I’m low key annoyed about the whole “it’s a social construct” to mean “it’s not real”. Social constructs are real as fuck and they can fuck you up good.
The economy is a social construct. Days of the week are a social construct. I still need to show up to work on Monday morning so I can give my socially constructed fiat currency to the grocery shop in order not to fucking starve.
Some people push it like that, but that’s not really what the observation is about. It’s meant to highlight that it’s not preordained. Life is mostly made up and we should learn to acknowledge that openly. Especially when aspects of that made-up-ness actively oppress people
I’ve socially transitioned and I can safely say it’s like going through a portal into a different dimension.
I mean it’s a bit like saying software is just 1s and 0s. Ya great but I still need to run Krita to draw.
What bothers me is when people use that argument to advocate for replacing ‘constructs’ which evolved more or less naturally over tens of thousands of years, even before the dawn of civilization, with something deliberately engineered by individual humans. Is a cis-normative nuclear family the only way that it’s possible to live? Of course not, but it’s also what the vast majority of the population wants in their lives, which is why it’s the standard.
This is patently absurd. For one thing, the nuclear family itself is not currently what the vast majority of the population wants; if you look at the global population, both now and historically, the extended family is dominant. I might as well argue that children abandoning their parents and home is an unnatural construct, that’s replacing the ‘tribal’ way of living that was natural for humans for millennia. I could further argue that (since the nuclear family only became the most common type in the US in the 1960s and 70s), it was done in corporate interests to sell more cars and suburban houses, and that it is in fact YOU that is slobbering all over corporate cock.
But I wouldn’t make that argument, because it’s reductive and, frankly, a bit silly to let a narrative take the place of actually reading some sociological studies.
You might enjoy reading some analysis into how capitalism requires the nuclear family in some ways
It’s a very interesting article. I broadly think its argument is sensible, but there’s a couple of places I’d offer some dissent:
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I think the idea of greater socialisation of child raising is framed as avoiding turning back the clock to a time when the nuclear family was stronger. I’d disagree with this framing of the suggestion; in many ways this is a return to tradition. Capitalism and the autonomy it represents has led to a loss of the kinds of community the author is describing. It has allowed the destruction of the ‘village’ in the idiom ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. There is now enough wealth for parents to leave the extended family and the local community to form their own, isolated nuclear family, which I personally think can be damaging for children’s socialisation.
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I think the author makes a good point about ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ as identies having the space to exist as subcultures with the greater autonomy afforded under capitalism, but I would take issue with the suggestion that queer identities are only able to exist as a result of capitalism. There are numerous examples of historical transgender and homosexual identities, not just behaviours (e.g. two-spirit people in Native American culture).
Overall I think it’s an interesting narrative and a good point about the distinction between homosexual behaviour and desires, and queer identity.
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Thanks – I’m familiar with some of Engels’ analysis on it, but will have a look at this. Seems interesting!
But I wouldn’t make that argument, because it’s reductive and, frankly, a bit silly to let a narrative take the place of actually reading some sociological studies.
I think if “you wouldn’t” make that argument, because it’s reductive, then you should refute it, after you have spelled out the narrative in your comment. I would appreciate that. Or just point me in the right direction idk that might be good enough.
My personal view is that you should always be wary of people asserting “this is how it is”. We’re in a science sub; we know that the purpose of a hypothesis is to rigorously attempt to disprove it and find counterexamples.
To discuss an area that I know some specifics about and can be more confident on: the historiography of the French revolution. Starting with George’s Lefebvre, the Marxist historians had a clear idea of what the revolution represented: a movement from the feudal mode of production to the capitalist, and so while their work is incredibly important and academically worth studying, they also tend to go into their work with a clear idea of what they wanted to find. So when the revisionists (starting with Cobban) come along, they find a lot of inconsistencies; the facts of the period don’t directly align with what the Marxist narratives wanted it to be (e.g. Cobban’s disagreement is that he thinks the feudal mode was near extinct by the time of the Revolution, and that it was more a political conflict than social).
