females, feminists and femininity.

When I read some of the comments in things like this, I wish superficiality dies a horrible death.

I don't mind a makeup/no-makeup comparison, but what is up with those descriptions?

 

I absolutely agree, but for once I was pleasantly surprised by the comments section at the bottom (what I initially thought you were talking about. The ones that were posted when I looked were all condemnation of the comments in the article.

 

This goes back to my post #324 and the concerns I enumerated therein. You've included a lot of words in this post, but you've spent your share attempting to reframe an entire class of arguments in your terms rather than saying anything of substance or offering a meaningful contribution.

 

Man, I can't believe I slept on this thread. It took me, literally (literally) 8 weeks to get through it. There were so many points were I was like 'huh', and 'aha!' and 'WTF?!??' and 'ohnohedi'in't'.

To answer the OP:

What are your earliest memories of gender awareness?

I don't know which happened first, me seeing a daycare provider change a female colleague or my mom flipping out on me for walking in on her changing. Either way, I was youngish.

What were the norms for gender in your family and your community?

There weren't any gender norms enforced in my immediate family. My parents actively tried to counteract community gender roles by not letting me and my brother play with toy guns and buying us my little ponies, which kind of sucked at the time (and I still think sucks now - let kids play with what they want). Community-wise, well, when we lived in the rural voids, they were traditional. When we moved to the city, there were less so, but still so so. I have found that gender norms persist in even the most socially liberal enclaves in the form of casual remarks about boys being easier to raise than girls or kind-of-creepy statements about dreading teenage-daughterhood.

How have your attitudes toward gender been influenced by your personal experiences -

with your parents and family?

My family talks the 'we don't give a fuck about gender roles' talk, but my mom and dad are pretty well split along the gender expectation chasm in predictable ways. My dad has MRA sympathies, maybe in part because he's pissed at my mom for leaving him. My mom still explains away certain behaviors in my children with facile appeals to gender. It goes without saying that I love them, but fucking come on. They are both gender rebels in the sense that throughout my childhood my dad was always the sensitive, emotionally in tune one and my mom was the 60+ hour a week corporate bread earner. They were both single parents with informal custody at different points. I saw both my parents handle their domestic chores and expect the same from me. I can't speak much about my extended family because I never came up explicitly and doing so ranks pretty low on my list of 'things I want to spend time figuring out'.

with your friendships?

Friendships have had a huge impact on my attitudes towards gender. I used to be a pretty solid gender norm conformer, because I was too chickenshit to not be a conformer. I was also a totally shitty dude to women in a lot of ways that weigh heavily on my soul. Then I started attending a high school full of radical activists and hanging out with radical feminist women, and my 'too chickenshit to not be a conformer' resulted in a copy of "Transforming a Rape Culture" sitting on my bookshelf. I tried reading it, but weed and videogames and it didn't work. Still, my prior default of 'being a thoughtless asshole towards women' flipped to 'trying not to piss off my friends'.

with your romantic relationships?

To have an open mind. There are a lot of ways to make romance work.

other experiences?

I've walked around the world enough to have noticed that I can get away with doing a lot less than my female peers.


How do you feel about feminism and how do you express it (if at all)?

I like feminism and consider myself a feminist. The people I spend time with seem like they're all feminists too, so that's cool. Of course women and men should be treated equally. Of course men aren't smarter than women. I understand the problems with branding that feminism has with some groups, and I think these problems are similar to the problem that racism has with some groups (i.e. the people for whom the only way to be a racist is to accuse other people of being racist).

What is your relationship with femininity?

I don't care about it. I reject dualities. The world is a multidimensional place. I feel that the notion of masculinity and femininity exist purely as a way of manipulating people.

 

I should have proofread that ^^ more.

 

MSD I just linked someone to the go-to FAQ for Feminism over at FinallyFeminism101 and Rationalwiki, both are ardently pro-feminist. Even the one source which isn't completely and staggeringly one-sided is STILL pro-feminist and criticizes it's own work. I also made it a point to use standard terminology as defined by FinallyFeminism101 and alternate between dealing with each side.

Call that QED for your straw man of me.

I think most people recognize the offensiveness of how women are treated when they don't have makeup on but I think the makeup itself is a problem as well. Many of these women look like completely different people after hours of makeup and airbrushing, imho it's no better than sticking a flat hockey mask on them and basically making them wear a different face.

 

You know, I wondered about this. Why isn't there a masculinity thread? Or, is that "just not cool"?

 

Oh good. So there's still a chance for me....

 

While I don't doubt that it's for you, I think it would be naive to claim that societal norms and gender roles don't play a part in it. It's like claiming to not be affected by advertising, even when we don't realize it, it's affecting us.

 

Women make up close to two-thirds of minimum-wage workers in the country — and upwards of 70 percent of those low-wage workers receive no paid sick days whatsoever, according to the report.

All the while, some 40 percent of all American households with children below the age of 18 include mothers who are either the only or primary source of income — with the average earnings of full-time female workers still just 77 percent of the average earnings of their male colleagues, the Shriver Report says. (US News and World Report)