What sort of language and tone have you used while doing so? Have you ensured that you did this in a way so as to be non-condescending and helpful, or were you being a man who explains things? Did you consider that there are harmful social consequences to a man “teaching” a woman anything about feminism? Did you at least feel intensely conscious and uncomfortable around this issue, knowing as a good feminist that you were in dangerous territory?
To answer this in particular because I think they’re all valid points you probably have more experience with than I do, I used the same text with the women as I used with men to whom I taught the same thing, and it was done through an impersonal text-only chat interface, and no I did not “know as a good feminist” all that much because I was merely, in my mind, correcting a behavior reinforcing unfairness. I had not learned to think more than four steps of causality forward in counterfactuals, at the time, nor of how to compute recursive not-exclusively-self-reinforcing social trends.
No, I did not feel intensely conscious and uncomfortable about these things, because ceteris paribus, it is better to feel good about doing good things than to feel bad about doing good things. I also rarely feel intensely conscious and uncomfortable for pretty much anything.
Do you recognize the value of any self-determination of women, or have you started engaging in reverse body policing?
Fortunately, I noticed the counter-signaling and reverse policing issues long before I would have had opportunity to accidentally cause damage in that manner. My body-policing towards men and women is exactly identical, barring practical issues like bits of skin only happening in some place for one of the two genders exclusively and thus requiring different structural solutions in clothing. In my workplace, men are required to wear dress shirts and formal business black pants. Women have no such requirements, as long as they dress “acceptably for a business environment”. This is the kind of thing I denounce and find unfair. I don’t even know, nor care, which of the two genders is being disadvantaged the most in this case, I only need know that there is unfair treatment to conclude that it ought not to be so.
I’ve said explicitly the reverse multiple times during this discussion. Unlearning patriarchy is similar if not identical to the extinction of any other learned behavior pattern.
The reason I claimed there didn’t seem to be any exit is that you propose a long road towards eliminating patriarchy, but it doesn’t seem as though anyone who would follow this road and yet still disagree with you would be a valid counterexample. You seem to be establishing within the premise that anyone who doesn’t study Feminism is automatically a Patriarchist, and that anyone who does study Feminism will inevitably agree with you, become a Feminist, and relinquish all Patriachism—and that anyone who claims to have studied Feminism yet did not end up in that particular state simply must have done it wrong.
On a last note, no, I have no intention of becoming a radical. What is a radical, anyway? What will being “radical” change from my current behavior of “Do everything I possibly can to act in a manner which promotes fair treatment of all humans without influence of any bias or skewed model of valuation.”?
Or, to be blunt and confrontational: Are you asking me to subjugate all men that might possibly be likely to engage in any form of patriarchal behavior in the future? Is the requirement for fitting your definition of morality that women must be completely free, and any influence of any man to any woman is immoral, such that “people” influencing “other people” is okay, but not men influencing women?
I’d really like to see a truth table here, because on my truth table, anyone can influence anyone else, as long as there is no nefarious will at work and there is no long-term self-reinforcing behavior being programmed, and any filtering by any criterion, be it gender or race or otherwise, is something I perceive as less moral. Despite this, I will obviously act rationally and sacrifice one person over two others according to some criterion if practical math dictates that such is the optimal moral result of shutting up and multiplying. I do my utmost to avoid letting properties of my own mind (or indeed, of anything that is not inherently in what I estimate to be truly real) from affecting these calculations, so things like Woman.Sexiness or Woman.Attractiveness will never be considered barring Newcomblike problems forcing me to consider them.
Because, you see, in my model, you’re the one feeding the problem by insisting on feminism and reducing oppression of females in particular over all other possible forms of unfair treatments from some humans to other humans. Focusing on women specifically seems like it would only reinforce the idea of gender distinctions. I focus on all occurences, and it only happens that cases involving male-female differences are statistically more frequent than other cases, with skin color and religion-belief-associated statements (or lack thereof) coming in not too far behind.
Edit: I realize that the last paragraph is very accusatory, but it is meant as an illustrative parallel to the Tentacle Super-Happy Aliens in the Three Worlds Collide story. I don’t actually believe that you’re acting in a negative-expected-utility manner, nor that my behavior has clearly and verifiably better expected utility. It’s just an expression of where my arguments generally come from and why I don’t identify as a Feminist, but rather as a Humanist.
I used the same text with the women as I used with men
My body-policing towards men and women is exactly identical
your entire pre-edit last paragraph
I don’t identify as a Feminist, but rather as a Humanist.
Patriarchy exists in an objective sense. It is tangibly demonstrated in experiments. Its physical, material manifestation in reality is as a pattern of activation in the neurons of human brains.
Going all the way back to my original post, hierarchy creates division, division creates difference (and difference justifies hierarchy, but that’s tangential here).
If you treat men and women identically, you are being patriarchal because you are ignoring how the same behavior can have different consequences when emitted towards a male-socialized or women-socialized person.
This is a very typical failure mode of proto-feminist thought. It’s well covered in snarky blog posts, but I’m not aware of any good sources to fix it.
Since we’ve isolated the source of our disagreement, I suggest we stop arguing here, because I can’t really convey any novel information to you at this point.
If you treat men and women identically, you are being patriarchal because you are ignoring how the same behavior can have different consequences when emitted towards a male-socialized or women-socialized person.
Okay. I have no idea how this would happen, concretely. I have never seen any evidence of this. My prior towards this being true is extremely small.
The closest match I have is: If I act identically towards men and women, and some people are biased or uninformed, they might perceive my behavior differently or it might have different consequences depending on who the other person is. There might even be hardcoded brain differences in how a woman will perceive an action versus how a man would.
