

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Thursday, 16 February 2012 01:01 (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"keep it simple"

so no one should feel stupid reading those texts - they are difficult and require a certain level of education/knowledge rather than a certain level of intelligence. as with science, it takes an interpreter/another writer/media/etc to translate the meat of the text so that everyone can understand it and see how it fits in everyday life (which it may or may not do...)

This was exactly what I was asking about upthread; who are the interpreters that people in gender studies would trust/recommend? I'm not looking for a single book that unlocks all the secrets at once, but some recommendations for the layperson that give a feel for the landscape. If the answer is "it's not that easy, you can't isolate this area of thought and jump in" or "it's like poetry, the value of the text is not in the content and is therefore unsummarisable" that's ok too I guess.

max that doesn't rule out the fact that the big concepts inside those books could have been expressed more clearly if that were really an important goal or something that was rewarded within the discipline

― iatee, Thursday, February 16, 2012 1:01 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is what i'm getting at though--in an important way, i think, someone like butler ~isn't really talking to us~. she's not writing for her ideas to be understood by some imagined mass audience that's unfamiliar with the ground she's exploring. she's very much talking to, say, Althusser, more than she's talking to you or me.

like (i think?) emily said upthread--she's doing the experiments, so to speak, we're just here to write about the implications of the results.

the plain reader be damned imo.

out.

― dayove cool (Noodle Vague), donderdag 16 februari 2012 2:14 (52 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

seconded.

this, actually

i don't think most academics want some kind of consumer majority to read and understand what they say!
if they did, they'd be journalists or romance novelists or something!
xps

― obliquity of the ecliptic (rrrobyn), Thursday, February 16, 2012 1:14 AM (52 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

riki wilchins queer theory gender theory is a p good layperson entrylevel guide

And Hoos completely otm

It's just odd, the way I can read a Dale Spender book and a Robin Lakoff book and ... I've forgotten the third author in that particular set but ... how I can read these three books on linguistics, in a series, or by themselves, and they form part of a discourse about linguistics, and part of a discourse about "women" and yet, they hold up individually, and I can understand them, without an intimate knowledge of the 2000 year history of language.

But I dunno, I just kinda hate most late 20th Century Philosophy. Probably my failing, not philosophy's.

max that doesn't rule out the fact that the big concepts inside those books could have been expressed more clearly if that were really an important goal or something that was rewarded within the discipline

― iatee, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 8:01 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im sort of of two minds about this -- i think on the one hand yes there are concepts, or versions of concepts, in something like 'gender trouble,' that are easy to express clearly -- "gender is a social construct" is an example.

why doesnt that happen tho? well in some ways it does as 'gender trouble' gets read and taught and its ideas absorded into the mainstream. also youre right 'clarity' is not really an important goal here because who cares? JB is not really writing for msg board posters shes writing for her peers.

more importantly though what many of these ppl are doing (to varying degrees of success) is thinking hard about language and the way it structures our world (vis a vis gender for example). its not really easy to be "clear" about that! i find wittgenstein impenetrable for example and 'everyone' seems to be okay that wittgenstein is hard, because of course its hard to be clear about these things -- wittgenstein says he is climbing a ladder and knocking out every rung as he passes it; similarish to derridas metaphor of writing and erasing at the same time -- but for some reason JB and JD and GD get bum raps even though theyre writing about the same things as LW

i mean i think i see yr point: there are incentives for humanities academics to write in this way. and sure there are -- and there are millions of shitty derrida imitators out there -- but theres constitutive reasons for the style too, reasons that i buy.

anyway rrrobyn and NV are talking about this in much better ways than i am and i have to go do the dishes. fwiw i think the "emperor has no clothes" arg. is kind of mistaken but i dont really like that fable. in my version everyone would turn to the little kid and say "duhhhhhh" and get naked too.

"tedious precision" is by no means the problem that i and (i think) others are objecting to. some tedious, hard-science-style precision would be great. careful building and clarifying of concepts. frequent summaries. would be awesome. the problem is the endless, airy abstractions that clearly take pleasure in adding a few hundred extra words wherever possible.

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 7:08 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha, not to be all 'you know not what you say' but 'careful building and clarifying of concepts' is not what medical writing tends to be about. and definitely not frequent summaries. that's ~didactic~ writing. this is writing that needs to, for the sake of space, tersely attend to all the practically innumerate contingencies (and the papers that splain them) and statistical assumptions that undergird the endeavor. if you want to be peer-reviewed, then erecting a thicket of densely cited and referential technical prose is the way to do it. if you want to be read and understood by ppl that lack the training and shop-talk of yr academic peers, then you ought to take a different tack.

