can we reject gender and still be pro female?

As for Caitlyn Jenner and the like, if they were saying that long hair, makeup & dresses were as valid a choice for men as for women I'd be right behind them cheering. But they're doing the opposite and reinforcing stereotypes.

I agree that gender covers all the non biological differences between men and women as a group, and that some of those differences need to be abolished.

Most women presumably agree with that?

But it seems, and the posts on this thread kind of illustrate that, that when we talk about gender it is often things like girls wearing pink that they're talking about.

If it were just the things you describe, I'd agree almond, but it isn't.

It's girls being told they shouldn't do X because they're girls, or boys being told they can't do X because they're boys. Gender limits people. It holds society back and makes things harder for those who don't want or need to be placed into restrictive roles they don't feel comfortable with.

It's part of a system that has consistently held women back from playing a full part in society, and while that's being eroded, it's still a problem.

A man made concept that holds huge numbers of people back from who they might have been is, to my mind, a cancer on that society.

It isn't about an individual choice though, is it?

One woman may choose to have an interest in caring for children, knitting, careers in education, wearing pink, putting on make up and so on. In itself it is meaningless and certainly not a cancer on society. It is just one individual woman liking things.

What makes it feminine is when huge numbers of women all like the same things and all do the same thing, and vastly outnumber the number of men liking those things.

There doesn't seem to be a great number of people wanting to be the ones who change that.

Why would anyone want to be a masculine woman or a feminine woman?

Why put yourself into little boxes?

Gender is a bloody cancer on society.

There's a big difference between it being okay to be a masculine woman and abolishing gender though, isn't there?

This article is quite interesting.

The problem isn't with pink in and of itself, it's with those things that are designated "female" and therefore coloured pink.

It's got so ubiquitous now that in order to get people to buy less female gender role specific toys for girls, manufacturers have had to start making even unisex toys into a variety of colours for boys version and a sickly pink for girls version.

The pinkified marketing of the last 10 years has succeeded in stopping people from seeing pink as just a colour and made them see it as a girl's colour, with all the negative societal connotations that involves. Not only that pink is somehow a girl's colour, but is the only colour that should be available for girls.

That uniformity just doesn't exist for boys.

If you're trying to raise children in as non gendered a way as possible, there is little choice but to buy clothing for boys. Simply due to the better choice of colours available to boys. However, you have to really look for female gender role specific toys for boys that aren't a violent shade of pink, and you do have to look, because, if you don't, they get teased by arseholes who think that pink toys will make boys gay or something. (like being gay or effeminate or female is the worst thing ever).

But, yes, it is still possible to be anti gender and all the baggage that comes from gender roles and society's need to box people up in them and to be pro-woman. Necessary in fact, especially now, at a time when gender roles are being enforced ever more strictly.

You don't have to treat them as superior, you just have to not treat them as an aberration

I was going to say exactly the same thing sleepy

You don't have to treat them as superior, you just have to not treat them as an aberration.

Hetrosexual people are more common than homosexual people. We didn't have to put gay and lesbian people on a pedestal to make it ok to be gay.

Jack Monroe etc are reinforcing gender stereotypes (imo) by suggesting that you can't be a woman if you like masculine things, you have to be something else.

Unless very large numbers of women start expressing themselves as masculine and very large numbers of men start expressing themselves as feminine, it is going to be seen as unusual.

So to bring about the change you think is positive, aren't you inevitably going to have to treat the gender nonconforming people as somehow superior.

Which is what is happening, isn't it? That Jack Monroe, Caitlyn Jenner, Laurie Penny and so on are treated as morally superior or more worthy of a political voice than feminine women.

I wish they hadn't called it "Pink Stinks" - I recognise what they're trying to do but it does denigrate something that is closely associated (wrongly imo) with femininity, ergo it denigrates femininity.

