Discussion: Is Gender a Social Construct

GayLubeOil · 2015-09-02T08:51:10+00:00

If you think gender is a social construct inject yourself with testosterone and see if your behaviour becomes more masculine.

PetticoatRuled · 2015-09-02T10:19:17+00:00

Gender roles, yes. Gender itself only partly.

CursedLemon · 2015-09-02T14:15:07+00:00

Christ almighty IT'S NATURE AND NUTURE can we stop arguing about this inane topic

kick6 · 2015-09-02T21:57:02+00:00

Gender isn't a social construct, society is a gender construct. We are a dimorphic species, and our societies reflect the dynamic between the two sexes.

Maoist-Pussy · 2015-09-02T06:58:50+00:00

If gender is a social construct, then it is a stupid, ambiguous word. Social expectations would be a better phrase for that.

If gender simply means the necessary and predictable behavioral expression of inherent sex differences, then obviously it is not a social construct.

Point of order: 3rd-wave fun-fems accept inherent gender differences, whereas 2nd-wave rad-fems do not. However, 3rd-wave fun-fems only accepted inherent gender differences because it was required in order to justify transgender and genderqueer identity politics.

alreadyredschool · 2015-09-02T07:50:09+00:00

I think it doesn't matter, rad fems want to justify extreme indoctrination with it, I say that should be forbidden.

I guess one day some of them will raise a lion to be a vegan and then be like "we proved that lions just eat meat because of lion culture" while the lion is a malnutritioned miserable little shit, possibly also half blind. We can indoctrinate humans to believe anything from communism is the best thing ever to fight communism till the last man, yes nurture is strong, if we use an incredible amount of resources, while our gender roles now are simply supported by anyone but social outcasts who don't manage to fit it.

statsfodder · 2015-09-02T12:54:56+00:00

Gender .... has a penis = male, has a vagina = female. Gender roles .... good reasons why a man should open the door for a woman and pay for everything but bad, made up reasons for why suzy homemaker should make bob a sammich. Sexuality .... what gender you prefer to have sexy time with.

Or have i not been "taught" hard enough by the fems? Aren't we all people? Humans? Homosapien? I thought labels were meant to be bad and yet here we are with every little snowflake begging to be special and different.... wait? Different? Why is a trans femme gerbil-kin different to me all of a sudden? Are we equal or not? Make up your fucking minds...

Atlas_B_Shruggin · 2015-09-02T13:32:55+00:00

Good video, I agree with pretty much all of it. The only bit I don't really agree with is that the genders must be different in order to be sexually attracted to each other. I mean gay people are sexually attracted to each other and they're obviously sexually attractive to each other.

But yes the genders are biologically different as a scientific fact and the people who deny this are no different than the Flat Earth Society. Sorry, Tumblr.

Edit: the video he did on MGTOW is interesting too, it uses a study done on mice to suggest MGTOW is a product of overpopulation, which is an interesting take on things.

grendalor · 2015-09-02T13:36:25+00:00

It wasn't that long ago that we didn't generally use the word "gender" in the way it is used today. We used the word "sex". The rise of the word "gender" was done more or less deliberately to drive a wedge between biological sex which is, leaving aside a tiny group of outliers who are hermaphrodites or similar, a binary thing, and the individual expression of members of each binary sex. Sex roles, which were similarly binary, emerged from the reality of binary biological sexuality.

The liberators were well aware of this connection, and, wanting to liberate sex roles from the binary reality of biological sex, started to use the word gender more commonly, precisely because it allowed a differentiation between biological sex and social roles, which were now referred to as "gender" or "gender roles". In other words, the rise of the use of the word itself was as a result of feminism.

The feminists have been largely successful in re-engineering the language in this way, such that "sex" has now shrunk in meaning, as a word, to referring to intercourse and related activities -- a development which serves to reinforce the reluctance of many/most English speakers to use it to describe biological sex without specifically using the qualifier "biological" before the word "sex".

So I would say that the word gender is a social construct itself. Are sex roles, which manifestly existed before the rise of the current use of the word "gender", social constructs? Yes and no. I would say that they were the expression, in a local cultural context, of differences between the sexes, in broad terms, as they functioned in family and society. They weren't created from whole cloth, from a blank piece of paper, but they also adapted over time to circumstances which changed. They remained tethered to the underlying sex of the people involved, but the details of how sex roles played out did change over time and vary, a bit, by location and culture.

That is in stark contrast to today, where we have been engaged in an aggressive campaign to do away with all concepts of sex/gender roles in the name of personal liberation. This kind of more or less complete (it can never be fully complete, due to biological differences around reproduction which create a kind of "hard limit" as to how much of a tabula rasa can really be engineered) separation of social/familial role from one's biological sex is unprecedented, and it remains to be seen if it is adaptive or not over the long term.

pandorarosie · 2015-09-02T21:28:16+00:00

Gender is a social construct...sex is biological (your genitals).

Gender is fluid...sex is not.

Tilting_Gambit · 2015-09-02T07:38:04+00:00

Is Gender a Social Construct

I never understand why it's scary for feminists to describe men and women as different. It doesn't mean that men and women shouldn't be treated the same in the workplace or home. If you agree that there are physical differences between men and women, like women able to give birth and men being physically stronger, then you agree there are differences between men and women, right?

In order to be a good mother 50,000 years ago you needed different skills than it took to be a good father. This is why men are stronger than women. A good father needed to be physically fit. And while it's harder to pinpoint what he needed psychologically to be a good father, you can pick some general attitudes: reliability, mental vigour, etc. Women needed good traits too, but rather than it involving leaving the house and killing animals it was more internally focused. The desire to protect and care for her kids, for example.

It's harder to prove differences in the brain because neuroscience is still a new field. My lecturer said that in the 90's it was easy to get your doctorate in Neuroscience, because nobody knew anything about it. You could just do basic research for a few years and be considered an expert. Which is why we can identify differences in male and female brains, but it's really hard to lock it down and say "You're born with these, it's not learned."

I totally grant that it's a cop out to say "Men and women are just different" is a total cop out. And more needs to be examined. But I genuinely believe some of those things to be true. For example: Women tend to be better listeners and communicators. Possibly because that's required for raising a healthy family. And I also believe that men make better leaders; again required for raising a healthy family. Do feminists or bluepillers have any major concerns with that line?

My other question is why do feminists seem dead set on not accepting differences between men and women? And if we found out tomorrow that some differences between us are purely biological, how would that change feminism in general?

5th_Law_of_Robotics · 2015-09-02T12:45:59+00:00

Not at all. Some gender roles are socially created. Boys liking blue and girls preferring pink for instance.

But by and large gender differences go beyond the simply physical and social mores reinforce existing differences.

ianturpiesmoustache · 2015-09-02T10:27:31+00:00

Gender itself is not a social construct, and I don't know anyone who argues that it is.

FallingSnowAngel · 2015-09-02T14:13:32+00:00

If gender and sex are the same thing, how does this quack explain the masculinized brains of autistic cis-women vs. the masculinized brains of trans men?

Title	Discussion: Is Gender a Social Construct
Author	MorpheusGodOfDreams
Upvotes	3
Comments	57
Date	September 2, 2015 6:49 AM UTC (10 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/3jbqtt/discussion_is_gender_a_social_construct/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/discussion-is-gender-a-social-construct.279877 https://theredarchive.com/post/279877

Comments