Wow, like maybe the sexes aren’t fungible after all?
Every time I find myself watching my girls make choices that are stereotypically “girly,” I flash back to a scene just a few years before they were born. I was in graduate school, involved in a lively discussion about the rhetoric of architecture. The details of the conversation are unimportant, but it ended with me appealing to my fellow progressive eggheads, “We all know gender is socially constructed anyway, right?”
I think, at that moment, I actually believed what I had just said. Not just that the notions and valuations of “masculine” and “feminine” were tools of patriarchal oppression; but that all gender differences aside from the obvious physical ones were constructs created and perpetuated, consciously or otherwise, to reinforce social structures.
My belief that gender was socially constructed certainly had more to do with my politics than any review of the science on the matter; but as a childless grad student (and later, adjunct Rhet/Comp professor) married to a brainy, ambitious physician, I found no significant challenges to this element of my worldview.
There are, and have been, all sorts of challenges to the Leftist notion of gender-as-social-construct meme. But when one is trained to regard purveyors of such as heretics or hobbits, one tends not to listen. Indeed, author Hinds admits as much:
Early on, we had been conscientious about providing them with gender-neutral toys like blocks, balls, and puzzles. But as they learned more words, they began to gravitate toward narrative-driven, imaginative play, and became less interested in running and throwing. These predilections corresponded to the kind of research about gender differences in children that I would have dismissed as flawed or irrelevant in my social-constructivist days. In fact, I didn’t need to read any studies to see how misguided I had been—I only needed to watch, at self-segregated parties and preschool, boys the same age as my girls as they wrestled, threw mulch, weaponized inanimate objects, and obsessed over machinery while the girls colored, talked about clothes, and pretended to be families of kitty-cats or ponies.
Children aren’t blank slates or clay to be molded as props in social justice plays. Parents are guides and teachers to help their children mature into good and whole people. That includes knowing how to interact with their own sex as well as The Other.
And the first step for parents is to recognize that the sexes are different.
Maybe Mr. Hinds will now question whatever other Leftist shibboleths he holds.
Isn’t it simply sex that isn’t a social construct, whereas the stupefying substitution of the term gender for the term sex precisely in order to obscure or obfuscate the simple ontology of the business is in fact exactly a socialist construct? Sure seems like it to me, anyhow.
Is it a coincidence that a lot of these wacky theories came out when people stopped having children? I think not. There is a lot of innateness in our behavior, in that we cannot be completely molded without being subject to a lot of abuse. Even then, the result will be a shell of a person.
I think it’s fine to expose boys and girls to the same kinds of toys, but I doubt forcing them one way or another will work.
I’m still much more concerned with what is happening to boys as far as squashing every natural tendency they have. The girls will be likely be fine.
I’m skeptical that the girls will be fine cranky-d, if only on account I expect they’ll be complaining about the missing males among them, if they aren’t already.
Gender is — because it refers to characteristics and usage of nouns in language, which is a means of social interaction.
Sex, however — which is what the discussion was actually about — is a biological characteristic inherent in each individual, prescribing his or her role and potential contribution to the perpetuation of the species.
Those with ambiguous or non-functional sexual characteristics have low potential, even with advanced technology.
Wait, what??? That was a man writing those things?
o_O
Hopefully, he IS coming around to reality, but I’d wager he was a “hipster douchebag” stereotype in college. Of course, being a man, he’s likely to be denounced for being a “patriarchal oppressor”…
At the link, it has another link that reads “View comments (32)”. Do I dare? Or will it ruin the rest of my (so far, lovely) day?
I didn’t realize it was a guy writing that either. That’s a new level of stupid added. I would expect a guy to know that boys are how they are.
Maybe Mr. Hinds will now question whatever other Leftist shibboleths he holds.
I shan’t hold my breath. As sure as the Sun rises in the East, the Progs will ignore most evidence in front of their faces.
Evidence is a social construct.