I would like to see sex divorced from gender sterotypes - a feminine man should be no more remarkable than a masculine woman. A masculine woman should not be seen as less of a woman as a feminine woman. A feminine man should not be seen as less of a man than a masculine man.

Nothing wrong with girls liking pink and sparkes, but there is also nothing wrong with boys liking pink and sparkles. It's not the pink and sparkles that's wrong, it's the gendered boxes that we put them in.

Nothing wrong with women wearing skirts, makeup and having umpteen frilly cushions on her bed, but also nothing wrong with men wearing skirts, makeup and having umpteen frilly cushions on his bed.

It's harder to think of masculine equivalents for women - probably gendered behaviour norms would be the best examples as we've hopefully got over the woman-can't-be-soldiers / woman-can't-wear-"men's"-clothes / woman-can't-play-football stereotypes. But they're there.

There are some really good posts here, especially from Nooka and also the comparison to Goths.

But there's still something that doesn't sit right with me, and I'm not sure what that is.

It seems to me that most women want to have more to being a woman than just biology. They do want to express themselves in ways that conform to what other women are doing.

I understand that protecting the rights of people who want to step pretty far beyond gender norms is absolutely essential, and it has some overlap with women's rights, but I'm not sure I'm convinced abolishing gender should be that central to women's rights.

Women's rights should overwhelmingly be about improving things for the majority of women, who aren't going to benefit much from the right to not be judged for being into polyamory, or whatever the fashionable gender non conforming thing of the moment is, because they never wanted to do it in the first place.

It seems like there's a false choice between feminism is all about trans people (irrelevant to most women) or feminism is all about disassociating femininity from being a woman (also irrelevant to most women).

It seems marketing and product development people have a very crystallised idea of what make us women

No, they're just going for as much of a gender divide as possible, because that helps them to sell more products when it comes to children's clothes and toys. They want people to feel they need to buy new clothes/toys if their children aren't the same sex, and throw the old ones away. That's why there are so many skeletons and monsters with sharp teeth on little boy's clothes - marketers/designers are constantly looking not for "masculine" imagery, but instead for the most extreme "non-feminine" images they can find, in order to put parents off "handing down".

I think the bad press pink is getting is that it is ubiquitous and overwhelming, something that was unheard of when I was a kid: even when my middle-aged daughters were kids it simply took its place among the colours.

I was looking for a card for my sister in law the other day and got so exasperated at the lack of colour choice I found myself saying to the assistant "have you got any cards that are not bloody pink"? I apologised immediately but explained how fed up I was with the lack of choice. She said she quite agreed, she was sick of it too!

Oh, and Lass - I wore jeans in 1950! And teenagers wore them, rolled up to just below the knee and accompanied by fluorescent socks (preferably lime, blue or orange).

I dont have a problem rejecting femininity as i am quite non conformist and live in jeans/

Unless you have been transported back to 1950 there is nothing unconventional in women wearing jeans. Given the number of posters on FWR who never wear feminine clothes a dress would be more unconventional.

It's commonplace on MN (both FWR and AIBU) to see posters despairing about their daughters' choices if they are feminine .

The campaign is called "Pink Stinks" not say "Pink Stinks and Blue does Too". The website of course explains they don't really mean that and you can wear pink (if you insist).

OP I understand your viewpoint.

I mean it's kind of cool that I grew my babies, but I'd have been very happy if dh could have done it instead (especially second time around!).

Hear Hear!

I've always been a loner, and not particularly feminine (although, thinking at what I can do, I would certainly be described as 'accomplished' if this were an 18th Century novel). I don't agree in denigrating traditionally women's things like knitting and cooking (I've been knitting for longer than I remember), but I also don't agree in calling them women's things (unlike things that only women can do - like growing a baby).

I don't think gender is an innate thing. I don't think the different sexes are innately drawn to certain hobbies or clothes. I don't think any hobbies necessarily have intrinsically more value than others.

I'm not sure that men have "pride" in being men (whether that's being biologically male or being masculine).

