21st century identity politics

Post Reply New Topic

^^^

Mikah, I don't think the current division of allegiance along ethnic and religious lines can last indefinitely. The reason for this is that socially-constructed identities like religion and ethnicity are unstable. There are conflicts within all classes that are organised on anything except a material basis, and even within the minds of individuals belonging to these groups. That's why the dialectical materialism of Marxism is the main compelling bit.

Nobody's ethnic or religious identity is as free from contradictions as their relation to the means of production (or with sex, reproduction). I have much more difficulty explaining what being British is than what being biologically female or not being a landowner are.

I don't want to make predictions because that's the realm of pseudo-prophets, but I don't think the current state of deepening conflicts around socially-constructed identities can last forever. Ethno-nationalism and religious fundamentalism will perhaps eat themselves.

Maybe I'm being too optimistic.

This is obviously rubbish. Not the bit about the patriarchy, but blaming capitalism for oppression. The issue has never been "too much capitalism", but rather "not enough capitalism". Women's liberation depends upon women having equal property rights. Likewise the greatest barriers to racial equality are uneven political rights and uneven property rights. Class, too - the working classes benefit from being given strong property rights, living in a thriving economy, access to capital, strong and equitable rule of law, good working conditions, and easy ways to start businesses, which are central to capitalism.

Generally speaking, more capitalist societies are structurally fairer. The poor live in better conditions and women earn similar amounts to men. Look at places like Singapore and Denmark, and particularly compare them to anti-capitalist countries. Compare communist China to modern China and modern China to the USA. Switzerland is an odd exception that I do not know enough about to explain (they were very late giving women the vote).

History has proven Marx wrong. Capitalism is what gives the oppressed hope.

My observation is that intersectional feminists tend to be strongly left-leaning. This is disappointing to me. Fortunately, I am seeing more right-wing feminists these days as feminism becomes the mainstream ideology.


Most intersectional feminists do not ignore that, but they go even further. They will argue that gender is socially constructed, and sex is irrelevant. How your gender is perceived is more important than your haplotype.

So that leaves us with class. Yep, wealth is not socially constructed. Markers of "class" are. Feminists talk extensively about the impact of having less wealth - see omnipresent discussion on the wage gap. But whether or not something is "real" is besides the point - if everybody hates star-bellied sneetches then it doesn't matter if there's a meaningful, measurable difference between star-bellied sneetches and the others.

Today, however, those who focus excessively on class and dismiss other issues would be dismissed as "brocialists" or "brogressives". Quite rightly imo - how can one hope to combat poverty if you ignore gender, race, and disability?

^

I'll get back to you tomorrow. I completely disagree with you on all counts, but you've put forward a decent argument that merits a decent, considered response.

Could you clarify the following, though?

Do you agree with this? If so, why?

I do agree. While some issues align better to sex than gender, I would rather talk about menstrators and pregnant people than "females".

Reading accounts of people who have publicly transitioned between binary genders, trans women speak of suddenly experiencing misogyny and understanding what it is to live as a woman, while trans men speak of suddenly experiencing male privilege and understanding what it is to live as a man. If biological sex were more important than socially-constructed gender, then this would not be the case: trans women would continue to experience male privilege and trans men would continue to experience the same level of misogyny (although I concede that some trans men probably do still experience misogyny, especially from people who were misogynist to them before they transitioned).

Sex is the axis upon which all women are oppressed, not gender. Patriarchy is essentially about controlling women's reproductive capacity, 'the means of reproduction'. This relates to sex, not gender.

How do you define gender, anyway?

I know I'm arguing ideologically here, but I want to clarify things before I go into more detail.

I think it's really important to point out here that the human social radar isn't particularly endowed with psychism, even on he levels that you'd think nature would prize such as genetic quality control. People with obvious outward disabilities or disabilities that cripple their capacity to comport themselves in a normal way for neurological reasons are also far more likely to be taken out of circulation when it comes to having children and are likely to always be treated differently by people who haven't gotten to know them. Having diabetes or sickle cell though doesn't seem to change a person's attractiveness, there's no extended sensory faculty like in the movie Species to sniff out that sort of thing, and it's likely to not have any effect even if you're dating someone who by all intents and purposes looks healthy who has to inject insulin several times per day. Similarly if a man transitions and becomes a woman and turns out to have transitioned exceptionally well, there may be some surprise at how many straight men are still attracted even knowing she's MTF.

