If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s a social construct of a duck. – Helena Cronin
Some of my readers have asked why the dogma of “social construction of gender” irritates me so. It isn’t just because it’s scientifically inaccurate; I don’t get nearly as irate about creationism. One difference is that while the latter is not accepted by nearly anyone who self-identifies as intellectual, the former is; many people who have both the education and the personal experience to recognize it as a fallacy instead choose to accept because it’s a tenet of their political faith (which is no different from “the Bible tells me so.”) But that’s not really the problem; it’s that “social construction of gender” is far more dangerous to human relationships than creationism could ever be. My ex-husband Jack was a creationist, and while it did cause considerable friction in our relationship it wasn’t nearly the level that would have ensued had he demanded I adhere to male norms of behavior because female behavior is only “socially constructed”. Furthermore, even if neither were used as an excuse for government control of individuals (which, alas, both are in the modern US), “social construction” dogma is bound to cause conflict in a mixed-sex group; I couldn’t tell you how many creationists worked at the library, but I can sure tell you which believed in “social construction” because of their unreasonable expectations about co-workers of the opposite sex.
The problem is glaringly obvious if you think about it; if we understand that men and women are different, we expect them to behave differently and make allowance for it when dealing with them. But “social construction of gender” presumes a single baseline, one norm from which all gender-specific behavior is a deviation. If humans were fair-minded and truly believed that all gender expression was equally deviant from an unattainable unisex “norm”, that would be silly and false but not actually harmful. But because humans aren’t perfectly fair-minded this isn’t what happens at all; those who believe in a unisex standard (such as neofeminists or male chauvinists) actually declare their own sex’s behavior as the norm, and the other’s as a pathological deviation from it. Whether the response is to condemn the other sex as hopelessly inferior and therefore creatures to be patronized, or to attempt to force the other to change to conform to the other’s norm, is immaterial; both inevitably result in strife, maltreatment and tyranny.
I discussed one example of this sort of misunderstanding in my column of one year ago today: many women condemn men for being attracted to the characteristics to which Nature has programmed them to be attracted, which is not merely an offense against logic and biology, but against decency and human rights as well. They may even rail loudly against those who are prejudiced against others for physical characteristics they cannot help (such as skin color), but deny that sexual preferences are just as innate because to admit it would undermine their catechism. Why is it OK to decry “fat shaming”, yet insult men who are sexually repulsed by obesity in women? If a woman can’t control her reaction to food, how is a man supposed to control his sexual feelings? The idea is not only nonsense, it exposes the real motive behind most neofeminist teachings: the sick and envious need to keep men from experiencing sex in the way that is enjoyable for them. Dig beneath the surface of any neofeminist policy on sex and you’ll find the same evil, rotten motive.
Another example is in the typical feminist reaction to my old (but still popular and controversial) column “A Whore in the Bedroom”. It’s been called “misogynistic”, “fat-shaming”, “anti-consent” and even “MRA-like”, because it says things they don’t want to hear and conflicts with “social construction of gender”. The basic theme of that column is stated in this passage:
Getting married is a free choice, and carries responsibilities with the privileges. If you refuse to take care of your dog you should give him to somebody who will, and if you refuse to give sex to your husband you should either divorce him or suggest he satisfy his needs elsewhere with your blessing. You cannot have your cake and eat it, too; a man is NOT a woman, and if you expect him to respect your choice not to have sex with him, you in turn must respect his choice to get it from somebody else.
The only way to deny the truth and fairness of that statement is to pretend that sex differences do not exist, that a man’s sex drive is a deviation from the (female) norm and that it is therefore reasonable to insist that a man can “learn” not to need what he needs. This goes beyond the absurd into the totally delusional; one might as well say that a 100-kg man can subsist on the same amount of food as a 60-kg woman, or that women don’t need tampons or birth control pills because men don’t. Relationships are not for the benefit of one person; they are for the benefit of both, and if either partner denies the other things he or she vitally needs (food, sex, money, companionship, personal space, understanding, emotional intimacy, etc) without some compelling reason he or she has no right whatsoever to complain if the other partner gets it from somewhere else or abandons the relationship entirely.
There is one last negative effect of “social construction of gender” I would like to address today; it only affects a very small minority of the population, but that’s no reason to ignore it. As Ayn Rand pointed out, “the smallest minority on earth is the individual”; anyone who wants his own rights protected had damned well better be concerned with those of minorities. The group in question here is transsexuals, whose entire experience is invalidated by the concept that gender is learned. These are people who were raised and conditioned as their biological sex indicated, yet for some reason science does not yet understand feel that they are psychologically and/or spiritually members of the other sex. If gender were indeed “socially constructed” transsexuals should not exist, yet they do; whatever switch in the brain identifies people as male or female is switched the wrong way for them…and that obviously wouldn’t be possible if there were no such switch. The only ways to explain gender identity disorder under a “social construction” model are A) to deny the statements of transsexuals and insist that they were “really” conditioned the wrong way, even if other siblings of the same biological sex were not; or B) to insist that transsexualism is a “choice”, just as fundamentalist Christians insist homosexuality is. For a Biblical literalist to admit that homosexuality is intrinsic to a person’s psychological makeup would refute the Biblical definition of it as a voluntary “sin”, and for a neofeminist to admit that transsexualism is intrinsic to a person’s psychological makeup would refute the fundamental dogma that gender is imposed by society; therefore both of them must deny the facts rather than admit that their cherished belief-systems are in error.
I suppose I see it as a continuum. Over here are the classic masculine traits, and over on the other end are the feminine, and we all fall somewhere in between. Sometimes where we fall doesn’t match our bodies.
My opinion is that we should, as much as possible, make ourselves comfortable. If you’re a femme, be that. A butch? then be as happily butch as you wish. I’m really tired of everyone having to apologize for who they are ad what they desire.
Where I resent it is when the model become limitations, as when I was told in school “You can’t do science, girls don’t do science.” We can choose to be other than gender stereotypes.
Perhaps one of the reasons that radical feminism never caught on in the Deep South is that I’ve never heard of academic limitations like “girls can’t do science” there; quite the opposite, in fact. I’ve never encountered any educator (and only rare non-educators) in the New Orleans area who didn’t believe that girls were the academic equals of boys. Yes, we of course had “ladies don’t act such-and-such way” stuff but then the boys had “gentlemen don’t act such-and-such way” too, so that’s no different.
I grew up in Atlanta and I hadn’t heard of things like that either.
And I heard the “ladies don’t act like that” and “gentlemen don’t act like that”, too.