Butler's style is certainly demanding, and I've also read critiques (maybe Nussbaum's? I don't remember) that suggest that her work suffers from not being more rigorously grounded in history and biology. As a somewhat sexually confused 19-year-old, though, I found her theories on gender performativity quite exciting.

xppppppps

I forget if it was actually Spender or Lakoff who was doing the talk-back to Chomsky and which one was doing the talk-back to the other of the pair (because I borrowed those books off a friend doing a PhD in linguistics, they were not mine, also did I mention I'm drunk) but they managed to have this dialogue in a way that they explained what the beef was, and I didn't *have* to read the previous book in order to understand what was being discussed.

I don't get the feeling I'd be able to do that with Butler.

maax's version of the Emperor fable is one of my favorite things btw

to either get this off track or back on track:
i am coming to feminism i guess through a back door. didnt study it all in college, but ive taken a bigger and bigger interest in it since i've been married. my wife didnt study it either and wouldnt categorize herself as a capital f feminist but she is a v strong influence to me and inspires me to be a better person and partner to her and i think learning more abt "women's issues" has been something that has ~opened mah eyes~ wrt my selfishness and privilege as a man.

i'll admit my academic knowledge is nil, i mostly read abt it online. i came to it thru reading a dude who turned out to be an out and out lech psychopath (who still writes p good things, just is personally skeezy 2 me now...hoping some of u know who i'm talking about).

now i'm interested in learning more bc i see sexist power dynamics all the time in my vocation as a teacher. i work in a low income school and gender norms are v traditional and they play out in a number of pernicious and frankly infuriating ways. i often feel pretty helpless in affecting a greater change other than to redirect boys tryina act hard with young women, but i dont know how to do this and still appeal to their "masculinity".

im rambling. short version: str8 married dude/teacher wants to know more about feminism and ways 2 b a feminist ally in lyfe.

lots of xps: judith, thanks for the Wilchins recommendation; I'll check it out.

but this basic and easily grasped concept was dressed up in piles of gibberish in order to make it seem more serious, difficult and "academic-y".

yeah WTF at this 600 page general relativity book I have, just say "mass bends space" and be done with it!

Also did I mention it is 1 in the morning and WTF am I doing arguing about Butler on the interweb when I don't even like Butler. *throws Man Made Language at Judith*

derrida is probably one of the best examples of meaning being performed instead of explained. its a tendency that is particularly strong in late 20th Century philosophy and probably accounts for a lot of the difficulty people might be having with it where they expect a different type of engagement. not that derrida is a walk in the park even when you consider it like this.

can God write a sentence so convoluted and post-everything that even She Herself cannot parse it? mmmmm..

i blame the french for everything

i shd note finally that i am not suggesting that butler is not difficult nor that shes not intentionally making herself difficult nor that shes even "right" or "rigorous" or anything. just defending a style, i suppose its antecedent is nietzsche or maybe heraclitus even. you know 'meaning as performance' 'performance as meaning'

lol xxp what plax said

right the incentives thing is my main point.

I'm not arguing that butler doesn't have important things to say, I'm arguing that humanities writing in general doesn't do itself any favors w/ impenetrability, in fact, there are prob lots of people out there who really would enjoy things butler has to say, and the fact that she's so stuck in her 'I'm not gonna be limited by traditional definitions of 'good writing'' prevents those people from reading her. like, wcc, for example...

xp * 1000 to max

i don't think most academics want some kind of consumer majority to read and understand what they say!
if they did, they'd be journalists or romance novelists or something!
xps

― obliquity of the ecliptic (rrrobyn), Thursday, February 16, 2012 1:14 AM (52 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no, this is a terrible defense. if journalists and romance novelists rendered their work into interpretation-hostile gibberish, it would not change the essential intellectual content of that work. it would still be saying basically the same shit about roger's horse and santorum's surge. the difference is that it would become totally useless to the vast majority of people. that's the only real difference.

that's what's happened in academic writing. the tendency of some people (self-regarding academics) to pride themselves on their ability to wade through the oceans of gibberish to find a kernel of sense has created an institutional mania for obfuscation. the only point of the style is that it excludes and is difficult. it does not facilitate the transmission of ideas and information even to its audience. if the academic audience could easily read and understand it, they'd sneer at its simplicity.

dogg did professors beat you up or steal your girlfriend or something

i am not married or a teacher but kinda in the same sitch as m bison here, in that all these authors you guys are talking about are people i had only the briefest glancing experience with in college. as an english major, who even took a theory course! <-- granted i was p much stoned 100% of the time i read for it

but yeah str8 dude/apprentice-level member of a guild that wields outsized and undeserved influence on constructions of gender wants to know more about feminism and ways 2 b a feminist ally in lyfe