"Being a man" is everywhere - films, TV, newspapers etc. It's "the norm", particularly being a straight white man. To him, that's probably like asking if he puts any focus on "human identity"!

I can't stand gender but think even if we managed to get rid of it there'd be more freedom to be what is now 'feminine' rather than less, without having it pushed on you because of being biologically female.

Like being a goth - you're not born with anything marking you out as 'a goth' and (usually) you're not raised with the expectation that you should or must be a goth but then at some point you can decide that actually what some/most people associate with being 'a goth' actually quite suits you and how you feel so you'll behave like one. I'd love that to be the same with what is now the stereotype of being feminine. Then there'd be no general need for transgender issues, problems of whether a boy is 'being sissy' etc, just let people 'grow' names for what they want to identify with while still keeping biological sex. So a man or woman could be an 'A' which stands for 'I'm wild about wearing dresses and heels, obsessed with make-up and my dearest wish in life is to Laura Ashley everything that stays still long enough" if they want to. Everyone else who doesn't need/want a label can wear a minidress while buying Duplo for their daughter and then go and play rugby if they want, male or female, no gender bollocks allowed.

But gendered behaviour isn't what makes us women.
Being gender critical doesn't mean we all have to wear potato sacks and work boots. I'm totally gender critical but I have long hair, dyed, wear make up, jewellery, dresses and lots of floral prints. I don't feel it's necessary to advertise my stance on gender through my clothing.
I don't do anything that I find oppressive - so no regular hair removal, fanny waxing, fake nails, high heels etc. But not all women experience those things as oppressive.

None of the above is what makes me a woman. It contributes to the way others categorise me and treat me but that's out of my control.

I think we need to decouple ideas about masculinity/ femininity from ideas about how men and women should behave. Studies show we all have a mixture of traits that are associated with masculinity and femininity. There's no binary and no spectrum, just lots of people with individual traits, likes and preferences. And we should celebrate that!

Gender, at least at the moment seems to constrain people, preventing them from expressing who they are freely without worrying about censure or diagnosis. It's that shoehorning I object to when rejecting gender. Plus the irritation of the muddle between gender and sex.

I don't think of myself as very feminine, but I'm definitely a woman. I'm not sure I'm particularly proud of that though, seems a bit odd to be proud of something that you have zero control over. I mean it's kind of cool that I grew my babies, but I'd have been very happy if dh could have done it instead (especially second time around!).

I do have a sense of fellowship with other women from time to time, but I think that's often in the face of oppression really, whether that's the shitness of biology or the effect of sexism. Sometimes it's common experiences too, but then I also have fellowship with other parents, other people who enjoy my hobbies etc etc.

Of course "pink bad blue good" is simplistic and "girly" should not be used to denigrate.

But I don't believe pink, or lipstick or whatever is an integral of being a woman so I don't feel I am letting the side down by "distancing myself from what makes me a woman"

...pages of every main newspaper every day are devoted to sport, 80 odd % of which is men's sports. I haven't observed any similar, prominent, regular space given to fashion, say.

"I'm struggling not to associate it with the idea that we are letting the side down somehow, fighting for women's equality and then turning around and distancing ourselves from what makes us women."

What makes us women is our biology. The source of women's oppression is women's biology - relative physical strength, vulnerability during pregnancy, birth and child rearing, social structures that control or censure women's sexuality in order to try and control the fathering of children.

Today, in western countries, the role of biology in the oppression is not quite so direct, but slut shaming and comments about single mothers, for example, show clear links.

From here, if two interests have broadly become more associated with men and women, the one associated with men will usually be deemed more important, more of general interest etc. The back

I think I know what you mean op. I sometimes hear posters referring to stereotypically "girly" stuff in a disparaging way.

I do understand where they are coming from - that not all girls want to (wear pink etc etc) and shouldn't feel pressured into it. But I don't think you should achieve this by criticising the girly options and making them seem somehow less worthy.