An FYI, there’s gay and/or bisexual Christians who don’t believe that their wanting sex/being attracted to the same sex is a literal choice. This includes fundamentalists. They’re tired of hearing this and I don’t blame them (I’m a bisexual Christian and also a fundamentalist Protestant). I’m tired of it also. We’re not in just certain safe little category boxes. I’ve been attracted to men way more than women since grade school. My “crushes” were mainly on boys and a few on girls in grade school. Now I still have a strong preference for men compared to women. In other words, these preferences haven’t changed. Some gay/bisexual Christians act on their desires (have sex, etc.) and some don’t. There’s also gay churches. There’s many in the city where I live. At least some of these churches have fundamentalist beliefs that aren’t related to sex. We’re sick and tired of hearing the ###*** also that if you say you’re gay and/or bisexual that you’re automatically screamed at/told to leave/told burn in hell, etc. from people and/or clergy in any church you go to and/or are a member of. WRONG. It’s not an automatic. I know this from 1st hand experience and this is why I talk about my experience in “coming out” to the clergy where I go to church (when I do go) any chance I get. I’ll never deny this does happen (it shouldn’t if the Bible is truly followed), but ONLY talking about when it does isn’t fair. It’s the same old negativity with positives not mentioned on purpose. I won’t speak for transgender Christians as I’ve never met any and haven’t read up on them. But, the gay/bisexual 1’s, yes, as I’m 1 plus have talked to some plus read up on them. It’s a great thing when the effort is actually MADE to talk to these Christians and/or read up on them. It’s like with MVS: if all you do is read about us in the media and never bother to actually TALK TO US and/or READ our 1st hand accounts then you’ll NEVER get the full picture. It’s the same with gay/bisexual Christians.
You really have to wonder if the more extreme feminists are the way they are because they are physically or mentally incapable of enjoying sex of any kind (heterosexual or homosexual). That would explain their interpretation of any sexual approach as an assault. If sex meant pain, then obviously a lustful look would be the threat of pain.
If social construction was real, why is it that everyone in the world can agree on what is really ugly in a person’s features? Surely some cultures would have come to a different conception? (And I’m not talking about tattoos, ritual scarring, or piercing.) And why was there never a society of significant size and longevity where all the women acted exactly like men? Even the Amazons (if they existed) were reputed to look and act female, even though they kicked arse. Conditioning should work both ways and on both sexes.
And why would any person choose to be transsexual, and be considered a social outcast or a freak by many otherwise compassionate people? Gay men can stay in the closet, but to embrace his or her sexual identity, a transsexual has to look and behave in an unmistakably revealing way, especially a male to female TS (tomboys being more socially acceptable).
“why is it that everyone in the world can agree on what is really ugly in a person’s features?” Really? Have you surveyed everyone in the world to come to that conclusion? Personally I find a lot of what is dished up by today’s media as the epitome of beauty is one-dimensionally dull. Give me a face (or body) with a bit of charcater instead of some surgically and cosmetically altered creature. I could watch elderly people all day; they have such interesting faces, and people get much less self-conscious with age, making them more natural. Perhaps their features aren’t beautiful, but they are often more intruiging than ugly.
I think a lot of what we perceive is beautiful is culturally conditioned. Compare Rubens’s models (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Three_Graces,_by_Peter_Paul_Rubens,_from_Prado_in_Google_Earth.jpg) with the stick-figures that walk the catwalks today. Or the changing status of tanned skin since the 1800s, from a sign of performing manual labour in the sun to an indicator of wealth (skiing or snorkelling in February). There is such a thing as the culture we live in and it shapes our terms of reference; and you still have to understand the rules if you want to break them.
Yes really. Being 10 kg heavier or thinner does not make a person ugly. Age does not make a person ugly, just old. Skin colour does not make a person ugly, just a different colour.
And Ugly Betty (America Ferrera) is not ugly either.
If these examples are all you can think of when someone mentions ugly, then perhaps you are the one who should look around a bit more.
However, since you commence your remarks with “Have you surveyed everyone in the world to come to that conclusion?” it makes the sincerity of your arguments rather dubious anyway.
You wrote, ““why is it that everyone in the world can agree on what is really ugly in a person’s features?” I’d really love to hear you elaborate on what you think are those universally accepted ugly features.
Find me any society (as a whole and not an individual or a small related group) that would classify these (female) faces as being attractive. (Note that I am not making any comment on their personalities or intelligence).
The pictures were the first ones I came across on the net and not intended to be representative of anything.
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John, it was demonstrated a few years ago that both people and primates – even human infants – find faces with a high degree of symmetry more attractive. The more symmetrical the face, the more beautiful people rate it. Factors like the width of the nose, shape of the eyes and all that vary by culture, but as long as the two sides of the face reflect each other well people see it as an attractive face. The researchers were even able to program a computer to “judge beauty” by rating degree of symmetry, and the computer gave the faces the same average ratings as human subjects who were asked to rate the faces’ beauty.
So, while cultures have different traits they consider markers, the attraction toward symmetrical arrangement is universal for reasons that make perfect biological sense.
I’m not aware of the studies you mention, but it sounds like drawing very broad conclusions based on dubious methods. How do you judge – really, objectively – how an infant or a primate makes those kinds of distinctions? Are they even capable of making them? Anyway, maybe I’m a statistical outlier, because I personally find character rather than perfect symetry more appealling.
The length of time babies and monkeys look at faces correlates very closely with how attractive adults rate those faces. The prettier the face, the longer a baby or monkey will stare at it.
That’s fine, but don’t act like “character” and “beauty” are the same thing.
For example, there’s something adorable about the second face V.W. Singer linked to, but she isn’t pretty.
I can’t see the pics but …
I agree with you. EXCLUDING hookers … by far some of the best girlfriends I have ever had were average looking girls. Just something in them that I found interesting and in a lot of cases sex for the first time with them was like … “WTF WAS THAT?!!!” – because I just didn’t expect them to be so good.
I dated a girl named “Sue” in Hawaii who did “extra” work on TV shows as a bikini model. She was in “Magnum PI” and “Murder She Wrote”, among others. Hottest looking girl I ever dated. She was the WORST in the sack of any girl I’ve experienced. A total PLYWOOD toss.
Sue, and some of the other prettier girls I knew had the biggest emotional hangups too and some of the worst problems with body image – even when they had perfect bodies.
By contrast – most of the “average” girls seemed to be perfectly cool with their bodies. I remember looking at one doing her hair in the bathroom mirror – totally naked. I’m laying in the bed thinking … “Her body’s not perfect, she’s doing her hair naked and she walks around the house naked when she knows I’m watching her …”
There is something very HOT about a woman who is willing to display her imperfect side to you so casually. It drove me absolutely nuts! In a very, very, good way! 🙂
You can’t see the pictures because he linked to them in a way that doesn’t work here. I’ll see if I can re-link them for you.
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I agree that women can be very appealing, aside from whether or not they are pretty in the conventional sense. I’ve mentioned a female astronomer I had full-on fantasies about. She wasn’t that pretty, in conventional terms. She was cute, a little, and she wasn’t ugly. But she’d’ve got my attention if she’d been talking about golf with all that enthusiasm and grinning (I can’t stand golf). The fact that she was talking planets and orbital mechanics and all made it soooo much better. I would do that girl, preferably under the stars but in a freaking CAVE if she wanted it that way.
Sailor Barsoom:
Re image link, I was afraid of that, but the host only provided one form of link and I can’t find a preview feature for these comments. Perhaps in future I’ll just stick any images on my own domain and post an url.
You can link to it, you just have to put the naked URL in, instead of the HTML markup.