Bringing it back to your question: I disagree with the narrative I put because I think reductive narratives aren’t helpful, and cause us to miss a lot of nuance. The nuclear family was dominant in England from the 13th Century onwards, but to leave it there misses a host of interesting social structures and changes (e.g. the role of the church and monasteries as social institutions that exist wholly separate from the family). Moreover, I don’t think it’s helpful to use the past as a suggestion for how we should build our future. The ‘return to tradition’ that’s suggested often has an idealised view of the past that misses all this nuance. The narrative around ‘ancient greek masculinity’, for instance, conveniently misses off their ideas around pederasty, which we perceive as abhorrent today.
As for reading, Foucault on how we like to categorise everything is quite interesting. If reading isn’t your cup of tea, the Thinking Allowed podcast from the BBC has an episode on Foucault that covers him that’s worth listening to.
That’s a huge strawman jk. We really just want the hets to stop trying to harm/kill people that are different from them.
TEH GAYS WANT TO DESTROY THE FAMILY is vintage homophobia and really needs to go jk.
We really just want the hets to stop trying to harm/kill people that are different from them
I know very well that this is what the majority of people want, but bad actors attempt to take advantage of the situation with bullshit, like DEI initiatives, which are really only thinly veiled plots to maximize profits that hurt people who just want to be left alone by weaponizing their lifestyles for political gains.
DEI initiatives, which are really only thinly veiled plots to maximize profits
How do they make a company more money? Is it that it makes them more morally acceptable to buy from, giving them a larger audience? I always thought that the common argument against DEI, and shit like it, was that some morally neutral omnipotent objective third party somewhere wouldn’t be able to hire all of the extremely highly qualified straight white men, and would be forced to hire everyone else who are by implication, less qualified, and that would tank productivity metrics.
Edit: which, by extension, ruins the economy, something something yadda yadda crushes western civilization, because now every company is run by some trans woman that wears programming socks, and has replaced everyone with a highly efficient system of different spreadsheets, connected to one another in some sort of chain, which generates free energy.
Studies done by Amazon and others show that diverse groups of workers are less likely to unionize. Other studies show workplace education on things like unconscious bias and racism actually increase our awareness of the differences between us and not in a good way.
Make of that what you will.
The big problem facing the corporate world is that they’re running out of space to expand, and so the new rage is all about rearranging what already exists into a more profitable configuration. The big hurdle to this is that we already have large segments of society which are arranged socially for the benefit and enjoyment of the population instead of maximizing profit metrics.
so the idea is basically that they’re using DEI to restructure corporations along like. profit metrics, right? sort of along the same lines as laying off the lower 10% of your workforce every year or whatever stupid thing that it is, which I’ve just been reminded of in a different lemmy post. so is the idea that DEI would basically just provide like a socially acceptable, progressive lens for that process to function through?
you know, that sounds more like you just dislike how corporations work, more than you dislike, necessarily, the idea of DEI initiatives. Like, if DEI initiatives were applied to a less flawed university system, to get more diversity in tech sectors at the beginning of someone’s journey into those sectors, at the beginning of their journey into capability and compoetence, would that be, would you speak out against that, or would that be acceptable? I guess what I’m asking is, is it the framework of the system which is flawed, or is it this specific piece that you’ve called out as flawed, which is flawed? because it seems like the framework of the system, to me.
I also would like to point out that this POV doesn’t really speak out against the narrative that like. if we get rid of/hire in their stead, all the capable straight white men everything, that would be bad. here’s the point of what I’m saying, I guess. basically, right, if DEI initiatives are applied just to new hires, that would be fine, right? it’s just that other people are getting fired, and then they are churning through people, and using DEI to launder that. if that’s the case, you should probably, instead of calling out DEI and lumping that in, right, you should be calling out the churn, and calling out the fact that corporate likes to restructure everything every five years to get more short term performance indicators out of it for stockholders.
the DEI is maybe a way to launder that, but people, on hearing you disagree with that, are probably going to think more along the lines of “this guy is calling out DEI because he hates X kind of people”, as most people who disagree with it do. what you would need to do is establish credibility first, with the preceding opinion, and then make sure that other people understand the perspective you’re arguing from, since they will tend to assume the worst. by having DEI be the main point of contention, corporate has gotten another benefit out of it, which is that now everyone’s arguing about stupid bullshit instead of arguing about how it sucks that we’re all driven around at the behest of bean counters and their rich gambling addicted lords.
