gender

soooo is it determined or... what

it is a "fake concept" iirc

when a max loves a womax

it's real

when a max loves bobby womack

generation durr

if u had a y instead of a x u'd be may. THINK ABAHT IT.

that actually works

is what determined

how come nobody ever asks, is it deterwomened? think about it

your gender did u determine it yet

determen
deter men

hahahha

Take the test to find out

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1006/1243510031_02c72d47af_o.jpg

lol

anyone wanna trade some sideburns for a concave chest

i did that and got 26% gay which seemed disappointing?

^^^is not camp or stereotypically homo in his outward behaviour at all, really

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2010/04/08/mens-studies-too-feminist-for-you-meet-male-studies/

According to Tiger, Male Studies emerged “from the notion that male and female organisms really are different” and the “enormous relation between . . . a person’s biology and their behavior.” To the Male Studies set, “Men’s Studies” has historically focused far too much on the social construction of masculinity, and not enough on the biological origins and purpose of “maleness.” The Foundation for Male Studies states that its focus is on studying “the male as male”:

lol

hmm pretty sure that field already is being plowed in the form of NAMBLA

Male studies...because evolutionary psycology wasn't producing enough bad science for the Daily Mail set?

lol @ this tho

i did that and got 26% gay which seemed disappointing?

― plax (ico), Monday, April 5, 2010 11:26 AM (2 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^^is not camp or stereotypically homo in his outward behaviour at all, really

― william mcgonadal's tay ridge disaster (acoleuthic), Monday, April 5, 2010 11:32 AM (2 months ago)

sigh

maybe u will bring out the diva in plaxico

sex-x-y.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/education/09men-t.html?_r=2&ref=education

maybe u will bring out the diva in plaxico

― Mark Ronson: "Led Zeppelin were responsible for hip-hop" (acoleuthic), Sunday, June 6, 2010 12:10 AM (7 months ago)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110524/ts_yblog_thelookout/parents-keep-childs-gender-under-wraps

The couple's other two children, Jazz and Kio, haven't escaped their parents' unconventional approach to parenting.

Jazz
Kio
Storm

Sounds like a Hyundai dealership. :(

But Stocker and Witterick's choices haven't always made life easy for their kids. Though Jazz likes dressing as a girl, he doesn't seem to want to be mistaken for one. He recently asked his mother to let the leaders of a nature center know that he's a boy. And he chose not to attend a conventional school because of the questions about his gender. Asked whether that upsets him, Jazz nodded.

As for his mother, she's not giving up the crusade against the tyranny of assigned gender roles. "Everyone keeps asking us, 'When will this end?'" she said. "And we always turn the question back. Yeah, when will this end? When will we live in a world where people can make choices to be whoever they are?"

The people sound insufferable.

Also that baby looks male to me. Now I want to know if I'm right just out of curiosity.

how come nobody ever asks, is it deterwomened? think about it

― still driving steen, banning deez, gettin my dick xhuxked (Curt1s Stephens), Sunday, April 4, 2010 11:39 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lmao

Comments 1 - 10 of 7218

Tbf, the comments are all pretty butthurt

OMG people commenting on some internet article are awful and dumb? You don't say!

Jazz is going to really hate his parents come puberty

the parents say that they are trying to limit the influence of social "messages" on their kids, that the two boys are free to choose whatever clothing/hair they want, and that they both happen to choose pink clothing and long hair (surprise!). i have no reason to doubt that, but given the intensity of parental disdain for "conventional" gender roles, you have to wonder how many warm fuzzies the boys get for dressing girly. i mean, i appreciate the basic nobility of the parents' quest, but have questions about the execution.

people are exhausting.

If you have to home school you're kids, you've already gone too far in your intellectual conceits

I think you mean "unschool" Michael. Get it straight. ;p

i mean, i appreciate the basic nobility of the parents' quest, but have questions about the execution

Well, yeah. Exactly. There's no way this could actually be accomplished but that's sort of irrelevant here I guess. I'm sure that Storm and Rio or whatever it was get plenty of praise for embracing their girly sides. Every quote in that article makes them sound like the most tedious people on the planet.

if home schooled kids can't grasp basical grammatical structures, do you blame the parentheses?

kids are weirdly obsessed with gender and gender rules--im sure most of that derives from still learning how to "perform" their particular gender. I can't help but think the parents in this story are doing their kids a diservice, getting along and coping with the BS of society is an important skill in its own right, so raising kids as if they live in a gender utopia is maybe not such great parenting.

maybe I'm just cynical, but I tend to assume that mainstream online news articles that deal with "unconventional" elements of sex, gender, and sexual orientation (this, the pregnant man, the boy who wore a dress for his Halloween costume, transgendered kids, etc.) are bigot bait packaged to get as many irate comments (= hits = ad revenue) as possible without explicitly shaming the subjects in the text of the article. while I appreciate this kid's parents efforts to challenge gender norms, I doubt sharing their story with the world will make the world a more tolerant place when news networks are using them in much the same way as they used the balloon boy family. admittedly, Yahoo isn't Fox News and the article (and even many of the comments) probably isn't totally ill-intentioned.

lolziest part is somehow trusting their other two kids to keep the secret

kids are weirdly obsessed with gender and gender rules--im sure most of that derives from still learning how to "perform" their particular gender. I can't help but think the parents in this story are doing their kids a diservice, getting along and coping with the BS of society is an important skill in its own right, so raising kids as if they live in a gender utopia is maybe not such great parenting.

sometimes, though, it's good parenting to allow your kids to express themselves in abnormal ways (w/r/t gender, sexual orientation, race, or whatever) even to the point where they risk getting ostracized and picked upon by other kids (or even adults). no matter how old you are, the price of being confident and having a strong sense of self is confrontation, and it's more worthwhile to learn how to face or defuse confrontation than it is to avoid it altogether at the expense of your individuality. mind you, I'm not saying parents should put their kids in controversial places merely for the sake of generating controversy, which is often the way it works when the media gets involved in people's personal lives.

thing is: how did this become "news" in the first place? like, did they call the paper and say "you know we'd just like to put this out there" or what?

yeah i get you, and i think i agree. surely that can be done in a way that says "be whoever or whatever you want" but also "this is how society may react, and how closed minded people are, and perhaps here's how to try and get along with them."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/fashion/new-challenge-for-parents-childrens-gender-roles.html?_r=1&ref=fashion

This post continues from here, emil.y's Feminist Theiry & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread. I'm jumping threads because I felt like my interest in discussing the biological basis of what we perceive as "gender" was not really appropriate for that thread. Anyone who's interested in that topic(hey, surfing!) or who would simply like to discuss gender in a differently framed space (ENBB, VegemiteGrrl, aimless, anyone) is welcome to join me here.

More to come...

Oh, right. Frame it as "discuss gender without those pesky feminists distracting us with their facts" = really not classy way to do this.

*sigh*

WCC, come on, surely you can see that Con is taking his subject of interest here also not to derail the previous thread.

xposts

Um I totally intend to be all up in this thread with feminist facts FWIW and I don't think Contenderizer is against that?

I read this as the other thread has gravitated (that's probably the wrong word but y'know) towards talking about social constructs and privilige and I felt the same, like I would be having a separate conversation at the same table if I talked about biological sex and constructing a working model of the relationship between the body, the brain and the mind's sex / gender uh.. stuff... so moving this conversation seems OK to me?

Oh, right. Frame it as "discuss gender without those pesky feminists distracting us with their facts" = really not classy way to do this.

it's framed as a open discussion of gender, WCC, that's all. and i'm only attempting to move a certain portion of the discussion because i felt as though i was intruding into the other thread by constantly bringing up the stuff i wanted to talk about. i didn't want to be a irritant or a boor. beyond that, a few other people had mentioned feeling nervous abt bringing up their viewpoints in that thread, so i hoped that this might provide a more comfortable space for them.

but hey, we're off to the races...

That "differently framed space" crack was pretty dumb, you have to admit. I think the initial post was judgier than it had to be under the circumstances. But I'm interested to see what's discussed here, because this kind of reading material is stuff I'm prob never going to tackle on my own!

It's not the reviving of the thread, or the addressing of the topic, it's the "hey! List of ppl who clashed w WCC & Laurel on the other thread, we got a new clubhouse here!" that irks.

So... WCC lent me this book called "Delusions of Gender", I can't copy-paste every paragraph because boring, illegal and tl;dr, but I want to talk about it LOTS. It is very interesting and stuffed with proper citations. I'm only a chapter in but would highly recommend.

WCC, perhaps this is in deference to your 'owning' the other thread and ppl not feeling comfortable about contradicting or disagreeing w/you there or even commenting questioningly. I certainly don't; it's been made clear that ppl of my accidental stripe are suspect.

i think one of the more interesting books i've read on gender and biological determinism is "Demonic Males"-- it cries out for a feminist critique, however.

http://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/dp/0395877431/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329339100&sr=8-1

Also

http://www.google.com/search?q=chevalier+d%27eon&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&ie=utf8&oe=utf8

I don't "own" the other thread. I didn't even start it.

And that "Demonic Males" although I read it, was picked apart pretty thoroughly by other primate scientists so I don't think much "feminist" critique is needed.

so, the first thing i wanna do is to restate my take on gender and biology from that previous thread, as i'd like to know what others think:

gender's odd. it's clearly a cultural construct, both in a hazy, general sense that exists outside any specific individual and in the various ways we all individually (re)construct & perceive it. but that's not all it is. unlike "race", there's a substantial biological component to gender, at least to the extent that sex and gender are related. of course, we can only understand what "biological gender" might mean at several levels of remove, as filtered through a thicket of complex inherited constructions from which we can't even sensibly hope to extricate our perspectives.

speaking personally and not necessarily scientifically, it seems to me that biological gender probably does in certain respects "drive" human behavior and that these drivings do sometimes correspond at least partially with the dubious cultural constructs we've inherited. men, for example, seem in general to be more openly and aggressively violent than women, to the extent that male violence is a serious problem the world over. the fact that male violence has been a problem in every society and historic epoch i know of suggests to me that it probably has at least some basis in human biology.

with that in mind, it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose that the relationship between testosterone and male competition might have something to do with this, as competition often expresses itself in aggression, and aggression in turn in violence. this is not to say that men are intractably violent, of course, or that women can't be violent themselves...

Oh and if you're going to trot out the tired old "feminists be making men all suspect bcuz they'd like them to acknowledge privilege" wow you are really taking the retro thing a bit far there.

Just from the PW review of that book, ryan, I will certainly not be reading it.

In their analysis, patriotism breeds aggression, yet, from an evolutionary standpoint, they reject the presumed inevitability of male violence and male dominance over women.

How enlightened and helpful of them. I'm so glad they took that first step toward actually doing something about a culture of rape and violence--they rejected its inevitability!

ah. well i read it a long time ago and it popped into my head on the "gender/biology" question. im not intending to defend it. not helpful bringing it up here, i guess.

That "differently framed space" crack was pretty dumb, you have to admit. I think the initial post was judgier than it had to be under the circumstances. But I'm interested to see what's discussed here, because this kind of reading material is stuff I'm prob never going to tackle on my own!

― one little aioli (Laurel), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 12:39 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark

It's not the reviving of the thread, or the addressing of the topic, it's the "hey! List of ppl who clashed w WCC & Laurel on the other thread, we got a new clubhouse here!" that irks.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 12:40 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark

okay, that's fair. guilty as charged. i was feeling a bit shut out in that last thread (and perhaps prickly in response) and i got the feeling that at least a few others were on the same page. could have been a bit more politic about it itt, though.

anyway, i don't in any way mean to frame this thread as "not feminist". my hope was that it would feel like a free and open space to all, including WCC & laurel & anyone else.

in the terms of this thread id argue simply that nothing is really anything until it's interpreted as such, and i think that even includes how we respond to our own hormonal states.

in that there is no real direct through-line from hormonal and/or biological states to behavior.

contdzr: In your whole 2nd paragraph, I feel like you could remove "male" from "male violence" and you'd be closer to the truth?

In partic, this statement: "the fact that male violence has been a problem in every society and historic epoch i know of suggests to me that it probably has at least some basis in human biology." That's not science! That's your assumption from a general knowledge of history! I don't know if you're right or wrong, but gbx made some pretty fact-filled posts to the oth thread about how from a medical standpoint he wasn't going along with any kind of hormone-driven assumptions about violence or anything else.

gender is weird in that there's the sex<->gender link at one level, the internal psychological self-image, the perception of others, and then the entire idea of "traditional gender roles" or even gender roles at all, in that you probably should be able to decide what aspects and roles you apply to your life(style)

and about eighty other angles, really

And that "Demonic Males" although I read it, was picked apart pretty thoroughly by other primate scientists so I don't think much "feminist" critique is needed.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 12:56 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

curious abt this. i read a good deal about it at the time, and it seemed to be fairly well-received, at least in mainstream circles at the time of publication. and criticism isn't necessarily negation, right? always meant to read it, tbh.

Laurel, can we at least assume that being born male in a society with customs that perpetuate male violence mean there's a relation, even if it's not directly a result of the organism, but rather the perceived gender role of the organism?

Oh and if you're going to trot out the tired old "feminists be making men all suspect bcuz they'd like them to acknowledge privilege" wow you are really taking the retro thing a bit far there.

are you replying to a post that hasn't even been made?

In their analysis, patriotism breeds aggression, yet, from an evolutionary standpoint, they reject the presumed inevitability of male violence and male dominance over women.

Huh? Patriotism is a relatively recent construct.

What if patriarchy was a very successful but increasingly less so human adaptation? Like, among all the other weird things in human evolution (and we above all species have had the most 'success' with cultural and social adaptation; we even eat in perhaps a highly unnatural way) like smaller jaws, etc..., we went through a period of endemic low-level violence that favored brutish males and now were still living through the genetic echo of that, even when it may or may not make much sense since anybody can sit in a control room and 'pilot' drones?

That "shut out" that you felt on that thread? That's pretty much how I feel on ~the rest of the Internet~ where I get advertising choices based on my google searches that mark me as "male" and try to sell me Rogaine. That's how I feel when my Sys Admin says "you're not a girl, you're a geek" as if that's supposed to be a compliment.

If you, as a man, are made to feel little ~shut out~ by a feminist space, you should actually take a little moment on how you have the rest of the world to feel comfortable in, which is not a choice for gender non-conforming women like me.

Opinions on "biological gender" presented without science to back them up make me so angry that I want to show you all exactly how little testosterone has to do with violence. But I dont get to write it off my violence as "testosterone" when I get angry, I just get written off as "crazy woman" and penalized in ways that a man getting angry will never face.

tbf the solution there is to stop society from accepting violence from any party, not to accept it from women, too

Laurel, can we at least assume that being born male in a society with customs that perpetuate male violence mean there's a relation, even if it's not directly a result of the organism, but rather the perceived gender role of the organism?