Hinds won’t learn anything for long. He can’t afford to. Being a heretic is exhausting and expensive. To recognize that your self identified “group” is full of shit and willfully stupid about it is to become ugly to that group, for that group in turn to become ugly to you. Existing like that is painful and stress inducing as a-hole after a-hole brings you up at dinner, and mocks you, and talks about you behind your back as a weird deluded idiot for being right about something instead of compliant. he will eventually be accused of making war on his own daughters and it will be proposed that someone should intervene on their behalf and minimize his impact on their true selves less they ever succumb to the chains of a temporary “societal” get barefoot, bake a pie, and/or push out a child. That sort of pressure, even hinted at, will cause him to put this incident down the memory hole, carve his own daughters out as exceptions, teach them to hide their girliness in certain company, and presume that the rest of drab mundane reality is as it was given to him by the big smart mind heads.
Look, everyone knows that “sex” exists and that sexual traits are a confoundingly complex biological spectrum that we still don’t fully understand. When we say that “gender is a social construct” its for the same reason why people don’t tell their children the truth. If a child asks where babies come from or where Grandma went after she was sick, you can’t really be completely honest with them. Same thing with conservatives. You can’t really be expected to handle the truth and act accordingly. You take the truth about gender and twist it into the most simplistic binary system that appeals to your personal prejudices and end up with “Girls are not good at math so they have to be good at cooking. They should wear dresses and must learn to please a man. It’s horrible for them to have sex because they don’t want it ever” & “Boys are strong and like football and guns and its always great for them to have sex. Even if a teacher rapes them, it’s still sex and therefore they love it. If a boy likes anything besides football and guns he’s a fag.” And lo, you end up with Warren Jeffs raping Little House on the Prairie extras in a compound somewhere. It’s just who you guys are and what you do.
Ya know, straw burns quite well on its own. You don’t need to douse all those straw men in gasoline.
Unless you were all wet to start with…
That there was one impressive wall o’ text. Lots of words.
Most people use that many words to, you know, say something.
It’s just who you guys are and what you do.
Aw… is Jeff’s usual description for progs getting under the attention-starved troll’s skin?
Stop projecting. Study statistics and learn what a “standard deviation” is. Hint: it isn’t referring to sexual acts.
>that sexual traits are a confoundingly complex biological spectrum that we still don’t fully understand.<
anti darwinist
>the most simplistic binary system <
dude fags don't make babies
And lo, you end up with
Warren Jeffs raping Little House on the Prairie extras in a compound somewherepublic school teachers.“Girls are not good at math so they have to be good at cooking. They should wear dresses and must learn to please a man. It’s horrible for them to have sex because they don’t want it ever”
It’s awesome how you have to make up some cartoonish he-thug gibberish, pass it off as ‘what conservatives say’ and then sincerely expect to be taken remotely seriously afterwards when you tell us how (you presume) it all really works. Lol! Because real life life is a blend of a Gidget movie and with ‘Hedwig and the Angry inch’.
othersteve/slipperyslope/squirtlesquirtlesquirtle can’t see real life with their Mother Jones blinders on.
Save the thermos of frozen embryos y’all. huehueheuheulollers!
“sexual traits are a confoundingly complex biological spectrum”
Nope. They aren’t.
“that we still don’t fully understand”
You don’t even partially understand them apparently. No worries!
I wonder if abortion will still be okay with the proggs if science advances enough to tell if the clump of tissue is going to be gay?
I’ll bet an exception will be written in making this a double-plus bad criminal offense.
If OTOH science advances enough to tell whether the fetus will grow up to be a conservative or libertarian, proggs will seek to have abortion in such cases made mandatory.
They’re easy to understand if you have firsthand experience with the sexual traits you weren’t born with. Though in codpiece’s case that’s probably both kinds.
Because spectrum.
Ass backwards on so many other levels besides projection.