What seems to be the case with how people are treated - first rule, external and social conformity uber alis. Conformity is almost elevated to deific status in its own right and typically along tribal rather than functional lines. If you conform on first glance and impression most things are well, if you can't you're in a lot of trouble, and even if you were male until December of last year and just became a woman you'll find yourself in one of two camps - as being interpreted and treated as a woman or being interpreted as a man trying to pass for a woman, the first will cause you to be treated as a woman, the later as something not in conformity and both of these go the same I'm sure for FTM transitions.

To the extent that a trans woman would be treated like a woman or a trans man treated like a man it just demonstrates that the rest of the world didn't transition with them and has no psychic server up in the aethers from which to pull down their medical history on first glance. That makes no suggestion that gender is purely a social construct, it just suggests that our ability to accurately discern people's states under the surface and the subconscious alarms that evolution built into us (whether or not we want them) is pretty easily deceived. The other thing I'd add - most of our cultural conditioning about gender seems to be the edifices each gender builds for itself both by general competition and competition for mates usually of the opposite gender. Since people of the opposite gender generally hold the approval score cards that pushes an arms race which is typically responding to what that gender's hormones are dictating much more so than any trained bias.

My main point, and people are welcome to dig into it IF they're willing to make a clear argument against it and talk evidence, is that what's driving things like 'the patriarchy' or men's treatment of women and vice a verse isn't coming from a rational basis. I'm saying that our minds are fused on top of an apparatus that, until perhaps even less than 100,000 years ago, was living pretty close to the earth and its nested impulses and instincts haven't changed or kept up with external realities nearly as fast as we'd want them to.

On some issues like race actually keeping certain groups financially oppressed as well as visceral attitudes being trained into children, that does have an effect and it's probably more significant in that case in the direction of sociology for a combination of both reasons I just described and also just how quickly someone of another race can be attractive, command respect, etc. when they're well educated, well dressed, hold in-group status, etc..

The way the genders treat each other though is really primal and far more so than race or even class. It's something that doesn't just go back to one of the biggest things to happen in the history of biological life (ie. eukaryotic organisms) but it also arranges almost everything that propels us in life in one way or another and it's there even for those of us who decide we'd never get married, wouldn't bother dating, etc. it still shapes how well we relate to both the opposite gender and our own. It's a core aspect of human identity and positioning oneself as an actor in the world and deciding how you interact, where you're safe, where you're unsafe, what you need to be to measure up in the eyes of your peers, etc.. Jung and Freud had lots to say also about just how much our own parents' genders and their manifestations of it, how it impacts us, sets our personalities up for much of the remainder of our lives and double-checking with people I know who happen to be clinical psychologists on where the psychology community is with Jung and Freud as of today it sounds like the dismissal of Freud and Jung by the behaviorists is increasingly getting rolled back as behaviorism is coming into question and as studies are showing how early a lot of our impulses come up.

I'll leave that open as I'm still really trying to figure out - with the people who really believe that gender is purely a social construct - what it is they're going on or how they give blanket dismissals to biology, social psychology, evolutionary psychology, etc..

The evidence in neuroscience suggests that most people's brains show a mixture of 'masculine' and 'feminine' neurological patterns. They struggle to tell whether any given brain belonged to a male or female. If we're using 'brain sex' arguments, then most people are genderqueer or nonbinary. The plasticity of the brain, and the way it can be shaped by environmental influences suggests that gender is largely socially constructed.

That said, I don't dismiss evolutionary psychology (or other forms of psychology) without good reason, that would make me an ideologue. That would be a case of ideology stopping enquiry - not something I support. I am increasingly finding Freudian and Jungian theories interesting, as well.

Even if it's not entirely socially constructed, gender is still not the primary axis on which women are oppressed. Male violence against women (e.g. domestic violence, rape in war) is not about gender. FGM, limits to the availability of safe abortion, child marriage, forced marriage, forced reproduction - these are not about gender. They are about controlling women and their sexuality at a basic, physical level - i.e. sex.