Sounds more like you should read an introduction to Evolutionary Psychology. Here: http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/David-Buss-Evolutionary-Psychology-The-New-Science-of-the-Mind-2007-496p-Evolutionary-Psychology-3rd-ed.pdf
i honestly think that those”feminists”are no different from”male shauvinists”as far as their behavior towards their hated group is concerned.and if anything the feminists do more damage because people actually listen to them.you cant say nowadays that women are inferior without being flamed but you can say that the global economic crisis is the fault of men,and more women are needed in top jobs ,cause they make better decisions(politician in england who is actually the equalities minister said that)and not have eggs thrown at you.also,the double standards that theese women create amazes me,if it is a holywood star in a playboy photoshoot shes a collaborator to womens oppression and men who drool ”perverted pigs”if it is christiano ronaldo in an oversexualized armani advertisement(p.s a must watch)hes fine and the women who watch him ”liberated women who are not afraid to express sexual interest”.how far is it from hes a stud,shes a slut”but from a different angle?i just think that the prestige that theese women have nowadays will destroy both men and women,the same way the male shauvinists prestige created problems all theese centuries.
I got in a huge-assed debate over this very subject in my Senior Enlisted Academy Class – me against 15 others alone – with two SEALS who agreed with me completely “abstaining” from the argument! Thanks guys!
We were talking about leadership and I told the class that it was much easier for a dumb, masculine “alpha” guy to lead people than it was for a woman or a small male – who would always have to be smarter, and work harder at being a leader. My assertion is that people – male and female, were programmed by evolution to follow the “alpha” more “unquestioning” than they would someone else.
Man … I got KILLED … one African American female actually threw her 3X5 speech cards at me!
But … my argument was a bit wrong – because now I’ve figured out that I DID meet several female leaders who made the job of leadership easy. However, they didn’t do it by embracing masculine traits – they embraced their FEMININE traits. I’ve even seen them use a little sexual tension in their leadership style – and they were simply amazing women in a leadership position.
The women I knew who tried to “do it like a guy” were often frustrated and prone to blaming the men she was supposed to lead as being “chauvinist” and not “good followers”. Of course – some of the women who were abysmal failures hit the floor with castration shears in hand expecting the men to challenge her. Funny – but men seem to have some kind of “aversion” to being “castrated” and will never give their loyalty to one of those types of women. And also funny – neither do the “follower” women!
I’ve always been viewed as a natural leader; people defer to me and I take charge without effort, even when the group includes a number of men. But as you might expect, I don’t ever try to act like a guy and the only time those “shears” come out is on the extremely rare occasion when I want to humiliate someone because other means of persuasion have failed.
Then, you are – what I would call … “A Queen”.
That’s the label I put on these women I knew who were so great. I tend to think some of the greatest Queens in history were very much like you are. That’s kind of the way I felt working for these women anyway – like they were “The Queen” and I was a “knight” in their court – and you didn’t fuck with the Queen without experiencing MY wrath! But – Queens are also expert at dealing with women too, and they deal with them differently from the men, they are freaking amazing but I only worked for like THREE of them so they’re rare.
By the way – you won’t want to hear this but Tipper Gore – was a “Queen” too!
I’m not surprised. There can be evil queens just like there are good ones. 😉
Other men have used similar terminology for me; Jeff and my husband prefer “princess”, and Jack used to call me a “queen bee“.
I don’t think Tipper Gore played with SNAKES there, my EVIL Queen!!!
And … we’ve all seen what you do with Kittens!! 😛
I liked Tipper Gore just fine once she figured out that screwing around with rock n’ roll wasn’t the best way to get her favorite political party the youth vote.
She had to have some kind of leadership quality; how many people bitch and moan about the crazy music the kids are listening to these days? Far too many, and most never get as far as Tipper did. Yes, she was married to a senator, but most male senators have wives, and I’m not sure I could tell you what any of those wives’ first names are.
Well, Al was a presidential candidate. That could have helped.
Her rock n’ roll silliness was before that. The memory of it years later probably lost Gore a hundred votes or so in Florida.
Krulac,
The only mistake in your argument was limit the idea of Alpha to the male gender, though that’s a big mistake(!).
In any mammalian grouping where there is an Alpha Male there is also an Alpha Female. The rest of the pack will follow her in the absence of the Alpha Male.
Oddly, there are mammalian species, including some primates, that Alpha Females but no Alpha Males.
Yeah, that’s true – and I wasn’t trying to say that only alpha males could be good leaders – I’m just saying they start out a little “ahead” in that department. But my real point was trying to tie into Maggie’s theme today about gender constructions because she’s totally right about what she is saying. I also think it’s pretty clever how she brought up the “transsexual” example to put those who believe that gender is “learned” into a terrifying little dark box for themselves that they can’t escape from! 😉
I’m leaving the gender dimorphism part completely alone. There are some logical flaws in her argument, but to argue them cannot be done without making statements that are bound to offend someone horribly and likely rat hole this conversation.
‘In any mammalian grouping where there is an Alpha Male there is also an Alpha Female. The rest of the pack will follow her in the absence of the Alpha Male”
Hardly. There are almost as many different mating systems as there are mammals. Gibbons pair bond with so social grouping. Gorillas have one big dominant male with a female harem. Chimps have an alpha male, Bonobos a dominant matriach, elephants are matriachal. The whole “alpha male” ideology is a lot of pseudoscience actually. In wolf packs where it comes from, the alpha male mates with the alpha female, but the beta male actually gets more matings from other females than the alpha male does. Humans are peculiar mammals, more like some bird species, in that we form pair bonds and extra-pair dalliances within a larger group of mixed males and females. Orangs have big alpha males that live alone, but are less agressive than the younger smaller males. They don’t form pair bonds like gibbons or troops like chimps or harems like gorillas. Lions are very different than tigers than leopards than Cheetahs etc.
It is very hard to tease out homology and analogy between human and other mammalian mating systems. In fact this holds for other aspects of behaviour too. Chimps aren’t able to follow where the human gaze points, but dogs are highly attuned to it, through co-evolution not commonality of descent.
Its complicated.
Evolution handles them both – creationism & social construction
Oh, man. That is a beautiful argument. You can also add that if gender is socially constructed, then these “pray away the gay” programs should work. If a man’s sexual desire — the strength of it, his preferences, is tendency toward young women — is programmed by society, then why isn’t a same-sex attraction equally programmed by society? Why do homosexual men, presumably programmed differently, have a similar manifestation of their sex drive to heterosexual men (e.g., interest in porn, disinterest in monogamy, etc.).
The funny thing for me, being an academic approaching middle age, is watching all my friends throw out their “social construction of gender” beliefs as they have kids. A friend who thought boys only played with guns because they were given guns said she realized that was garbage when her boys chewed sandwiches into gun shapes and started shooting each other. Another raised twins — a boy and a girl – and watched as the girl rapidly civilized and the boy remained a monster.
Life all pseudo-intellectual BS, this one scrapes a truth: *how* our gender differences manifest can be socially constructed. There was a time when being plump was seen as a sign of youth, health and fertility (and in parts of the world, it still is). But the basic underpinning of who we are is intrinsically linked to what we are.
Thank you, Hal! And yes, I’ve seen the same thing with people having kids; those who start out with silly unisex beliefs usually throw up their hands and give in by the time the kid is three or four because they just can’t make those beliefs square with reality.