We need to remove the apparent bipolarity of sex by ignoring biology and defining it as a feeling and a social construct, then we can expand it into a weird undifferentiated gradient of inconsistent and capriciously identified states on multiple axes so that sex as a concept can dynamically take any shape like a shoggoth in a subterranean all you can eat blind penguin buffet. Tekelili.
Group Unit 1: What sex are you?
Group Unit 2: I am a complex intersectionality of a spicy Nicaraguan A-Frame with SCSI French Vanilla sorcery noodle limits.
Group Unit 1: Oh you poor thing, I can practically see all the microaggressions protruding from your soul flesh like hundreds of tiny javelins. The cruelty. I’ll just put that you like to get drunk and fuck clowns in the bed of a Mazda B compact pickup truck on a Thursday when it is raining and that your dad is an asshole.
oh my king baracky
IllTemperedCur
It’s not the first time Abramson has been pushed aside in favor of a black man.
From her wiki:
“Abramson was scheduled to address the commencement exercises of Barnard College on May 14, 2012. Her speech was canceled after President Barack Obama requested to speak instead.”
NY Times’ Jill Abramson: ‘This Is The Most Secretive White House…I Have Ever Dealt With’
Obama Will Speak at Commencement at Barnard College
ah, such a brave little troll who hides behind, not just a fake name, but a proxy server.
107.182.135.94
If he didn’t hide behind the proxy, we might be able to keep him locked out…
Of course, if he weren’t so stuffed with bovine excrement from start to finish, he wouldn’t need to worry about that
How else is he going to stand up against all this reich wing oppression of his “speech”?
Any way to ban comments coming from a proxy server?
This Ed Driscoll post looks like it should be right up Jeff’s alley:
And in another corner.
Regarding this Andy Hinds fellow…
-It’s always interesting to watch a parrot apparatchik being confronted with Reality. You wonder: will his carefully built, but fragile, house of cards of Ideology collapse and burn? Or will he, as Palaeomerus remarks above, flush his Salvation as a Human Being and as a Man, down the sewer of willful blindness. And, if the former, will he lose his already ill mind? I can no longer eat popcorn, so would you mind if I just stuck to Junior Mints?
-Who TF uses a nickname like ‘Andy’ as their byline once they’re over the age of thirty? I had much trouble supporting Scooter Libby when he was unjustly targeted by the Despots because how can you take a grown man seriously who lets himself be called ‘Scooter’?
-Am I nuts for believing that Andy is never on top?
-Am I nuts for frequently mumbling to myself these days: ‘Lord, kill me now’?
Those of us blessed enough to be parents know this as a truth: Children teach us infinitely more about human nature than we teach them.
****”The debate has left many academics fuming, saying that professors should be trusted to use common sense and that being provocative is part of their mandate.”****
Bilgewater. Academicians and intellectualists have been the main enablers of trigger warning pushers and their ilk.
There is a certain point to all this, but unfortunately our eggheaded friends don’t seem to be able to get to the bottom of it.
Which is baffling, because they’re supposed to be far more scientifically-minded than we knuckledraggers are.
If the hypothesis is that gender is purely a social construct, then you need to do experiments that attempt to nullify that hypothesis; in other words: you need to remove all possible sources of societal influences in these matters. Which means you have to remove television, movies, and (in fact) the social presence of all other children who have (purportedly) themselves been influenced by artificial gender constructs.
Do that. Then get back to us regarding what you have learned. Until you have done that, please go fuck yourselves. You’re lecturing us, based on something you made up out of whole cloth, and it’s boring.
If your little girls STILL want their M-16s in pink after all that, maybe you have learned something.
The unreality of the world.
Racists, non-racists, American patriots, unpatriotic bastards.
I was in graduate school, involved in a lively discussion about the rhetoric of architecture. The details of the conversation are unimportant…
Truer words were never spoken.