Even if there's some deep psychological origin for gender, gender itself is still a hierarchy. The gender rituals enforced on those playing the feminine role - mandatory removal of body hair, wearing of constrictive clothing, time-consuming grooming rituals, shaming of body types (even healthy ones) that don't fit an ideal. This oppression via gender roles is not independent of the primary oppression related to sex, it supports it. Some biological males identify as feminine or female, but that doesn't change how women (and men) are oppressed by patriarchy. Some biological females don't identify as feminine or female, but that doesn't change how women (and men) are oppressed by patriarchy. Patriarchy is the subordination of one sex class to another.

I know gender roles =/= gender identity, before anyone says that. I'm not really sure what gender identity is, though. You could say that's because I'm cisgendered, but according to gender identity theory, I'm probably genderqueer - only I don't identify that way. I just identify as me, and whether I like it or not, a female.

I'm not arguing that transgendered people aren't oppressed. I'm arguing that patriarchy is primarily about controlling women's sexuality and reproductive capacity, so oppression based on sex (patriarchy) is a fundamental oppression. When we lose the focus on sex-based oppression, we risk halting feminism altogether.

I think our culture is really far behind in understanding gender dynamics and this is largely, and sadly, as a result of us going for so long to revealed texts for answers to these questions.

I think Jordan Peterson does a pretty good job of at least explaining why more women aren't CEO's or lead partners at law firms, ie. the guys at the top are a super-rare breed, obsessive among men even, and they put so much time into work that they're doing very little of anything else. That ends up being an imbalance of life that few men, and even fewer women, are willing or able to pay without life getting unbearable (internally or externally) in other ways. IF there's a pay gap that exists over and above that though, hour per hour, that still would remain unexplained and it very well could just be on social hierarchy.

The other part, broader social oppression, the way dialog is going these days it seems like even the dividing line between social conditioning and preference is hotly contested and people seem to have opinions falling on either side regarding the findings on career in Sweden. People can suggest internalized misogyny but they tend to also ignore the jobs men do because no one else would want them. As far as psychological cues regarding math and women being automatically assumed to be weak in that area and not encouraged into STEM - that will have to be walked, ie. giving women more encouragement on math and the sciences, to see if that's what's needed in that area.

The other piece, and I think it's the part the everyone brings up but reading the implications gets disorganized and contested, is the issue of childbearing and maternity. It would make sense to me at least that if a woman is married and she makes more money than her husband that the husband would be better off staying home, that may be getting to be more of a thing and it really should be. To the extent though that women are still encumbered, especially if they're single and have kids, they're forced to make a lot of choices and one of them is work flexibility often at the expense of income. It's not desirable that they have to do that, it is one of those areas where capitalism as a structure is particularly brutal in its tendency to meet people at the maximum that they're willing to take for a given product, given situation, etc. and people who are forced to make a decision in this regard usually come out on the losing end. I really don't know what our culture will or can do about that, UBI's the best stopgap I can think of and even at that, the capitalist structure over and above that would probably remain unchanged. Capitalism, like republican democracy, is something few people cherish for its own sake and most people agree that - at least at present - it's the second-worst option in practice to everything else.

I know Stefan Molyneux often brings up that women are commoditized essentially for their ova and as much as society stilts itself around sexuality and attraction it also stilts itself around reproduction, mainly because this is dealing with the most primal and subconscious aspects of what it is to be human - places where our moods, feelings, and hormones give unfortunately limited sway to logic. While a lot of it can be conditioned down that sort of conditioning is usually something that someone's able to achieve in their 30's and by that time things have already cooled down sum. Teens and early 20's? It's at it's worst there.

Historically I've always considered this problem in the same ways that I considered capitalism - ie. that the most painless way to handle culture when these types of biological, genetic, and atavistic problems exist that we have no idea how to solve - that our best bet is to know ourselves on that level as well as we can, hold back no truth no matter how degrading it is to our current sensibilities (most of the moral mythology we've inherited is a really blunt tautological tool and doesn't help us anymore than the moral myths of intersectionality do), and then with all of that out in the open figure out what the best way is to do culture around it accordingly and try to channel whatever it is we can't change about men, women, etc. or capital and labor markets in as healthy and constructive a manner possible.