The above paragraph merely seems to imply that stupid people will privilege their own hypothesis whether I act differently towards them or not. This is not dependent on patriarchy, but merely a cognitive defect of the human brain in general. If your claim is on the basis of brain differences, then I believe myself justified in requesting evidence for this, because the standard extremist-feminist claim I’ve heard is that most difference in interpretation is not hardcoded, but rather cultural.
What is “male-socialized or women-socialized”, exactly? They sound like applause lights, and I have no idea what they could even mean on a technical level. It doesn’t even look like a hypothesis, only a mysterious “explanation”.
Suppose we were not in a particularly patriarchal society. Is treating everyone equally, regardless of gender or race or otherwise, still patriarchal? Surely not. If it is, then I am confused.
If some people perceive my behavior as being oppressive towards men but not women, or oppressive towards women but not men, despite being identical towards both, even when my behavior has no gender-conditionals implanted within it, then that is a property of their minds. The behavior is not inherently “patriarchal” or “oppressive” if it contains exactly zero conditionals that correlate with gender. This is obviously not the case, because the above is a mathematically-perfect representation of my ideal / attempted behavior.
Behaving differently towards men and towards women seems like exactly the kind of thing we want to avoid if we want to eliminate gender-unfairness. Unless your objective is to turn things around and make women dominant over men instead? Or make some other group dominant? Or create some other form of inequality?
A summarized, distilled, refined, purified version of my behavioral guidelines on this subject is basically:
I should act in the exact same manner towards everyone all the time, with no discriminatory conditionals that correlate with specific subsets of humans, and in the same convergent-coherent manner that I would act whether I were a man, a woman, any kind of transgender, an androgynous human, or any other form of humanlike mind that had these same goals.
I fully expect, with high probability, that living in a “patriarchal society” populated entirely with people applying these behaviors would be essentially no different than what I do not consider a “patriarchal society” and no different from a gender-fair society. It is also exactly the goal sought by not-female-domination-oriented feminism, to my knowledge.
If you have any specific evidence or reading material on the above-quoted claim you could point out, I’d be glad to read up on it.
Saying “we now know why we disagree” without having a chance to change my mind if I am wrong is insufficient for me. I must become stronger. I must not worship ignorance. I do not have sufficient evidence (not even remotely close) to assert that you are Most Definitely Wrong. Therefore my priors could be wrong.
While your last paragraph is admirable in itself, I can only see it as an applause light in the context of the adversarial nature of both your post and this discussion in general.
For one, if you truly wish to become stronger, read better radical feminists than me. I can no better educate you in radical feminism than you could educate a christian in rationalism.
Gender socialization is a process I’ve defined earlier, and that turns up huge amounts of google hits and a long Wikipedia page. The wikipedia page isn’t very good, but essentially, gender socialization is the process of being taught (via operant conditioning, modeling, and observational learning) gender.
Which brings us here:
There might even be hardcoded brain differences in how a woman will perceive an action versus how a man would.
Brains are plastic. They are reprogrammable. They are computers.
There are differences between the brains of people socialized as men and the brains of people socialized as women. They are a result of gender socialization—of men and women learning to emit different behaviors, and respond in different ways to behaviors emitted by people of masculine or feminine expression.
If you emit some behavior B, that behavior is processed differently by different human minds. The automatic processes of association will produce drastically different responses in those minds depending on the distance between them.
To put it another way, I could say a sentence to you that you would (possibly) be completely nonchalant about, but would trigger someone with PTSD into a panic attack or flashback. The sentence has no PTSD-conditionality; as such, any triggering is an artifact of the listener’s mind, and the sentence is not inherently “triggering” or “oppressive.”
Do you see the problem in the above scenario?
It is also exactly the goal sought by not-female-domination-oriented feminism, to my knowledge.
Well, liberal feminists that I disagree with would point out that the sentence “You certainly seem to have sex with lots of people” provokes very different reactions when you say it to men than when you say it to women. If you disbelieve me, try it out on your Facebook friends.
Suppose we were not in a particularly patriarchal society. Is treating everyone equally, regardless of gender or race or otherwise, still patriarchal?
A non-patriarchal society is one wherein the concept of gender is alien to those within it. “Treating everyone equally regardless of gender” implies that gender still exists, which to me implies that patriarchy still exists. You can refer back to the infographic at my top-level post in this thread for more on this.
I hope you don’t mind me jumping into this discussion; I find it fascinating.
Brains are plastic. They are reprogrammable. They are computers. There are differences between the brains of people socialized as men and the brains of people socialized as women. They are a result of gender socialization...
Would the below statement be an accurate rephrasing of your views ?
“Any differences in behaviors between men and women are due entirely to their upbringing. Their biological makeup has no measurable effect on such behaviors.”
I think this is a reasonable claim—but how would you determine whether it’s true or not, without performing exactly the kind of biological research that you oppose ? Actually, I may be jumping ahead of myself. Assuming that you agree with my phrasing, do you think that it matters how likely it is to be true ?
Do you see the problem in the above scenario?
I do not (unless, of course, you deliberately designed the sentence to be an effective basilisk, in which case I’d say you are behaving unethically). What am I missing ?
“Treating everyone equally regardless of gender” implies that gender still exists, which to me implies that patriarchy still exists.
I understand what you’re saying, but, technically speaking, the mere existence of gender does not imply patriarchy. It could imply matriarchy, instead. That’s a minor nitpick, though.
