I’m Thinking About A Stray Post That I Saw A While Back That Went Something Like, ‘You Don’t Think
I’m thinking about a stray post that I saw a while back that went something like, ‘You don’t think of ‘privilege’ when you think of gay males’ in the context of male privilege. And it kind of makes me think about… How privilege is talked about at all. I’d say a major element of privilege is blindness towards the ways it benefits you. It’s not just that you’re able bodied, it’s that you don’t have to have to worry about any kind of accommodations being made for you to exist in public because the world was already made with your needs as a central focus as an example. In that sense, it’s easier to look at the ways a person knows they are disadvantaged. So Gay Males are noticeably discriminated against on the basis of their homosexuality, and that’s the first thing a person will think about when they hear Gay Male. What NO ONE thinks is, ‘that’s a gay male, he’ll never have to worry about being forced to give birth. That’s a gay man, he lives in a world where seat belts were made with his safety in mind.’ And that’s usually fine, the ways that gay males benefit from manhood isn’t something that always needs to be brought up- the same way that a white woman’s whiteness is not always relevant to the conversation.
HOWEVER, it becomes a problem when we’re talking about misogyny and people start pretending oppression exists as one scale instead of multiple axes. Admittedly this is VERY Intersectionalism 101 (and people understand this concept weirdly well when we’re talking about rich white women) but it still feels like it needs to be stated on this site.
More Posts from Listening-andor-learning and Others
Now a new study looking at 400,000 youths from 88 countries around the world suggests such bans are making a difference in reducing youth violence. It marks the first systematic assessment of whether an association exists between a ban on corporal punishment and the frequency in which adolescents get into fights.
wild how many "karen gets karma" and "karen is put in her place" videos there are on youtube top results, yet so few incel equivalents. just "what incels believe", "the world of incels", "why incels exist". why do men with awful beliefs get analysis videos, explanations, understanding, and agency but women with awful beliefs get put in their place on camera?
The punching down of a multibillion dollar industry
the fact that criticizing the sex industry is seen as more oppressive than the sex industry itself should really make people think
People who are say 'everyone knows black women are universally more masculine' but in a woke way, also in the same breath sexualize black women's bodies and we're known as the big titty'd fat ass baddies who invented every modern beauty trend. So which is it? People all see us as men (non women) or are we all baddies who Kardashians/Ariana/Iggy are appropriating from. We can't possibly be viewed as women by society, so we're compared to men, and desperately need femininity, 'feminine representation', yet when a celebrity becomes a hyper feminine baddie (surgeries, makeup, nails, extensions) you know exactly what group of women she's mimicking.
What the actual FUCK.
Social Construct Masterpost
I was inspired to make this post because of the mass confusion on tumblr about what social constructs are and how they function. I will start with a simple example:
This is a one dollar bill. It is an excellent example of a social construct. This piece of paper represents a specific amount of spending power in the society that it exists in (the USA). An individual person could decide personally that it represents 1000$ worth of spending power, but it would not matter because like all social constructs, the collective agreement between individuals in society is what determines the meaning of the construct. There are laws on the books about currency but it doesn’t stop society from changing the meaning of a dollar; after all, in times of scarcity a dollar is a much more valuable asset than in times of plenty. The exact value of a dollar is something that fluctuates in tune with other factors, including things like consumer confidence- meaning, how consumers feel about the economy. Social constructs can change based on changes of opinion in the population.
One way to test if something is a social construct is to remove it from its native society and see if it retains the same functionality. The US dollar is accepted in some foreign countries, but in other places, it is just a piece of paper.
Another way to test if something is a social construct is to remove people from the picture entirely and see if it retains its functionality. Without people to give a dollar meaning it simply becomes paper.
Contrast the attributes of a dollar with say, biological sex.
Male humans produce sperm and much higher levels of testosterone than females. Females produce ova and offspring if their eggs are fertilized and implanted. Individuals who are sterile still have either male or female anatomy which serves sexual functions for the individual. Virtually everyone on earth qualifies as one sex or the other, with or without malfunctioning or variations. Is this binary a social construct?
Does the collective agreement of society give male and female organs their functionality? Absolutely not. Humans did not always have an understanding of how pregnancy happened, and yet it happened anyway. Individuals who don’t know about or understand reproduction can and do get pregnant via sex. No matter how many people got together and decided that females inseminate males there would be no change in the function of testes or ovaries.
The functionality of human reproductive organs is also impervious to cultural or geographical differences. All over the world people get pregnant and have babies by mixing sperm from males with ova from females. There is no exception.
Removing humans from the equation also has no effect on the biological reality of mammalian reproduction. Male mammals are male, female mammals are female, and only one of the two can give birth.
Biological sex is not and never has been a social construct.
Another example is gender. Femininity is the easiest example to discuss. Lets look at different examples of femininity from around the world:
As you can see, what it means to be feminine or girly is very different depending upon the society. None of these is the “correct” femininity, just different versions from different cultures. There is no objective way to determine what makes someone feminine in any given culture- you have to ask people.
The nature of femininity is totally subjective and relies on the collective agreement of society. If you move one of these women into a different society their defining feminine characteristics instead become physical characteristics with no gender designation at all. In fact, what would make you gender conforming in one culture would make you gender non conforming in another. Gender also changes in individual societies over time, so the meaning of being feminine in America in the 1800s would differ markedly from what it means to be feminine in America right now. How people feel about the construct changes its meaning.Thus we can easily say that gender is a social construct.
not even lukewarm but cold take: if you're a childfree woman that experiences opposite sex attraction you should only be with men that are VEHEMENTLY child-free. Men who get a vasectomy or refuse to have any sort of sex without protection. Any man that's on the fence while you're strongly convinced about the fact that you do not want children, will eventually turn on you and want children.
based take
(op turned off rbs but there’s a lot of things wrong with this)
a woman IS more than reproductive organs, women can be anything, do anything, dress any way, act any way, so on and so forth. HOWEVER the only requirement is that she be of the female sex, ie have female reproductive organs.
this does not mean ALL a woman is is her female sex, only that to be a woman she MUST be the female sex
I have preestablished biases and beliefs about the world, I acknowledge that and am willing to adjust with new information shared.
188 posts