I don't know! But that's not what contend was asking, he is specifically talking about the likelihood of a link between masculine violence/aggression and testosterone...or something? If I'm parsing correctly.

@MW Replace 'genetic echo' with 'cultural echo' and I think you might have more of a point.

but gbx made some pretty fact-filled posts to the oth thread about how from a medical standpoint he wasn't going along with any kind of hormone-driven assumptions about violence or anything else.

Even if you ignore the fact that adolescent males are far more likely to kill, die or engage in anti-social bhaviors you haven't even looked at the (slightly, by comparison) bi-morphism of humans, meaning even if your aggressor is a woman, you have a statistical chance that, if you're a man, you outweigh her or are taller.

in the terms of this thread id argue simply that nothing is really anything until it's interpreted as such, and i think that even includes how we respond to our own hormonal states.

...in that there is no real direct through-line from hormonal and/or biological states to behavior.

― ryan, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 1:04 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

sure, but we don't need a direct through-line of the "hormone Y causes behavior X" sort in order to reasonably suppose that human chemistry might have some kind of influence on human behavior, especially when considered in a general sense.

I'm not interested in explaining books to ppl who haven't read them. If you're so interested in gender, go read them yourself. I gotta get off this thread because this level of anger makes me feel violent and women are socialized to direct that violence / anger on themselves.

...

@MW Replace 'genetic echo' with 'cultural echo' and I think you might have more of a point.

I am super curious about the effect of culture on human evolution. In aworld filled w/racism and the kind of sexism that leaves little girls out to die, the relationship is not tenuous in some cases, it's very direct. Thus I think genetic and cultural are intertwined.

If you aren't interested in a thread, indeed, why stick around? It can be interesting to others who are interested in it, and I think Con has made a sensible decision to separate his interests from the former thread and place them here.

xxp

man, you can cut the sexual tension in here with a knife, amiright?

This biological underpinings of gender discussion is kind of one that involves actual science and not just how we feel about things? Maybe it should have a reading list? Because otherwise this convo is kind of weird.

in the terms of this thread id argue simply that nothing is really anything until it's interpreted as such

Mr Shakespear?

the same society that is trying to tell WCC that her actions are untoward or that she's going to get male advertisements (which, I dunno, I get ads that seem more woman-targeted sometimes, advertising algorithms suck) is the one that told me as a kid that aggressively standing up to a bully was ok, I should be in the pursuing role in relationships, I should be protective of women in my life to an extent I wouldn't be for men, and that I am supposed to have interests or aspirations that I am not that into

Yet, as a white male, I can go up to people and they assume my privilege until I disavow enough of these and get a look of disgust or questioning? Do I lose some marginal amount of privilege, or is it just a stigma on top of that privilege?

man, you can cut the sexual tension in here with a knife

If there's one reason for sexual reproduction, it's 'tension'. It may be fucked to live and throw out lots of 'weirdos' but it's not as complacent nor as vulnerable as asexual reproduction. Hence us...

btw I left the other threads because I felt I wasn't really contributing anything -- not everyone is an endless font of deep thought! And really, other than trying to root around for devil's advocacy or whatever, I've got nothing some days

it's worth pointing out that biodeterministic assertions that are necessarily rooted in some dichotomous Testosterone/Estrogen ish betray a fundamental and devastating, argument-wise, misapprehension of some basic endocrine stuff

― i love pinfold cricket (gbx), Tuesday, February 14, 2012 1:17 AM

in that: genotypically men and women are pumping out estrogens and androgens all the time, but at differing rates and compositions. this is largely (but not entirely) due to having different soft things making different hormonal stews; stews that, in XX/XY or XXY or XYY or w/e, are comprised of hormones shared and produced by literally (almost) everyone and that (surprise) can be chemically induced to act more like what we simplistically believe are their binaries.

which is to say: it might be very likely that if someone's hormonal ecosystem, with its v special concentration ratios, is experiencing a surfeit of testosterone, that that may predispose someone to aggression. or "aggression." and so sure XY "men" are more likely to roiling in that brew.

but that says nothing about the actual, root-causes of violence and violent behavior, what's doing the roiling. many ppl have a genetic predisposition to cancer (and these genes are often ~less~ subtle than the in-yr-face obviousness of X/Y phenotypic difference). and some of these people will, "inevitably," go on to develop cancer. but many of them dramatically increase their risk by engaging in behaviors and exposing themselves to risks (maybe unknowingly!) that also predispose to cancer. would we be right to demur on the topic of "bad behavior" or "social determinants" and make the genetic component the essential one, because it's more "science-y"? because that would be dumb.

so yeah ok i guess retrospectively males are pretty violent and sure if you take steroids (as a man or a woman) you're gonna be more hot-tempered than if you didn't. and criminals have excessive levels of testosterone or something (note the word "excessive"). big fucking deal! PCP, booze, and lust make all ppl violent and criminals also have "excessive levels" of drug addiction, mental illness, minority status, and connections to poverty.

tl;dr even pretending to get serious about the ~hormonal~ roots of gendered relations is roughly equivalent to phrenology, both scientifically and ethically

― i love pinfold cricket (gbx), Tuesday, February 14, 2012 1:46 AM

I kind of lost the plot after that tbh.

contdzr: In your whole 2nd paragraph, I feel like you could remove "male" from "male violence" and you'd be closer to the truth?

In partic, this statement: "the fact that male violence has been a problem in every society and historic epoch i know of suggests to me that it probably has at least some basis in human biology." That's not science! That's your assumption from a general knowledge of history! I don't know if you're right or wrong, but gbx made some pretty fact-filled posts to the oth thread about how from a medical standpoint he wasn't going along with any kind of hormone-driven assumptions about violence or anything else.

― one little aioli (Laurel), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 1:05 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

first part of that i disagree with. yes, violence has always been a problem. but males seem always (in every culture and throughout history) to be disproportionately responsible for extreme acts violence and aggression. regardless of how we interpret this fact, it remains a fact, and i don't see why we should sweep it under the table.

fwiw, i responded to GBX in that other thread. while testosterone might not be clearly linked to male violence, it is clearly linked to make competition and seems to be produced as a result of victory over other males. the competition in question is often aggressive and even violent, and from those few things it seems reasonable to at least keep the hypothesis on the table.

^ when i say that, i mean scientifically linked.

sure, but we don't need a direct through-line of the "hormone Y causes behavior X" sort in order to reasonably suppose that human chemistry might have some kind of influence on human behavior, especially when considered in a general sense.

yeah, this is in fact a very complex problem.

i think my take is simply this: "gender" and "biology" are entirely separate realms. they are absolutely irreducible to each other. incommensurable. just in the way your nervous systems only communicates with itself, gender and biology are closed off from one another. at best they are "environmental irritations" that are nevertheless folded into the self-referential processes at work in both.

in fact, and it sounds weird, but it's just as pertinent a question to ask how gender influences biology!

maybe men are just told their entire lives that they're more violent and the masculine culture reinforces that?

God these dicussions feel so depressing to me :/

the natural correlary to that testosterone assertion, contendz, is that is that the social construct of masculinity is rooted in competition, aggression, and acts of violence. and that is ... to me, limiting, especially if we view gender as either dichotomized or (male-female) spectral.

That "shut out" that you felt on that thread? That's pretty much how I feel on ~the rest of the Internet~ where I get advertising choices based on my google searches that mark me as "male" and try to sell me Rogaine. That's how I feel when my Sys Admin says "you're not a girl, you're a geek" as if that's supposed to be a compliment.

If you, as a man, are made to feel little ~shut out~ by a feminist space, you should actually take a little moment on how you have the rest of the world to feel comfortable in, which is not a choice for gender non-conforming women like me.

Opinions on "biological gender" presented without science to back them up make me so angry that I want to show you all exactly how little testosterone has to do with violence. But I dont get to write it off my violence as "testosterone" when I get angry, I just get written off as "crazy woman" and penalized in ways that a man getting angry will never face.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 1:11 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

hey look. it's possible that i felt shut out of the other thread for good reasons that i need to reflect on. and it's possible that i felt shut out due to interpersonal shit that isn't quite as politically clear-cut. or both. fwiw, it's possible that i did reflect in the manner you suggest and did this anyway. i humbly submit that i did.

i mean, i'd love to talk to someone about the science involved. that's a big part of why i brought this stuff up here.

contend, you are normally so sensible and otm in my estimation that it's a crazy new world in which I have to stop myself from reflexively agreeing with you, but you have not brought any facts to this thread except your own wondering about stuff.

I'm not saying that wondering about stuff isn't great and good for discussions, but there is actual research in the area this thread purports to be about, and WCC and ryan and (hopefully!) zora and other people who're engaged with stuff like this right now, will drop some info and then we can look into the studies and critique them, maybe, and stuff like that.

That was a many-post xp in case that wasn't obvious.

So it's too simple to assume that gender isn't 'based' around ranges of phenotypes?

I guess where I'm getting with this is: I think we can all agree that the gender norms and prescribed gender roles in society have a number of harmful effects, the most visible being male privilege -- that is where the feminism thread was going, and really I think that bring this discussion elsewhere is worthwhile as a big picture thing. Because the feminist discussion is supremely important in the ~now~.

But what about the long term? Is there any way we can get to a point where a lot of the baggage of supposed gender roles is dropped? At the biological base, we're stuck with only one sex being able to bear children. But the traditional mother/father roles are already being reevaluated, especially with marriage between any two consenting adults (and the assumed child-rearing privileges) becoming the norm.

Is gay marriage an automatic boon to the negatives of gender roles, in that it breaks them down?

I am learning new language recently and I'm super into the idea of performance, the performance of gender, and I thought plax/judith's post on the other thread was rly beautiful and visionary about where we could go with gender, if we made it happen.

:)

maybe men are just told their entire lives that they're more violent and the masculine culture reinforces that?

― valleys of your mind (mh), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 1:24 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the natural correlary to that testosterone assertion, contendz, is that is that the social construct of masculinity is rooted in competition, aggression, and acts of violence. and that is ... to me, limiting, especially if we view gender as either dichotomized or (male-female) spectral.

― "renegade" gnome (remy bean), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 1:27 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

okay, that makes sense. but one of the things i found really interesting in that other thread was this quote brought up by La Lechera, from the book The First Sexual Revolution: Lust and Liberty In the 18th Century:

"Adulterers and prostitutes could be executed and women were agreed to be more libidinous than men – then in the 18th century attitudes to sex underwent an extraordinary change"

this is fascinating, not least because it contradicts what current western societies often try to tell us about the "natural" nature of human sexual roles, attitudes and behaviors. this supports the idea that gender is a cultural construct, and as such is as fluid as culture itself can be. but the "disproportionate" nature of male violence does not seem to be similarly fluid. instead, it seems to be pretty consistent throughout history and across cultures. that's why i've focused so much on it in both of these threads. it's an outlier. a special case.

I feel like I'm venturing more into the ridiculous self-help dump thread with this, but I feel like discovering where we would optimally like to go with the future of these things and then shaping our dialogue to influence and persuade others in the world at large is more effective than squabbling over differences of definition

contenderizer, no one is arguing that males have been more violent historically or that current male culture is more violent, I think?

in the terms of this thread id argue simply that nothing is really anything until it's interpreted as such, and i think that even includes how we respond to our own hormonal states.

― ryan, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 1:04 PM (23 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is interesting to me. i've always imagined i can feel hormonal influences at work in certain moments regarding certain desires/needs. but they are inchoate to the point where they don't actually mean anything at root, i'm realizing this more and more, and that that sort of libidinal energy is like low-level programming routinage that is used to effect/affect all sorts of behavior. i suspect that we channel so much of our biology through social/historical conditioning (which--isn't this biology anyway? neural pathways and such) that we confuse the constancy and power and "root-feeling" of hormonal influences with the root-feelings of directionality, binary thinking, etc, or that we do a lot of processing and channeling and "work" to get where we are wrt gender identities and such. i think my point is that male and female essentialism that appeals to the body and "biology" is funny and both true and false (though not in the way the two sides want it) because 1 the body is extremely multivalent (as gbx details v v wonderfully in one of these threads that inevitably contains 1,000 blathering contenderizer posts, wtf is up with that) and 2 the body is like literally a physical node for the larger cultural/social/historical body in which it exists as a cell.

so many xps

I am learning new language recently and I'm super into the idea of performance, the performance of gender, and I thought plax/judith's post on the other thread was rly beautiful and visionary about where we could go with gender, if we made it happen.

Am I wrong, or has Judith Butler really not been invoked yet on these threads?

like, the constant circle jerk was "male culture is more violent, something something biology?" and then lots of debate on whether it's nature or nurture

who gives a fuck? the only thing to ask is whether this is a biology we can overcome, or if it in some way serves a purpose, and if it does, how we can work that to our means

Matt P, I kiss you, that is a good post

I give you this beautiful thing from the oth thread:

its just even with a both/and you're positing this distinction. as if the body ended at the surface of the skin, but the body leaves itself in traces, ruffled traces, the warm part on a sofa, the smell of someone sleeping. and in words, the sounds of voices in other rooms, the shape of handwriting. culture and nature are no more distinct than bodies and language. the difference between xx and xy. i mean where is it that these separate influences are being exerted. sexism is the description of a certain terrain maybe. not exactly a pre-coded set of tactics. new sexisms come into being all the time just as new feminisms come into being in order to combat them. new terrains and new means of navigating them. a set of survival strategies. it might be easier to just think of nature itself, how it is produced by culture. if we want to unhinge and dismantle patriarchy then we need to unhinge and dismantle the logics that produce it. the constant need to find a set of anteriors. bodies themselves are processes, movements, materials, sites of inscription. bodies are culture, not just because they are cultured but because the complexity of such assemblages is irreducible. fractures, continuities. its hard to understand where trans people would fit into a world in which gender can only be understood as a construct of culture or language or whatever. why the need to transition, to submit to these particular technologies of the body, vaginaplasty, testosterone injections, bilateral masectomy, brow shaping, etc etc. are these elaborate modes of gender performativity? that seems insulting somehow. how to disconnect these processes from learning how to walk like a woman, changing your name. moving. finding a space to transition. bodies are narrated and they narrate themselves.

― judith, Monday, February 13, 2012 8:41 PM

sure, but we don't need a direct through-line of the "hormone Y causes behavior X" sort in order to reasonably suppose that human chemistry might have some kind of influence on human behavior, especially when considered in a general sense.