I do not (unless, of course, you deliberately designed the sentence to be an effective basilisk, in which case I’d say you are behaving unethically). What am I missing ?
ISTM that the issue is similar to that of the old injunction against yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater or the more recent one of yelling “BOMB!” while pointing at an abandoned bag in an airport. Sure, the words themselves do not inherently carry panic, mayhem, children trampled to death by mobs, etc. - just like no word inherently carries PTSD attacks in them—but it is still much preferable ceteris paribus not to have a behavior A when there are known expected negative consequences.
Think: “I know making dead baby jokes while that person is still traumatized by having their five (baby) children tortured to death in front of them will cause them incredibly grief, horror and pain, but it’s not my fault they’re like that and the words themselves don’t cause the pain, so it’s fine I can do whatever I want!”
As for your other questions, I’m also eager to see a response.
I see what you’re saying, and I agree, but I don’t think the scenarios are identical.
In both of your scenarios, the speakers know with an extremely high degree of certainty that their words will have a negative effect. That’s why I singled out “deliberately creating an effective basilisk” as an unethical activity.
In eridu’s scenario, however, this is not the case (unless I misunderstood him). His scenario is more like the following:
“I am going to talk about my trip to the zoo where I saw some rare monkeys. I understand that there must exist some people in the world who have been savaged by vicious monkeys, and might react negatively to my tale, but I’m going to narrate it anyway”.
If we are going to implement a hard rule saying, “don’t utter any sentence that could trigger anyone, under any circumstances”, then communication would become untenable.
In addition, from a strictly nitpicky philosophical point of view, I’d argue that sentences by themselves are not “triggering” or “oppressive”; they are just bit strings. It’s the interaction of a sentence with a particular human’s mind that could be potentially triggering. If no one in the world had ever been savaged by monkeys, my tale of monkeys at the zoo could not trigger anyone, which would imply that it is not inherently triggering.
“Any differences in behaviors between men and women are due entirely to their upbringing. Their biological makeup has no measurable effect on such behaviors.”
I agree with that for the most part.
how would you determine whether it’s true or not, without performing exactly the kind of biological research that you oppose?
I don’t think that would do it. If by “destroying patriarchy” you mean “destroying the systemic oppression of women by men”, then achieving this goal alone would not bring you closer to knowing whether gender has biological underpinnings. After patriarchy is destroyed, men and women would still exist, they just wouldn’t oppress each other (*) .
On the other hand, if your goal is to destroy gender altogether (which would, as a consequence, bring about the destruction of the patriarchy), then it would be very valuable for you to discover whether gender has biological underpinnings or not. If it does, then your goal is unachievable (at least, through purely social methods, transhumanism aside), and you’d end up wasting a lot of effort.
Prove to me that you’ve tried harder.
See my reply to DaFranker, below.
(*) Or perhaps the women would oppress the men, since the goal of “destroying patriarchy” doesn’t specify any specific outcome.
I don’t think that would do it. If by “destroying patriarchy” you mean “destroying the systemic oppression of women by men”, then achieving this goal alone would not bring you closer to knowing whether gender has biological underpinnings. After patriarchy is destroyed, men and women would still exist, they just wouldn’t oppress each other.
Well, if as a consequence of the mechanisms that perpetuate oppression being abolished, people no longer have gender identities, then you could be pretty sure after the fact that that hypothesis was right after all.
However, it seems to me that the approach of finding out whether gender identities are innate or learned by destroying patriarchy is question-begging, because the means by which the people advocating it intend to destroy the patriarchy presuppose that gender identities are learned.
Well, if as a consequence of the mechanisms that perpetuate oppression being abolished, people no longer have gender identities, then you could be pretty sure after the fact that that hypothesis was right after all.
Indeed.
However, it seems to me that the approach of finding out whether gender identities are innate or learned by destroying patriarchy is question-begging, because the means by which the people advocating it intend to destroy the patriarchy presuppose that gender identities are learned.
This is hardly unusual in the space of traditional rationality, and even in nontraditional rationality.
(...)
Do you see the problem in the above scenario?
Yes. However, it’s fairly evident that the cost of a general policy against uttering potentially-damaging sentences for all cases is prohibitive; you pretty much by rule can’t exist if you’re absolutely not allowed to ever accidentally trigger a negative reaction. That’s hyperbole, though, but the key point is:
It’s all about quantities and how much whiter or blacker.
A super-general ultra-powerful general policy against possibly-patriarchal words or behaviors by adjusting for expected perceptions would not only carry a much higher cost-per-avoided-damage than other behaviors, but would also in most cases dramatically increase the risk of committing errors in judgment, on top of pretty much becoming your sole lifegoal and preventing you from ever doing any progress in any other topic of interest.
What’s more, the very policy is itself sexist, because it expects differences in minds and perceptions between genders. This expectation is not secret, so it would obviously have an effect on others’ behaviors.
Historically / experimentally, what have we seen happen when others know that X is expected of them?
They will either X, or -X in order to signal.
By placing Expectation X, you are focusing the behavior-space on X in particular, and discouraging escape from that zone. This is why I find the idea of behaving differently and having different expectations of different genders to be harmful. By placing my expectations and own behaviors in a wider X, and having the same X for all audiences, I believe myself to be actively contributing to the reduction of unfair discrimination.
Well, liberal feminists that I disagree with would point out that the sentence “You certainly seem to have sex with lots of people” provokes very different reactions when you say it to men than when you say it to women. If you disbelieve me, try it out on your Facebook friends.
