Gender politics and liberalism

[Antonio the Sixth]

As this forum eloquently shows, there are lots of liberal guys who have a complete blind spot on gender issues. This deeply saddens me.

[Antonio the Sixth]

As this forum eloquently shows, there are lots of liberal guys who have a complete blind spot on gender issues. This deeply saddens me.

well, i don't think it would be 100% honest to portray feminism as attacked purely from the right. feminism for a long time was largely a movement of middle class white cishet women - the NOW didn't want lesbians involved when they first formed iirc, and there's still plenty of hatred towards transwomen from even mainstream feminists because they take social constructivism to its logical ends i.e. abolishing gender.

I'm not surprised that many feminists in the past may have held certain awful views, just like many progressive crusaders of the late 19th-early 20th centuries were deeply racist, or like many civil right activists were raging homophobes. Unfortunately, being on the vanguard on one issue doesn't necessarily entail being on other issues.

That said, I'm pretty sure 99% of feminists today are also strong supporters of LGBT causes.

Oh, and welcome back BTW!

[Antonio the Sixth]

I think you’re looking too closely into it. Men tend not to wear their hearts on their sleeves which is neither a good nor bad thing. On a thing like Facebook they are less likely to do the whole ‘share this link if you want to beat cancer’ stuff that a lot of my female friends tend to do.

This is what I originally thought too, until I noticed the guys went rather out of their way to criticize the practice.

There's a friend of mine who is very liberal but often finds himself at odds with feminism, particularly if it requires PC-ness. This is something he sent me that he mocked a lot over the past week:

http://i.imgur.com/gWe2umL.jpg

Maybe I'm just observing a subset of the population that is particularly grounded in the internet, and therefore a bit less sensitive towards social interactions than a lot of others.

i think there's a backlash amongst liberals against what i suppose you'd call new "new left" types, i.e. those with a focus on identity politics and social justice. i spend most of my time on tumblr and there's a culture of that there as opposed to sites like reddit where masculists and such run rampant.

This is basically the truth (I also lol @ the reddit/tumblr dichotomy as a user of both sites, it's pretty accurate tho).

There's definitely a trend among younger, mostly male, liberals to adopt a "colorblind"/genderblind (never heard that as a term, but I'm coining it because it works here) perspective on things, essentially a belief that "race, gender, etc were big things in the past, but they don't matter anymore" which leads to support of gay marriage but also a dislike or at best indifference towards feminism and other "social justicey" movements.

Which is unfortunate, yet understandable (in an insidious way). The ideology that "race doesn't matter" or "gender doesn't matter" is common among many "progressive" types who want to both keep their own social privilege and to deny that that privilege exists, or that they themselves have a role to play in perpetuating oppression. 

I'm not really fond of "identity politics" myself. Not in the sense that race and gender "don't matter" (really, only an idiot could claim that with a straight face... and if a liberal claims this he's a hypocritical idiot), but in the sense that I think the goal should be to build a society where they, indeed, don't matter. I find it a bit saddening that many movement chose to emphasize difference and identity as opposed to a message along the lines of "we're not blacks/women/homosexuals/whatever, we're just human beings with the same rights as you". That said, this obviously doesn't make me any less supportive of their cause.

[Antonio the Sixth]

As this forum eloquently shows, there are lots of liberal guys who have a complete blind spot on gender issues. This deeply saddens me.

well, i don't think it would be 100% honest to portray feminism as attacked purely from the right. feminism for a long time was largely a movement of middle class white cishet women - the NOW didn't want lesbians involved when they first formed iirc, and there's still plenty of hatred towards transwomen from even mainstream feminists because they take social constructivism to its logical ends i.e. abolishing gender.

I'm not surprised that many feminists in the past may have held certain awful views, just like many progressive crusaders of the late 19th-early 20th centuries were deeply racist, or like many civil right activists were raging homophobes. Unfortunately, being on the vanguard on one issue doesn't necessarily entail being on other issues.

That said, I'm pretty sure 99% of feminists today are also strong supporters of LGBT causes.

Oh, and welcome back BTW!

a lot of them certainly are, idk, maybe i've been skewed by being on tumblr for a long time and seeing some of the more vile segments of the community.

and thanks

I don't know either, honestly, but that just seems really weird to me. A feminist who's anti-LGBT is the epitome of completely missing the point IMO.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Thank you DRJ for these clarifications! My knowledge of feminism is superficial and I admit I don't really have a strong grasp on its various branches and currents of thought.

Anyway, based on what you said, I think I would qualify as a "social constructionist", in the sense that I believe the presence of two X chromosome or of a X and an Y does not predetermine anything about one's personality (or only does on a so marginal level that it's not worth talking about), and that all the behavioral differences observed in society between men and women can be found to have a root in socialization.

I never imagined that this line of reasoning could be used to justify anti-transsexual bigotry, and those who would do considerably miss the point. In my opinion (again, I know nothing about the subject, so apologies if I say anything stupid), transsexuality simply means that one identifies more closely to the set of social norms associated to people of an opposite biological gender. So isn't this basically the same quest as that of feminism? Both seek to free themselves from an identity that society tries to impose on them.