Another example is jewelry: we in the US today tend to see wearing a lot of jewelry as feminine, and a man who wears a lot of jewelry as effeminate.* But in many cultures, it has been the norm for women to wear a little jewelry, and for men to wear a whole big honking lot of it.
So “girls wear pretty jewelry and boys don’t” is socially constructed. “Boys have dicks and girls have pussies” is not socially constructed, though sometimes I think these weird people must believe that it is.
And then some things are averages, with a wide range of what is “normal.” MORE men than women take of rough sports like MMA or jousting, but SOME women do, and they are not freaks or extreme outliers. MORE women want to be professional dancers than men, but there are some damn fine male dancers, and they are not some one-in-infinity aberrations.
* Exceptions are made if the jewelry-wearing man is obviously macho in other ways, like Mr. T.
I find this blog educational and I am very sympathetic to your cause. I agree with most of your points, but the one about transsexuals seems weak to me.
The idea that something is socially constructed doesn’t mean that society imposes it with 100% efficiency; any social system can fail and even achieve the opposite results when trying to indoctrinate.
The social construction concept is more related to the idea that your behaviour and preferences are a result of the environment you live in. And of course, this environment is not uniform – different pockets of the environment would create different, “unusual” preferences.
Also, the idea that sexuality is influenced by the experiences in your life (for example the idea that the events in your life determine which sex you feel comfortable with) doesn’t make that preference a conscious choice. So, for example being gay is not a conscious choice, and there isn’t gay lifestyle propaganda going 24/7 on national TV, but these facts are not enough to claim that sexual preference is not a result of the experiences in your life and the environment you live in (which is not limited to TV or to the official social values).
In a similar way, you may have different phobias (from heights, spiders etc.) – but the reason for them is not necessarily coded in your genes, and they may have appeared late in your life after a specific set of events that you don’t even remember. Or you may be very rebellious and “fuck the system” type of person – this can also be a result of particular events in your life, which are not limited to the official social values.
Many transsexuals have siblings of the same sex whose gender identification is perfectly normal, so the idea that socialization could cause it is absurd. And the idea that transsexuals consciously adopt the other sex’s role to be rebellious not only ignores and diminishes their stated experiences, but also the fact that most of them have zero desire to attract attention. I think you’re confusing drag queens (who definitely want attention and relish unconventionality) with transsexuals, most of whom want to live quietly as members of the sex they feel they belong to.
I haven’t implied that the goal of transsexuals is to be rebellious; the “rebellion” example, just like the “phobia” example were unrelated and aimed only to show that a certain behaviour, which isn’t necessarily a conscious choice, can be a result of experiences in your life.
Siblings also don’t prove a lot, because even people who grew in the same family have very different experiences.
Loved all but your last paragraph, which seems to me totally backward. I know quite a few TS folk, and only a few would say they’ve always felt they were in the wrong bodies. Most were simply lucky (or in a few cases, unlucky) enough to get an upbringing/”social construction” that better fit the sex the eventually had themselves turned into. A couple were even born with hardware such that the doctors could have “assigned” them either sex.
The lesson I draw from this is that we ought to hold back from having rigid social expectations of other people within and even well beyond the range of behaviors you might describe as normal male through normal female, and let individual taste prevail instead. In particular parents need to allow their kids this kind of latitude. This is where the “social conservative” model of human nature does the most harm.
I’m not talking about “gender-noncomforming” people; I’m talking about genuine transsexuals, who are rare but (as I pointed out) still disprove the idea that gender roles are purely taught.
There are quite a few of such examples. Now comes the really unfortunate situation. Some children are born with mixed sexual genitals (inter-sex). When they are, a choice must sooner or later be made which direction to operate them in. This has sometimes resulted in the wrong choice being made. It was this way because the belief was that the child could just be socialized to feel as whatever sex was chosen. This sometimes results in the sad situation of someone who was born inter-sex, operated to be one gender, but feels like the other gender.
For more details and a case study about this, watch the Norwegian documentary series Hjernevask, which is about this social constructivism nonsense. http://genusnytt.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/se-hjernevask-avsloja-genusmyterna/
Here are a couple of links to a TV-series made by a Norwegian comedian Harald Eia. In my opinion the series is quite brilliant as he is able to ask questions that other seem to avoid. The answers Norwegian sociologist and gender researchers give are quite illuminating and infuriating. It’s subtitles in English where needed.
The password is “hjernevask” (brainwash).
1 – ”The Gender Equality Paradox”
2 – ”The Parental Effect”
3 – ”Gay/straight”
4 – ”Violence”
5 – ”Sex”
6 – ”Race”
7 – ”Nature or Nurture”
I’ve watch the first two so far, and will watch them all. The series has a “nature over nurture” bias, but not a huge one it would seem. It just happens that nature is a bigger influence than a lot of people want to believe.
Things I feel are important (so far):
Environment does play a role, especially if the differences in environment are extreme.
The nature influence is predominating in Norway largely because the environment is rather equalized. The sorts of environmental factors which could reduce intelligence (such as malnutrition, substandard schools for the poor, or being slapped upside the head once too often) are not making themselves felt, so genetics is almost all that’s left.
Thus, efforts towards a more equitable society ARE still justified, because “it’s all genetics” is only true when environmental disadvantages are reduced or eliminated.
They’re still leaving some stuff out. The children of smokers are 50% more likely to take up smoking in their teens than the children of non-smokers. Is this because they are imitating their parents, or is it because they have a genetic predisposition towards addiction, which they inherited from their addicted parents? How large a role do their peers play?
Gee, those are good questions. Glad you’re working on it. Um… could the fact that the children of smokers have been sucking up cigarette smoke for thirteen years before they even are teenagers possibly have something to do with it? I realize that I’m not a professor of anything but, well, I can’t help but wonder.
That question is asked in one of them. Both are possible factors. One can do adoption studies and see if the adopted children smoke like their adoptive or genetic parents, or some mixture.
Reminds me, some years ago I went to a therapist, and then another one, and then a marriage counsellor as a couple. In each case the therapist was a woman, and with hindsight quite clearly a feminist….or at the least a follower of the “social construction of gender” ideology. Needless to say, each such series of sessions actually made me worse rather than better. Looking back, there seemed to be absolutely no hint of understanding at all about the enormous sexual frustration I was experiencing, and how that underpinned all my various problems that I’d got into.There was constant analysis of childhood and family experiences and all that, but no acknowledgement at all that I had (and have) a raging sexual beast inside me that was crazed with starvation, and despite my being a decent and urbane gentleman, would leak out in various ways and cause trouble….absolutely no understanding at all that the “raging sexual beast” is actually another name for “normal male Homo sapiens”.
Needless to say, eventually I started see a REAL expert, an escort, and not only was the beast tamed, but I had someone to talk to who actually understood and treated it as banal and everyday commonplace male behaviour. Correction of behavioural and emotional problems took place in short order. Added bonus, my wife is actually more receptive these days now that i’m a happier more relaxed man to be with, a better husband.
Forget therapists, get an escort guys. You’ll come away not only happy, but HAPPY.
Notice how it is presented as “women as victims”. The women are somehow being corrupted by “the internet”. It could not possibly be that the women could be held accountable for their actions.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2131726/A-generation-girls-sexually-corrupted-web.html
Just started reading it, and I’ve noticed a few things already.