So DEI is DESTROYING TEH FAMILY now?
You need to l lay off the glue jk.
Why are you ending* every sentence in jk
That’s his name. I’m talking to him, zal.
Hah, wondered too, usually jk = just kidding :-)
DEI is a corporate initiative designed to restructure society so it can be more easily commodified and monetized, with a crudely drawn rainbow on it so that people will defend it like these corporate entities are somehow your friends.
Why is everyone obsessed with DEI all of a sudden? Is DEI the new thing to be mad at or something?
Did y’all move on from 15 minutes cities and political correctness?
It’s just one simple example of current corporate culture that most people will understand.
CORPORATIONS ARE NOT YOUR FRIEND
How convenient of you to ignore not only a much bigger chunk of human history than the last couple thousand years (if even that), and so so many cultures that aren’t the handful you’re familiar with, but also all of the vast systemic social man made influences that make it that way, like religion, patriarchy, and even capitalism…
That’s what people do because they were told so.
God has an elephant head and loves pancakes?
Thunder comes from Thor hitting, … Clouds with his hammer?
You go to geaven/hell if you do this don’t…
…
It’s just what many peoples software run on, because that was how they were taught/indoctrinated from birth and they didn’t really have the need to break out of it. And well, if it works it might do it for them, the problem is they might think your life/lifestyle is the wrong way to live.
That’s what people do because they were told so.
Nah, man, I happen to think that women are amazing and the idea of living with a woman who loves me is pretty damn cool.
I’m not talking about love, but the artificial idea that when you found someone, then you must stay with them “forever” and other things christian marriage enforcing.
I’m not certain that I possess the linguistic ability to adequately express the full magnitude of my feelings on this matter. Sharing my entire life with this wonderful, magical, creature who loves me back, is exactly what pushes my buttons. Nobody has to enforce that upon me.
Sure, and that applies to LGBT+ too, and also if the fire vanes.
How come you’re defending something deliberately engineered by individual humans recently, right after saying that behaviour bothers you?
What bothers me even more is that for a lot of these subjects they’re keen to tear it down, but don’t have anything to replace it. People are creatures of order, and patterns. We can’t operate effectively as a society without structure, and mutual understanding.
Who is “they” anticorp? Tell me, who wants to destroy the nuclear family?
Immigrants and trans people! Obviously.
/s
I want to destroy the social construct of reality and replace it with tolerance.
Babies do not have gender, because baby minds aren’t developed enough to understand that kind of social construct. A baby’s gender is both a social construct AND not real.
I’d love to go to that kind of party, where rainbow cake is served along with a slice of anthropological oration. But even though I’m gay (and therefore supposed to accept every odd idea that comes along, apparently), I’m not sure gender is a “social construct” alone. There are so many other things that can play into it including hormones and body image and psychological stuff - yet I still feel it was so much easier and breezier when we could just call ourselves men or women or he or she. *(not that I’m against people calling themselves whatever else they want).
Oh! I’m going to present the following in good faith.
You’re referring to sex. Sex is biological, gender is a concept. Sex is related to your hormones and your healthcare and what’s in your pants, but the idea of masculinity or femininity being tied to specific behaviors or clothes is a social construct. (Gender.)
IE; I’m a woman. Very much a woman. Super secure in that. I’ve got all the parts, enjoy having them. When I go to the gym or when I drink my cousins under the table or when I work on a car, those things shouldn’t be tied to an idea of being masculine, because I’m not suddenly more masculine for doing them. I’m definitely still a woman the whole time. That’s the difference here, is that there’s a concept of gender which is different than sex.
I’m not sure your explanation really argues that gender is entirely a social construct. You identify strongly as being a woman. It doesn’t matter how many things you do that society views as masculine. You innately feel like a woman. So it isn’t an identity that society really defines. There’s something more to it.
What if we swap “gender” for “cool”? I think it’s pretty inarguable that’s a social construct. I think I’m cool, and while walking around in socks and sandals isn’t cool, I know I’m cool nonetheless.