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 1:15 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

like this is such a dumb post, what are u even trying to accomplish

judith's post invokes Gilles Deleuze and Genesis P. Orridge, and beauty

Matt, I don't kiss you but that was great. That's the kind of stuff I need.

well, my point is that it seems reasonable, given what we know, to keep the idea that "biology influences behavior" on the table on the table where sex and gender are concerned.

i mean, it's sort of funny to contrast the strong ILX resistance to biological determinism where gender is concerned to the casual and even happy acceptance of it in the free will thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf1KhJR3aI8

I have no good reason other than prejudgement to believe that my encounters with aggression and competitiveness have been with people who are biologically predisposed to display these qualities.

gbx otm wrt phrenology. Laurel otm wrt reading list. And I empathise with WCC's frustration.

really hoping Genesis P. Orridge is not the model of gender relations/definitions of the future tbqh

that last one went to MH, and yeah, laurel OTM, that judith post was/is beautiful. thanks for reposting it here.

it's sort of funny to contrast the strong ILX resistance to biological determinism where gender is concerned to the casual and even happy acceptance of it in the free will thread.

I was totally shocked by that free will thread, mind done got boggled

Did anyone ever say there wasn't an influence though? I think that the shouting match in the other thread was one side going "behavior and roles do not have to be determined by biology" and the other side going "but biology influences behavior!!!"

influence and determination, and the male psyche

I love that judith post.

judith's post invokes Gilles Deleuze and Genesis P. Orridge, and beauty

― valleys of your mind (mh), woensdag 15 februari 2012 22:44 (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I kind of figure that one error we heave tended to make in the 'scientific era' is one of conflating our social values w/norms. Perhaps trans ppl and queers and dumb jocks and beauty queens and smart jocks and nerds and quiet ppl and partiers and moralists and hedonists are all part of the human genome for friggin genetic adaptive reasons, even if they're not particularly well adapted to the era they live in - maybe they were once or that behavior was/is associated w/another adaptation that meant the difference between life and death for some geneaolgy.

I have no good reason other than prejudgement to believe that my encounters with aggression and competitiveness have been with people who are biologically predisposed to display these qualities.

gbx otm wrt phrenology. Laurel otm wrt reading list. And I empathise with WCC's frustration.

― Unleash the Chang (he did what!) (Austerity Ponies), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 1:45 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

as far as any given instance of aggression goes, of course not. we know that insects can carry disease, but this doesn't mean that all disease is caused by insects.

like i said before, there's a clear, scientifically established connection between testosterone and competitive behavior in males. i don't claim to be an expert, but this is what i gather. and there's obvious connections between competition, aggression and violence. i honestly find it baffling that this argument would be objectionable to anyone, even if there were less scientific support for it. i simply do not understand what even might be objectionable about it. and even if i did, the argument has sufficient scientific and logical merit to at least be worthy of consideration, imo.

i'm honestly not trying to troll or ruffle feathers here...

Did anyone ever say there wasn't an influence though? I think that the shouting match in the other thread was one side going "behavior and roles do not have to be determined by biology" and the other side going "but biology influences behavior!!!"

― valleys of your mind (mh), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 1:48 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

valuable distinction, but all i've ever talked about was influence, not straight-up determination. and the blowback has been severe. so, uh...

So, in theory, if one side were conflating the two, and the other side kept responding in kind, causing a feedback loop...

I don't see any casual and happy acceptance of biological determinism on the free will thread, at least not in a way that could possibly inform this debate. I won't speak for others, but my anti-free will stance is deterministic on a universal level, which is to say that there can be no conscious choices because the mind does not exist independently of the body, and choices cannot be made by a 'will' that exists outside of the physical universe, unless you invoke magical beliefs.

It's important to understand, however, that this point at which a choice is (not) made, occurs in an instant. The brain at that instant is in a certain state, which determines the next instant, and so on and so forth. Viewing it as a continuous flow of instants however, you have an extremely fluid, complex, dynamic series of realities. The world affects the mind/brain and the mind/brain affects the world.

sure, but i think most people itt get the distinction? i mean, to say that biological gender likely has some influence on human behavior (in a general sense) does not mean that any given human behavior was caused or even influenced by biological gender.

I always assume that gender roles have been 'assigned' by history as a result of whatever 'accidental' adaptation the assigning culture survived whether frankly germane or not and I assume that ppl who lived to reproduce perhaps once or twice before dying and who had far poorer language and technological skills than we have didn't question 'gender' as much as we do. Perhaps moralistic systems w/their weird (to us, at least) exclusions and normative expectations were part of the 'socio-technological progress' of the agrarian revolution (civilization) and some kind of halcyon Golden Age (such as posited by Rousseau) had existed where the full spectrum of different expressions of gender existed. We know of Amazons in mythology and warrior queens and there's no end of homosexuals (though not usually as fey as they became recently) in history...

Who thinks anything is a one way street these days? Nature/Nurture, Biology/Culture, etc/... These are dichotomies imnposed on phenomena. It's the phenomena that are interesting.

When I said the brain is in a certain state at a given instant, I of course mean the universe is in a certain state.

The world affects the mind/brain and the mind/brain affects the world.

yeah, that was my response to determinism (which i reject, btw). it's a loop, thus the self is part of a system that is self-determining, and the question of ultimate responsibility becomes a chicken/egg wormhole.

but anyway, the brain isn't isolated from the body. the brain is an electrochemical machine. the "state" of the brain seems to be determined by the chemicals flowing through it at any given point, among other things. i mean, i think the crossover to this discussion is p obvious, and i don't want to get sidetracked.

anyway, i had really hoped that this thread would be less contentious, more cooperative and wide-ranging. i'm starting to get a bit depressed about the general tenor of the discussion itt. maybe trayce was right ("God these dicussions feel so depressing to me :/"). like it's not that there's anything wrong with talking abt this stuff, necessarily, but maybe it's just too hard to have a productive, noncombative discussion.

Also, this is going to sound really weak, but I love WCC's passion and committment to the reading but I really have to admit I approach gender first off (even before sex or possible privilege) from a negative personal POV mostly wrt violence, like violence against me or my ppl, and my violence-dar does not go off around women anyway near as much as it does around men, unless the women are around and attracted to the kinds of guys who are good at that stuff. I am not a fighter by any stretch of the imagination and I am pretty good at reading when situations are getting or likely to get hairy and I will take French leave and it's much rarer around women, though hardly unheard of.

Egg obv came first btw

i honestly find it baffling that this argument would be objectionable to anyone, even if there were less scientific support for it. i simply do not understand what even might be objectionable about it. and even if i did, the argument has sufficient scientific and logical merit to at least be worthy of consideration, imo.

Speaking only for myself, obv, I'm really reluctant to engage this disc because it feels like even a hard-fought argument of point-for-point overly emphatic posting about it would at best only solve a teeny, tiny problem (if it solved anything), be unnecessarily nit-picky and unpleasant, and still leave us marooned on the isle of the next small problem, whatever it was.

Sometimes I am really tit-for-tat about small problems and get way bogged down in them, but I'm feeling inspired on this topic, I want BIG SWEEPING IDEAS instead.

I've read so many books about transgender positioning, people's personal strugges, in adults, in children (so sad), lots of fucked up hypothesizing by doctors ruining people's lives and sometimes their bodies in irreversible ways. And even now, what we have is better than like 20 years ago but it's still news articles about judges in Germany forcing a minor to go through puberty when she wants to be on puberty-delaying drugs just to give her a few more years until she's considered capable of deciding what she wants, how to live, and like IS THIS ALL THESE IS??? No way, Jose. Give me something else, give me a different world, this is bullshit.

I'm really reluctant to engage this disc because it feels like even a hard-fought argument of point-for-point overly emphatic posting about it would at best only solve a teeny, tiny problem (if it solved anything), be unnecessarily nit-picky and unpleasant, and still leave us marooned on the isle of the next small problem, whatever it was.

yeah, i agree. that would lead nowhere. maybe part of the reason i wanted to have this discussion (which i'm now happy not to abandon, exactly, but to progress from) is that i wanted to be able to speak openly about this stuff, to expose my operating POV without being shouted down like a heretic or told i that had to provide SCIENTIFIC PROOF before my thinking would even be considered. i mean, i basically just hope it's understood that we can differ on this issue without being idiots, bigots or trolls.

and fuck yeah, BIG IDEAS PLS!

judges in Germany forcing a minor to go through puberty when she wants to be on puberty-delaying drugs just to give her a few more years until she's considered capable of deciding what she wants

uh isn't the minor's body forcing the body to go through puberty?

my hatred of the pharm industry possibly trumping my hatred of gender conventions there tbh

Michael White OTM.

Part of why I usually just throw my hands up at these kinds of discussions and don't participate is that I find biological determinism (or at least our piss poor attempts at interpreting/explaining the biological 'causes' of things) and social determinism (geneder is all a construct) to be equally unsatisfying, and because I think the interplay between biological and social factors is probably too complext to sort out. For example, mh says above that maybe society just encourages males to be more aggressive. And I think that's probably right -- gender is reinforced by societal pressures to behave as our gender, and by our own internalization of these pressures. But at the same time, this doesn't rule out that there might also be genetic factors in that aggression. And even those genetic factors may have been shaped in part by societal expectations, i.e. women are given the idea that male aggression is a good trait in a mate, they choose aggressive males. Gross oversimplification obviously, and I'm starting to sound too much like David Brooks for my liking.

But one thing that makes this even more messy for me -- I never hear a good explanation from people who lean toward the "social construct" side of things as to WHY society is expecting males and females to behave certain respective ways. Utility? Historical accident?

Anyway I think that biology and societal forces shape each other and over time produce fluid but distinct gender identity constructs, and also that at any given time there are multiple competing claims as to what makes a man or a woman, but that at any given time there exist these claims and a general idea of division between male and female. And also that of course at any given time there are many people who do not fit within either of these gender constructs (or sets of gender constructs), but I don't think this means the entire thing is a figment of peoples' imaginations.

Flag post me all you want for this but my god, Contenderizer you are acting like a butthurt asshole still going on about how outraged you are that you might have to back up opinion on a controversial subject with some science. Really not doing yourself any favours not letting the sniping thing go.

I'm happy to engage on this stuff if Contenderizer can point up the studies that confirm a causal link, as I failed to find any?

Some time - probably tomorrow night - I will post highlights from chapter one of Delusions that I think will be of interest and hopefully move this aspect of the conversation forward. Apologies in advance for what will inevitably be a rather narrow focus from me while I'm reading this book.

and like IS THIS ALL THESE IS??? No way, Jose. Give me something else, give me a different world, this is bullshit.

okay, see, that makes sense to me. i sort of get why one might want to categorically reject thinking that seemed associated in even a slight way with a culture of horror that one hoped to transcend. like, why cling to the old when new thinking might offer the possibility of transformation? why not just make something better?

i get that. it's just that i (i don't know how to say this) i don't work that way. i can only see and say what seems sensible to me, what seems right or likely or true or w/e. i guess i assume that by being as rigorously objective about things as possible, i can cut through the bullshit, even the culture bullshit that frames perception and "objectivity", and that this will ultimately provide a more reliable shot at real transformation.

i won't say that either approach is better, and i can certainly see how they might conflict.

uh isn't the minor's body forcing the body to go through puberty?

― max buzzword (Shakey Mo Collier

SEEEEE!!! This is interesting!! So, okay, first: the blockers/drugs are not harmful, they just delay the onset of male puberty, so if the transwoman/girl wants to transition once she's considered old enough to "know" "herself" (wtf here, btw), she won't have to fight with physically male characteristics like facial hair, a lower voice, physical size, etc. If she WANTS to allow her body to do what it chemically wants to do later, she can always go through puberty later, too. It doesn't take that away, it's just a delaying tactic.

Second, WHY SHOULD WHAT HER BODY "WANTS" BE MORE "NATURAL" FOR HER?

Laurel otm. The mind takes the body into account all the time, but the reverse can't be said of the body taking the mind into account.

So, okay, first: the blockers/drugs are not harmful,

deeply, deeply skeptical of this claim, to put it mildly.

Flag post me all you want for this but my god, Contenderizer you are acting like a butthurt asshole still going on about how outraged you are that you might have to back up opinion on a controversial subject with some science. Really not doing yourself any favours not letting the sniping thing go.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 2:26 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

hey, WCC. if you want to take my articulation of my feelings as the ravings of a "butthurt" "asshole", that's up to you, and i have no problem with that. i'm not "outraged", though, and nothing i said there had anything to do with you in particular. my point was simply what i hope we (the universal we) can amicably agree to disagree on certain points without derailing the conversation.

Wtf shakey, do you say when your loved one needs medical care, "I'm deeply suspicious of this medical/pharmaceutical intervention into my loved one's well being. I'm going to need to think about it."? Look it up, then! Figure it out! Meanwhile I will google "puberty inhibitors" for you so maybe we can all learn something.

http://www.imatyfa.org/permanent_files/pubertyblockers101.html

Puberty Inhibitors (Puberty Blockers, GnRh Analogues, Puberty Suppressors, Hormone Suppressors) are a group of medications that are prescribed by an endocrinologist to suppress or inhibit puberty. The medications work by suppressing the production of sex hormones (Testosterone and estrogen). Puberty Inhibitors are reversible and are used to prevent the devastating effects of developing unwanted secondary sexual characteristics in gender dysphoric children.
Reviewed by: Dr. Norman P. Spack, M.D.,
Associate in Endocrinology at Children’s Hospital Boston

so if the transwoman/girl wants to transition once she's considered old enough to "know" "herself" (wtf here, btw), she won't have to fight with physically male characteristics like facial hair, a lower voice, physical size, etc. If she WANTS to allow her body to do what it chemically wants to do later, she can always go through puberty later, too. It doesn't take that away, it's just a delaying tactic.

Second, WHY SHOULD WHAT HER BODY "WANTS" BE MORE "NATURAL" FOR HER?

― one little aioli (Laurel), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 2:31 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

well, this sort of elides the question of self-determination as relates to age, right? we don't allow those below a certain age to "own" themselves. they're considered the property of others, and that's part of the grounds on which we enforce (for instance) laws against pederasty. those below a certain age aren't considered capable of making the relevant decisions for themselves. i mean, i'd side with the kid, myself, but i can see why the issue would get complex fast if the parents opposed the administration of the drug.

Wtf shakey, do you say when your loved one needs medical care, "I'm deeply suspicious of this medical/pharmaceutical intervention into my loved one's well being. I'm going to need to think about it."?

um... yes? having worked with medical care providers and the pharm industry let me tell you there is a lot of scary shit/questionable motives out there.

I hadn't really thought about puberty inhibitors much before, would need to look into it.

xp Yes but it's the only window available to make this decision, before full-blown physical development of secondary sex characteristics. So maybe our culture of invalidating the agency of young people will also have to readjust?