“Becky’s story is all the more alarming as she is not only from a loving home, but also a good student who achieved As and Bs at GCSEs.”
Because of course grades are the best indicator of a girl’s sexual proclivities.[/sarcasm]
“40 per cent of 11 to 18-year-olds questioned admitted knowing friends who engage in ‘sexting’”
Which could mean 40% of eleven-year-olds, 40% of twelve-year-olds, 40% of thirteen… but probably means something like 2% of eleven-year-olds and 70% of eighteen-year-olds. Which isn’t nearly as shocking, which is why they use the form “40 per cent of 11 to 18-year-olds.”
“I grew up a lot and realised I didn’t want to go back to using dating websites.’
Becky adds: ‘For the past six months I’ve been in a stable relationship with a man I met through mutual friends.”
I hope all goes well for her, but you can meet a jerk, a psycho, or a cad through mutual friends, at work, at church, or at your job just as easy as you can online.
“My advice to other young girls is just not to have any online sexual encounters with men'”
Since this is advice unlikely to be heeded, perhaps we would do better to accept that this is something people (it’s obviously not just women) do, and act accordingly?
Anywho, they just took the worst cases of online dating and put it out there as a sort of “this is what it’s all about” bit of nonsense. I could post links to five cases of wives who murdered their husbands, or five cases of husbands who murdered their wives, and say, “See? Marriage is a horrible thing!”
It would be bullshit, but no more than this is.
Well, forgive my sick male mind (:p) but if you splice out the various bits in this story where she is following the moralising neofeminist script to social redemption that a girl is required to bow to when she’s caught out, then I find it pretty hot.
The only thing dumb about this girl is that she didn’t charge for her services (when past the age of consent I mean). Or maybe she did….
Not charging doesn’t make you dumb. Charging doesn’t make you dumb. Having sex with men she didn’t want to have sex with, for reasons of love, pleasure, money, charity, stealing national secrets, notoriety, or status, is dumb.
THANK YOU for speaking up for the women like me whose choice to not literally charge for sex has nothing to do with “stupidity”. THANK YOU. Your voice is NEEDED because I learned here and other places since I came out fully as a bisexual Christian plus what I call a “wild woman” that this evil ###*** is going strong. Disgusting. My choice to not charge a cent for sex (and I never will unless there’s no other jobs and no other way to live, i.e., a very last resort to stay alive) is for reasons that have nothing to do with my brain power, etc. Neither does my choice to keep sex as free of literal cost as possible for men. By cost I mean travel, condoms, actual dates, etc. Your speaking out against ###*** ASS-umptions, blanket statements, etc. about whole groups of people is a wonderful trait that got me to want a full relationship with you not long after we starting traveling to see each other in person.
You’ve missed my main point, the last line was glib, the main point was in the first paragraph.
Therefore:
“…didn’t want to have sex with..”
Are you kidding me? When something unpleasant happens to people, they don’t rush off and do it a few more dozen times, they avoid it. She is saying now, after the fact, that she didn’t like it -actually, she said in as many words that she liked the excitement, and approval – hasn’t Maggie written repeatedly about the rush many women get from being desired? The actual sex act needn’t have been good for her to have got something out of it, as she obviously did. Now she’s got what is sometimes called here (unfairly) “slappers remorse”, which is the mumblings of remorse, victimhood, and so forth that a young woman is required to go through to redeem herself in the social world she lives in when she’s caught out (unless she is particularly strong and centered). See “neofeminist script….social redemption” above. It’s another variety of the “sex addiction” and “I’ve done a terrible thing” nonsense that men come out with when they are caught in sex scandals. Exposure makes people say things that you don’t take at face value.
Dear Darren Thompson, please see my reply below to Sailor Barsoom on that WONDERFUL ###*** that women who don’t charge for sex are literally and/or wilfully stupid.
Oh for goodness sake, is this place full of literal minded pedants or something? It was a glib comment, what insane idiot would really claim that any woman that doesn’t charge for sex is dumb? Does irony have to be flagged and explicated in great detail.
I can’t believe how you people could overlook the substantive first paragraph and then start getting on a high horse over the ironical closure.
But, I shouldn’t complain, the vast majority of people are literal minded and deaf to nuance, and many the politician or broadcaster who has come unstuck when the ironical is taken literal.
You sound like my five year old who when he hears me make a silly comment to my 10 year old to make him laugh, immediately pipes up and tells me what I should have said.
Tin ears the both of you. Pah!
Ah but Darren, you are wrong, it’s utter ###*** that people have tin ears, they are made of flesh. That a myth women have had to bear and I for one am not going to stand it. I’m sick of men who stereotype woman as having ears made of tin. I haven’t. It’s a sick stereotype.
Darren, Darren Darren, you are forgetting that what you have just done is irony at 2 levels instead of just 1 level of recursion (and this comment is at 3 levels). Are you expecting people who don’t get irony in the first intention to get it at the second or third intention? Wise up man.
An FYI: saying that women who don’t literally charge for sex are literally and/or wilfully stupid is all over the Internet. I’ve found this ###*** all over. I’ve found other stuff besides this ###***, unfortunately, all over the Internet. I apologize that I didn’t get that you weren’t serious about this. To be honest, it’s wonderful to see someone NOT being part of the ###*** stuff said about women who don’t charge for sex on purpose. I get defensive on these issues because I’m very tired of them and have resolved to fight them. This is also a new cause to me as I’ve only been “out” for the past few years. I find it sad you’re so patronizing towards people who don’t get right off what you’re saying. I use the ###*** for at least a few reasons and it wasn’t personally directed at you in a bad way and doesn’t deserve to be mocked.
Darren, Darren, Darren, you are forgetting that of all forms of humor, irony carries over least to the Internet. If you’re going to get upset every time somebody doesn’t get it, you’re going to be upset much of the time.
My comment was intended, in part, to pacify Laura, who is sensitive on this issue (not without reason; some here actually have suggested that women who don’t charge are literally dumb). I replied before she did. My expectation was sort of, “She’s dumb because she didn’t charge!? Why that… oh, Sailor already said something. I’ll tell him thanks and go on with my life.” But Laura being Laura, she had to take it very personally and get righteous on yo ass.
Laura, Sweetie, you know I love you, but you remember how I said that sometimes you come on like a bulldozer? Well…
OK, about what the teen cutie in the story did or didn’t like:
I probably should have started my statement with, “If we take her at her word” but I didn’t. Yes, of course she got something out of it. Maybe the adventure of traveling all over England in the dead of night like some sort of secret agent… at fifteen. A lot more exciting than staying home (or at the house of this friend who was clearly covering for her) and watching TV.
I dunno, Maggie. A few comments:
1. You seem to be working with a straw man argument in saying that socially-constructed folk believe it is 100% social. But radical queer theorists, after all, agree that being gay is biological. So, I see no contradiction with the transsexual thing. In fact, I would argue that transsexuals, drag queens, and the butch-belle dichotomy amongst lesbians strengthens the case for social factors, since they appear repeat the roles that society puts out—they can’t think of anything new.
2. You are assuming that evolutionary psychologists are actually doing science. I don’t think they are. I mean, just think of your exchange with Dr Satoshi Kanazawa. The guy sounds like a total idiot and racist to boot.
