Gender abolition

[Damsili]

On another thread a few posters have enthused about the abolition of gender. I wonder how many people see this as the ultimate goal of feminism?

Also, is there room for people who are broadly content with the idea of femininity and masculinity being separate things, but want better treatment of women? Do the abolitionists accept this point of view?

Beach, thank you for your clarifying post at 23:47 and the ones after! I'm glad I stopped internetting last night, as the 'gender problem' is quite obvious to my mind - in a personal way; I'm not that clued up on theoretical expression - and was feeling like the unstoppable force hitting the immovable object (or vice versa.)

Almond, I could barely agree less that people don't have innate abilities and disabilities. I do believe that "bookreading, competitiveness and everything else is innate to some and not others". I find these individual differences have nothing to do with gender, so my gripe with cultural gender assumptions is that people's individual talents are differently valued according to whether they're male or female.

This could explain why we seem to have had trouble understanding one another! If you're coming at personal qualities & abilities from the position that each person is a blank slate, to be written upon by their culture (with or without gender considerations), then I can see why you feel values must be imposed. By contrast, I see individuals as containing innate talents (regardless of gender), which will be moulded by their culture.

I'm not sure this is what you meant, however, because of your original remark about DD's butterfly dress. It seemed to convey that you think DD prefers them because she's a girl - ie, not a blank slate but predisposed towards pretty things by her gender. Is this what you meant, or have I grossly misunderstood?

I've still got about 20 posts to catch up on, but this is getting long already.

Almond, I wish I'd ready your 08:32 post before writing my reply. It gives me more insight into where you're coming from.

I do need to catch up ... !

Agree, rabbit - 50 SOG isn't "chick lit"

So if we were to apply this value to the Sahel.....

This was a really interesting post Almond. It argues against some of the thinking I've been going with in this thread, but I see the sense of the position you're laying out and the dangers of prioritising 'macho' over 'girly' (which is how I think it was being referred to upthread).

Garlic, I think we have been talking about different things mostly!

The first lot of my posts were about addressing Bobby's point that a lot of people are resistant to giving up little gender markers and trying to convince them to do so can put them off feminism. Girls in butterfly motifs could just as easily be replaced with girls are the ones to spend more time whooping, or playing plants vs. zombies or singing ten green bottles. What the culture of the little things is isn't innate, just that people want to have some kind of cultural marker that is mostly about them.

The second lot of my posts was not about people being put off feminism. it was a different discussion about what a gender neutral world would be like if we were to have it, and about the lack of any particular values, and none of it was connected to Helga's post. Looking at Helga's post, I realised that it was a. not really to do with what I meant by values and b. her post was about something pretty complicated that I'd have to read up on and would be in a kind of writing style that I find difficult to comprehend (not Helga's writing style, but the actual theory linked to). So I ignored it, but we then got into a second misunderstanding where we were talking about different things as you were digesting the veil theory and I wasn't.

But neither of us was deliberately misunderstanding the other.

And I always like to read your posts!

I'm fairly sure 50 shades is porn not chick lit (chick lit is more your Marion Keyes sort of stuff, isn't it?)

Yes, ok. This isn't really where my reading takes me so I suppose I should admit some ignorance of the genres... I find the idea of genres in literature problematic - whilst contrarily thinking that I don't read much 'genre' fiction. I read some SF - I tried Stranger in a Strange Land recently - but mainly just general stuff.

Nobody's argued for gender neutrality.

Beach's concept of abolition of gender meaning abolition of the hierarchy has to logically include the value of prioritising what women do.

Yes: we're disagreeing about how to achieve that. In current practice, it is vitally important to improve the fortunes of women doing undervalued work.

However, I believe it is undervalued because it's work done mainly by women. I believe that "work done mainly by women" is a consequence of genderisation. I think this is easily demonstrated by imagining the conversation:
"Your job is to care for the sick & elderly."
"I can't do that! I've got a penis!"

Since having a penis is immaterial to every human activity except insemination, the allotment of certain tasks to women makes no sense at all. Genderisation is a tool for restricting women to certain areas of work. These areas are then undervalued, so you get oppression by gender.

My perspective collapses if you assume that women are generally equipped to carry out caring, hoeing, fetching & carrying better than men. I suggest there's plenty of evidence that it is not so.
The devaluation of women's work is one issue. The denotation of this work as women's work is another.

Phaedra I know you are determined to believe that absolutely nothing is gendered and we are all imagining it, but your belief and reality don't match up. Would be nice if your belief was true and there were no gendered interests.

Actually on that note, if you are right that there is no gendered activities/interests and both sexes are free to like whatever they like without any sort of negativity and we've just imagined this, then a genderless society wouldn't change anything. So surely you support that? After all, it'd just show up how silly us feminists are being right?

:) Thanks for your reply, Almond :)

almond I see where you are coming from, and that makes a lot of sense. I think for me gender abolition is just one element amongst many needed to make this a fairer society.

I don't think that just having a genderless society will magically fix things, but I think it will add some strength to other things that need to be done.

In the example you gave
Men and women will be attempt to be culturally the same and so will be more equal. And the 'value' of that will be? The things in society that will be prioritised will be... we don't know. People are just going to be themselves. So maybe we will prioritise health, or maybe we will prioritise war and high risk behaviour in financial institutions, and the Sahel can prioritise war as well or maybe it will go for health. But none of that really matters, because if we do have more more high risk financial disasters and less health care, at least men and women will die from lack of health care in equal numbers. It doesn't matter what the 'values' are, as long as we are equal.