Let's be honest, as a 19-year-old, I was probably also attracted to Butler's difficulty, why because I was pretentious.

fucken book promised a thousand plateaus and i only counted 46

max!

iatee yeah i think maybe the biggest thing missing is a kind of 'translation' level for this stuff. like a "science journalism" layer in the way discourse gets dispersed. otoh i dont think professors would be particularly welcoming to being "translated"

Can someone wake me up when this gets back to "women's issues" and off bitching about academia and the performative construction of philosophical writing, pls? kthxbye

just to throw this out there, being involved in occupy dc has allowed me to plug into what it means to be an ally & engage in all kinds of learning through our decolonize & liberate gender WG

so like, getting involved with feminist activist circles is a really good way to engage with this stuff ime

without even having to wade through any long sentences

hmmm beginning to think wcc's idea of 'women's issues' is 'wcc's issues'

"if journalists and romance novelists rendered their work into interpretation-hostile gibberish, it would not change the essential intellectual content of that work. it would still be saying basically the same shit about roger's horse and santorum's surge. the difference is that it would become totally useless to the vast majority of people. that's the only real difference."

well tbf this is a point partially conceded by some of these ppl here

except that also the deployment of gibberish would actually be the trying-on-of-language to a concept that, if said outfit really worked, could be used to simplify things, ungibberishly.

hmmmm beginning to think that snipes about wcc's supposed self-centered "issue" are a little too ready to hand for ilxors, keep it positive ;)

Bcuz I really wanna see m bison and gbx (hasn't gbx already been posting on this thread and saying awesome stuffs or I am just drunk?) get some answers to those questions. Coz those are really really good questions to be asking. And questions I wanna see answered.

but 'careful building and clarifying of concepts' is not what medical writing tends to be about. and definitely not frequent summaries. that's ~didactic~ writing.

― i love pinfold cricket (gbx), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 5:19 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

i dunno, man. medical writing usually strikes me as exceptionally clear and direct, and i know nothing about medicine. the terms may be unfamiliar, but the way information is communicated is very straightforward. the writing style you find in theory and philosophy is very, very different, imo. it's not technical. it's aggressively hostile to decoding, and it's very transparent about this.

man, this thread

^^ i feel like that post means something

I know that, like "is Butler obtuse and how can I show off my knowledge of Derrida to other ILX boys" is like fascinating to those who are showing off on this thread, but seriously, it's less "WCC issues" and more "hey, you guys have a billion other academia and philosophy threads to talk about this stuff on, and I would really like to see guys like m bison and gbx who are saying WHAT CAN I DO TO HELP?!?!? actually get some good pointers about what they can do to, you know, help.

what i was saying with the journalists/romance writers thing was that, in many ways, people who deal in ideas and communication of those ideas exist on many levels and are sorting through the same ideas but in different ways - imo you can't really judge which ways have more or less merit based on the form of communication - just because we have brilliant poetry that perfectly explains what it is to be a woman married living an unfulfilled life doesn't mean we don't need a non-fiction book based on in-the-field interviews or an academic texts that say the same thing in a different way

what i would hazard, con, is that the medical writing you're getting is like just a few levels down the rhetorical ladder from atul gawande or something. i'm talking about the ground level raw meat shit you see in journals with very funny names and very very narrow purviews

anyway

as an english major, who even took a theory course!

Critical theory didn't really permeate the English dept. of my college in the late '90s. I encountered Butler (and Foucault and Barthes et al.) while taking a cultural studies course at the British university where I studied abroad, and when I came back to the States, I enrolled in Contemporary Continental Philosophy to continue that path.

WCC, "feminist theory" is in the thread title for a reason. It's fair ground for discussion, imo.

That said, I'll repeat my suggestion to geebs & m bison: reaching out to local feminist activist groups (they often do book club stuff, have meetings, lots of material on their sites) can be really helpful.

I don't read medical journals but it's entirely possible that you could say 'they have a prob w/ poor writing too, prob for the same mix of cultural and incentive problems'

I don't know, trying to force an abrupt end to an ongoing discourse is nagl imho. As the great late 20th century philosopher George Constanza once said, "a subject matter should resolve itself based on its own momentum"

xxxxps

I think that dismissing or ignoring the questions of newbies who would like to get engaged in active change (except for Big Hoos) is also NAGL but whatevs.

eh?

An important principle here that we talk a lot about in my working group is "Step up, Step back." if you'll forgive the long excerpt:

“Step up” means that men who choose to identify as feminists (or, if you prefer, as “feminist allies” or “pro-feminists”) are called to take an active role in the anti-sexist movement. Building a genuinely egalitarian and non-violent society requires everyone’s involvement. Empowering women to defend themselves from rapists and harassers is important; raising a generation of young men to whom the idea of rape or harassment is anathema is also vital. We need men of all ages in the feminist movement to “step up” and commit themselves to embodying egalitarian principles in their private and public lives.