We suffered like 6 decades under the supposed science of Sigmund Freud before we finally all came to our senses. I predict a similar outing of evolutionary psychologists for being charlatans. But it may take another 6 decades, alas… I mean, you agree with them that men are naturally attracted to certain features in a woman. So, which is it, little, young perky breasts or large, hanging fertile looking ones. In my experience amongst MODERN males, not hunter-gatherers or cavemen, I have no idea. I personally prefer little, perky breasts.
3. You would also have to account for the fact that in Latin America, a guy sticking his dick in an other guy’s ass doesn’t make you gay—only the receiver is gay. Same with in US prisons. Those are socially-constructed conceptions about what it means to be gay. So, yeah, to return to my first point, I think the queer theorists actually got it wrong too
To expand on point #1: There are indeed third genders in India and in the Istmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca, Mexico, that don’t conform exactly to traditional male-female roles. Unlike in the US, where we do see a tendency for such gender minorities to mimic the general social conceptions of what it means to be male or female.
Thank you. I spend some time on feminist websites and recently, physically in academia. I’ve seen a number of people who self-identify as “social constructionist”. Not a single one of them advocates what Maggie says they advocate. I have no doubt that “100% social constructionists” exist, I just never run into them so it is hard for me to see them as a reasonable concern.
In my personal life, with no claims of representativeness, the complaints about social construction were about rigid gender roles. I am happy nobody told some commenters here what a boy or a girl should feel and be like, but I met many people who were not so lucky.
I do find evolutionary theory very compelling. But as a scientist in training, I also agree that a lot of studies on the topic do not have very valid methods. And there is always a confounding of culture and biology that makes it hard to interpret the results in one way. For example, some people here stated young children adopt gender roles even though parents treat them equally, and seem to jump to a biological explanations. A good scientist should consider all possible explanations. It could be biology. It could also be influences of peers, TV, what they see around them, and the slight differences in gender roles their parents might display in their own behaviour. From what I learned in my courses, there is evidence that direct parental influence is far smaller than we’d like to think.
I also find it interesting how some people adopt the simplest evolutionary theory like it is a gospel, with little conception of the complexity and diversity of what really happens in the animal kingdom. The discussion above about Alpha males, with an insightful comment by Darren Thompson, is a great illustration. I’ve been listening to some biological anthropology lectures that highlight how diverse female sexual behaviour is among monkey and how far it is from the stereotype of “males need a lot more sex than females”. They had an example of some monkey, where a female has sex on average every 30 minutes, and given such frequency, it is very hard to pin it down on procreation drive alone.
If I based my knowledge about female sexual drive on my former escort experience, I would have been on board with men just need more sex. But I hang out on online communities about relationship and sexual advice, populated by people in the 20-30 age group, and have observed equal number of complaints from both men and women that their partner’s sexual drive went down. Of course, there may be way more women than men there, explaining equal prevalence. But even so, my research on casual sex so far makes me believe that there is a significant minority of women (closer to 20-30%, not 1 or 2) who have strong need and desire for good regular sex for their own pleasure. At least, in the 20-30 age group because most research is done on college students. The variability within a gender is always greater than the statistically significant differences between genders.
I disagree that the variability within a gender is greater than the significant difference between genders; that’s called the “gender similarities” hypothesis, and here’s a short explanation of how its proponent “cooked” the numbers to make it appear to be true when it isn’t.
Thanks, Quest! Very interesting post. Can you point out where we can read more about this: “I’ve been listening to some biological anthropology lectures that highlight how diverse female sexual behaviour is among monkey and how far it is from the stereotype of “males need a lot more sex than females”.” Sounds very interesting.
It doesn’t have to be “pure” to be debunked. The “social constructionists” believe it’s mostly construction, and science says it’s mostly programming; neither one claims a pure stance. I’m arguing against the notion that to deny the preponderance of the biological role (as social constructionists do) requires so much denial of fact it’s tantamount to a religion. As for “queer theory”, that’s even more of a religion than “social construction”, and relies on logical stretches that would make most neofeminists blush.
However, I’m not sure why you’re bringing homosexual behavior into the argument, since it arguably has nothing to do with gender; even among transsexuals there are those who identify as hetero and those who identify as homo. Whom one is attracted to is not necessarily inextricably linked to gender roles, and you’ll pardon me if I point out that your bringing up the ridiculous idea that a man who is raped is gay but his rapist isn’t as an example of gender roles is the very definition of a straw man, not only because it flies in the face of reason but also because it’s A) purely regional, while biological gender roles are not; and B) a false definition of sexual orientation, not a false one of gender.
Shit, just wrote a long-ass reply but it got lost in the aether cause I hit the wrong button or something…
Anyway, I’ll just try to repeat what I wrote about your last point: I added the thing about prison rape at the last minute, so that’s why it read wrong. I meant that the rapist is not considered gay. So, what society considers to be “gay” is not based on nature, rather on social constructions.
Yes, but “gayness” isn’t gender, not remotely.
But your post was an attack on social-constructedness theories. I’m guessing you agree, then, that what man-on-man sex means is largely socially constructed. Good for that then.
Just because gender, sex drive and the need for oxygen aren’t “socially constructed” doesn’t mean clothing styles and food preferences aren’t. And what things “mean” is always socially constructed because there is no such thing as “meaning” in nature; it’s something Man imposes on the world to order it for his own understanding.
Ok, so you agree that you were presenting a straw man argument when you made it seem like social-construction folks believe it 100% of the time. Likewise, I never said that you “it’s in the genes folks” do that 100% of the time either. Ok then. Peace on that point, Maggie. (Although I do believe evolutionary psychologists like that idiot Kanazawa do exactly that.)
And we agree on your last sentence. But then why did you appear to suggest that there are some things that already have meaning in nature: “Relationships are not for the benefit of one person; they are for the benefit of both, and if either partner denies the other things he or she vitally needs.” Weren’t you saying here that men naturally have vital sexual needs even before socialization?
I agree to no such thing; I do not use logical fallacies, especially not straw-man arguments, nor would I ever be so ridiculous as to claim that most people believe 100^ in anything without exceptions (though, alas, a few do). YOU put those words in my mouth in a (probably unconscious) attempt to invalidate my argument.
And yes, men DO have vital sexual needs, and the idea that such needs are “socialized” is ridiculous and flies in the face of all evidence. That’s not “meaning”, it’s a fact. Why do you keep trying to change the argument from what it is to something else you can argue against? There’s a name for that, you know: “straw man fallacy”.
I may be misunderstanding your argument, but I’m confused. What a person or group of people do “in extremis” has little to do with their inclinations or desires if given a choice. Men deprived by force of sexual access to women make do with watermelons, livestock, and loaves of bread, as well as other men.
This is a testimony to the power of their sexual drives, but does not indicate their sexual orientation or preferences if given unfettered choice and access.
Thus, a man who rapes another man in prison is not considered gay, because he would not have done so if the prison provided female prostitutes or frequent conjugal visits, any more than a person eating dirt during a famine provides any indication of what that person prefers as a “natural” diet. (Note, I said dirt, not meat vs vegetables or vice versa.)
