Feminist Movement Discussion Con't

covets the day when pele will stuff dollars in his pants while whooping it up as he does shimmy circles in front of her drunk, maniacal slobbering, screaming freinds
just had to pop in with that

viva Pele! and Dio! and all the others who've offered thoughtful, well supported responses and dragged the thread back from the oblivion of angst and zealotry into the lands of interesting discussion. you people rule.

Wow... I'm hesitant to post on this thread because there are so many points and hot topics being discussed.

I can, and will, only speak from my own small experiences in my own small world.

"fem·i·nism (fm-nzm) n.
Belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. The movement organized around this belief."

Firstly, that's what feminism is.

Bah... I had a second but it pissed me off too much.... I'm bowing out of this coversation.

I guess I'm amazed that many of you have been so sheilded by the incredible inequities of the sexes. Consider yourselves lucky.

{Runs off to think happy thoughts}

Divi, Dio, Astar, Pele ... incredible posts, all of you. intelligent and coming from your own perspectives and amazingly i agree with all of you totally ... no matter how contradictory that may sound. everyone's experiences are valid. there are wrongs in the world that will be perpetuated against you, no matter your sex and because of your sex.

love each other and vow to never treat someone else with that sort of disregard. it is hard! i hold lust in my heart for boys but try not to let that get in my way of treating them like a human being first! *lol*

and Pele, as a 35yo woman i have to tell you: it only gets better. i have had more fun and love and friends in the last several years than in the entire rest of my life put together. i love my 30's!

Astar, I'm sorry to hear about you being the subject of discrimination. When I read your post, I actually felt discouraged... sometimes people say things that make me realize the immensity of oppression, and you said one of those things.
Although I do recognize and struggle against oppression in my day-to-day life, I admittedly tend to make my struggle seem singular (For example, I am against state oppression, women's oppression, and all animal oppression. Phrased differently, I am an anarcha-feminist animal liberationist). This makes my struggle seem manageable and allows me to continue in my activist work.
The biggest problem with this perspective is that I am easily blinded from acknowledging the immensity of oppression. My heart broke when I read Astar's post because we are not as far as I would like to be. I feel like the struggle is too large, and it paralyzes me.
Why can't the world just get along tomorrow?

And Durbs, about wymyn taking advantage of patriarchal mindsets and stereotypes...
I think that anything that doesn't challenge patriarchy is nonfeminist. Therefore, a womyn who uses sex appeal to gain employment is acting wrongly. She is allowing herself to perpetuate the mindsets of the employer.
(As an aside, do you realize that you assumed that the employer would be male? Just an observation..)

Next, the difference/equality debate.
Always a kicker...
I think that sex divides are fluid. This perspective comes from being close to many trans- people and from observing the troubling of many sex role stereotypes.
I am a competitive downhill skier, and I cannot beat your average male downhill racer in the same "carded" category (based on the number of races raced and placement in those races).
On the other side of that coin, I am also a forest firefighter, and yes I can do that just as well as (if not better than) your average male.
It is true that men can build muscle mass quicker and easier than wymyn, but I don't think that this should be the essence of the equality/difference debate.
If I were to train myself as a bodybuilder, I would be able to lift the same amount as many men in the same weight category.
I think that it's the size of the drive that determines a person's ability to do heavy labour.

But at the same time, does the ability to do heavy labour dictate anything in the end?
To me, this does not say that men are meant to be "the providers", or anything of the sort. We (in middle-class North America) generally do not depend on our labour for our immediate survival. And strength does not necessarily mean dominance from a violence perspective either (think: the martial art of akido, or the Viet Nam war).

Very often, people boil down the equality debate to "but men are stronger". I once ascribed to this myself. Why is it that this perspective is so pervasive? Any insight?

Later days!

[ 12. November 2003, 18:40: Message edited by: divi ]

just on the point of physical gender differences, this was an issue (I THINK this is the issue) that had me irritated at the whole modern feminist movement as a kid actually - I had a fervid feminist school teacher that refused to allow that there were differences in male and female physiology, and that these differences could possibly cause differing abilities or behavioural propensities between the sexes. I was dumbfounded that she would be so adamant in the face of so much research, if not simple human observation. We had arguments aplenty and she made life pretty unpleasant for me but that's beside the point -

I'm since well over it, having left most of my blindingly polarised opinions behind along with adolescence and made some intelligent friends who explained to me what feminism was really about, and i reconciled myself with its basis at least... but it still amazes me that some people refuse to allow that there might be more differences between the sexes than simple muscle mass. It's clear to anyone with two eyes in their head that the male and female body are built differently, and even if it weren't for the masses of behavioural and neurological research that have gone into this subject, you'd think it a fairly logical conclusion that a different physical make-up would extend to the biochemistry and neurology and produce different behaviour, skills and propensities. Obviously common-sense says that not EVERY woman is going to have better peripheral vision (for instance) than EVERY man, but chances are pretty good that for any given couple this will be the case.

