FWIW, personally I think genders without any -archy at all (i.e., some behaviours are more typical of men than of women and vice versa, but neither men nor women are frowned upon when exhibiting behaviours typical of the other gender, and neither group is obviously worse off overall) wouldn’t be bad at all.
I meant from Eridu’s perspective. I was correcting what I saw as an internal flaw in Eridu’s claims not making a statement of my own values. (I assume this is how I was interpreted because of the downvotes, not because of your reply.Or are people actually objecting to the correction?)
How does some behaviour being more typical of men than women constitute gender? You have to (not sure if next word is right word) essentialise the average difference in behaviour before it becomes gender or it’s just an average. And how is that not bad? The reason that, in the current world it’s so efficient to think this way (other than agreeing with your peers) is because of all the frowning and hitting and ostracisation, or just lowered respect suppressing the cases where the essentialism breaks down (and the opposite rewarding people for staying within bounds of the idea). When there’s no more societal level frowning the essentialisation isn’t bad (edit: well, worse than any other essentialisation) in principle but there’s going to be a lot more cases where it doesn’t apply so what do you need it for?
Isn’t the point of gender just judging people according to how similiar they are to that essentialised difference anyway though? I have trouble conceiving of a world where people don’t do this but they hold onto the concept (if the idea is even seperable from the idea that being a manly male or a feminine female is a good thing.)
How does some behaviour being more typical of men than women constitute gender?
The human brain is quite good at naive Bayes classifiers. Look at Network 2 in http://lesswrong.com/lw/nn/neural_categories/ but imagine that instead of “blegg/rube” the node in the middle read “man/woman” (and similar changes for the nodes in the periphery).
FWIW, personally I think genders without any -archy at all (i.e., some behaviours are more typical of men than of women and vice versa, but neither men nor women are frowned upon when exhibiting behaviours typical of the other gender, and neither group is obviously worse off overall) wouldn’t be bad at all.
I meant from Eridu’s perspective. I was correcting what I saw as an internal flaw in Eridu’s claims not making a statement of my own values. (I assume this is how I was interpreted because of the downvotes, not because of your reply.Or are people actually objecting to the correction?)
How does some behaviour being more typical of men than women constitute gender? You have to (not sure if next word is right word) essentialise the average difference in behaviour before it becomes gender or it’s just an average. And how is that not bad? The reason that, in the current world it’s so efficient to think this way (other than agreeing with your peers) is because of all the frowning and hitting and ostracisation, or just lowered respect suppressing the cases where the essentialism breaks down (and the opposite rewarding people for staying within bounds of the idea). When there’s no more societal level frowning the essentialisation isn’t bad (edit: well, worse than any other essentialisation) in principle but there’s going to be a lot more cases where it doesn’t apply so what do you need it for?
Isn’t the point of gender just judging people according to how similiar they are to that essentialised difference anyway though? I have trouble conceiving of a world where people don’t do this but they hold onto the concept (if the idea is even seperable from the idea that being a manly male or a feminine female is a good thing.)
The human brain is quite good at naive Bayes classifiers. Look at Network 2 in http://lesswrong.com/lw/nn/neural_categories/ but imagine that instead of “blegg/rube” the node in the middle read “man/woman” (and similar changes for the nodes in the periphery).