I don't see why a genderless society means we then wouldn't look at what would benefit the maximum amount of people.

A genderless society shouldn't mean we stop working on other problem areas.

I have no problem with acknowledging that some people are better equipped to do some jobs than other people. But this is to do with intrinsic characteristics of the individual which are unrelated to their gender. I would be rubbish at fetching and carrying for example, because as a dyspraxic, I'm a dropper. Most people wouldn't be able or want to do what I do, but the fact that I can do it is nothing to do with me being a woman. My field is pretty small and there are men who do what I do brilliantly and women who do what I do brilliantly (I do not do it brilliantly, I'm more sort of barely adequate).

My thing is - if we were to succeed in decoding things anyone would feel free to do what they wanted to do and that wouldn't just mean women being able to do 'man things'. I know plenty of men who would like to work part time and have a better work/life balance with their kids but the only ones I know who have achieved this are the ones who are fairly senior/successful. Because they don't care about being seen to be doing something 'odd'.

re chick lit i have heard suggestions that actually the fact that it is devalued can sometimes work in women's favour. there are quite a few authors who tackle quite important subjects (abuse, MH, DV), which if women are in an abusive situation can help them whilst not signalling that they are reading something on that subject. note, this is not the aim of publishers who are branding the products, nor is it representative of all books within that genre, nor is it necessarily a reason to keep denigrating it as a category or assigning books more quality than they merit, but it is an argument i have heard

by that i mean, the non-threatening and "lite" appearance of the category can help in some situations

Agree many are formulaic (as are other types of fiction) but many actually tackle serious issues.

Garlic, indeed it makes no sense and is caused by genderisation, as you put it.

But it has, as far as we know, been the case for thousands of years. And if women are the group that has been denied time, resources, status and attention for all that time, then the X that women do has also been denied those things, and those things are essential. So we need to change the status of both, and women benefit immediately from changing the status of X . And once society agrees those things are important and acknowledges it, and it isn't mostly women who acknowledge this, then those things get done by all not just by women.

Bella, my paragraph underneath the one you quoted explains why I think gender neutrality would be assimilation, which would be a barrier to helping the maximum number of people, and would harm them instead.

But even if that is not true, if gender neutrality doesn't logically lead to any particular priorities in society - a set of values, and it doesn't immediately improve life for many women, then it isn't as important as Beach's theory.

It is like saying I am going to paint a fence green, and abolish slavery, so everyone advocate for green fences.

While Beach's argument: We will prioritise stuff women do most because it is given low status and without freedom in a hierarchy logically has to include the end of chattel slavery. It isn't something she'll do as well. It is part of what she must do according to the argument.

Disclaimer: You can have some gender neutrality increasing at the same time as the abolition of the hierarchy and it be a good thing.

Disclaimer 2: I'm tired and this post may not explain what I mean it to.

Disclaimer 3: Beach is not actually Moses.

Interesting point re chick-lit Petula. I can certainly see the value in that.

Beach's concept of abolition of gender meaning abolition of the hierarchy has to logically include the value of prioritizing what women do.

In the utopia in my head, when women are not considered lesser human beings than men, we won't have to prioritize what they do or place particular value on what we do. The value will simply be there as an authentic non sexual politics value of human behavior. Caring for children will not be considered of low value because it is women's work - it will be considered (as it quite obviously should be) one of the most important activities in our society because of what the activity itself actually entails.

Men are not superior to women. Girls and women are not inferior. If society acted on this one simple truth the entire concept of gender would become obsolete. There may well be things that girls and women tend to do more than boys and men - but there would be no stigma or lesser value placed on those things. The world would be organised differently to reflect this.

"Girly" or "womanly" behaviour/roles/activities/stereoptypes/etc wouldn't exist as a concept. If there were things that women were more likely to do than men, they would simply be things that women are more likely to do than men. Period.

Beach, I don't mean that once the hierarchy was abolished you would continue to prioritise what women do. I mean the process of getting there follows this logic:

I want to abolish a gender hierarchy.

Women are the group with a low status and what they do has a low status.

It must be the case that for the hierarchy to be abolished, the priority must be to increase the status of what women do so that it is equal to that of what men do.

(I will stop referring to it as your theory, and just say abolition of the hierarchy, so you are not dragged in)

Rabbit, I think it would be interesting if you had a whole thread (or massive post or whatever) on women in scifi and in fandom in general.

well, I have other places to talk about that, and it's always a bit tricky because a lot of the people I was a teenager with are now, you know, working in the field, and I need to be careful about what I say really.

That is a shame, but I understand.

Got you almondcakes. Yes.

You say few of the posters realise this. I might borrow your style and ask you to prove that however I know you can't.

Suggest you re-read the thread then. It asked for examples as at least one poster could not think of any examples.

Hi Phaedra

I won't ask again and will assume you don't want to answer if you don't this time (which is totally up to you, of course) - but are there specific areas of feminism that you do agree with (not necessarily agreeing with MN posters, could be ones not generally covered in FWR)

Phaedra that thread was discussing mainstream music and examples of successful mainstream women who were not expected to be half naked. You were responding with decidedly non-mainstream responses whilst admonishing others to expand their musical horizons. Lucky for them you were there to enlighten, eh?