I very much believe you. I have also seen experimental evidence of pretty much the same. I don’t really see how that is directly relevant, or what your underlying point is, though. A policy of identical behaviors and identical reaction expectations will, on pain of deliberately choosing to lower its expected total utility, take into account known evidence for realistically-expected behavior and expect its conjugate¹, so as to causally bring behaviors closer to the ideal expected identical behaviors.
Perhaps this is already what you are doing, perhaps this decision theory approach is wrong (I try to use TDT-like processes because, well, so far they work), or perhaps I’m confusing things or putting too many concepts together. The above does makes sense to me—the mathlike stuff works out and the anecdotal evidence supports—and is not a conclusion I arrived to trivially by Authority or some form of subculture programming, barring denial-of-denial problems.
Other than this, Bugmaster has made some interesting queries, which I’m also interested in.
(¹. I mean here in the algebra sense of “conjugates”, figuratively, as the behavior which is expected to multiply or add up with the current expected real behavior such that the resulting behavior after future corrections by the other party becomes 1, AKA gender-identical and otherwise calibrated as much as possible for utility-increasing future behavior. )
ETA: I’ve elaborated a bit more on general policies in more technical terms and with more standard LW jargon in this other comment.
There are differences between the brains of people socialized as men and the brains of people socialized as women. They are a result of gender socialization—of men and women learning to emit different behaviors, and respond in different ways to behaviors emitted by people of masculine or feminine expression.
I agree provided you don’t mean they are exclusively a result of gender socialization, and that (say) hormones don’t play any significant role.
I don’t think that hormones play a significant role, and I don’t think that they can override socialization.
For example, how much traditionally gendered behavior do feral children display? That’s biological gender, right there. They have the same hormones any of the rest of us do, minus all the socialization.
The trouble with this argument is that the feral condition is not the natural condition for humans, as philosophers once imagined it to be. A whole slew of development doesn’t work without the appropriate stimuli which are provided by all human societies, for instance exposure to language during the critical period.
The gold standard for demonstrating that something is due to socialization is to demonstrate difference among societies or social groups (subcultures, classes, etc.) — not to compare a healthy person to one that has been developmentally impaired, i.e. a feral child.
EDIT: To taboo “natural” — The feral condition is not the environment of evolutionary adaptation for the human mind, and we know about specific deficits that develop in feral children.
“Is not the natural condition” is not a counterargument of any sort to eridu’s claim:
*(I got this from Eridu’s profile. it is the right post: I clicked permalink and it bought me here)
Eridu:
“I don’t think that hormones play a significant role, and I don’t think that they can override socialization.
For example, how much traditionally gendered behavior do feral children display? That’s biological gender, right there. They have the same hormones any of the rest of us do, minus all the socialization.”
“The feral condition is not the natural condition” is irrelevant. Eridu was using biological to mean non-socialised, not natural or normal. A critcism that could be made at this point is that lots (most? all surviving?) feral children are raised by some non-human mini-society in the form of a pack of animals so maybe in fact they are desocialised of their biological default gender by living in such a society. Or a gender neutral survivor personality supresses gender: maybe if you raised some kids in an empty room but gave them food so they didn’t have to scavenge the females would be more “feminine” and the males more masculine. Or (sorry I only meant to write the first but these other possibilities have occured to me as I go) femininity and masculinity are mostly only social anyway and their agenderedness is just a byproduct of their asocialness to humans.
Or that hormones are actually perfectly amenable to changes due to socialisation.
So the thing about development is a non sequitur who’s only purpose I can think of seems to be imply that gender could be a “development” which is much like saying ADHD is/isn’t a disease.
Anyway then fuba cunningly redefines “due to socialisation” as “due to non-universal socialisation.” Or perhaps this is just what most people usually mean by “due to socialisation” but the literal words in this specific case can not just be substituted for their usual meaning because Eridu obviously meant by “socialisation”, socialisation, and not non-universal socialisation.
If gender creating stimuli are universal to all societies that necessarrilly imples that they come from society. If every human hates red, red is still not “objectively bad.” Similiarly, if every society socialises the vast majority of its members into being gendered that doesn’t make it inherent that humans are gendered.
The naturalistic fallacy is the implication that if it turns out that it really is a universal (as a fact about all the particular societies that exist or have existed) adopting a gender identity would constitude “development” in a way comparable to adoption of language.
Now Fuba doesn’t explicitly commit the naturalistic fallacy at any point but I don’t belive he’s just bringing up these facts at this point totally at random after starting his post with “the trouble with this post is that” and not trying to imply anything. The point of Fuba’s post seems to be that because feral children lack some development that all societies provide the stimuli for, gender is also a “development,” and that still doesn’t even contradict eridu. She merely claimed that gender is socialised, not that that is bad (in that specific post.) To actually disagree with Eridu’s post it requires also that universal socialisation people approve of is “development” and hence not due to socialisation. But a lot of “development” (e.g. language) is due to socialisation.
Sorry fuba. I’m naturally an asshole when I think I’m pointing out people’s mistakes and have the excuse that I am tired so I’m not going to try and fix that.
So I guess I was wrong. The argument seems to be that if gender is good and universal in societies that currently exist/have existed it is “development” and so not socialisation. Naturalistic fallacy doesn’t quite cover it. It’s also like that diseased thinking post. I don’t know the term for that.
Alternatively maybe it is just an appeal to process in some well respected area. In which case it is a misunderstanding because the process is designed to look for the meaning commonly substituted for “socialisation” (non-universal socialisation) and Eridu was talking about socialisation.