That last part is really difficult if there are factions assuming bad faith and it seems like people on both sides of any issue have to work around them. I don't know if that's the right way going forward on how men and women, across the races, do sexuality and gender in the 21st century and beyond - we may have some options with gene editing and the like - but even there we have to very carefully identify what it is we want in the bigger scheme of things before we commit ourselves either to heavy social engineering projects or gene sequence editing - both are very heavy medicine.

This might sound stupid, but I think most people are really in favour of social democracy and a mixed economy, as it seems to 'work' better than neoliberal capitalism, and it suits the huge majority of people neurologically (even many people who aren't neurotypical). The only people neoliberalism suits are the ones Jordan Peterson seems to not unreservedly admire. The same is true for progressive liberalism, secularism and equality between the sexes. The only people who don't benefit from those things have exceptional neurological traits, and not really in a good way, like we're conditioned to believe. Not so much with secularism, as most people are neurologically inclined to be quite superstitious and 'spiritual' - but the religious fanatic (or even just the priest) is a neurological outlier and the rest of the congregation go along with him/her.

I think the reason why all countries aren't more social democratic, free, equal and secular is partly due to a profound masochistic streak that runs through people. I think liberalism, democratic socialism and feminism are scared of themselves and scared to go to their logical conclusions. The people who hold everyone else down are the neurological emperors and priests of old, modern-day Ozymandiases, and the population is still frightened of them through thousands of years of conditioning.

This is on top of the Hegelian/Marxist dialectical understanding of history, which is still useful. I'm not some doctrinaire Marxist, even though I probably sound like one to some people.

I remember my mum saying two things to me in childhood that were like at the time, and have stayed with me:
1. Women and men are equal. (No qualifications given to that statement)
2. Everybody has masculine and feminine qualities in their mind.
I've spent the rest of my life wondering why everyone pretends this isn't self-evident, and feeling disturbed all the pretence.

A silly theory I have is that humans are secretly mostly like bonobos, but the ones 'at the top' have more in common with chimpanzees.

Women and men may well be different for evolutionary reasons. I don't know. I do know that women are oppressed, and I don't focus on issues around having more female world leaders and CEOs. I'm more concerned with ending the violence they endure materially and psychically. I care more about some Nepalese girl made to stay in a freezing cold hut because she's menstruating than I do about Hilary Clinton. I support females in STEM because it's better for human progress to have the other half of population being able to make contributions to intellectual culture - but the same there applies to women in the arts (even though more women study the arts, the actual arts world is still male dominated). I would like the oppression to end first, and then the flourishing of women's capacities will be able to follow.

This is on top of the Hegelian/Marxist dialectical understanding of history, which is still useful. I'm not some doctrinaire Marxist, even though I probably sound like one to some people.[/quote]
The biggest challenge perhaps with trying to ever say that one theory of history is the right one is that we can't even apply that to our own lives, ie. we're always refactoring our own past and life stories for the sake of extracting lessons later when things happen that force us to rotate the crystal and look through it from a different angle.

I think in general the moment someone goes into absolutes or starts thinking that one tool is the particular tool to not only rule them all but replace them all - they're turning into a carny barker.

As for fear of the alphas, I can see where that goes into plenty of our military spending - ie. if a particular group of people forces us to go to war it typically has a lot to do with the abuse of power at the top of their culture as well as their use of military or military and religious muscle to conscribe their populace as serfs.


I'd definitely say that there have to be ways to bring the rest of the world up to speed. In the west at least - aside from following the letter of the law already on the books to prosecute and jail rapists and abusers or steeply fine business who would knowingly pay employees disparately for no other reason than gender or race, I'm not sure what we have further than that other than perhaps wondering if there's a way to rethink our capitalism where the whole megacorp and holding company model gets dissolved in favor of much smaller units with high-end IT integration with one another.