Stepping up means being willing to listen to women’s righteous anger. That doesn’t mean groveling on the ground in abject apology merely for having a penis — contrary to stereotype, that’s not what feminists (at least not any I’ve ever met) want. That means really hearing women, without giving into the temptation to become petulant, defensive, or hurt. It means realizing that each and every one of us is tangled in the Gordian knot of sexism, but that men and women are entangled in different ways that almost invariably cause greater suffering to the latter. Stepping up doesn’t mean denying that, as the old saying goes, The Patriarchy Hurts Men Too (TPHMT). It means understanding that in feminist spaces, to focus on male suffering both suggests a false equivalence and derails the most vital anti-sexist work.

Stepping up means, of course, being willing to confront other men. I’ve said over and over again that the acid test of a man’s commitment to feminism often comes not only in terms of how he treats women, but also how he speaks about women when he’s in all-male spaces. Many young men are earnest about living out feminist principles when around women (of course, some like Amelia’s troll and the lamentable Kyle Payne obviously aren’t.) But get them around their “bros” and their words change. Or, as is more often the case, they may not join in on sexist banter — but they fail to raise vocal objection to it. Stepping up means challenging the jokes and complaints and objectifying remarks that are so much a part of the conversation in all-male spaces. This is, as far as I’m concerned, a sine qua non of being a feminist ally.

Stepping back means acknowledging that in almost every instance, feminist organizations ought to be led by women. It means that men in feminist spaces need to check themselves before they pursue leadership roles. While that might seem unfair, arguing that biological sex should have no bearing on who wields authority in a feminist organization fails to take into account the myriad ways in which the wider world discriminates against women. Even now, we still socialize young men to be assertive and young women to be deferential. (Yes, there are plenty of exceptions, but not enough to disprove that rule.) Part of undoing that socialization for women means pushing themselves to take on leadership positions even if they feel awkward about doing so; part of undoing that socialization for young men means holding themselves back from those same offices.

Stepping back doesn’t mean men should never speak up in feminist spaces. Stepping back is not about silently serving in the background. Stepping back is about the willingness to engage in self-reflection, to defer, and remembering that the most important job feminist men have within the movement is not to lead women but to serve as role models to other men. Stepping back is a way of renouncing the “knight in shining armor” tendency that afflicts many young men who first come to anti-sexist work. Women need colleagues and partners on this journey, not rescuers or substitute father figures.

so with that said i'm gonna step back

what i would hazard, con, is that the medical writing you're getting is like just a few levels down the rhetorical ladder from atul gawande or something. i'm talking about the ground level raw meat shit you see in journals with very funny names and very very narrow purviews

― i love pinfold cricket (gbx), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 5:33 PM (5 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

maybe, but i used to prep presentation materials for medical conferences, so i'm pretty familiar with the "raw meat" of medical writing, both figuratively and literally. what tends to make it impenetrable is either technical language or poor writing. i feel that in philosophy and crit circles, it's the product of a deliberately chosen (if perhaps unconsciously chosen) culture of obfuscation and poor writing. but that's just me, and i'm cool with letting this drop as i've said more than enough on the topic.

I understand that theory is an important part of the discussion of this thread, but I would just like to see it circle back to praxis when someone asks. If I can say that without being accused of having ~issues~.

x-post to Hoos bringing exactly the sort of thing I wanted to see, so bravo, well done hoos.

the tendency of some people (self-regarding academics) to pride themselves on their ability to wade through the oceans of gibberish to find a kernel of sense has created an institutional mania for obfuscation. the only point of the style is that it excludes and is difficult. it does not facilitate the transmission of ideas and information even to its audience. if the academic audience could easily read and understand it, they'd sneer at its simplicity.

no

oop, one more (i promise):

I don't read medical journals but it's entirely possible that you could say 'they have a prob w/ poor writing too, prob for the same mix of cultural and incentive problems'

― iatee, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 5:35 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

that's not true though. medical journals are like guidebooks for mechanics. doctors and mechanics are about equally averse to obfuscation. they just want the relevant information to be delivered in an efficient, sensible, and technically precise manner. writing shit that makes people tear their hair out with the "difficulty" would guarantee that you'd never get published in most medical journals.

nice excerpt, hoos
being a true colleague and a partner to women and feminism, even if you don't quite understand it all but are willing to watch, listen and learn, is more important than reading all the books - the books (theory and otherwise) are just a part of the broader understanding obv

I second hoos. Engaging in grassroots political work really helped my actual understanding of a lot of stuff I had learned in undergrad and that both the theory and the practice is vital.