Presumably feral children would display gendered behavior in some respects if gender was hormonal—spatial manipulation is the first one I can think of. In general, the set of gendered behavior minus the set of behaviors that require intervention during a critical or sensitive period should be gendered in feral children.
What you say is in general true, and I don’t think that it would be hard to demonstrate difference in gender expectations across social groups.
For example, how much traditionally gendered behavior do feral children display? That’s biological gender, right there. They have the same hormones any of the rest of us do, minus all the socialization.
By itself it only proves that hormones are not sufficient and socialization is necessary, not that hormones are not necessary and socialization is sufficient.
IIRC many people born with ambiguous external genitalia, accidentally surgically assigned to the sex other than their gonadal one, and raised as the corresponding gender tend to become transgender (i.e. to identify with the gender corresponding to their gonadal sex rather than their assigned sex) by their late teens.
Also, by quickly glancing at the Wikipedia article ISTM that chemical castration does work—though to be sure I would have to see double-blind trials, which for obvious reasons would be problematic (to say the least) to perform.
Surely different gender roles are possible. Shouldn’t Gender still exists then implystill bad, rather than gender still exists imply patriarchy (tied to current gender roles no?) An equal and opposite (where possible) matriarchy (or some other -archy based on alien genders) would be about as bad, right?
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).
To answer this in particular because I think they’re all valid points you probably have more experience with than I do, I used the same text with the women as I used with men to whom I taught the same thing, and it was done through an impersonal text-only chat interface, and no I did not “know as a good feminist” all that much because I was merely, in my mind, correcting a behavior reinforcing unfairness. I had not learned to think more than four steps of causality forward in counterfactuals, at the time, nor of how to compute recursive not-exclusively-self-reinforcing social trends.
No, I did not feel intensely conscious and uncomfortable about these things, because ceteris paribus, it is better to feel good about doing good things than to feel bad about doing good things. I also rarely feel intensely conscious and uncomfortable for pretty much anything.
Fortunately, I noticed the counter-signaling and reverse policing issues long before I would have had opportunity to accidentally cause damage in that manner. My body-policing towards men and women is exactly identical, barring practical issues like bits of skin only happening in some place for one of the two genders exclusively and thus requiring different structural solutions in clothing. In my workplace, men are required to wear dress shirts and formal business black pants. Women have no such requirements, as long as they dress “acceptably for a business environment”. This is the kind of thing I denounce and find unfair. I don’t even know, nor care, which of the two genders is being disadvantaged the most in this case, I only need know that there is unfair treatment to conclude that it ought not to be so.
The reason I claimed there didn’t seem to be any exit is that you propose a long road towards eliminating patriarchy, but it doesn’t seem as though anyone who would follow this road and yet still disagree with you would be a valid counterexample. You seem to be establishing within the premise that anyone who doesn’t study Feminism is automatically a Patriarchist, and that anyone who does study Feminism will inevitably agree with you, become a Feminist, and relinquish all Patriachism—and that anyone who claims to have studied Feminism yet did not end up in that particular state simply must have done it wrong.
On a last note, no, I have no intention of becoming a radical. What is a radical, anyway? What will being “radical” change from my current behavior of “Do everything I possibly can to act in a manner which promotes fair treatment of all humans without influence of any bias or skewed model of valuation.”?
Or, to be blunt and confrontational: Are you asking me to subjugate all men that might possibly be likely to engage in any form of patriarchal behavior in the future? Is the requirement for fitting your definition of morality that women must be completely free, and any influence of any man to any woman is immoral, such that “people” influencing “other people” is okay, but not men influencing women?
I’d really like to see a truth table here, because on my truth table, anyone can influence anyone else, as long as there is no nefarious will at work and there is no long-term self-reinforcing behavior being programmed, and any filtering by any criterion, be it gender or race or otherwise, is something I perceive as less moral. Despite this, I will obviously act rationally and sacrifice one person over two others according to some criterion if practical math dictates that such is the optimal moral result of shutting up and multiplying. I do my utmost to avoid letting properties of my own mind (or indeed, of anything that is not inherently in what I estimate to be truly real) from affecting these calculations, so things like Woman.Sexiness or Woman.Attractiveness will never be considered barring Newcomblike problems forcing me to consider them.
Because, you see, in my model, you’re the one feeding the problem by insisting on feminism and reducing oppression of females in particular over all other possible forms of unfair treatments from some humans to other humans. Focusing on women specifically seems like it would only reinforce the idea of gender distinctions. I focus on all occurences, and it only happens that cases involving male-female differences are statistically more frequent than other cases, with skin color and religion-belief-associated statements (or lack thereof) coming in not too far behind.
Edit: I realize that the last paragraph is very accusatory, but it is meant as an illustrative parallel to the Tentacle Super-Happy Aliens in the Three Worlds Collide story. I don’t actually believe that you’re acting in a negative-expected-utility manner, nor that my behavior has clearly and verifiably better expected utility. It’s just an expression of where my arguments generally come from and why I don’t identify as a Feminist, but rather as a Humanist.
Patriarchy exists in an objective sense. It is tangibly demonstrated in experiments. Its physical, material manifestation in reality is as a pattern of activation in the neurons of human brains.
Going all the way back to my original post, hierarchy creates division, division creates difference (and difference justifies hierarchy, but that’s tangential here).
If you treat men and women identically, you are being patriarchal because you are ignoring how the same behavior can have different consequences when emitted towards a male-socialized or women-socialized person.
This is a very typical failure mode of proto-feminist thought. It’s well covered in snarky blog posts, but I’m not aware of any good sources to fix it.