^ yeah, i'm cool with that. dreading the inevitable "preteen girls gone wild" vids though.

can't find much about their long-term efficacy and safety, dunno how much googling and paper-reading I wanna do on this subject atm

xp

okay, now THAT was trolling. sorry :/

in general, i think we should be more open to the idea that older adolescents might have some idea of what they want in life.

xp

Really, in keeping with plax's bit from before, maybe a preferable world would be one in which a person's physical body DIDN'T inhibit them from claiming a different set of behaviors, performances, whatever, of gender, I don't really have the language to properly put this in academic terms, but we don't live there yet. Unfortunately.

It feels like small problem-wrangling again, but in the meantime people are having lives, having crisis moments and not being helped, not seeing solutions or being flatly told there ARE no solutions, and these are people's LIVES we're messing with.

I think the question of whether the average 11/12 year-old should be given the right and power to delay his/her own puberty is at least worthy of a debate and not dismissive comments as though it were illiberal to raise an eyebrow.

^ yeah, i'm cool with that. dreading the inevitable "preteen girls gone wild" vids though

Why do you even think this would come up in any way? It feels like you're conflating gender and sex?

http://www.wikigallery.org/paintings/258001-258500/258135/painting1.jpg

This extremely effeminate (he wore dressed his whole life), privileged homosexual is known as the grandfather of Europe (at least to Roman Catholic royalty) since he did his dyanstic job and married twice and begat appropriately. He also won the battle of Cassel in 1677 yet was once called 'one of the silliest women in France'.

Er, dresses

I'll just come out and say there are all kinds of things I intend to deny my 11/12 yo when she reaches that age, and serious body modification is going to be one of them, to say nothing of relatively new hormone treatments promoted by the pharmaceutical industry.

xp

Saying that someone is capable of knowing whether their private, mental self is "male" or "female" or neither, or something else, has absolutely 0% to do with their availability or readiness for sex.

Hurting, if you felt that strongly at 12 that you didn't want to turn into a man and I were your father, my sympathy would be entirely with you. I agree that 11/12 isn't adult nor think it should be but, man, if you fuck this up as a dad, your whole relationship is probably screwed.

Well, Shakey, hopefully your 12 year old will never be in this particular very difficult position and you can continue to be reductive about gender on the internet.

Why do you even think this would come up in any way? It feels like you're conflating gender and sex?

― one little aioli (Laurel), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 2:48 PM (9 seconds ago) Bookmark

lol nonononononono. with that regrettable "girls gone wild joke", i was trying to point out that if we grant what we now consider "kids" more agency over their lives, then there will be scumbags out there willing to exploit it

My trans friend knew she was meant to be a woman when she was quite young.

wait how am I being reductive

xp

if it turns out she wants to be trans she can wait to make that decision imho. average 12yo is not a very rational actor.

I think the question of whether the average 11/12 year-old should be given the right and power to delay his/her own puberty is at least worthy of a debate and not dismissive comments as though it were illiberal to raise an eyebrow.

― happiness is the new productivity (Hurting 2), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 2:48 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

^ see, i agree with this, too. shit is complicated, really complicated.

And I'm saying that you're making a big leap that positions gender and sexual er maturity/readiness/something close to each other as related things, but they're not, so this should not even be a component.

if it turns out she wants to be trans

to be clear my objection is not to kids figuring out their gender identity, it's to their confusion being exploited and catered to by total evil companies who do not have their health or best interest in mind.

xp

if it turns out she wants to be trans

I have a daughter...? I don't get what you're getting at.

I mean I wouldn't let a 12yo get a boob job either, you know?

to be clear my objection is not to kids figuring out their gender identity, it's to their confusion being exploited and catered to by total evil companies who do not have their health or best interest in mind.

shakey dont you see that this happens already regardless? its just that instead of the pharma industry its the entertainment/fashion/education/church/friends/life industry

lol this thread

well duh. it's my job as a parent to help her navigate that stuff.

xp

these were on the table next to my laptop

http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/photo-2.jpg

shakey dont you see that this happens already regardless? its just that instead of the pharma industry its the entertainment/fashion/education/church/friends/life industry

Sure, but Big Pharm can cause chemical imbalances that make dealing with education/church/friends/life worse.

man, this thread

And I'm saying that you're making a big leap that positions gender and sexual er maturity/readiness/something close to each other as related things, but they're not, so this should not even be a component.

oh, i see where yr coming from now. legally, like i said before, this case hinges on the sorts of decisions that children are legally permitted to take ultimate responsibility for and authority over. at present, in most western societies, this = "none". age-designated "children" are not legally responsible for themselves or their decisions. they have no authority to enforce their own will. this principle is what allows parents and the state to make decisions for and to "protect" children. it is what allows us to forbid sexual relations between children and adults.

sure, we could undo the special legal status of children if we want, either in this one particular case or in a more general sense. it's an interesting suggestion, but i do think there are risks involved and that they aren't trivial.

lol judith

lol this thread

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 2:59 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

man, this thread

― plee help i am lookin for (crüt), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 3:01 PM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark

yeah, who knew?

more like woman, this thread

also yeah, i've been reading a lot of deleuze lately and i think that way of thinking is pretty crucial for me at this point. i think "gender is a social construct" has been drained of a lot of its productivity. reading gender trouble was p crucial for me too but judith butler has herself gone beyond this way of thinking. her recent writing about tahrir square about spaces of appearance, the requirements of bodies. i think its important to understand that the social writing of bodies rewrites bodies themselves. a more radical reading of "one is not born a woman."

gender and sexuality need to be destroyed.

asexuality is the future.

feel compelled to post itt but I'm not sure I can be more explicit than I was before tbh

that said: "there's a clear, scientifically established connection between testosterone and competitive behavior in males" demands citation

this case hinges on the sorts of decisions that children are legally permitted to take ultimate responsibility for and authority over. at present, in most western societies, this = "none"

this hasn't been true for the last 10 to 20 years btw, US and UK laws to my knowledge have enshrined certain rights for children in relation to for example family law

how come nobody ever asks, is it deterwomened? think about it

― still driving steen, banning deez, gettin my dick xhuxked (Curt1s Stephens), Sunday, April 4, 2010 4:39 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I LOVE GENITAL GINGERBREADS

well, here's a general overview type thing that touches on the subject in a number of ways: http://www.shoreline.edu/psparks/researchnotes/articles/testosteroneaggression.pdf

also, for the sake of o_O the study of a very dubious study as coughed up by the internet: http://www.news-medical.net/news/20110311/Testosterone-associated-with-dominant-behavior-and-competitive-success-in-attracting-women.aspx

Findings from a recent study at Wayne State University give a clearer understanding of the links between testosterone and human mating behavior, and how testosterone is associated with dominance and competitive success when men battle for the attention of an attractive woman.

The study engaged pairs of men in a seven-minute videotaped competition for the attention of an attractive female undergraduate. Pre-competition testosterone levels were positively associated with men's dominance behaviors in the mate competition-including how assertive they were and how much they "took control" of the conversation-and with how much the woman indicated that she "clicked" with each of the men.

all apologies for the way that study was set up and described ("an attractive woman" ffs), but the observations and conclusions seem potentially valid nonetheless.

the social writing of bodies rewrites bodies themselves.

i think this is an important idea to take into consideration w/r/t the genetic basis of gender(or even any social thing). inasmuch as our bodies are sensory processing machines with real physical networks in our brain that govern how we 'think', genetics certainly had a role in the initial wiring of these structures. but then stuff like neuroplasticity goes and shows us that we can actually change the way we think; blurring the lines between nature and nurture even further

that xpost was for gbx

Do all transgendered people "know" from an early age though? I mean there have been a lot of challenges to that narrative as it pertains to homosexuality ("I always knew"). My mother has a friend who became a woman in his 40s after having a family -- I have no idea whether she always "knew." I worked with her one summer while she still held herself out as a man and there was nothing that would have clued me in. I'm sure she experienced at very least confusion but I wonder if she would have been confident enough at 11 -- in a more accepting society -- to make life-altering choices, even ones that just delay the decision.

this hasn't been true for the last 10 to 20 years btw, US and UK laws to my knowledge have enshrined certain rights for children in relation to for example family law

― dayove cool (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 3:22 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

okay, good point. i knew i was kind of overstating things there. but "rights" for children does not necessarily = legal responsibility for self and/or authority over one's life, right? can i ask what kind of rights you mean and how they apply here? assume you're not talking about emancipated minors and so forth.

BTW in re testosterone studies, just googling around a little I notice that even the way "aggression" gets defined is problematic. E.g. one of the "refuting" studies defined it as "risky and egocentric behavior" and what "disproved" the link was that testosterone seemed to lead to more "fair" negotiations. So everything is already colored by this idea that "male aggression" and "competition" is synonymous with acting like Michael Douglas in Wall Street.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091208132241.htm

So everything is already colored by this idea that "male aggression" and "competition" is synonymous with acting like Michael Douglas in Wall Street.

well, or that one study, anyway. we do have to define these things somehow...

thx con I'll take a look at those

What we need is testimony from a female to male trans person who's taken or is taking supplemental testosterone therapy.

Obv, we all have tesosterone and estrogens but it was my understanding that young men have the highest concentrations of testosterone, on average, of any population.

Also I mean there's the questionable probativeness of a study of males that were injected a single time with testosterone right before they did something. Hormones are complex things that interact with our physiology in complex ways.

(xposts) I found a lot of stuff like this in that paper you linked to:

This study indicates that young men who are from a culture where honor is important do respond to an insult—a challenge to honor—with an increase in testosterone levels, and also with more aggressive, domineering, behavior. Whether the testosterone surge plays any causal role cannot be inferred from the study.

&

The other side to the challenge hypothesis—and indeed its whole point in adaptive terms—is that the testosterone surge should increase aggressiveness in competitive situations. The evidence for this is hard to find in studies of humans, which have tended to examine the association between levels of testosterone and aggressiveness among samples of adults (see Section 9), or have involved the impact of competition on testosterone levels.

This seems to be in line with other studies I perused which suggest that there is little evidence that testosterone generates aggressive behavior or that there is any proof that differences in testosterone levels between genders has anything to do with differences in aggression.

fwiw, i'm not trying prove that i'm right. i think laurel was absolutely right that an endless, research-driven back-and-forth about the "correct" interpretation of the available science would accomplish nothing. afaict, there's a LOT of research out there, more than enough to provide adequate support for any position one might choose to take. rather than get hung up on it, i'd rather agree that it's okay have diverging opinions and more forward.

afaict, there's a LOT of research out there, more than enough to provide adequate support for any position one might choose to take. rather than get hung up on it, i'd rather agree that it's okay have diverging opinions and more forward.

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 5:51 PM (34 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not to snipe but dogg this attitude is why we can't have nice things. or say confront global warming or w/e

yeah, i'm pretty over "can't we all just be friends??/agree to disagree??" when it comes to certain issues

oh maybe that should go on 'things you're fascist about' thread...

okay, point taken. but there are also these sorts of things in that study:

Testosterone levels showed a low but positive correlation
with measures of aggression and higher correlations with
dominance, variously measured by leadership, toughness,
personal power, and aggressive dominance. A study of 13-
year-old boys found the highest associations with testosterone
for being a tough leader, and little sign of an association
with measures of fighting. There was also evidence that men
with higher testosterone levels were more prone to react in
situations that were perceived as challenges, such as an
angry face or a more psychologically-induced challenge to
their self worth. These studies broadly support the
prediction that there would be an association between
aggression-based dominance and testosterone levels. They
also go beyond this, in indicating that challenges and status
matters more to high testosterone people, and influences
their behavior.

and this:

High testosterone men tend to be stable
extraverts, and to show a range of characteristics
indicating that they tend to prioritize shorter-term goals.
For example, high testosterone men show more antisocial
behavior, take more risks, and have less stable sexual
relationships. There was evidence that high and low
testosterone males tend to set out on different life courses
from a relatively early age, although it is clear that any
initial dispositions interacts with social circumstances.

i mean, there seems to be little doubt that testosterone affects human behavior in all sorts of ways, many of them measurable on a statistical/demographic scale.

yeah, i'm pretty over "can't we all just be friends??/agree to disagree??" when it comes to certain issues

― obliquity of the ecliptic (rrrobyn), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 3:59 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

oh, i know. was hoping this wasn't one of them. and i sort of wish people on ILX were more inclined to accept certain kinds of dissent, but i suppose that if they were, it wouldn't be such a brilliant and hospitable place...

Wait, so high-testosterone males are stable extraverts who engage in antisocial and risk-taking behavior?

but seriously, oh what a world it would be if we could all voice our opinions and then use rigorous scientific method-like analysis to call bullshit on the ones that don't serve the whole
xps
hm

obv i'm not talking about quantitative science itself there BUT choosing to fund certain projects could be determined in such a way. i'm being a socialist now tho with this line.

Science is the only known corrective for the limits of human cognition. No matter how discomforting the truth of what it reveals, we must abide by its findings until better findings come along.

lol

Wait, so high-testosterone males are stable extraverts who engage in antisocial and risk-taking behavior?

― happiness is the new productivity (Hurting 2), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 4:04 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

"stable" in that they're consistently extroverted, yeah

banaka otm, posthuman future now plz

I don't quite know how to posit this without sounding suuuper airheaded, but I'll try...

I know that menstrual synchrony is kinda dismissed as hogwash hearsay, but I've always wondered if hormonally certain groups/types of people (and types could even mean on a chemical level, I'm not sure)...if there's ever some kind of...'hivemind' way that gender can manifest. Whether it's in male violence for example.

And I'm not discounting behavioural choice here. I don't quite know what I'm suggesting. But I'm just wondering about all the ways that 'typically' male/female behaviour come out, and if we all have the same kind of stew, as gbx, described it, if there's ever circumstances where certain behaviours might seem to manifest innately?

I'm kind of lost in my own question now so I'll pull the chute and apologize in advance for being so hilariously nebulous

i think it's been proven that humans are social creatures and that yes 'hivemind' exists to a certain extent! it's the only way to explain the popularity of reality tv anyway

and other things that groups of people like

^ science

science rules

it's like magic

science, how does it work

bunsen burners are involved iirc

we're gonna need some of those big glass beakers. Where's Walter White when you need him.

hey, things have chilled back down over here. nice. anyway, i dunno about the idea of gender groups becoming one. i do notice that if i'm watching sports with a bunch of guys who like sports, i find that i can easily sink in and enjoy the game. i get caught up in the action, work to figure out the details, even commit emotionally to my team. if i'm on my own, however, sports are the most boring shit in the universe. don't think i do this anywhere near as much with groups of girls.

in other words, my self is socially dependent, is redefined constantly by my social environment. this extends to stuff like gender and even my body. who and what i am are not by any means constant.

which i guess = VGrrl OTM

Just FYI, I'm caught up with both the feminist and gender threads. I think I should win an award for that.

don't be so competitive, man

don't think i do this anywhere near as much with groups of girls.