How does this prove that male homosexuality is socially constructed?
Also, there is no such thing as an pure, untainted individual. We are all born into a family and a society. We are all social beings. Ann Ryan has it all wrong right at the beginning. I mean, there is a reason why Germans prefer bread, why Mexicans prefer corn, and why Chinese prefer rice. And I’ve seen how members of each group think the other grains are totally disgusting.
Nobody argued that there was, not even Rand. Demonstrating that Chinese prefer rice, some African cultures think makeup should be for men and biological flukes in some isolated populations are not remotely valid arguments against the sound fact that there are some gendered behaviors that are not only consistent across cultures and primate species, but also can be altered by monkeying with hormone levels.
But you quoted Rand (sorry for botching her name) above: “the smallest minority on earth is the individual.” And I recently watched Mike Wallace’s interview with Rand where she seems to base her thoughts starting with the individual and the reason of the individual in perceiving “reality.” She says in that interview: “Man’s mind, reason, is his means of perceiving it [i.e. reality].”
She seems totally ahistorical (reason, as you know, is a 18th-century concept, at least compared to the Middle Ages and primitive societies) and she just assumes that the concept of the “individual” is unproblematic, even though questions about the “individual” are not some new, post-structuralist notion, but go back to the 5th century BC with the Buddha.
Or do I misunderstand her? Seems to me like the starting point of her philosophy is reason and the individual.
Of course her starting point is the individual, as any true philosophy of humanism has to be. Our individuality as humans is what sets us apart from the lower orders; no fish is an individual, but as one climbs the evolutionary ladder one finds greater and greater individuality, with the greatest in humans. Philosophies that require humans to submit to a herd, pack or hive-like existence are therefore counter-evolutionary and retrograde; they force humans to the level of lower animals.
Ah, but Maggie, you’re forgetting that the New Soviet Man would be a new evolutionary, er, Lamarckian, uh, that is according to Lysenko, I mean, uh, I mean, but We’re All Socialists Now! 😉
All irony aside, though, I think that you’ve articulated the difference between Enlightenment culture and what is assumed in both pre and post enlightenment modes of thought.
But above you denied that Rand argued this: “there is no such thing as an pure, untainted individual. We are all born into a family and a society. We are all social beings.” So, do we start with a socialized individual or a detached individual already equiped with reason. That’s what you and Rand seem to be arguing.
In case I wasn’t clear, you seem to be arguing the latter: That we don’t start out as thoroughly socialized beings but rather as detached individuals already equiped with reason. If that is what you are saying, well, that’s ahistorical. medieval Europeans didn’t reason the way we understand reason today. It’s socially conditioned.
In the first place, I’m not a Rand scholar; just because I quoted her doesn’t mean I agree with (or am even familiar with) everything she ever wrote. I’ve quoted over 600 authors and speakers; surely you don’t think I agree with the totality of each of their philosophies simultaneously merely because I quoted each of them?
Second, individuals are born wholly individual except for out genetic baggage and shaped by families and society, not programmed by them as the social constructionists wish to believe. It’s a huge difference; the social constructionist looks at a mighty river girdled by levees and declares that the former is as artificial as the latter. The view of the constructionists, like that of the behaviorists before them, is simultaneously cynical and malevolent because it holds not only that humans are the puppets of mere other humans (instead of Nature, which guides every creature and force in the universe), but also holds out the promise to future social engineers and dictators that people can be programmed as you want them to be. What do you think the excesses of Swedish “feminism” are inspired by? None other than the recognition that if it were really true that people’s personalities are “written” by society, then if the state can control society it can “write” all future citizens as docile and obedient as the typical seven-year-old girl, and simply incorporate any outliers into the government and police.
Fortunately, gender and personality are NOT wholly or even largely the product of “social construction”, and therefore totalitarians looking for a population of sheeple will need to go far beyond mere social engineering to accomplish their goals.
Maggie wrote: The view of the constructionists, like that of the behaviorists before them, is simultaneously cynical and malevolent because it holds not only that humans are the puppets of mere other humans (instead of Nature, which guides every creature and force in the universe), but also holds out the promise to future social engineers and dictators that people can be programmed as you want them to be.
Herbert Spencer thought that Social Darwinism would improve the morality of the human species by gradual means in a manner similar to biological evolution. The totalitarians figured, “Why Wait?” and embarked on massive “selection regimes” to bring the human race to that Brave New World or whatever other millennial substitute that accorded with their secular religion – Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich was not just a number chosen at random.
The totalitarians embraced the notion, most famously expressed by Arnaud Armaury, Abbott of Citeaux, of “Kill them all. God will know his own”. They just substituted their own secular deity – the proletariat, the race, cultural purity, etc., – for the medieval Lord and put the force of modern industrial processes behind their crusades.
And like you wrote, Maggie, it’s the social constructionists that will give future authoritarians the “scientific” justifications for their tyranny, whether it is the soft fascism of Cass Sunstein’s “Nudge” or the hard fascists of a more committed sort.
Huh? What the fuck are you talking about,dude?!
“The totalitarians figured, “Why Wait?” and embarked on massive “selection regimes” to bring the human race to that Brave New World or whatever other millennial substitute that accorded with their secular religion – Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich was not just a number chosen at random.”
Compadre, who are the “totalitarians” you are talking about? Seriously, just give a few names please!
Tovarisch,
You do have a knack for focusing on the non-essential. If you are asking me if various totalitarian dictators actually conferred with Herbert Spencer on his notion of Social Darwinism, found it to be of an insufficiently expeditious time scale and collectively proclaimed “Why Wait?” before rushing off to impose their own interpretations of the doctrine by widespread death and destruction, well, then Ya Got Me. No such meeting
actually occurred.
Since I was addressing Maggie and, from previous comments she has made, assumed that she knew the players, I was engaging in a bit of comedic shorthand; contrasting Spencer’s outlook that this was a generational process based on improving choices and behavior of the lower classes with the heretofore nameless totalitarians’ approach
of removing undesireables by means of sterilization, employed by the United States and Hitler’s Germany, and mass murder, employed by Hitler’s Germany, the USSR under Stalin, and Mao’s China.
And while Spencer’s approach was perhaps naive and partook of the Whig Theory of History, it was relatively benign, focusing on reducing the size of the lower classes by improving their conditions, allowing them to escape the inter-generational poverty trap. The totalitarians focused on eliminating the objectionable classes, however they each determined them, by … eliminating the objectionable classes.
Hitler did in the name of Aryan racial purity by an appeal to a mythological past and a return to “Blood and Soil.”
The Soviets were doing their best to create the New Soviet Man and were killing job lots of people who did not conform toward that end. In addition, the pseudo-biology of Lysenkoism provided the scientific buttressing for their political theory. After all, if environmental adaptation can be forced upon grains by such simple methods, then surely man is malleable toward this end as well!
Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” and “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” were undertaken with the end in mind of preserving the Stalinist model of Communism that Kruschev had recently repudiated in the Soviet Union. Tens of millions of dissenters, “counter-revolutionaries” and undesirables were killed by government forces or starved to death by government policy – including agricultural policies based on the theories of Trofim Lysenko even after he had been discredited in the USSR. Many of these dissenters
were peasant farmers who knew that official agricultural Lysenkoism wouldn’t work and had the temerity to object.