Since we’ve isolated the source of our disagreement, I suggest we stop arguing here, because I can’t really convey any novel information to you at this point.
Okay. I have no idea how this would happen, concretely. I have never seen any evidence of this. My prior towards this being true is extremely small.
The closest match I have is: If I act identically towards men and women, and some people are biased or uninformed, they might perceive my behavior differently or it might have different consequences depending on who the other person is. There might even be hardcoded brain differences in how a woman will perceive an action versus how a man would.
The above paragraph merely seems to imply that stupid people will privilege their own hypothesis whether I act differently towards them or not. This is not dependent on patriarchy, but merely a cognitive defect of the human brain in general. If your claim is on the basis of brain differences, then I believe myself justified in requesting evidence for this, because the standard extremist-feminist claim I’ve heard is that most difference in interpretation is not hardcoded, but rather cultural.
What is “male-socialized or women-socialized”, exactly? They sound like applause lights, and I have no idea what they could even mean on a technical level. It doesn’t even look like a hypothesis, only a mysterious “explanation”.
Suppose we were not in a particularly patriarchal society. Is treating everyone equally, regardless of gender or race or otherwise, still patriarchal? Surely not. If it is, then I am confused.
If some people perceive my behavior as being oppressive towards men but not women, or oppressive towards women but not men, despite being identical towards both, even when my behavior has no gender-conditionals implanted within it, then that is a property of their minds. The behavior is not inherently “patriarchal” or “oppressive” if it contains exactly zero conditionals that correlate with gender. This is obviously not the case, because the above is a mathematically-perfect representation of my ideal / attempted behavior.
Behaving differently towards men and towards women seems like exactly the kind of thing we want to avoid if we want to eliminate gender-unfairness. Unless your objective is to turn things around and make women dominant over men instead? Or make some other group dominant? Or create some other form of inequality?
A summarized, distilled, refined, purified version of my behavioral guidelines on this subject is basically:
I should act in the exact same manner towards everyone all the time, with no discriminatory conditionals that correlate with specific subsets of humans, and in the same convergent-coherent manner that I would act whether I were a man, a woman, any kind of transgender, an androgynous human, or any other form of humanlike mind that had these same goals.
I fully expect, with high probability, that living in a “patriarchal society” populated entirely with people applying these behaviors would be essentially no different than what I do not consider a “patriarchal society” and no different from a gender-fair society. It is also exactly the goal sought by not-female-domination-oriented feminism, to my knowledge.
If you have any specific evidence or reading material on the above-quoted claim you could point out, I’d be glad to read up on it.
Saying “we now know why we disagree” without having a chance to change my mind if I am wrong is insufficient for me. I must become stronger. I must not worship ignorance. I do not have sufficient evidence (not even remotely close) to assert that you are Most Definitely Wrong. Therefore my priors could be wrong.
While your last paragraph is admirable in itself, I can only see it as an applause light in the context of the adversarial nature of both your post and this discussion in general.
For one, if you truly wish to become stronger, read better radical feminists than me. I can no better educate you in radical feminism than you could educate a christian in rationalism.
Gender socialization is a process I’ve defined earlier, and that turns up huge amounts of google hits and a long Wikipedia page. The wikipedia page isn’t very good, but essentially, gender socialization is the process of being taught (via operant conditioning, modeling, and observational learning) gender.
Which brings us here:
Brains are plastic. They are reprogrammable. They are computers.
There are differences between the brains of people socialized as men and the brains of people socialized as women. They are a result of gender socialization—of men and women learning to emit different behaviors, and respond in different ways to behaviors emitted by people of masculine or feminine expression.
If you emit some behavior B, that behavior is processed differently by different human minds. The automatic processes of association will produce drastically different responses in those minds depending on the distance between them.
To put it another way, I could say a sentence to you that you would (possibly) be completely nonchalant about, but would trigger someone with PTSD into a panic attack or flashback. The sentence has no PTSD-conditionality; as such, any triggering is an artifact of the listener’s mind, and the sentence is not inherently “triggering” or “oppressive.”
Do you see the problem in the above scenario?
Well, liberal feminists that I disagree with would point out that the sentence “You certainly seem to have sex with lots of people” provokes very different reactions when you say it to men than when you say it to women. If you disbelieve me, try it out on your Facebook friends.
A non-patriarchal society is one wherein the concept of gender is alien to those within it. “Treating everyone equally regardless of gender” implies that gender still exists, which to me implies that patriarchy still exists. You can refer back to the infographic at my top-level post in this thread for more on this.
I hope you don’t mind me jumping into this discussion; I find it fascinating.
Would the below statement be an accurate rephrasing of your views ?
“Any differences in behaviors between men and women are due entirely to their upbringing. Their biological makeup has no measurable effect on such behaviors.”
I think this is a reasonable claim—but how would you determine whether it’s true or not, without performing exactly the kind of biological research that you oppose ? Actually, I may be jumping ahead of myself. Assuming that you agree with my phrasing, do you think that it matters how likely it is to be true ?
I do not (unless, of course, you deliberately designed the sentence to be an effective basilisk, in which case I’d say you are behaving unethically). What am I missing ?
I understand what you’re saying, but, technically speaking, the mere existence of gender does not imply patriarchy. It could imply matriarchy, instead. That’s a minor nitpick, though.
(Edit: formatting)
ISTM that the issue is similar to that of the old injunction against yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater or the more recent one of yelling “BOMB!” while pointing at an abandoned bag in an airport. Sure, the words themselves do not inherently carry panic, mayhem, children trampled to death by mobs, etc. - just like no word inherently carries PTSD attacks in them—but it is still much preferable ceteris paribus not to have a behavior A when there are known expected negative consequences.