You don't know the same girls I do. I've watched the last two World Cups and the last two Euros w/a group of women

i get caught up in the action, work to figure out the details, even commit emotionally to my team.

Why do you think I'm into soccer?

lol nearly xp w MW

girls.

Well, to be fair, it was in opposition to "guys".

Not saying it's not a blunder, but...

Note how I both echoed contenderizer but shifted to ladies women.

Why do you think I'm into soccer?

b/c you're an Anglophile?

You have to admit to the eye-candy aspect, Laurel

The only eye candy aspect that interests me is cuet skinheads also watching the game tbh. The players? Tscheh.

Except for Agger obv.

LOL

The only part of the last WC that my gf cared two cents about was the daily post in Jezebel of the best abs or thighs or something.

That thing is so fuckin annoying.

This is undoubtedly sexist as hell of me but I also like watching w/my ladyfriends 'cause I get all the dirt on the WAGs.

I'm a little ashamed to say that her present fb crush is none other than the Special One. De gustibus, etc...

No, I meant my experience is exactly like contend's: I like other people liking the game. I like the tacit permission to let go and feel something that other people are sharing. That's it. My complete intro to soccer as a thing was with a bunch of Americans who were absolute maniacs for it, no public scene was too large, crying after the game was de rigueur win or lose. I still feel this.

i do notice that if i'm watching sports with a bunch of guys who like sports, i find that i can easily sink in and enjoy the game. i get caught up in the action, work to figure out the details, even commit emotionally to my team. if i'm on my own, however, sports are the most boring shit in the universe.
...
in other words, my self is socially dependent, is redefined constantly by my social environment.

this is so alien to me. i think of my sense of self as way too hard-won to be so malleable. ha, the last conversation i had along these lines was with kelly clarkson (she agreed with me)

i agree, laurel.

and lex, it's not malleable, exactly - there's no bending w/r/t perception or cognition, but rather a heightened empathy for Human Achievement or shared spectacle or common experience. kind of akin to good times at a bad movie, b/c the rest of the audience finds it equally hilares.

No, I meant my experience is exactly like contend's: I like other people liking the game. I like the tacit permission to let go and feel something that other people are sharing. That's it. My complete intro to soccer as a thing was with a bunch of Americans who were absolute maniacs for it, no public scene was too large, crying after the game was de rigueur win or lose. I still feel this.

― drawn to them like a moth toward a spanakopita (Laurel), Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:30 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This exactly why I like sports most specifically going to actual games. There's something so amazing and electrifying about sharing that buzz and excitement. It's amazing.

I even went to basketball game recently and had a blast specifically because of this. I mean, I know NOTHING about basketball but watching and feeling everyone get so into it made it awesome.

I prefer but don't need society to get into soccer. I don't even need commentary though I like to hear the crowd.

I enjoy football (American) when I am watching it with friends who know more than me – that is most of my friends - and add the value of a soundtrack or emotional pulse and interactivity. fwiw, my mom and aunt are the football fans in my family - my dad could give a rat's ass for any game except competitive ice skating (?).

You know what makes me really angry and could probably either fit somewhere in here or in the IA thread - fan gear made for women that is all pink and rhinestoned and ridiculous. I hate it to the point where if I see some girl/woman wearing that sort of thing I will automatically assume I'd hate her. I realize that isn't necessarily true but the mere existence of that stuff bothers the hell out of me let alone the people that actually by it.

the Patriots / Susan G. Koman stuff is espesh egregious

I am somewhat tired of ppl who say something about a pink shirt. A simple nice shirt/tie combo would be sufficient, if you have to say something, but 'brave', 'gay, wink, wink' and 'in touch w/my feminine side' are perfectly ludicrous.

communal experiences enhance stuff i already like but if it's something i don't enjoy on some level already, i'm either gonna be left cold or just be annoyed if i have to endure it with other people. football is a very good example of that

It's so patronizing to 'feminize' sports gear as if a fan wouldn't wear the normal color scheme. Come to think of it, I know lots of normal American women who wear Am fb shirts on Sundays.

It's incredibly patronizing. I work right by Fenway Park so see a lot of basball fans during the season and (I mean I guess this is why they make it) but lots of women love that stuff! It's amazing to me how much of it is sold/worn. I HATE IT. /rant

If there's anything that cheapens, it's friggin rhinestones.

"I like shiny things!"

somebody's not getting a vajazzler for x-mas

Where is zora to haul us back around by the head to an actual gender discussion? I want to know more about that book.

I am somewhat tired of ppl who say something about a pink shirt. A simple nice shirt/tie combo would be sufficient, if you have to say something, but 'brave', 'gay, wink, wink' and 'in touch w/my feminine side' are perfectly ludicrous.

― le ralliement du doute et de l'erreur (Michael White), Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:45 AM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

How about 'fratty fratty bo-batty'?

I'm just starting to wind down my day at the office. I'll try and make myself post something before I run for the car.

those aren't rhinestones, michael, they're swarovski crystals.

Zora's thoughts on Delusions of Gender (Cordelia Fine, 2010)

1. The Introduction

This is the 'why I wrote this book' story and hurrah! Fine was obviously as furious about Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus as I was, and SHE actually got off her arse and wrote the riposte I only dreamed of writing.

She starts off by quoting a lot of deterministic accounts of the male-brain female-brain dichotomy. Books like The Female Brain, Why Gender Matters, Leadership and the Sexes and What Could he Be Thinking? Quotes like this, from the first in the list:

Maneuvering like an F-15, Sarah's female brain is a high performance emotion machine - geared to tracking, moment by moment, the non-verbal signals of the innermost feelings of others.

The thrust of these texts, as we probably know or could guess, is that women are hard-wired to be good at one set of things and men at another. Although Simon Baren-Cohen, when talking about 'male' and female' brains doesn't say that only men can own male brains, he has nevertheless chosen to use these words as labels for two distinct types of brain that humans can possess. Female ones, good at empathy. Male ones, good at 'understanding and building systems'.

Having read on a bit, though, I think the key reference in terms of the way Fine builds her themes, is this, from 19th century cleric Thomas Gisborne (I have elided the quotes here and the underscores are me summarising Fine, where you'd usually use square brackets but the bbcode won't let me):

The science of legislation, of jurisprudence, of political economy; the conduct of government... the abstruse researches of erudition... the knowledge indispensable in the wide field of commercial enterprise... these, and other studies, pursuits, and occupations, assigned chiefly or entirely to men, demand the efforts of a mind endued with the powers of close and comprehensive reasoning, and of intense and continued application.

_These qualities should be imparted_ to the female mind with a more sparing hand, _because women have less need of such talents in the discharge of their duties... When it comes to performance in the feminine sphere,_ the superiority of the female mind is unrivalled, _enjoying_ powers adapted to unbend the brow of the learned, to refresh the over-laboured faculties of the wise, and to diffuse, throughout the family circle, the enlivening and endearing smile of cheerfulness.

Fine then says, "What awfully good luck that these womanly qualities should coincide so happily with the duties of the female sex."

She's dry; I like her.

Fine then whizzes us through the history of the search for sex differences in the brain, including all that hilar stuff about calipers and scales. Finally, she starts to unpack what she intends to do in the book, which hinges on the idea that our minds, our sense of ourselves, our behaviour and the whole shebang are indeed physical but are not discrete or stable. She says:

...we can't understand gender differences in female and male minds -the minds that are the source of our thoughts, feelings, abilities, motivations and behaviour - without understanding how psychologically permeable is the skull that separates the mind from the sociocultural context in which is operates.

She's talking about self-fulfilling prophecies. Tell people that men are good at systems thinking and women are good at being cheerful & smoothing the menz' furrowed brows, and both women and men will not only believe it (often against their conscious beliefs and best efforts) but will actually become better at those things. And it's not only a cumulative effect that leaves you with a certain set of propensities that are relatively stable, it's dynamic and surprisingly immediate.

Best of all, she does a pretty good job -based on what I've seen in the first chapter-and-a-half - of backing these assertions up with scientific citations. She also seems to have a good grip on what makes good science vs. bad science.

It's bound to be selective, nobody could reflect *all* the work that's been done in the field, but at the moment... I'm inclined to trust her. I would like to be challenged to defend my trust, because it feels too easy; my gut feeling back in 1991 when my uni profs (mostly male) were crowing about 'proven, meaningful' sex-differences in brain function, was that this couldn't possibly be the way the world worked, it went against everything I held dear. I also know that people find it very hard to accept opposing viewpoints no matter how strong the evidence or argument is, and very easy to accept supporting viewpoints even when the evidence or argument is weak.

Anyway, enjoying it v. much. thoughts on chapter 1 later.

that sounds great! and is an excellent summary; thank you!

I am glad you are getting something good out of that book. When I first read it, I wanted to buy a copy for everyone I knew. So clearly written, concise, so properly researched and well-cited - the first place I saw it reviewed was the New Scientist so it holds up under examination.

She talks about self fulfilling prophecies, but she backs it up with loads of studies about e.g. Stereotype Threat, talks about how the control groups were run (and how things like Baron-Cohen fell down on lack of double blind / control group) Obviously you can't have control groups of non-gendered children, but accounting for observer bias is always critical.

Anyway I'll melt away again so no one gets ~put off~ by my presence but I cannot recommend that book (and the developmental science counterpart, Pink Brain Blue Brain) if you are interested in gender and science.

Also you can see the difference between the prose Z quotes and Judith Butler and why I'd rather read the former?

I know what you mean about *wanting* to believe books you agree with, though. When I first read Demonic Males, it felt so truthy, I really wanted to believe its premise - it took some overcoming of mental resistance to accept that it wasn't as straightforward as the author posited (the group of chimps they studied were in a precarious environment, in danger, and being provided with most of their limited food by researchers, while the bonobos were in a much more stable environment - it would be analogous to comparing the behavior of humans in a famine-torn warzone to those in prosperous farmland, and comparing which group of humans were "naturally" violent. Not that we can't learn a lot from primate studies when conducted properly, but there were lots of unaddressed concerns in that book. So that taught me to not believe research just because you *want* to.

re: pink stuff. i'm a guys, so i'll try to tread lightly here, but...

It's incredibly patronizing. I work right by Fenway Park so see a lot of basball fans during the season and (I mean I guess this is why they make it) but lots of women love that stuff! It's amazing to me how much of it is sold/worn. I HATE IT. /rant

― wolf kabob (ENBB), Thursday, February 16, 2012 9:03 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

isn't one of the signals sent by pink/blingy lady fan stuff that "feminine" coded dress & behavior are acceptable in a traditionally male-defined space? i mean, it's not like most "normal" sports gear doesn't very clearly code as "guy stuff". it very strongly does. is it better to implicitly demand that women dress and behave like guys when they're in male space, or to accept that they might want "girly" versions of the costume? i don't think there's a clear answer.

the pink shiny crap seems insulting when we assume that it represents an externally imposed and demeaning expectation or costume, but we could also view it as an assertion of pride in the feminine (however we unpack that word). it's all but impossible to shorthand a group identity without recourse to familiar, shared symbols. i don't really know what i'm trying to say here, except that this shit is really, really complicated, and there doesn't seem to be any clear way to "get it right".

P.S. sorry for "girls" above. i was trying to oppose it w "guys", but if i'd thought it through, i would have chosen my words a bit more carefully.

i think it's more that the pink stuff is...not the team colors so it's weirdly setting female fanhood in a space apart.

Yes, exactly. I got a Pats shirt recently that I'm pretty sure is a women's shirt insofar as that it's cut and sized to be for women but it's red and white and the design is the same as ones on some of the mens' shirts. That's not at all the same as the pink stuff imo.

red and blue - not white

i think it's more that the pink stuff is...not the team colors so it's weirdly setting female fanhood in a space apart.

― horseshoe, Thursday, February 16, 2012 10:58 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

ok, yeah, that makes sense. it's hard to sort out, though, cuz "normal" sports gear is so strongly coded as masculine. it's not just that we think of it as that, but that it bases itself on other masculine coded stuff, and exerts a profound influence on masculine culture as a whole.

do all teams have these? That just seems really weird to me, like, a team's colors are an integral part of their brand, part of their identity, it's almost like it's a different team. I dunno, I just remember being 11 years old and thinking i was so cool for owning a silver & black Raiders hoodie. And now that I live in Oakland, I don't think I've ever seen any femme-y colored Raiders gear.

the idea of wearing pink raiders' gear is particularly tragic. but yeah, pink gear definitely exists for all of the nfl franchises afaik

http://tradebenefit.com/pic/NFL-Oakland-Raiders--2320-McFadden-Pink-Women-Jersey-7316.jpg

was just going to link that which, btw, is called the: 2010 Women's Zebra Field Flirt Fashion Jersey

how you going to mess with the baddest-looking uniforms in the league like that

2010 Women's Zebra Field Flirt Fashion Jersey

― wolf kabob (ENBB), Thursday, February 16, 2012 2:09 PM (19 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lololol

whoa! Have never seen anyone on the street sporting anything like that! Maybe it's a bedroom item?

I bet if you went to a game you would.

i feel like that shit must just not sell to raiders fans. the whole point of being a raiders fan is looking cool y/n?

that's a good question for Veg. Grrl iirc?

I don't know anything about the Raiders so HS may be right but I still you might spot some in the stadium.

i did totally crush on Jim Plunkett when I was 11, so weird.

plus there's a whole line of team-colored tight bedazzled UGHHHH boobalicious tshirts for Raider chicks...I have had the hardest time finding team stuff that I like

but this is kind of a mega derail from
z's observations so...

The workers at my local grocery store are allowed to wear jerseys on game days, and since we have purple down here, the pink and purple mix felt kinda advent-y to me.

no i'm sure you would, i'm just saying if you don't want to be part of the sea of silver and black i would like to sic the ghost of al davis on you

xxp to E

oh sorry I forgot we're not allowed thread derails on ILX

i feel like that shit must just not sell to raiders fans. the whole point of being a raiders fan is looking cool y/n?

― horseshoe, Thursday, February 16, 2012 2:10 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you and i, i think, have different definitions of the word "cool"

I'd go for boobalicious and team-colored though. It's the pink stuff, that's like, wtf?

the whole point of being a raiders fan is looking cool y/n?

