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[–]Datachost 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

It's what Germaine Greer said a few years ago: Female is sex and that's real. Feminine is gender and that's unreal. Gender certainly exists in the sense of a classification system we use to put certain actions or behaviour into the masculine/feminine box. But we don't have to. And really that should be the post-modernist take on gender, but it isn't, because of a mixture of fetishists wanting their fetish legitimised and a bunch of fuckwits who were taken in by their pseudo-philosophical bullshit about how sex doesn't really exist.

[–]Alienhunter糞大名 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I tend to agree. I see this idea that people who show behaviors which are atypical of their sex as a sign that they are actually the opposite sex quite regressive.

It's very much the difference between "women can't box because they are dainty flowers" which is sexist nonsense, and "women can't box against men because if the men don't hold back she'll die" which is objective reality you can go test yourself if you have a death wish.

[–]Datachost 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

It seems to be another case of society finding a middle ground difficult. We've gone from "Behaviour should change to suit biology" to "Biology should change to suit behaviour" and completely missed the sensible solution of "Biology is biology and shouldn't be needlessly fucked with. Behaviour may be linked to it in some ways, but people shouldn't be punished for stepping outside of those trends"

[–]Alienhunter糞大名 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I doubt most of society understands it well which leads to people taking extreme takes. Traditional gender rolls exist for good reason and aren't necessarily bad since the majority will follow them happily but there's no reason why individuals should be forced to follow them should they wish otherwise. Likewise there are cases where biology alone can cause bad outcomes for people and in such cases messing with it isn't necessarily wrong, but it's not something you want to mess with haphazardly without fully understanding the risks and trade offs. Honestly I think messing with social norms is similar. I think the wisdom of Ecclesiastes often reigns true from a study of history. There is nothing new under the sun. While we shouldn't blindly hold to traditions if we find new better ways of doing things, the argument that traditions are bad because they are old fashioned isn't a good one to me. These traditions exist for a reason, maybe that reason is a bad one and we should change it, but unless we actually understand the reason why beyond "it's old fashioned" I think we risk causing problems we can't foresee, perhaps problems that people in the past solved with such traditions.