Think: “I know making dead baby jokes while that person is still traumatized by having their five (baby) children tortured to death in front of them will cause them incredibly grief, horror and pain, but it’s not my fault they’re like that and the words themselves don’t cause the pain, so it’s fine I can do whatever I want!”
As for your other questions, I’m also eager to see a response.
I see what you’re saying, and I agree, but I don’t think the scenarios are identical.
In both of your scenarios, the speakers know with an extremely high degree of certainty that their words will have a negative effect. That’s why I singled out “deliberately creating an effective basilisk” as an unethical activity.
In eridu’s scenario, however, this is not the case (unless I misunderstood him). His scenario is more like the following:
“I am going to talk about my trip to the zoo where I saw some rare monkeys. I understand that there must exist some people in the world who have been savaged by vicious monkeys, and might react negatively to my tale, but I’m going to narrate it anyway”.
If we are going to implement a hard rule saying, “don’t utter any sentence that could trigger anyone, under any circumstances”, then communication would become untenable.
In addition, from a strictly nitpicky philosophical point of view, I’d argue that sentences by themselves are not “triggering” or “oppressive”; they are just bit strings. It’s the interaction of a sentence with a particular human’s mind that could be potentially triggering. If no one in the world had ever been savaged by monkeys, my tale of monkeys at the zoo could not trigger anyone, which would imply that it is not inherently triggering.
I agree with that for the most part.
Destroying patriarchy.
Prove to me that you’ve tried harder.
I don’t think that would do it. If by “destroying patriarchy” you mean “destroying the systemic oppression of women by men”, then achieving this goal alone would not bring you closer to knowing whether gender has biological underpinnings. After patriarchy is destroyed, men and women would still exist, they just wouldn’t oppress each other (*) .
On the other hand, if your goal is to destroy gender altogether (which would, as a consequence, bring about the destruction of the patriarchy), then it would be very valuable for you to discover whether gender has biological underpinnings or not. If it does, then your goal is unachievable (at least, through purely social methods, transhumanism aside), and you’d end up wasting a lot of effort.
See my reply to DaFranker, below.
(*) Or perhaps the women would oppress the men, since the goal of “destroying patriarchy” doesn’t specify any specific outcome.
Well, if as a consequence of the mechanisms that perpetuate oppression being abolished, people no longer have gender identities, then you could be pretty sure after the fact that that hypothesis was right after all.
However, it seems to me that the approach of finding out whether gender identities are innate or learned by destroying patriarchy is question-begging, because the means by which the people advocating it intend to destroy the patriarchy presuppose that gender identities are learned.
Indeed.
This is hardly unusual in the space of traditional rationality, and even in nontraditional rationality.
Yes. However, it’s fairly evident that the cost of a general policy against uttering potentially-damaging sentences for all cases is prohibitive; you pretty much by rule can’t exist if you’re absolutely not allowed to ever accidentally trigger a negative reaction. That’s hyperbole, though, but the key point is:
It’s all about quantities and how much whiter or blacker.
A super-general ultra-powerful general policy against possibly-patriarchal words or behaviors by adjusting for expected perceptions would not only carry a much higher cost-per-avoided-damage than other behaviors, but would also in most cases dramatically increase the risk of committing errors in judgment, on top of pretty much becoming your sole lifegoal and preventing you from ever doing any progress in any other topic of interest.
What’s more, the very policy is itself sexist, because it expects differences in minds and perceptions between genders. This expectation is not secret, so it would obviously have an effect on others’ behaviors.
Historically / experimentally, what have we seen happen when others know that X is expected of them?
They will either X, or -X in order to signal.
By placing Expectation X, you are focusing the behavior-space on X in particular, and discouraging escape from that zone. This is why I find the idea of behaving differently and having different expectations of different genders to be harmful. By placing my expectations and own behaviors in a wider X, and having the same X for all audiences, I believe myself to be actively contributing to the reduction of unfair discrimination.
I very much believe you. I have also seen experimental evidence of pretty much the same. I don’t really see how that is directly relevant, or what your underlying point is, though. A policy of identical behaviors and identical reaction expectations will, on pain of deliberately choosing to lower its expected total utility, take into account known evidence for realistically-expected behavior and expect its conjugate¹, so as to causally bring behaviors closer to the ideal expected identical behaviors.
Perhaps this is already what you are doing, perhaps this decision theory approach is wrong (I try to use TDT-like processes because, well, so far they work), or perhaps I’m confusing things or putting too many concepts together. The above does makes sense to me—the mathlike stuff works out and the anecdotal evidence supports—and is not a conclusion I arrived to trivially by Authority or some form of subculture programming, barring denial-of-denial problems.
Other than this, Bugmaster has made some interesting queries, which I’m also interested in.
(¹. I mean here in the algebra sense of “conjugates”, figuratively, as the behavior which is expected to multiply or add up with the current expected real behavior such that the resulting behavior after future corrections by the other party becomes 1, AKA gender-identical and otherwise calibrated as much as possible for utility-increasing future behavior. )
ETA: I’ve elaborated a bit more on general policies in more technical terms and with more standard LW jargon in this other comment.
I agree provided you don’t mean they are exclusively a result of gender socialization, and that (say) hormones don’t play any significant role.
I don’t think that hormones play a significant role, and I don’t think that they can override socialization.
For example, how much traditionally gendered behavior do feral children display? That’s biological gender, right there. They have the same hormones any of the rest of us do, minus all the socialization.