Perhaps for the first time in our cultural memory, we're at a point where we can look at gender definitions free of the strictures of outmoded and often ignorant traditional values; we have reams of knowledge in the fields of psychology, neurology and behavioural sciences to help us form sensible and above all USEFUL gender definitions, but now it seems we not only have to combat the incumbent traditionalists to have these ideas brought forth - we're warring with equally small-minded people who're waving the flag of political activism.

If anyone out there DOES hold that there are not necessarily any differences between men and women and have a rational argument for why, PLEASE post it, cos as it is, I don't understand it - or rather, I think do and I think it's pretty sad. It's archetypal of the way people latch on to and pervert ideas for their own uses.

Ideologies are only worth as much as those espousing them and the opressed can be just as guilty of small-mindedness as the oppressor - being a victim doesn't make you right. Anger and pain don't justify anything, let alone the inspiration of more anger. Somehow good causes always seem to be taken over by people who use them as justification for their own angst - it makes a mockery of the very idea of activism, and it seems a depressingly fixed feature of human nature. So is it any wonder that so many of us find it difficult to stomach a cause?

zwitter, my argument is simply that physical differences should not dictate ascribed gender roles to men and wymyn.

to your point on physical differences: admittedly, i am not a behavioural neuroscientist, but i understand that the major neurological difference between wymyn and men lies in a single node in the base of the brain (any verification on this? i'll look it up and get back to people).
physical bodies are built differently. people who are genetically female (XX) are generally bottom heavy while men (XY) are generally top heavy, for example. the problem lays not in these sex variations, but in the fact that these variations have been constructed in the western psyche to equate with the 'naturalness' of male superiority, or of certain gendered behaviours (ie. female passivity and male aggressiveness. qualifier: testosterone is a factor, but studies to date have been unable to prove the extent of its influence, so i cannot comment).

and don't forget that sex is fluid. there is a proportion of the population that has chromosomes other than XX or XY (although this poplulation is relatively small, it is still much larger than poeople would anticipate; it is approximately 1 in every 500 humins born). this statistic has been pivotal in my understanding of sex relations. if sex is so non-concrete, then why are gender/sex divides?

don't be so hostile, zwitter. this thread seems to be getting friendlier with each successive post (myself included )

Later days!

oh, and my peripheral vision sucks.

Sorry to be picky Divi but where did Durbs say that the employer was male? Maybe it's not him who is making the assumtions....

Anyway, what I was actually gonna write about is what was the comment about peripheral vision? Is that a female thing or a Divi thing? It must be a pain in the ass not having good peripheral vision! I lost mine for a while (well I actually went 90% blind and it slowly came back through the course of the day) when I had a very unprofessional removal of a tooth and went into severe shock and realised then just how much I used it day to day.

Nice to see this thread chilling out a little. Of course guilty of it myself (as most people who have posted here are!) debate is always far nicer than argument!

around the "wearing a short skirt to an interview" comment, my immediate image was that the womyn who is wearing the short skirt in order to gain employment through sex appeal is assuming the employer is male. so when people say that wymyn wear short skirts to interviews in order to get jobs based on sex appeal, they are making the same assumption.
meh, like i said, it was the image called to my mind, and it could very well be a divi thing.

around peripheral vision, i had mine tested at a science centre, and i am well below average. it doesn't bother me; i never had it to begin with, so i don't know what having a better periphery might be like.
i've heard that wayne gretzky is such a good hockey player because of his superb peripheral vision... that's really very much an aside, but i figured i'd mention it anyway.

later, g's

Don't have time to add my own arguments to the debate, but I'll just pop in quickly and let everyone know that there are huge differences in the brains of men and women- not just one node.

Processing in women in far more bilateral (ie occur simultaneously in both hemispheres) while men is unilateral (concentrated in one side at a time). That's why men have more trouble recovering after strokes.

There are likely loads more, but that is the one major difference and it's certainly enough to show there are big difference between male and female brains.

Not sure how transgendered/transidentified people fit into the equation.