― horseshoe, Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:10 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

sure, but "looking cool" is masculine coded, almost without exception. in that sense, pink raiders shit seems kind of awesome.

it's only masculine coded in the sense of the dominance of the "male gaze" - there are male and female coded versions of "looking cool"

you and i, i think, have different definitions of the word "cool"

― max, Thursday, February 16, 2012 2:13 PM (28 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha cool in a mad max-y apocalyptic crazy future pirate way

contenderizer i recognize what you're talking about. i don't have contempt for pink in general. (i have a pink puffy winter coat! it's v kelly kapoor.) i think it's hard to argue against the patronizing nature of pink fan gear marketed to women, though.

but yeah, Raiders fan wear for women looks like it plays to a bad stereotype but the amount of women I see wearing that stuff to games, it's a very weird chicken/egg situation imo

(I didnt want to get in trouble for raider-talk, I was just trying to cover my ass re derail comment, lol)

re: the shirt

you could call it a feminine violation of cool/tough/dudely raiders-ness just as easily as an ostraciziation of women from the team. but yeah, i get horseshoe's point.

like, it just is weird. the whole point of sports fandom is an irrational feeling that you represent the team/are being represented by the team. if you're wearing a pink jersey you're just representing a very rigid notion of femininity?

Veg, are the women wearing the pink shirts, or just blingee silver & black boob-accentuating stuff?

xp I think the subtext is that they assume you don't care about the team.

totes

that is a better way of saying why it's annoying, Laurel, thank you

but you care about yr man who cares about the team!

feel like ally went on an otm/hilarious rant about this in some ilnfl thread of yore.

I honestly dont see a lot of fans at game wearing that much pink bullshit tbh, Raider fans are pretty tribal over the team colors, for the most part

like, it just is weird. the whole point of sports fandom is an irrational feeling that you represent the team/are being represented by the team. if you're wearing a pink jersey you're just representing a very rigid notion of femininity?

― horseshoe, Thursday, February 16, 2012 2:17 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

YES! Also what Laurel said otm.

re: i don't have contempt for pink in general. (i have a pink puffy winter coat! it's v kelly kapoor.) i think it's hard to argue against the patronizing nature of pink fan gear marketed to women, though.

Pink is my favorite color. Looking around my desk just now I saw seven or eight pink things. Not liking those shirts has nothing to do with not liking pink in general.

Who is kelly kapoor?

it's only masculine coded in the sense of the dominance of the "male gaze" - there are male and female coded versions of "looking cool"

― sarahell, Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:15 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

this is true, but masculine cool tends to exaggerate traditionally masculine-coded attributes. feminine cool tends to minimize the traditionally feminine. i.e., most female coded version of looking cool = subtle and not-so-subtle masculinization. implies that the traditionally feminine isn't cool enough to be cool.

haha kelly kapoor is the mindy kaling character on the office

and yeah I was just talking about off the shoulder fitted jerseys & blinged out stuff

see that's what I thought! SF Giants fans seem less tribal (both of these assumptions are based solely on seeing people going to/from games walking down the street/on public transit), but I've never seen pink shit on them either.

also a better example of refiguring masculine cool in sports gear is when ally contemplated belting a huge giants jersey she owned and wearing it as a dress. in some ilnfl thread of yore.

i am not a crazed ally stalker i promise; i just miss her

xp I think the subtext is that they assume you don't care about the team.

― drawn to them like a moth toward a spanakopita (Laurel), Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:18 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

okay, yeah, it puts being a "girl" over being a fan. makes sense.

x-post I hope she did that.

xp Yes.

also is there anything cool about a dude wearing a football jersey? because i live in buffalo i often see men wearing them like, out to dinner on a tuesday night and it's always like, really? i don't think cool is partic important to those guys.

i think the subtext is even worse, because if the woman doesn't care about the team, why is she wearing said item of clothing? Presumably to appeal to a guy. Which is gross in more ways than one: 1. that she isn't appealing enough as herself that she needs to additionally brand herself; 2. the pigeonholing that we've previously discussed

but you care about yr man who cares about the team!

That's totally how I see it. Cringeworthy.

i don't think cool is partic important to those guys.

― horseshoe, Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:24 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

you'd be surprised. cool is v important to guys, and we have LOTS of different ways of constructing it. to many guys, a sports jersey is the height of sartorial coolness.

omg i am not five! i guess i am objecting to the word "cool" but yes, of course wearing a football jersey is a performance of a certain kind of masculinity. i think the guys i am talking about would take pride in their "uncoolness" where "coolness" is read as effeminate.

but please, explain to me more about guys.

football players in jerseys:yes
dudes in throwbacks: yes, kinda
in public or at a bar it's almost a signpost "i will be shitty drunk & shouting later, fyi"

I dont think it's as dorkville as some do, but I like seeing team loyalty anyway

yeah now i feel mean to fellow buffalonians. i say these things affectionately, except for the part about thinking dressing well is kind of gay.

lol @ omg I am not five!

i guess part of my questioning on the pink stuff is this: i see something very interesting and potentially positive in the "culture of girly, glittery pinkness" that seems to have become this huge thing over the last, what, 15 years or so? among other things, it strikes me as an aggressive statement of pride in femininity.

like: "FUCK YOU, i am a GIRL and i can wear whatever the FUCK i want! you don't like pink glittery shit? well FUCK YOU, i LOVE pink glittery shit, and i am going to make my whole fucking life pink and glittery because i am a GIRL and this is what we do. i am PROUD to be a girl, to be "girly", and FUCK YOU if you don't like it."

it seems super tribal to me, and kind of badass. i get that it's also consenting to be defined by an infantilizing and potentially toxic stereotype, but that tension is fascinating in itself. how do you define female culture without being defined by patriarchal expectations? you're either endorsing them (yay, girly shit!) or engaging in something like misogyny (boo, girly shit!).

i think the guys i am talking about would take pride in their "uncoolness" where "coolness" is read as effeminate.

― horseshoe, Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:30 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

okay, but masculine "pride in uncoolness" is just another kind of coolness. it's like hipsters sneering at hipsters.

i guess you could read it that way, as something coming out of the babydoll dresses of RiotGrrl, maybe?

or ugh I hate pink

like: "FUCK YOU, i am a GIRL and i can wear whatever the FUCK i want! you don't like pink glittery shit? well FUCK YOU, i LOVE pink glittery shit, and i am going to make my whole fucking life pink and glittery because i am a GIRL and this is what we do. i am PROUD to be a girl, to be "girly", and FUCK YOU if you don't like it."

Listen, I did this. I did this when I was 18 and I had blue hair and wore steel-toe docs with my baby pink mini skirt. I reclaimed it and wore the shit out of pink. That's not what's going on here. Trust me.

okay, but masculine "pride in uncoolness" is just another kind of coolness. it's like hipsters sneering at hipsters.

hahaha! i know so many guys that do this, but i don't think it's exclusive to guys.

super tribal to me, and kind of badass

It can be but not in the way the majority of the women buying and wearing pin sports stuff are doing so. It's just not. Sorry.

there are intended uses, and oppositional/ironic/whatever uses to consumer goods. I am really reticent to say that every female who wears these pink sports things or glittery pink stuff is doing so with the same frame of mind/intention.

but that brings us back to post-structuralism and critiques of Althusser

not

^^ mistake post

derrida!

/sigh

yeah, i think part of the difference in this discussion is that, as a guy, i'm loath to criticize "girly" type stuff. i figure it just isn't my place. guys going "gross, girl shit!" is nagl. but women have no reason to hold back.

'Cause you're not entitled to an aesthetic opinion?

so did anyone see the daily show bit with Samantha B earlier this week

It's the girl in 'girly type stuff' at which I take offense. If you're 13 and going through a pubescent pink and sparkles phase I may roll my eyes and say nothing but if you're 26 and still playing the girl my response will be less forgiving. I feel the same way about guys. I don't want to derail this from issues of gender but there are a lot of hang-ups we seem to have about being men and women and aging which I find foolish.

i'd be up to discuss gender and aging

when you're old men's balls get soft turn into mush
science

There's a difference between girl shit and girl shit conforming to a toxic stereotype. I like pink, I like sparkles, I loathe the hegemony of disney princess pink sparkles, bows, ruffles and anything that elevates prettiness to basically being the only valuable quality a female person can have.

xxpost gbx yeah I saw it last night. It felt kinda on the nose for me. I dunno. Kristen Schaal's stuff was always pretty on point, but somehow this Bee thing just did not sit right with me at all.

'Cause you're not entitled to an aesthetic opinion?

― le ralliement du doute et de l'erreur (Michael White), Thursday, February 16, 2012 12:34 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

no, because aesthetics are inseparable from the construction of gender, and the masculine dismissal of traditionally feminine things doesn't sit well with me at this point in the development of our thinking abt this kind of stuff. too tied to a long and ugly history of the demeaning of the feminine.

separating the feminine from the childlike does help, but i'm not sure that can be done as clearly as it might seem.

yeah but erica isn't saying "gross, girl shit!", i think she's saying "gross, girls wearing pink/glittery/"raunchy" sports gear to please their men!" or IOW it's cool to wear what you like if you like it, but to wear it bc it pleases men is NAGL. xps to contenderizer

yeah, it's cool for erica (?) to take it however. i was mostly addressing my own reticence to condemn it as a man.

like (and not to open a can of worms) i think "feminism" should mean different things to men than it does to women. a perspective that would be feminist coming from a woman is not necessarily feminist coming from a man, and vice-versa.

I'm sure it does not escape the marketing people that large gatherings of men and women are converging before the game to drink/socialize so in their minds lllllllllllladies will want to be looking as blingy and boobalicious as possible, because, youknow, BOYS!

I think if you make something in a "coded" color, even if you're largely inventing/reinventing the coding by doing so, you can sell twice as many of them once you've convinced oppositionally coded groups that they have to have one or the other.

Which is really my yuck factor on this stuff. Also that I am more man-shaped where shirts are concerned and sexified ones are useless to me.

Contenderizer - I'm the Erica referred to above. Just FYI.

And, yes, just1n3 because in the end, as we sort of worked out collectively, that's what a lot of the pink/sparkly/tight sports stuff really comes down to however much I wish that weren't actually the case.

I tailgate with a couple of other women a bit older than me, and we all have the same complaints about buying fan gear, that it's all either sorta lame boring men's designs, or OTT miami beach nightclub wear.

But even the whole...football milieu?...i'm not sure of the right word...community, I guess...doesn't really handle, or really acknowledge female fans in a good way, i don't think. There's some exceptions, but for the most part you're either there because your boyfriend is, or you're some kind of weird lesbian anomaly or something, idk. There's no communities halfways as cool as I have found ILNFL to be, with regard to dudes and chicks just hanging out talking baout sports. It just doesn't seem to naturally occur out in the regular internets. But I guess that's good, so I never have reason to leave ILNFL.

sorry, tl; dr

pfft, i show you how to tl;dr

because aesthetics are inseparable from the construction of gender

i think this statement warrants a closer look, because while i do not disagree with this out of hand i don't think this is such a simple thing to declare

fwiw, i'm not saying that aesthetics = gender constructions, just that they can't be clearly separated, especially when we're talking about our response to "girly shit"

well, when we talk about "girly shit" re: sports merch, a lot of the time we're talking about the default men's merchandise that's modified in certain ways... rendered in loud colors or patterns; and/or cut to be more form-fitting / revealing / body conscious; or embellished, bedazzled, and decorated

is it a coincidence that a lot of these modifications kinda code as having a class dimension, too?

I think men's sports merchandise codes as having a similar "class dimension" tbh.

Ding ding ding

yeah, true

it depends on the sport and the merchandise

yeah, this is v true. context matters, too. in the US, soccer/futball stuff codes as more elevated than, you know, football.

Fair point:

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01435/henley_1435753c.jpg

like that scene in The Wire where Bunk shows up in a lacrosse t-shirt.

Nothing to see here, I'm just bumping this to remind myself to post my chapter 1 based ramblings.

i think this is a good place to post a link to something emil.y posted to facebook: re women and noise
http://www.splicetoday.com/music/this-is-not-bdsm-it-s-the-destruction-of-women

interesting interview. veldon's criticism of "the destruction of women" as a trope in harsh noise is OTM. that stuff has bothered me for a v long time, and it's heartening to hear abt people in that community working against it.

i read that too, it was interesting and inspiring

Yeah, I for one always wanted Merzbow's Music for Bondage Performance type stuff unpacked; and never trusted Whitehouse (hated the little I heard of their music anyway)...thing is no one seemed to bother to question, it just had this polarising effect (and w/music like that y'know..)

Anyway, good that some moves are being made in more positive directions.

Gotta say the distinction applied between "real" and uh, "unreal" computer based noise is hilarious. Never heard of that one before.

Colour photography isn't art and all that...

she gives an "out" re whitehouse at the end which i agree with, god bless em. xp there are a lot of idiot noisers out there iirc

Zora's reading Delusions of Gender (Cordelia Fine, 2010)

Chapter 1: "We Think, Therefore You Are"

Fine opens the chapter with a quote from Jan Morris, an M2F transexual, which I think bears transcribing, supporting as it does, this business of mutability in the face of expectations -

The more I was treated as a woman, the more a woman I became. I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.

Fine reminds us that we all carry sexual stereotypes around in our heads, regardless of whether we consciously subscribe to them. We can all label traits as masculine or feminine pretty consistently. These associations of course cascade all over the place, without you knowing it's happening. (Fine doesn't go the mechanics of implicit association, but of course it is no surprise as it is well established as just being how the brain works - most of what goes on happens without conscious awareness, and language processing in particular involves a lot of pre-conscious priming that is very amenable to study.)

Anyway, back to gender. So - if everything we are exposed to our whole lives goes into building up this network of associations, and the associations all very in terms of strength, and recent exposure carries more weight that less recent etc. etc. (this is really cool stuff & I would recommend reading around it if you're interested in psychology), it's even less surprising that images of people doing stuff - Fine uses women doing the hoovering in adverts as her example - feed into our mental construct of what it means to be female, at a level that is utterly beyond our control.

She cites a study demonstrating that women in two colleges in the US, one co-ed and one women's only, started and finished their studies with the same explicit (self-reported) beliefs about women in leadership positions. However, the women in the co-ed school became slower at pairing words denoting leadership with words denoting female, and the women in the single-sex school got quicker, indicating that their implicit understanding of gender roles had been altered by their experiences.

(This ties in with stats showing girls tend to do better in all-girls schools at secondary level too, where boys do better in mixed schools, something that would give me a real dilemma if I had a daughter.)

As mentioned in the intro discussion, one's sense of self - I won't barter definitions of self here - is also dynamic and malleable. We adapt according to context. As Fine puts it, we have a range of self-concepts from which choose among in our "Wardrobe of Self." She says:

With a particular social identity in place, it would not be surprising if self-perception became more stereotypic as a result.