The trouble with this argument is that the feral condition is not the natural condition for humans, as philosophers once imagined it to be. A whole slew of development doesn’t work without the appropriate stimuli which are provided by all human societies, for instance exposure to language during the critical period.
The gold standard for demonstrating that something is due to socialization is to demonstrate difference among societies or social groups (subcultures, classes, etc.) — not to compare a healthy person to one that has been developmentally impaired, i.e. a feral child.
EDIT: To taboo “natural” — The feral condition is not the environment of evolutionary adaptation for the human mind, and we know about specific deficits that develop in feral children.
This is still 100% naturalistic fallacy. Or appeal to nature if you don’t feel that it is a fallacy in this case.
Can you explain a little further? I don’t follow.
“Is not the natural condition” is not a counterargument of any sort to eridu’s claim:
*(I got this from Eridu’s profile. it is the right post: I clicked permalink and it bought me here)
Eridu: “I don’t think that hormones play a significant role, and I don’t think that they can override socialization.
For example, how much traditionally gendered behavior do feral children display? That’s biological gender, right there. They have the same hormones any of the rest of us do, minus all the socialization.”
“The feral condition is not the natural condition” is irrelevant. Eridu was using biological to mean non-socialised, not natural or normal. A critcism that could be made at this point is that lots (most? all surviving?) feral children are raised by some non-human mini-society in the form of a pack of animals so maybe in fact they are desocialised of their biological default gender by living in such a society. Or a gender neutral survivor personality supresses gender: maybe if you raised some kids in an empty room but gave them food so they didn’t have to scavenge the females would be more “feminine” and the males more masculine. Or (sorry I only meant to write the first but these other possibilities have occured to me as I go) femininity and masculinity are mostly only social anyway and their agenderedness is just a byproduct of their asocialness to humans.
Or that hormones are actually perfectly amenable to changes due to socialisation.
So the thing about development is a non sequitur who’s only purpose I can think of seems to be imply that gender could be a “development” which is much like saying ADHD is/isn’t a disease.
Anyway then fuba cunningly redefines “due to socialisation” as “due to non-universal socialisation.” Or perhaps this is just what most people usually mean by “due to socialisation” but the literal words in this specific case can not just be substituted for their usual meaning because Eridu obviously meant by “socialisation”, socialisation, and not non-universal socialisation.
If gender creating stimuli are universal to all societies that necessarrilly imples that they come from society. If every human hates red, red is still not “objectively bad.” Similiarly, if every society socialises the vast majority of its members into being gendered that doesn’t make it inherent that humans are gendered.
The naturalistic fallacy is the implication that if it turns out that it really is a universal (as a fact about all the particular societies that exist or have existed) adopting a gender identity would constitude “development” in a way comparable to adoption of language.
Now Fuba doesn’t explicitly commit the naturalistic fallacy at any point but I don’t belive he’s just bringing up these facts at this point totally at random after starting his post with “the trouble with this post is that” and not trying to imply anything. The point of Fuba’s post seems to be that because feral children lack some development that all societies provide the stimuli for, gender is also a “development,” and that still doesn’t even contradict eridu. She merely claimed that gender is socialised, not that that is bad (in that specific post.) To actually disagree with Eridu’s post it requires also that universal socialisation people approve of is “development” and hence not due to socialisation. But a lot of “development” (e.g. language) is due to socialisation.
Sorry fuba. I’m naturally an asshole when I think I’m pointing out people’s mistakes and have the excuse that I am tired so I’m not going to try and fix that.
So I guess I was wrong. The argument seems to be that if gender is good and universal in societies that currently exist/have existed it is “development” and so not socialisation. Naturalistic fallacy doesn’t quite cover it. It’s also like that diseased thinking post. I don’t know the term for that.
Alternatively maybe it is just an appeal to process in some well respected area. In which case it is a misunderstanding because the process is designed to look for the meaning commonly substituted for “socialisation” (non-universal socialisation) and Eridu was talking about socialisation.
Presumably feral children would display gendered behavior in some respects if gender was hormonal—spatial manipulation is the first one I can think of. In general, the set of gendered behavior minus the set of behaviors that require intervention during a critical or sensitive period should be gendered in feral children.
What you say is in general true, and I don’t think that it would be hard to demonstrate difference in gender expectations across social groups.
By itself it only proves that hormones are not sufficient and socialization is necessary, not that hormones are not necessary and socialization is sufficient.
IIRC many people born with ambiguous external genitalia, accidentally surgically assigned to the sex other than their gonadal one, and raised as the corresponding gender tend to become transgender (i.e. to identify with the gender corresponding to their gonadal sex rather than their assigned sex) by their late teens.
Also, by quickly glancing at the Wikipedia article ISTM that chemical castration does work—though to be sure I would have to see double-blind trials, which for obvious reasons would be problematic (to say the least) to perform.
I’m afraid I’ve never met a feral child. And I would not expect children to have as much socialization as an adult.
I don’t suppose anyone has ever dropped a bunch of babies on the woods and seen what sort of society they develop 25 years later...
I rather quiet one, I’d imagine.
Assuming they survived (with an artificially plentiful supply of rabbits and chickens).
Ah. Well, that’s quite an assumption.
Hm.
Beats me.
Surely different gender roles are possible. Shouldn’t Gender still exists then implystill bad, rather than gender still exists imply patriarchy (tied to current gender roles no?) An equal and opposite (where possible) matriarchy (or some other -archy based on alien genders) would be about as bad, right?
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).