Why I Can’t Get on Board with ‘Embracing Differences Between Men and Women’ for Feminism

ClarityofDisaster · 2017-05-21T11:31:01+00:00

Each side just wants to fit their followers into boxes. It's up to each individual to decide whether they are comfortable in those boxes, or if they just want to say "fuck it all, I'm just me".

siaynoq11 · 2017-05-21T16:03:30+00:00

Oh man. "Nurturing, peaceful, emotional and group-oriented" sounds like sinking into a soft pastel hell for me. No thank you. I'll be happy to embrace my warlike, aggressive, ambitious, female nature.

HugMuffin · 2017-05-21T11:35:26+00:00

I've always seen the third wave as "you do you, who cares about gender roles?"

soccerstar77 · 2017-05-21T16:41:33+00:00

Your confusing gender essentialism with gender roles.

She wants to be individualistic, career oriented, and angry

That's a masculine way of being. That's NOT feminine. Now, you can be a women who behaves in a masculine way, this doesn't mean your not a woman.

breakfasttopiates · 2017-05-21T18:12:25+00:00

intersectional feminism has rejected essentialism for a long time now

fidsysoda · 2017-05-21T19:30:09+00:00

I think her views are great, fine. She seems like a nice person. Her language suggests an entire school that you're unlikely to see any RPers accept-- and that I don't accept myself. I also think she's ignoring some middle ground, and judging "gender essentialism" (which is like all things, not really one thing, but a spectrum; she should reject philosophical essentialism first lol) on the arguments and behaviors of its worst adherents rather than its best.

Second thing first. Most of her arguments are not against the idea, but against how that idea is used. All of her arguments that involve, "When we believe that, we tend to..." are good arguments for rigor. They are not good arguments against gender essentialism. If we extrapolate inappropriately, our failing is that we extrapolate inappropriately, not that we embrace the idea from which we're extrapolating.

What I'm saying here, is that if gender essentialism is valid, it doesn't matter that it supports patriarchy. If it's valid, and the link to patriarchy is valid, then patriarchy is valid. Pretending otherwise is backwards reasoning: starting with the thing we want to demonstrate, and choosing the philosophy that leads to it.

First thing second: unexplored middle ground. She's absolutely right that when you graph distribution of traits by sex, there is way more overlap than not. This is really important to remember, and most people forget it. But to then ignore the non-overlapping areas is equally mistaken. The reality is the sexual difference is complicated. Ignoring data to make it simpler is a bad idea. For example, yes, male violence is a rare trait. Yes, gender essentialists frequently forget this. But even outliers can have extreme consequences. It doesn't take very many violent people to have a large impact. And our social structures can easily drive us to exacerbate these differences rather than compensate for them, as when Weiss describes how she felt bad for being unfeminine. To achieve masculinity or femininity, we often dive headlong for those outliers.

There are a number of problems with the understanding of sexual difference. A lot of this comes from the naturalist fallacy, that what is natural is what is good, or that what is natural is immutable. Rejecting the concept of sexual difference is not the answer to this. Improving our understanding of it is.

Title	Why I Can’t Get on Board with ‘Embracing Differences Between Men and Women’ for Feminism
Author	questioningwoman
Upvotes	5
Comments	13
Date	May 21, 2017 12:15 AM UTC (9 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/6cdoi6/why_i_cant_get_on_board_with_embracing/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/why-i-cant-get-on-board-with-embracing-differences.268007 https://theredarchive.com/post/268007

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