As to the latest droppings left behind by our resident truth-teller, I can only observe that it takes a committed level of willful blindness to make such broad, sweeping generalizations about the way a demographic group behaves, specifically the way it supposedly makes broad, sweeping generalizations about the way a demographic group behaves.
One suspects that fishsticks possesses the ability to appreciate neither the irony, the hypocrisy, nor the recursion.
Fisksticks[sic] is likely a Camp Obama graduate operating online with his 16 gig thumb-drive equivalent of the 3 ring binder from which he dutifully cut&pastes out of as he was instructed.
Another not-racist act.
It’s weird how the IWonPenPhoners can be so acutely concerned with “fraud” in public commerce, yet ignore entirely the frauds they commit against the public weal day in and day out. It’s good to be the king.
Just remember, it’s those damned “biologists who have tried over and over again to explain gender difference by invoking ‘science'”. Yes, Sandra, I’m looking at you.
So I think we can assume that Sandra Korn is never going to be one of those shes who blinded us with science?
PS: What a pathetic and very disappointing life she has awaiting her if she keeps this crap up.
Well, they can’t have sycophants going off on their own. The message must be controlled.
After reading Geoff’s Washtington Times link, I noticed in the sidebar a link to this op-ed. It seems the ACLU is suing a school district in Florida for having established single-sex classrooms for parents who want that option.
The author is especially critical of the ACLU’s anti-science scientification.
I wonder if abortion will still be okay with the proggs if science advances enough to tell if the clump of tissue is going to be gay?
We can already tell the sex of the child from conception and girls are being aborted at higher rates than boys.
#caring
But, by aborting girls at a higher rate than boys, they’re effectively preventing all those abortions that would’ve taken place 15-25 years down the line.
So… ‘win’, I guess?
‘Course one can argue that a single, sufficiently driven young lad can be behind (or more accurately, ‘on top of’) a greater number of abortions than any single lass could possibly incur. So maybe we ought to kill all the boys, instead.
Decisions, decisions.
Run do not walk to Kevin Williamson’s “It’s not about you, Sunshine.“
I can’t believe just how much edjumacation you can get for under $100K per year.
fishsticksandtatertots is going to have some tough competition for those O!-bucks. Poetry 4 de ppl fo sho gonna be hard on his ass.
Christopher Lasch anticipated Williams by almost forty years.
“College Wins US Debate Championship By Repeating the N-Word Over and Over, Speaking Incomprehensibly”
What the hell way that? Ouch.
Also, per Ernst Schreiber
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_of_Narcissism
There’s another lingering puzzle there in the sanctimonious culture of culture, a plainer question beg one could not seek.
I think that debate may well be what is in room 101 for me. That’s my “rats on the face.” I’m getting Orwellian chills. Cosmic ones.
Take it up with Kant
Heh, well, the post headline leads with reality, even as though that isn’t fraught with trouble, so what the heck, in for a dime, in for a dollar.
The cargo cult is winning, they are tearing down the real airports to end the competition, and soon there will be no more planes. In time, only a wasteland of fake empty airstrips remains, marred by great footprints as if a god of the copy book headings had felt obliged to pass through.
On Leftism And Parenting
WARNING: It Ain’t Pretty… THE MOTHER: Former Lesbian [!] and still Socialist, New York City’s First Womyn Chirlane McCray, tells New York Magazine in a interview: Given her resume and biography, I’m not surprised — are you? More…
I thought the gods of the copybook headings were eldritch gods. So wouldn’t that mean they’d leave behind them an oozy trail of smoking, blasted ruin and festering, miasmical gore instead of footprints?
You know, like Michael Moore at an all you can eat buffet.
You know, like Michael Moore at an all you can eat buffet.
But without the half-eaten napkins…
I don’t even know what’s so great about the footprints. Pretty good? Sure! Great? I don’t know.
OT:
The wonders of diversity, coming soon to the whole of the western world if our “betters” get their way.
Absolutely no hope for this guy.
Can’t bring himself to use the F-word. That’d be Father, of course.