Yes, gender is inherently associated with sex, and correlates with it the majority of the time, but it’s not defined by it. This is similar to driving and being an adult - most adults drive, and most drivers are adults, but some grow up on farms, driving as kids, others live in live in accessible cities and never get their license.
Baby sex parties all around!..
Yeah, unfortunately the wide use of sex ruins it when dealing with babies and reveals. There’s a reason people use gender and not sex for those parties lol.
Sex reveal party!
Gender reveal party!
Baby sex reveal party!
Baby gender reveal party!
The joys of linguistics.
Of course it’s not devoid of the effects of sexual dimorphism. It’s just that how one’s sex determines societal roles and stereotypes (a closer definition of gender), shouldn’t be so rigid and unmovable.
I agree we need to move beyond stereotypical old fashioned ideals of what is feminine or masculine, those have always been so narrow and actually many times were totally lies. I hope we can embrace sometime the idea that we’re all people with multitudes of possibility and behavioral traits, and we are all full of change and huge potential.
Body image and psychological stuff still fall under societal influence rather than biological influence, and the hormones we produce are fundamentally a sex thing, not a gender thing.
Something being a social construct doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a tangible influence on how people feel, it just means that it isn’t based on intrinsic biological fact. What constitutes being a “man” or a “woman” differs between cultures and between people, it is often tied to biology because of societal expectations and association, but it doesn’t actually come from biology. Something like pink being a girl’s colour or women wearing makeup or men drinking beers instead of daquiris, those are all arbitrary performances people put on based on what society tells them men or women should do. Even the pronouns he/she were invented, some languages don’t have gendered pronouns by default like English does. None of that comes from biology, biology doesn’t tell us what pronouns we use or what we should wear.
I agree with you totally. There are more factors in gender than just body image or genetics alone. Also I wonder - what happens if you’re a girl in western society, but you don’t like the color pink? When you go to Toys 'R Us, doesn’t it feel weird that all the girls toys are pink and in pink boxes - but you don’t see boys toys in blue boxes or just with one predominant color.
(That’s appropo of nothing, just something I’ve been wondering about for awhile).
Wow careful with that logical thinking buddy, we don’t like that here \s
Careful with them thar backslarshes, city boy, this ere is furwudslash country.
Actually, we should go the other way and have more reveal parties for other genetic traits, and elevate them to the same level of perceived importance as apparent biosex! Let’s have blood type reveal parties! Joint mobility reveal parties! Relative nose and eye position reveal parties! Relative limb length reveal parties! Roof of mouth topology reveal parties! Single nucleotide polymorphism reveal parties!
Sex, like all genetics, is way more important to how people turn out than people give credit for lol. That’s beyond the cheating route and using strictly physical differences. Height, weight, puberty, etc.
It’s kinda like the back swing to people complaining that parents should be lynched for something their children do. The Sins of the Father runs both ways. People really don’t like to think that the genetic roll of the lottery can give you a serial killer though. The entropy of life is a hard thing for pattern seeking humans to deal with.
Boys and girls are different, but most psychological sex differences are modest in size. For example, gaps in verbal skills, math performance, empathy and even most types of aggression are generally much smaller than the disparity in adult height, in which the average five-foot, 10-inch man in the U.S. is taller than 98 percent of U.S. women. When it comes to mental abilities, males and females overlap much more than they differ.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-differences-in-boys-and-girls-how-much-is-inborn/
Helicopter or hands-off parenting? The choice won’t impact a kid as much as you think
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1193176710
Lots of evidence going back and forth regarding how male / female brain structure has an influence on gender incongruence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_gender_incongruence
Brothers and fathers of men convicted of sexual offences are up to five times more likely to be convicted of sexual offences than men in the general population, a new study shows. Genetic factors were found to make a substantial contribution to this increased risk with the shared family environment having a relatively small influence.
https://www.psych.ox.ac.uk/news/sex-offending-genes-more-important-than-family-environment
Contemporary research in neurobiology (a branch of science that deals with the anatomy,[9] physiology, and pathology of nervous system) of addiction points to genetics as a major contributing factor to addiction vulnerability. It has been estimated that 40–60% of the vulnerability to developing an addiction is due to genetics.[10][11]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction_vulnerability#Genetic_factors
Aberrant brain activity in pedophilia links to receptor distribution, gene expression, and behavior
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00105-0
A good read about how the cards can be stacked against people from the moment they’re born. You might still end up with a winning hand, but it’s just that much harder.