As far as Jordan Peterson goes I think he's trying to issue the warnings and caveates of what we're leaving and that if we're going to leave it we have a lot of warning signals to watch out for and a lot of things in base-level human nature that can come unhinged as it is a sharp break in hundreds of thousands of years of tuning. I don't necessarily think that's a reason to can the whole project and go back to aristocratic systems, we're too technologically powerful and they'd blow us off the planet. I think it just means that we've gotta do our level best to ignore the carny barkers at both ends of the political spectrum and anyone who thinks in a one-issue manner because to the extent that people listen to them their lens of reality is getting distorted.

Again, I have to disagree.

FGM, child marriage, limits to the availability of safe abortion, and forced reproduction are not issues confronting many women in our society. They're issues that need to be tackled, yes, but they're not the things grinding women down. In other societies they are of course bigger issues.

Forced marriage, rape, and gendered violence are issues affecting women, not "females". So is the gender pay gap, sexual objectification, predatory sexual behaviour, etc. In practice, the issues which affect women in our society are issues of gender, not issues of sex. Again, I point to people who have a physical sex which does not match their perceived gender - they experience life largely as cis members of their gender rather than cis members of their sex. If that doesn't fit with your ideology then it would suggest that your ideology is wrong.

I would define gender as a set of socially-constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that society considers appropriate for a man or woman, boy or girl, or any other genders a society has.

I gave the worst examples of oppression that women face, but I think it matters little 'where' they happen. All of those issues do affect women in the UK, as well - just in smaller numbers. If they happen to one woman, it's too many. Limits to access to safe abortion happen just across the Irish Sea, and women in the UK still face social pressure from pro-life groups.

WRT predatory sexual behaviour (I assume you mean right up to rape) and sexual objectification, the clue is in the name, those are forms of oppression related to sex. Yes, a transwoman experiences them as well, if they're perceived as female, that's perceived sex in play. If they're perceived as something else, then it's still male violence and probably homophobia at work.

There are many other things that grind women down in the UK, related to their biological sex, like the shame surrounding menstruation, endemic body hatred which can lead to eating disorders (I admit gay men face this, but it's still related to sexual role, not gender), medical practice that assumes the male body as a default, child sexual exploitation, and the trio of rape, prostitution and domestic violence. Men experience some of these, but they overwhelmingly happen to women, which isn't to diminish the suffering of them men. It's the result of a system of oppression based on sex.

I'm informed by what I see in the world rather than ideology. The theory that patriarchy is a system of oppression that operates on the axis of sex simply makes the most sense to me.

Might as well give up. We're never going to agree on this.

I've got a question and it's mostly to see if we can probe out something constructive.

I'm going to present a hypothetical scenario where women of every political stripe across the west got together, IRL and online perhaps, and decided to hash out a formal pronouncement, lets say through the UN, on what it needs to mean to be female in our culture and discuss both what's going on right now that's strongly against their preference for their daughters and granddaughters to go through as well as discussing the areas where they know that they have a lot more to give society but that their ability to contribute their piece to the public weal is being impeded by current ways of doing things.

In that scenario - if they were to be able to come to a consensus, mostly up the political center with some useful observations or insights from the flanks as to falling off points or scope issues, what do you think at least the key bullet points would be? I'm asking this from the perspective that perhaps a very classic liberal centrist chaired the event and suggested the mission statement that this particular congress needed to come up with ideas and implementations that would leave society better off for all (reigning in both the 3rd wave feminists and white identitarians in the group).

Very good question. I'll get back to you after I've slept and my brain's a bit cleaner.

If you want to argue that British society systematically oppresses females then the odd monstrosity doesn't show anything about a system. The bigger issues are the pervasive things which affect most women, most days.


Conflation. They're forms of oppression which are related to sexual intercourse, rather than forms of oppression based on haplotype.

Also known as "gender".

Could you explain what you mean by this?

Isn't something like 40% of domestic violence against men?


But what makes you think that it operates on sex, rather than gender? What observations have you made that would lead you in that direction?

If patriarchy operates on sex, then we would expect trans men to be oppressed by it more than trans women.
If patriarchy operates on gender, we would expect trans women to be oppressed by it more than trans men.

Speaking to and reading the writings of trans people, it would seem that trans women are more oppressed by patriarchy than trans men, who experience male privilege.