It's funny that my previous post came out "heated" cause i wasn't feeling particularly agnsty when writing it. Anyway sorry i was just trying to make a point.

Paddy is right the differences in brain structure as defined by sex are enormous; they start appearing within the first few months of foetal development, largely dictated by concentrations of male or female hormones that the foetus is exposed to, and get solidified and more defined through puberty. Naturally this is an entirely organic process and the extent of genderisation of a man's neurology for instance can be anywhere from extremely male to, for all intents and purposes, entirely female. That's pretty rare tho. As an interesting aside, "female" brains do not necessarily denote homosexuality, some researchers have tried to draw a link there but it's shaky at best.

The difference between female mental functioning and male mental functioning is pronounced tho, for any given activity (speech for instance) females will employ many different neural areas, while males brains use highly specialised and isolated neural centers that generally don't "talk" to each other. The effects cover every area of behaviour you can think of, you've probably heard of some of these; females on average show around a third to a quarter the attention span of males, but are able to focus on around five individual simultaneous tasks to the average male's one. Female hearing and peripheral vision are considerably more accute, and male night vision and spacial perception is better. In verbal conversation, males tend to be literal and sparing in their use of words, employing a far wider vocabulary and specific words to communicate ideas, whereas females tend to use a wide array of tonalities, body language and expressions along with more words (from a smaller range) to communicate.

I'd give an example of a good application of this in business but frankly i'm beginning to find the length of my posts a bit embarrassing so i'll stop now. If anyone's interested tho, there is tonnes of reading out there on the subject, I'd recommend "Brainsex" by Anne Moir and David Jessel as a good matter of fact book without too much over-interpretation in it.

Ive read a bit of shakey research about brain structures changeing themselves a bit when hormones in the body change (with hormone therapy)

Also testosterone definatly has an impact on aggression. But aggression!=violence. And there are other factors involving aggression which are mainly psychological. It's hard to attribute what amount of hormones/body chemistry effect aggresion and what amount is just psychology, Very much like trying to figure out the nature of depression.

Also I got some more information on the whole nurseing thing that seems like discrimination agaisnt me. The more I think about it the more I think I just made a very poor impression the one time I talked to the woman who decides who enters and leaves the program, as It was unexpected that I would be meeting with her and I had very dirty grungey clothes on, unkept hair, was overtired from not sleeping the previous night and was in the depths of a major depression.

Also the reason I think gender is largely a social construct is because I have a half baked theory that's only supported by some shakey research and observations that a lot of the scientifically recorded, averaged numbers that suggest these "facts" about the diffrence between the sexes are still being done on women and men who still live in a gender polarized society. And I also believe external factors have a lot more in brain development and structure and chemistry and overall bio chemistry (which is all regulated largely by the brain, and effects all aspects of our body) (I think it can even effect structure sometimes after it is finished developing because it doesn't really stop it's development but just slows down)

If I am right theres a whole bunch of hormones they don't even really understand exactly what their purpose is, yet exactly understand all the purposes of the ones they "do" understand.

PS-watch mike come in here with his fancy pants medical education and destroy my ramblings based on poor ass speculation and lazy self-education

If you're one of those people who wanders into a discussion about feminism without actually understanding it... don't apologize, just do some reading.

i think that astar articulated my argument when he said that research is inconclusive, as it is always influenced by the surrounding environment. under this circumstance of inevitable ignorance, we should focus on removing gender divides and oppressions between us.
who really cares about the biology of it all? it is inconclusive at best and skewed at worst. we should not allow this type of research dictate our view of the world, and should definately not allow it to construt certain things on this planet as being better than others.
pele is right when she says that people should have every opportunity to do what they want. however, different circumstances make this ideal better described than put into practice (such divides include class, race, sex, gender, etc.). people are treated differently based on their personal circumstances (and this is where our problem lays).
the way that i see it is: as a capable humin being, it is my responsibility to work towards the liberation of all things, and remove superficial oppositions between us. although this sounds ultra-idealist, i (as stated in a previous post) recognize the enormousness of it all. i like to believe, however, that every little bit counts.
later days!

nah the research (that i've read of) has been anything but inconclusive. Any statistical analysis of a population is going to involve variation obviously. But saying "women generally have a higher body fat / muscle ration than men" does not force women into anything at all - it's a fact which could very well have useful applications. And if anyone wants to discuss the quality of said research then please at least mention specific studies, otherwise it's all just conjecture.

oh yeah, and for the record, in my earlier post where I was criticising certain types of activism, I hadn't intended it as a poke at divi. Sorry if anyone thought I did.