Minor Physical Anomalies and Congenital Malformations
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00940/full
All men are created equal is the biggest lie there ever was. I wonder if there will ever be such a thing as genetic equity.
Sex, like all things, matters. How much you attribute to it can vary anywhere from 0 to 100 due to what you get stuck with in your DNA. Sussing out those nuances is going to takes us decades to centuries still.
Nature probably has way more control over nurture than we would like to think. It’s much easier to look down on others in disgust than compassion though and I’m a much bigger optimist and advocate for understanding others than Lemmy likes lol. I’m also for free will over determinism both philosophically and through quantum physics… but sex, something genes are very much tied to, matters.
Blood type? I blame that for how much mosquitos like me, besides oily ass skin.
E: More sauce and tidbits.
Oddly I think parties like this would be more beneficial to the child.
If my parents had thought to have a joint mobility party for me, then maybe my hip joint deformity would have been found in infancy, when it’s treatable, and not when I was 17 after years of being told I had “growing pains”.
I motion we re-name them “genital reveal parties”
Yeah let’s reveal your child’s genitals… doesn’t have the same ring to it
Better yet, don’t even mention a child. Just invite all your friends to a Genital Reveal Party and see what happens.
Genital Reveal Party
Children welcome!
Hoho, I’ve been to plenty of those
Giving gendered pronouns to a child too young to understand gender accomplishes only one thing, and that’s telling strangers what genitals the child has. It’s pedo bait and child abuse.
Aren’t there skeletal differences that an anthropologist would point out?
Humans have sexual dimorphism, but it’s a cultural thing that women wear skirts and men drink themselves to death instead of talking about their problems (both of these are jokes btw. I have a friend who wore kilts quite often and my mother drank herself to death)
Also, genetics is tricky, there a plenty of examples of people who do not fall into one category or another for these sexually dimorphic traits. There are people who have genetics from both sex, as well and differences in hormones distributions will causes these traits to appear or not appear.
Is a huge grey area.
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You’re confusing sex with gender
I want a sex reveal party. Who’s having sex in the bedroom right now? Let’s find out!
Isn’t that basically what they did at weddings in times gone by?
Very interesting, I appreciate the link.
Which no one would then know at the point of a typical gender reveal party.
A baby is a baby! Don’t need an excuse to celebrate new life. :)
In the off chance I ever reproduce, I want “I’m pregnant, chips and dips party!” style events. Everyone wins at those.
People generally expect you to have an excuse, though. Otherwise, you get your one baby shower (only the first baby!) and anything else is tacky. I think that’s why gender reveals caught on so fast. The parents and, maybe, grandparents are grasping at excuses to celebrate. And why people find them so cringe in general. Everyone else is a bit annoyed you’re getting more than your one party.
That’s called a baby shower.
Not with that attitude
- pulls out mobile X-Ray *
The anthropologist might see skeletal differences but they’d also pay attention to the manner in which the subject was buried or what possessions survived with them that could also serve as clues of the subject’s identity in life.
Exactly; for instance, if two people of the same (biological) sex were buried together, it means they were definitely just very good friends.
Perhaps even roommates.
Bert and Ernie?
Oscar and Gil?
It’s a cultural anthropologist, obviously! :)
Skeletal differences are related to sex not gender.
Not in a fetus.
My favorite part of this is that anthropology majors can find inconsistent gig work not involving food delivery and they still have to be a professor to qualify
And … The gender is cake! 🌈🎂🎉
The cake is a lie
wildly based science posting
Finally one I’d ACTUALLY want to be invited to.
Make it ice cream cake and I am in
You and I have vastly different interpretations of the word “party”…
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Was this part of an actual thought, or…?
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TIL my dick is a social construct.
Gender ≠ Sex
I’ve heard that about you. Isn’t it also a certified historic site?
