This morning I was talking to my friend (who's female), and we had a little bit of an argument about feminism, in which she said that she doesn't really agree with it and finds feminists annoying. Why is it that some women and girls don't "like" the people campaigning for their equal treatment of society? Because they kind of know but ignore how patriarchy is objectifying them, because it makes your life a whole lot easier, but with the presence of feminists, they can't ignore it as well. Feminists disrupt the cycle of ignoring that so many women engage in.
People aren't going to like it when you tell them they've been brainwashed or are oppressed without their noticing. Inherently, I think humans all have too much of a narcissistic trend in order to just accept if someone tells them they wrong about something. And we've been conditioning women and girls not to notice or really care about the fact that society treats them very differently to men and boys. Can you force it onto women and girls to realise how the patriarchy is effecting their lives negatively? If you try to convince someone that their opinions are wrong, they're most likely going to harden their views and be more opposed to changing their point of views.
"I mean boys will be boys, but when they really embrace the LAD Culture, that really annoys me" Does that mean she's beginning to realise, but it's only the very extreme of the spectrum of behaviour that she finds irritating? The reason that you only find lad-culture in boys is that it is based on sexual difference, and objectifying females. You don't find it in girls, because "objects" can't objectify.
Alsop, Fitzsimons and Lennon write in Theorizing Gender (2002): "Until we treat men and women the same socially then we have no way of telling what natural differences there may be between them." They found that the impact of cultural conditioning is so great that it can impacts our abilities. Following that, it seems obvious that if you tell a group of people that they should spend a great amount of time and money on trying to make themselves look nice, and that, physically, another group of people will always outperform them (when in fact that depends on training, not sex), well, then OF COURSE THEY ARE GOING TO START THINKING THAT. If we would start treating sex difference as not important, however, the gender stereotypes employed by out culture would fade and we would see, what we as a human race are truly capable of, not what our men and our women are truly capable of. I hope that the wider acceptance and knowledge of intersex and transgender people will help, because there is (obviously) no fitting stereotype for these people, so people will need to change their ways of thinking.
Society needs to change how we treat women and men, though. At the rate we're currently going, near half of the next generation will believe that dressing up and putting make up on is more important than anything else - with our current issues of for example global warming, with only about half of the scientists that we could have, might not be able to find a solution (but a greater pool of talents has greater chances of success and development).
So, about 30-40 years after Second Wave Feminism, we've arrived at a even more difficult point of view. What does this teach us? Do we need to spread our ideas on how both (or all) genders should be equal more aggressively? I doubt that that would do any good. Instead, we should try to change how we talk about all genders, the kinds of attitudes we express, and the kinds of attitudes that we spread. And if we have an important position in our culture, we should use our ability to reach out to people and just show them a different set of attitudes than the ones that they might currently be applying.
Humanity has such a great variety and diversity in character and thoughts, why do we have to class it by race or gender or sexual orientation? None of these factors detract from our thinking ability. We are able to do so many amazing things, we have built cars that can go up to 300 km/s, triple of the cheetah, the fastest animal. We have left our planet, we can communicate with each other using radio waves. Humanity has such a great potential, well the half that has so far been participating more. Imagine what we could do, if 100% were allowed and able to contribute?
Charlie Crxsh
People aren't going to like it when you tell them they've been brainwashed or are oppressed without their noticing. Inherently, I think humans all have too much of a narcissistic trend in order to just accept if someone tells them they wrong about something. And we've been conditioning women and girls not to notice or really care about the fact that society treats them very differently to men and boys. Can you force it onto women and girls to realise how the patriarchy is effecting their lives negatively? If you try to convince someone that their opinions are wrong, they're most likely going to harden their views and be more opposed to changing their point of views.
"I mean boys will be boys, but when they really embrace the LAD Culture, that really annoys me" Does that mean she's beginning to realise, but it's only the very extreme of the spectrum of behaviour that she finds irritating? The reason that you only find lad-culture in boys is that it is based on sexual difference, and objectifying females. You don't find it in girls, because "objects" can't objectify.
Alsop, Fitzsimons and Lennon write in Theorizing Gender (2002): "Until we treat men and women the same socially then we have no way of telling what natural differences there may be between them." They found that the impact of cultural conditioning is so great that it can impacts our abilities. Following that, it seems obvious that if you tell a group of people that they should spend a great amount of time and money on trying to make themselves look nice, and that, physically, another group of people will always outperform them (when in fact that depends on training, not sex), well, then OF COURSE THEY ARE GOING TO START THINKING THAT. If we would start treating sex difference as not important, however, the gender stereotypes employed by out culture would fade and we would see, what we as a human race are truly capable of, not what our men and our women are truly capable of. I hope that the wider acceptance and knowledge of intersex and transgender people will help, because there is (obviously) no fitting stereotype for these people, so people will need to change their ways of thinking.
Society needs to change how we treat women and men, though. At the rate we're currently going, near half of the next generation will believe that dressing up and putting make up on is more important than anything else - with our current issues of for example global warming, with only about half of the scientists that we could have, might not be able to find a solution (but a greater pool of talents has greater chances of success and development).
So, about 30-40 years after Second Wave Feminism, we've arrived at a even more difficult point of view. What does this teach us? Do we need to spread our ideas on how both (or all) genders should be equal more aggressively? I doubt that that would do any good. Instead, we should try to change how we talk about all genders, the kinds of attitudes we express, and the kinds of attitudes that we spread. And if we have an important position in our culture, we should use our ability to reach out to people and just show them a different set of attitudes than the ones that they might currently be applying.
Humanity has such a great variety and diversity in character and thoughts, why do we have to class it by race or gender or sexual orientation? None of these factors detract from our thinking ability. We are able to do so many amazing things, we have built cars that can go up to 300 km/s, triple of the cheetah, the fastest animal. We have left our planet, we can communicate with each other using radio waves. Humanity has such a great potential, well the half that has so far been participating more. Imagine what we could do, if 100% were allowed and able to contribute?
Charlie Crxsh
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