She goes on to back this up with some studies that demonstrate that even something so apparently innocuous as asking people to tick a box indicating M or F at the beginning of a questionnaire changes their responses to be more in line with sexual stereotypes.

Skipping, skipping... the next bit that grabbed me was the study about imagination / empathy in which people were shown photos of different people and asked either to write 'a day in the life of' in the 3rd person or to imagine that they *were* that person and then write 'a day in the life of' from a 1st person POV. After this exercise, people's self-ratings of their *own* characteristics changed to be more in line with the character's. People writing from the POV of an athlete felt themselves more athletic, people writing a cheerleader felt themselves sexier, etc. Apart from scaring the shit out of me b/c I am writing a story about a hugely dislikable, emotionally and creatively stunted, misogynistic junkie right now, this is brilliant. It shows that asking people to put themselves in someone else's shoes for a bit actually works, and as Fine points out, such exercises can help us to take on challenging roles; "'Fake it til you make it' gains empirical support."

So our ideas about and associations relating to gender (& race, age, frogs and stones for that matter) are flexible, adaptive. Our self-concept is also flexible and adaptive. She's going to go on to examine the knock on effects on behaviour. To close the chapter:

No doubt the female and male self can be as useful as any other social identity in the right circumstances. But _this_ is not the same as 'hardwired'. And... we find that what is being chalked up to hardwiring... starts to look more like sensitive tuning of the self to the expectations lurking in the social context.

I hope this is of some value and not tl;dr for everyone. Really it would be best if all y'all bought the book, or others in this area so we could have a proper debate.

And I should point out that whilst our ideas about and associations wrt stones are flexible, I am aware that there is in fact an objective reality wrt stones that does not seem to apply to gender in any meaningful way.

So, does this set any bells ringing with anyone, or so far so obvious?

Yeah, I for one always wanted Merzbow's Music for Bondage Performance type stuff unpacked; and never trusted Whitehouse (hated the little I heard of their music anyway)...thing is no one seemed to bother to question, it just had this polarising effect (and w/music like that y'know..)

see, I think EV's defense of Whitehouse is OTM. There's a sense of humor/irony behind their aesthetic that seems pretty blatant to me compared to some newer noise musicians who flirt with the same imagery & are a lot more serious about it.

I hate ILX.

sorry?

I thought it was ok to respond to an earlier discussion.

yeah just kidding <3 ILX. just a bit of a whump! after taking an hour to write that big post up there.

I completely hear you, Zora. This is my frustration, this sense of banging one's head against a wall, and why I can't do these conversations any more.

That people on ILX looooooove to discuss their ~opinions~ about what it all means when it comes to gender (and lots of other subjects) but when it comes to discussing what is experimentally known and confirmed about gender (i.e. very little, and how slippery and un-rock-like and guesswork it all is) it's just... not so interested.

But perhaps it's just confirmation bias, on both sides, I don't know.

I'm appreciating your summaries of this because, like I said, I found it a very interesting and possibly life-changing (definitely mind-changing) approach to the subject, and I just wanted other people to read it and see, did they draw the same conclusions about the book as I did. And you seem to be doing so.

people writing a cheerleader felt themselves sexier

So depressing.

Or maybe you just posted a dense, long post in the middle of the workday and no one has responded to it an hour later! I just finally read your post after loading it half an hour ago and then getting sidetracked by (gasp) my job. I think this pull to contextualize unfulfilling (or not yet fulfilled) ILX expectations as somehow being embedded in the same dynamics of gender + sex as the content being discussed is a dead-end.

Fwiw, the question of sending my daughter (when she's old enough) to an all-girls school has been on my mind a lot, especially because that was the default in the community I grew up and we've had studies for a long time about how girls perform better in all-girls schools. IIRC Peggy Orenstein talks about this in Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap. On the other hand, the educational models for all-girls schooling (esp in my community) can bring their own baggage in terms of reinforcing gender roles. In the Yeshiva system, boys learn Talmud (difficult legal exegesis) and girls learn Halacha (practical domestic household law) and Tanach (biblical stories). These things code in other ways too. The very religious girls-only school here doesn't teach Talmud, and the curriculum is heavy on memorization. The co-ed school had a more contemporary pedagogical model, teaches Talmud, etc, but the boys and girls take classes together.

hey guys I'm not uninterested in the discussion I just saw people were talking about Whitehouse and I was like "hey, that's something I can chime in on!" Sorry to continue a tradition of brickwalling!!

S'ok Mordy, crut, it was just a momentary flash of irritation because there was a post itt (Surprised! Excited!) but then it turned out to be an unrelated post (Ow! Disappointed!) I'm over it. And I should be working, too.

Mordy your schooling conundrum does sound like it will be tough to disentangle. Does the co-ed school have good represenation of women at senior levels? Is discipline good? I went to a co-ed school myself, and I have to say I think I have come out of it OK, but it doubtless helped that the staff had a good balance and subject teaching wasn't distributed along gender stereotyped lines. My only problem with it, in retrospect, was that there was a lot of playing up designed to impress members of the opposite sex, and not all the teachers controlled it well.

If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.

from a Sci American blog entry awhile ago when there was a sexism issue with Nature magazine...

It was Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson who, in 1995, first coined the term stereotype threat. It refers to how the knowledge of a prejudicial stereotype can lead to enough anxiety that a person actually ends up confirming the image. Since that landmark paper, more than 300 studies have found evidence for the pervasive negative effects of societal stereotypes.

When it comes to women, studies have shown that stereotype threat is very real. Women are stereotyped to be worse at math than men due to lower test scores. But it turns out that women only score lower when they are reminded of their gender or take the test in the presence of men. In fact, the greater the number of men in the room with a female test taker, the worse she will do. The gender profile of the environment has no effect, however, on women’s verbal test scores, where no such inferiority stereotype exists.

brings back memories of the panic attacks i'd have during calc tests. every time i was faced with a calc test, my brain just freaked out and nothing would make sense. i'd stare at it and feel stupid and get more and more upset. i was good at crying silently tho.

the (woman) instructor talked with me, and, after ascertaining that i knew my shit, gave me extra time. so for the first hour i'd freak and then i'd eventually calm down and get my snot under control, and use my extra hour to take the test. (argh, embarrassing)

i got an a in the class. i would have flunked if the prof hadn't noticed and considered what was going on w/me individually. (despite a pretty big class)

i had some big psychological math/sci issues in school. i was also a biochem major.

omg, this:

Simply reminding girls that they are girls is enough to drive down their math test scores. Even at the age of five, girls will score 15% lower on a math skills test when they perform a gender-reinforcing activity first.

Simply reminding girls that they are girls is enough to drive down their math test scores. Even at the age of five, girls will score 15% lower on a math skills test when they perform a gender-reinforcing activity first.

This is called The Stereotype Threat.

This is a real, documented thing, and I think it's one of those discoveries that should just completely change and reorder not just our perceptions about gender, but about the entire ways that our societies are structured.

That's it's one thing to talk about Privilege as a concept, and quite another to discover the actual methods of how it works and influences behaviour in the real world.

Sorry, I only skimmed Julia's post, you made the same point!

Like, these studies, this concept, it's like a fucking BOMB in terms of why this stuff matters.

Simply reminding girls that they are girls is enough to drive down their math test scores. Even at the age of five, girls will score 15% lower on a math skills test when they perform a gender-reinforcing activity first.

― Also unknown as Zora (Surfing At Work), Wednesday, February 22, 2012 7:53 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is fascinating. are there parallel examples of similar effects for/on other groups, either positive or negative?

Yes, basically any group that has a stereotype about them, positive or negative. It was confirmed with regards to race, that members of racial groups who were reminded of stereotypes about their race - e.g. American stereotypes that Asians perform academically well, African Americans perform badly - showed test results that were more in line with the stereotypes than the test results of people who had not been so reminded.

This ties in with stats showing girls tend to do better in all-girls schools at secondary level too, where boys do better in mixed schools...

i mean, that's one possible parallel, but i wonder if the effect is wholly attributable to the diminishment of female performance, or if there's some corollary effect whereby male achievement is enhanced. looking forward to reading the book anyway...

con, i'm not sure how you parsed that distinction any different from the line that you quoted

It was confirmed with regards to race, that members of racial groups who were reminded of stereotypes about their race - e.g. American stereotypes that Asians perform academically well, African Americans perform badly - showed test results that were more in line with the stereotypes than the test results of people who had not been so reminded.

yeah, that's the sort of thing i was wondering about. not a surprising result, really, but challenging on lots of levels.

con, i'm not sure how you parsed that distinction any different from the line that you quoted

― Mordy, Wednesday, February 22, 2012 8:10 AM (34 seconds ago) Bookmark

well, being unfamiliar w the studies and hearing abt these things only third (or fourth or fifth) hand, i wanted to make sure i knew i was on the right page

"...make sure i knew i was on the right page"

I would love to see how this works along a spectrum of self-confidence among students; those who I always felt conformed most to gender stereotypes were either severely lacking in confidence (troubled families, etc...) or those with almost delusional self-confidence (the jocks and popular girls) but I'm not sure that wasn't just my classes and I'm not sure how to find an effective control. I just know that there were lots of women in my math classes who were as bright and appreciated by the teachers as anybody.

Self-confidence is just one of those nebulous qualities that I'm not sure you could even measure? And also, self confidence in what? Self confidence in one's physical appearance or academic prowess might not be protective against stereotypes involving mathematical ability?

It would be interesting to try to find out what kinds of things *did* provide some kind of measure of protective influence - things like having a female maths teacher for example - and another example that was talked about in the book was the gender of the person handing out the papers and invigilating.

I'm guessing that things like, being repeatedly exposed to examples that went against the stereotype (for example my mathematician grandmother) would have an inoculative effect. The inoculation of being told or shown that the stereotypes didn't apply to you, because some other mitigating factor?

There probably are things that mitigate it, but I'm guessing that "confidence" is just too wide an idea.

Yeah, I agree, yet, I certainly had a feel for it in class as a kid. Some ppl 'kowtowed' to avoid being totally ostracized and some ppl in their youthful ignorance thought that if they were this popular now, they alwasy would be and probably didn't have to try that hard - I presume that in many girls that meant an over-reliance on seduction to the exclusion of other social strategies. I was an outsider after 6th grade in several different ways so I didn't even bother and read my history books.

I had a lot of female science teachers but the only math teacher who ever made me try much was a kind of avuncular figure who I actually spent lunch hours chatting with, though by no means exclusively about math.

I think if I'd had a mathematician grandmother I wouldn't have been so cavalier about math.

I had one mathematician grandmother and one scientist grandmother, so I think I had a lot of early exposure to the idea that gender was what you make it, rather than what the stereotypes of it were. And this is why examples and role models are important.

I'm so ambivalent about that. My feminist stepmother exposed me to a lot of non 'boy's stuff' as a kid and I was kind of explicitly taught not to seek too much to indentify w/characters but with situations, principles and character. I still read mostly Eurocentric history but I ended up naming a cat Boudicca and have a long-standing attachment to Aliénor de Guyenne (Aquitaine).

Role models are very important but so is being able to discern between ppl who look like you who peddle you horseshit and ppl who don't necessarily look like you that are at least trying to find truth and beauty and meaning. Like many things, I imagine it's a spectrum and one needs a bit of both.

OK, I'll clarify that. This is why positive role models are so much *more* important to those people who are at risk of being negatively affected by Stereotype Threat.

For those for whom the Stereotype Threat works in their favour, they may not have need for anything to counteract stereotypes that actually help them.

Wait, are you sure about the latter? I was a white male which surely helped but I was raised by hippyish, working class ppl in relative isolation so when I moved to an affluent suburb at 12, I may not have been selected against based on race or gender but I was some weird, loner dork and I wasn't all that thrilled w/the dominant stereotypes about what was 'manly', 'gay' or 'normal for white ppl' that were all around me since I knew that to conform to them, even for privilege, would be to deny who I was and what I knew to be true.

^ yeah, similar experiences here. helps to keep in mind the kyriarchical complexities. still, no matter what, to be born white and male confers massive privilege, everything else being equal...

...but you *do* need to take into account race, class, status, disability, family life, migration, mental health etc etc before you can talk about any one person's privilige wrt any one other person.

...also, it's great that your gran was able to help you to appreciate people who weren't like you MW, and what WCC said doesn't preclude your experience imo.

Stereotype Threat is not about your conscious perceptions, it's about the unconscious impact of social norms. The fact that I am deeply unhappy about the idea of women being hardwired to be better at language than men doesn't mean that I haven't benefited from whatever confidence boosts this might have given me along the way, all unawares.

...but you *do* need to take into account race, class, status, disability, family life, migration, mental health etc etc before you can talk about any one person's privilige wrt any one other person.

yeah, because everything else isn't equal. hell, local culture and quirks of personality/appearance figure in, too. just saying that our awareness of the complexities shouldn't blind us to the simplicities. self-evident point, i suppose...

xpost

OK that went in a direction that doesn't make sense. Basically the point is that dominant stereotypes *might* have helped you in ways you don't know about.

And as for role models, there's been a lot more written about white men in the history books than p. much anyone else, so however much of an outsider you felt, you might not have had as far to look for an inspiring role model as some people do? Maybe?

I guess I should feel grateful for my family: my dad's father was a math professor who had grown up in rural small town West Virginia and strongly believed in education as a means of mobility and self-fulfillment and thus was quite emphatic about the importance of educational advancement for both my dad and his sister, especially when it came to math. My mom only had sisters. And as an only child, who kinda had to function as both "daughter" and "son," my parents inflicted very minimal traditional gender expectations on me.

So, I don't know if I was even aware of that stereotype as a kid, but definitely as I grew older, I was aware of it, but had no sense of it applying to me.

garg, went to the library to look for a copy of delusions of gender. turns out that there is NOT A SINGLE COPY in the entire tacoma library system, or in those of affiliated institutions/universities/etc. fume gnash rend. requested that they order a copy, so we'll see...

Simply reminding girls that they are girls is enough to drive down their math test scores. Even at the age of five, girls will score 15% lower on a math skills test when they perform a gender-reinforcing activity first.

This is so weird. I'm sure I can genuinely say I never felt this "stereotype" at all in school. Maths and science were always full of clever girls in my school and were always my strongest points - my female best mates and I started trying to program Spectrums when we were kids, it was always just fun although we were aware it was a bit nerdy. Even now all my engineer friends are women. It was only when getting to 'careers guidance' stage, around 14 or so I guess, that people started going on about how yes, girls could be scientists too, that I was aware it was a stereotype. (And my dad's a former engineer and my mum a social worker ... I take after my dad).

I guess the main thing that tells me is that generally I was in my own little world when I was a kid and didn't pick up on a lot of pop culture or societal stuff that most other people just absorbed.