Of the three Hitler has the closest link to Social Darwinism via his enthusiasm for the American eugenicists. Ironically, he has no link to Darwin as most of the German anthropologists and racial theorists repudiated the idea of evolution. So, a biological hypothesis – natural selection – morphs into a political theory by way of a tagline – “survival of the fittest” whose most radical proponents – the American eugenicists –
give rise to the most ruthless practitioner of their methods in the name of racial hygiene – Hitler – who gave no credence to the biology that supposedly gave rise to it all.
And Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union was a form of neo-Lamarckianism and also a denial of the validity of evolution. In fact, Lysenko had the foremost advocate of scientific agriculture purged and imprisoned in the Lubyanka where he was starved to death.
The totalitarians did not march openly under the banner of “Social Darwinism.” But they did employ its selection methods to eliminate undesirables toward the same kinds of ends; pure Blood for the Nazi’s and the New Soviet Man for the Stalinists.
Ah, maybe I get it now. It’s not “nature versus nurture”, but “nature versus programming”. Nurture is obvious, programming is bunk.
Perhaps the only thing that discredited theories are useful for is to give us another way of looking at problems (while not accepting the theory). Marxism, for those who understand these things, is said to give insights into capitalism.
Ok, sorry, Maggie. I’ve been reading your really interesting blog for some time now, though I only started posting here like a month ago. But I’ve been reading it for a while. And all this time I thought that you were a libertarian. But, if that is not the case, that’s cool.
As for your second point, yes, I guess that we aren’t actually much in disagreement. I didn’t take the social contructionist position to mean something totally radical compared to “shaped,” but yeah, I can’t disagree with what you just wrote.
Hopefully this means that we are in peace now. 😉
Sorry if my late night post wasn’t clear. I meant with the last sentence that I never thought social constructionists were super radicals who thought everything was “programmed” as opposed to “shaped.” I always thought that they meant “shaped.” But, unless we name some of these “social constructionists,” I can’t be sure… I mean, is Luis Altusser one of those “programmer social constructionists?”
But peace…
I am very much a libertarian; what gave you the idea that I wasn’t? A libertarian is someone who holds that individual liberties cannot morally be infringed by governments, and that the only moral transactions are voluntary ones. Statists who prefer the label “liberal” have in the past couple of decades created a straw man with exaggerated characteristics they label as “libertarian”, but it bears almost no resemblance to any libertarian I know. For example, brainwashed followers of that bunch often attack Radley Balko with claims like “you libertarians don’t care about the poor (or minorities or whatever)” despite the fact that Balko has worked tirelessly to point out police abuses that more often target disadvantaged socioeconomic groups, and to win legal representation for people who have been railroaded and can’t afford their own.
Most statists have some group of rights they’re willing to “allow” so they aren’t seen as tyrants; thus so-called “conservative” statists concern themselves with property and gun rights while trampling all over criminal and sexual rights, while so-called “liberal” statists concern themselves with speech and drug rights while advocating the government be given the power to disarm everyone and steal whatever it likes. A libertarian rejects both views as cynical paths to total control, which (as the nearly identical behavior of Bush and Obama has proven) they are.
Furthermore, if you think Ayn Rand is some sort of prophet in whom all libertarians believe, you are badly in need of education about libertarian philosophy. You might start with today’s column and then progress to sites like those of the gentlemen I listed in “Stand-Up Guys“.
Maggie, you’re too smart and too independent-minded to be a Randroid, but there are a lot of them out there. And most of them call themselves libertarians. They’re doing to that word what the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson have done to the word “Christian.”
Well, but you quoted Ayn Rand in your post, so that’s why I thought you believed in her. And your post was an attack on the role of society in influencing us, shall we say, (in order to avoid talk of “construction,” “programming,” “shaping”), so, that seemed to me a Randian notion. And add that to the fact that you like evolutionary psychology. You believe in “characteristics to which Nature has programmed them to be attracted.” So, it seemed to me that you like you like evolutionary psychology because, like Randian Libertarianism, it says that individuals come to this world not only as rational beings, but also with all kinds of programmed behaviors and preferences. And if all this clashes with society, well, it’s society to blame, not the individual.
I didn’t understand most of the rest of your comment, but I will read today’s column soon.
Sailor,
Most of Rand’s adherents would be more likely to describe themselves as classical liberals than as libertarians. But they are more likely to be described as libertarians from the outside given apparent gross similarity between the two movements.
Rand’s adherents can call themselves whatever they want. The only reason I take them seriously at all is because they exist in sufficient numbers to influence policy. Which scares me.
They’re not nearly as numerous or influential as those who believe in the twisted philosophy of Karl Marx, which scares me much more.
I’d be happy to let Rand and Marx beat each other into the ground, and leave the rest of us alone. A cage match might be entertaining.
Yikes. C Andrew, you sound pretty scary. Your response above deserves absolutely no reply. Waste of time.
Hmm, and yet you replied?
There is good reason to believe that little girls are mentally castrated in traditional Western countries (just as little girls are physically castrated in some Third World countrires). That’s a kind of social construction of gender, but not the kind neofeminists want to believe. If little girls aren’t castrated, they have much more interest in sexuality than is healthy for neofeminist dogma. http://sexhysteria.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/sexual-inhibition-and-mental-castration/
This article should be on http;//www.the-spearhead.com/ at The Spearhead blog by W.F. Price. Sadly too many( a noticeable minority) of the men over there beleve that all or at least all women are bad because of their own personal bad experiences or what they saw others go through. I wish these men would see through this and think like Price and me who hold similar views. I just like Price personally think not all women are inherently bad or most women are inherintly bad. I think the “SYSTEM” incentivizes women to behave badly and for men to get screwed in the USA just like I think the “SYSTEM” incentivises Afghan men to behave badly and women to get screwed, but I think both men and women are inherently and more or less equally good and bad. Men and women are different because of their genders, but are equally human. I’ll link you in if I can.
Your post involves three arguments:
One – those who believe that gender is constructed also pretend that everyone should act like one gender or the other.
Obviously denying the objectivity of gender roles also should involve denying that everyone should act one way or the other. How people act is conditioned, and people are not obliged to act one way or the other.
Two – men want sex more than women.
There are physical differences, no denying that. But that that should match on to personality traits and in particular roles in society and social interactions is the hypothesis that is being argued against. Leading nicely onto 3.
Three – transsexuals.
Transsexuals may identify with one or other gender. Or they may feel more comfortable with a different physiology. Or both. The latter can be solved by a sex change. The former can be solved by acting differently and socialising differently. Neither points to the objectivity of gender. In fact, it points to the social construction of gender, because gender (socially constructed) is not equivalent to sex (physically constructed).
Your third argument is spurious. Most transsexuals identify strongly with the opposite of their birth sex, regardless of upbringing. This points away from social construction, not toward it. And your first two arguments ignore the observable facts that A) other animals have gender-specific behavior, not just humans; and B) virtually no biologist or neurologist supports social construction because they understand the physiology, neurochemistry, and extensive cross-cultural/cross-species correlations. Finally, as I have pointed out before, the concept that gender=gender role is fallacious; they are two different things.