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The two kinds of gender - Printable Version

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The two kinds of gender - YesYourNigel - Dec 2 2024

So much of the discussion in liberal feminist spaces gets bogged down by the inability to make a distinction between two kinds of gender roles, and the movement ends up being reduced to "Anything women do is good and should never be criticised, and anything men do is only perceived as good due to androcentrism and the patriarchy".

The two kinds I'm talking of are:
1. Useful, empowering and self-beneficial skills, presentation and personality traits reserved for men, and submissive impractical ones being reserved for women - let's call this "objective traits"
2. The mere relation to women signifying something as bad, and relation to men automatically making things good - let's call this "stereotypical traits" or "associated traits".

For example: the fact that high heels are uncomfortable, restrictive of movement and damaging to feet is not because women are so unfairly hated that anything associated with them is bad, but because this is the truth about high heels. These things became associated with women because they were impractical, not vice versa. This is an objectively bad trait.

STEM skills are objectively useful in a world that increasingly relies on technology, but gaming as a hobby isn't. I want to see more women in STEM, as this is an objectively positive, beneficial trait to have. I don't want to see more women sitting on their asses all day glued to the screen to win e-sport tournaments while their children starve and their friends and family never see them. The only reason why gaming is seen as somehow more worthwhile as a hobby than, say, reading books or crocheting, is because it's associated with men.

The distinction isn't always clear cut (even useless hobbies will have a tendency to exclude women and limit women's options for pure entertainment, and what should be objectively harmless traits often become limiting due to women being forcefully pigeonholed into then) and generally people will even treat objective traits through stereotypical lens - for instance, even though makeup and beauty standards are objectively bad for women, women who don too much of it are mocked due to misogyny. Men still demand that women engage in impractical, harmful and damaging trends to sexually appeal to them, it's just that when it's too extreme even for some of them, they get pissy. The pissiness comes not from any humanist or empathetic concern for the woman, but out of rage for her not pandering properly to men's dicks. And this misogyny is what liberal women want to react to, but the reaction ends up being reduced to the childish idea that anything associated with women must be positive because women are oppressed so anything associated with them is oppressed as well. And when enough normies start parroting this you get the absurd conclusion that the main victim of the patriarchy isn't women (aka actual human beings), but femininity coming under attack. You take the insanity far enough and combine it with the copious amounts of attention given to male voices and self-absorbtion, and the real victims become men, specifically trans and gay ones, but also any man who feels slighted for not profiting enough from male supremacy due to nor being high enough in the male pecking order, aka he's too "feminine".

An additional layer of complexity is that female associated traits are sometimes objectively positive for humanity, but women get punished due to doing the overwhelming amount of work placed on them. i.e. childrearing and empathy are good but because the burden of this falls so overwhelmingly on women that women turn into everyone's emotional support animals who run around and mummy lazy, self centered individuals (especially men). So an additional question is also to what degree women should best utilise rejection of gender to compensate for this lop-sidedness. Additionally, centuries-old patriarchal mechanisms that launch so many men into pure narcissism and abuse do not exist for women, so to some degree being expected to engage in superficially negative traits (being more selfish or career-focused) is not going to snowball for women into narcissism the way it does for men. Or at least not unless said selfishness is encouraged through gendered lens. Women (conservative women, TIFs, NotLikeOtherGirls) who are only confident, proactive and assertive when it comes to policing other women or children under the approving gaze of men for male benefir are not subverting gender roles despite showing traits that are not stereotypically feminine.

Which traits should be discouraged or not in women must not be determined on the basis of patriarchal knee-jerk reactions but rather on the basis of how beneficial and humanist these traits are. Women are raised and brainwashed within the confines of patriarchal society and they can't expect to do 0 work to undo it. But this work needs to always be performed for their own benefit. Not to pander to men, not to get their approval, not to prop themselves up over "other girls", but to retake the confidence, skills and dignity that they have been denied and that would objectively improve their lives.