This is really deeply part of the problem, that yeah, trying to get the ideas in books like Delusions of Gender into discourse is like pulling teeth - while I bet that if you tried to get a copy of, say, Women Are From Pluto, Men Are From Outer Space, you would find half a dozen copies in circulation. People are really deeply attached to these stereotypes.

holding on to stereotypes of your own gender/sexuality seems almost like a comfort blanket for some people. it probably smooths certain situations. that, more than anything else, might be the biggest barrier to breaking down those stereotypes.

i had good friends in school who were female and physics/maths-leaning - including the girl widely acknowledged to be top of the year in all those subjects - i don't recall her feeling that being a girl was a barrier in any way. (but then we had a good proportion of female maths/science teachers, including the head of maths who was one of the most brilliant teachers i encountered, and did a lot to coax me through my own maths fear) (and also i genuinely don't recall any sort of pink-princess-girly-girly culture when i was growing up?!). i mean, there are so many environmental factors to consider as well - type of school, location blah blah blah.

also the type of student you are? if you're a straight-As pupil, male or female, you're going to develop an innate assumption that you should be good at every subject even if you don't have a feel for it (like, i stayed in the maths top set throughout school without ever really understanding any of it). if you're a middling student you might feel that your lack of feel for a subject might be down to gender?

hmmm i also just remembered that while many of the maths/science-leaning boys in our school went on to jobs in engineering, that girl i mentioned never did go into academia like she wanted, and is a school teacher now, and i'm not sure she's entirely happy with the way things turned out :/

btw i am enjoying zora's posts but haven't yet been able to take them in *and* formulate a worthwhile response

There honestly wasn't as much pink-princess-girly-girly culture when I was growing up. I know I'm about 10 years older than you, Lex, but I was very much a product of a 70s childhood when my mother's generation were coming from their consciousness raising groups and NOW meetings and actively trying to dismantle gender stereotypes in their own lives, as well as the lives of their kids. I think, on the whole, this was a good thing.

But also, on another level, childhood just hadn't been commercialised in the same way it has now. That there was one set of toys, everyone wore each others' handmedowns and that was that. And now toy companies realise that they can make twice as much money by selling a blue version and a slightly shitter pink version of the same toy, and so this stuff gets actively promoted.

It was one of the things that I noted in those books, that round about the age that kids start to notice that they Has A Gender, they become interested (usually, not always) in figuring out what it is, what it means, and how to (for lack of a better word) perform it. You can nudge kids into accepting gender roles, you can nudge them into wider ideas about gender. Apparently, one of the influential factors in developing ideas about gender is actually whether one has a closely aged sibling of a different gender. (That girls with a brother and boys with a sister tended to be more relaxed about gender roles.)

But yes, individual circumstances certainly play a role - and we're talking about averages, not absolutes here. "An average of 15% drop" can mean that some girls won't drop at all, and some girls will drop by as much as 30%. These things aren't that useful on an individual level because individuals in populations vary, that's what they do.

That yes, I had a protective influence because I had parents that said "your one grandmother was a mathematician, your other was a scientist, one of your great aunts was a code breaker at Bletchley Park, it would be very surprising (and you would bring shame on our family) if you turned out not to be good at maths" and lo and behold, I, too, do if for a living. But that does not mean that the stereotypes don't exist and aren't powerful to people who did not have situational factors like that.

Yeah, I for one always wanted Merzbow's Music for Bondage Performance type stuff unpacked; and never trusted Whitehouse (hated the little I heard of their music anyway)...thing is no one seemed to bother to question, it just had this polarising effect (and w/music like that y'know..)

see, I think EV's defense of Whitehouse is OTM. There's a sense of humor/irony behind their aesthetic that seems pretty blatant to me compared to some newer noise musicians who flirt with the same imagery & are a lot more serious about it.

― Big Mr. Guess U.S.A. Champion (crüt), Wednesday, 22 February 2012 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Can you give me an example of this, btw? At the time I just thought it was a blatant apolitical free for all. Granted, all a very fine line which could get misinterpreted by idiots down the line but if you give 'em rope..

I don't want to derail anybody's discussions, but this seemed like the appropriate thread for this - a great post at Jezebel about gendered marketing of LEGO products, and what happens when you switch the audio on the commercials.

my own personal experience with gender/sci: both parents are highly educated with tons of graduate degrees, working in sci or health. my older sis ended up collecting master's degrees in the sciences. i was expected to excel in sci/math and i did, although i still had enormous anxiety about it. i tested better in sci/math than humanities when i did any sort of standardized testing. but my biggest class problems were always in sci and math. my honors chem teacher in HS used to say that i was really smart but i got in my own way.

i was never consciously aware of any discouragement or implication that i might not be great at sci/math--but it freaked me the fuck out. and i believe that it was partially due to gender bs that i absorbed, although i tried to reject it. (wearing men's clothes, etc)

I had a young cousin once that posted on facebook that she did well on a math test once and it scared her.

been thinking abt gender and expectations of academic performance...

it seems to me that we've seen, over the last few decades, the emergence of new stereotypes regarding gender and things like general intelligence and ability in math/science. in characters like hermione granger and lisa simpson, we see a girl who easily excels her male peers in these areas, but who is comparatively straightlaced and "uptight". the "nerdy girl" is smart and academically accomplished but socially unskilled and often unhappy/dissatisfied. she is a stickler for rules and order, and is often seen as "annoying" by those around her, adults and children alike. she's basically a modern version of "bossy" and/or "goody-goody" midcentury female comic strip characters like lucy (peanuts) and margaret (dennis the menace), but much more sympathetic and clearly "bright".

the emergence of the nerdy girl runs parallel to a much remarked-on shift in american sitcom family dynamics, where adult male husband/father characters over the same few decades have become increasingly childlike, foolish and irresponsible, exaggerating in their television wives the same "straightlaced" and "uptight" rule-enforcing and behavior monitoring characteristics we see in characters like hermione and lisa. the sitcom wife is not typically (ever?) pictured as truly brilliant, especially not when it comes to things like math and science, but she is often, clearly, a good deal more sensibly intelligent than her husband.

in certain respects, the stereotype of the "less smart woman" is perhaps beginning to be traded out for "smarter, but less fun".

i think we've also seen the emergence of an adult version of the nerdy girl character in stereotypical portrayals of the "corporate woman", a character who is typically portrayed as occupying a management position. she is extremely capable, but also rather ruthless and even cruel, a sort of evil twin to the "good" sitcom wife.

a lot of this stuff seems to reflect changing power dynamics in american society, and anxieties about the same.

This trope is at least as old as Jane Austen. It exists, but it's hardly a new development.

yeah, what i was going to say. thinking young maggie tulliver in mill on the floss

yeah, i'm not saying that any of this is newly invented (it's not, obviously), but these sorts of images do seem to have gained a fair amount of cultural prominence in the last few decades. in the states, anyway.

Well actually it was one of the principle objections to female education down through the ages! That educating women to use their minds will make them un-womanly and possibly sterile! This was a classic Georgian to Victorian complaint (I bet you could probably find it as far back as the Classical period.)

yeah, but hermione, for instance, isn't exactly "unwomanly", and lisa clearly vaccilates on that point (probably depending on who's writing the jokes). in these characters and the contemporary sitcom mom/wife, intelligence is, to some extent, positively associated with femininity.

again, not entirely new ("sensible" sitcom wives and "smart, prissy" young girls go back quite a ways), but i see a greater and more positive emphasis on such characters than in the recent past. more thinking aloud than making an argument...

and then there's everyone's favorite manic pixie dreamgirl!

http://www.narth.com/docs/york.html

I need to get back on track with my chapter précis, and then come back and demolish this fucker.

It is very interesting and stuffed with proper citations.

真的

I want to add additional gender options to a form that parents fill in about both themselves and their children. I'm not sure about the best wording.

A colleague who wants to write 'other' and have people write in what they want, but that is 1. not practical for data collation reasons - we need to automatize that - and 2. sounds dismissive to me. Is it? In any case I suspect she is not suggesting this from a place of inclusivity, but I can't be sure.

I suggested adding 'transgender' to the existing 'Male' and 'Female'. Would having just those three options be appropriate? Are there more that should be included? Re the children, another colleague suggested adding 'intersex' but I think parents of intersex children would tick the box corresponding to their child's presenting gender.

Please avoid "Other" at all costs. It's literally Othering as all hell.

The problem with suggesting "transgender" as a gender is that: 1) it erases the difference of M to F and F to M because "transgender" singular is not really the identity, "trans man" and "trans woman" are the identities. and 2) it disregards non-binary genders and 3) specifying out, if you are going to use "trans" you should really use "cis" as well, but that gets into the bad kettle of fish of forcing people to out themselves. There is considerable debate as to what you should call a third gender option. Personally, I like "non-binary" because there are differences between people who identify as "genderqueer" (both) or "agender" (neither) or something else entirely. Most people agree a third or maybe even fourth option is necessary, but there is disagreement on what it should be.

What is more important is how you phrase the question. The problem is, that the most inclusive language you can use "what gender do you identify as?" or "what gender do you present as?" are the questions which will most confuse cis people (also, ending questions with "as" = grammatically clumsy). I'm sure there are resources out there about good ways of phrasing this question, and a third option in an open and inclusive way that doesn't make cis ppl too upset? I will look for some.

Sorry, this is not a good answer, but basically, I'm mostly aware of what options to avoid, rather than what options are preferred.

Sorry for multiple posts, but this just occurred to me... the other consideration is, indeed, why are you asking the question? Because there are circumstances under which you are not looking for the person's gender, you are looking for their sex - very specific circumstances, usually involving medical treatment. In which case, M, F, Intersex would be preferred (and possibly some trans options). If you are just asking about gender, consider why you need to know gender at all.

the other consideration is, indeed, why are you asking the question?

^ not saying this has relevance to ljubljana's situation but lots of places collect info without thinking, I've tried to phase it out of records at previous employers

Thanks, BB, that's extremely helpful. I really like the possibility of having a 'non-binary' option.

Currently there is no question as such - just 'Gender' and a list. I'll give that some thought.

Ogmor, you're right, we always need to keep an eye on whether we really going to use the data. I'd rather not say too much on here about the actual studies, but we're interested in parents' gender because of an interest in how that might correlate with the ways they do specific activities with their children. We're interested in children's gender both for that reason, and because there are established (but small) developmental differences in language and other cognitive development.

OK, that is a perfectly valid and reasonable reason to be interested in gender. (It's the "what gender should we ~market~ to you as" questions that really irritate me.)

Maybe use "non-binary" with some examples ("e.g. agender, genderqueer, genderfluid, bigender") so that cis people don't get too confused? It's too bad you can't use a freetext for gender, but I understand that would make data collection an absolute nightmare.

Why do you keep assuming cis ppl're going to be confused

can you just put a blank space for people to write in whatever they want?

Our first "NOT AAALLLL CIS PEOPLE!!!!" comment. Yay!

Zing

Omg, my co- worker who did not even bother coming to the meeting about re-doing the questions is fighting me on this and directing me to census categories. I suspect religious grounds are behind that. Nnnnnggggg. 20 emails and counting.

Crut - that would be great but would cause us probs with auto-categorizing the data.

Everyone agreed yesterday to change the question, bar the co-worker who skipped the meeting. We just needed to sort out wording. Today no-one except me is responding to her emails saying we mustn't add any other options. Her reasons: (bear in mind we are asking parents as well as children about their gender):

Again, I think g3ender should be m@le/fem@le. If there is a consensus to have third option, which I d0n't think there is, then the third opti0n should just be blank. I don't think w3 are in a position to get into terminology that is p0tentially confus1ng (children aren't usually transg3nd3r and p@rents don't necessarily choose a different g3nder for young childr3n). It becomes too pol1tical as well.

I responded to that by saying I disagree but would go along with the results of a vote, so please let's have show of hands. No-one responded, and the person trying to get the new questionnaire together has now asked our supervisor to decide. I think I know which way it'll go, unfortunately. I could still be wrong.

How is gender manifest? Should gender be understood as entirely cultural? For example, I think of gait and voice as associated with gender. While both are associated with the body, I think of the former as an understanding and the latter as a given.

gender pronouns for consideration as a possible set: you (en), one (en), on (fr)
Are there other language equivalents that are as impersonal as possible?

In languages with neuter gender, can you use neuter pronouns after your name and what does it mean when you do this?

Sweden introduced a gender-neutral pronoun last decade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hen_(pronoun)

xp: i don't really know what you mean, neuter as a grammatical gender and gendered pronouns (as prominent in english) are not really related

this might be of interest (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_pronoun#Gender)

many languages do not distinguish female and male in the third person pronoun.
Some languages have or had a non-gender-specific third person pronoun:

Malay (including Indonesian and Malaysian standards), Malagasy of Madagascar, Philippine languages, Māori, Rapa Nui, Hawaiian, and other Austronesian languages
Chinese, Burmese, and other Sino-Tibetan languages
Vietnamese and other Mon–Khmer languages
Igbo, Yoruba, and other Volta-Niger languages
Swahili, and other Bantu languages
Haitian Creole
Turkish and other Turkic languages
Luo and other Nilo-Saharan languages
Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and other Uralic languages
Hindi-Urdu
Georgian
Japanese
Armenian
Korean
Mapudungun
Basque
Persian

Some of these languages started to distinguish gender in the third person pronoun due to influence from European languages. Mandarin, for example, introduced, in the early 20th century a different character for she (她), which is pronounced identically as he (他) and thus is still indistinguishable in speech (tā). Korean geunyeo (그녀) is found in writing to translate "she" from European languages. In the spoken language it still sounds awkward and rather unnatural, as it literally translates to "that female".

I know from personal experience that Chinese or Turkish speakers that have come to English (or, for instance, Dutch) later in life sometimes tend to exclusively use 'he' for the third person, regardless of the particular person's gender (or in some cases throw in a random 'she' sometimes, again regardless of the actual gender).

Thanks for the link and sorry for the possible confusion. I think what I mean, and sorry for working this out here, is this: if gender in language is used to convey the gender of a person, in a language with a neuter gender, what does it mean when you put neuter gender pronouns with slashes in between in parentheses behind a name?

Are there always male and female versions of nouns for gendered species in languages with gender and if there is not would it be wrong to use the masculine or feminine to refer to an instance that is not masculine or feminine respectively?

(where gender identity is an issue and needs to be conveyed in language, I think it would be best to mark (recognize, signal, announce) in the first and second person.)

(or first is where when has authority and second is where it is a priority to mark for communication and third is where what does not need to claim any knowledge)

(third is where one does not need to claim any knowledge but perhaps being able to refer presumes knowledge in which case all persons bear responsibility)