My friend Wes (substack) has some disagreements with my previous post where I advise men to like the feminine virtues of their women partners. Is This Just Gender Essentialism? This is just gender essentialism Eneasz Brodski, for some reason, makes it about gender and acts like all women are the same and into "girl stuff"
Yet, truth is not absent from love. She has been good for him, I think.
Eneasz is saying things that he needed to hear uears ago, and that I also needed to hear a decade ago. A lot of men don't even realize they still need to hear it. But for those that do, better they get it here than from people who will bundle it with misogyny, machismo, and strict essentialism.
It seems to me that the term "gender essentialism" is an oxymoron. "Gender" is a very recently-invented term, invented specifically to mean "socially-constructed roles which we associate with sex." As gender is by definition socially constructed (and assuming the default interpretation of "social construction" which assumes that anything socially-constructed is arbitrary and could have been constructed any other way, which is idiotic--an airplane is socially-constructed, but it won't go far without wings--but I digress), gender by definition has no essential character. The /entire purpose/ of inventing the word "gender" was to assert that sex roles have accumulated a patina of socially-constructed roles as well. The idea that "gender" /replaces/ rather than supplements "sex" is even more-recent.
We really should get back to using the term "sex" when we mean sex. Keep these terms separate.
Recently I saw an article about "gender discrimination" by the Taliban. Which implied that the Taliban would not discriminate against women enacting the male gender. Absurd. The Taliban don't even have a concept of "gender"!
I think it's the other way around? When I was young gender was a 100% interchangeable synonym for sex, it was just more polite to say than sex. And couldn't be confused with "the act of having sex" version of the word. ("Sex? Yes pls.") It didn't start to diverge into meaning the social roles part until this century.
but yeah, I agree people need to start saying sex when they mean biological stuff, and only use gender when they mean social stuff. I don't think that'll happen tho :/
Well, it won't happen as long as people try to win political arguments by redefining terms. There was a big kerfluffle some time ago when some administration, maybe Obama's, declared that the word "sex" in laws would be interpreted as implying "gender", meaning all the protections previously given to cis women were to be extended to trans women. I read the top 50 Google hits to news arguments about the matter, and IIRC every one except some scientific websites deliberately ignored the question at hand--whether "sex" and "gender" should be treated as synonyms--and instead wrote an angry diatribe which "won" its argument by replacing all usages of "sex" with "gender" (if radical leftist) or of "gender" with "sex" (if not radical leftist). It was a very blatant case of everyone in the "debate" deliberately avoiding engaging in debate.
I think you're both right. On the streets, gender was just a more polite synonym for sex as far as I can remember (90s and 00s). But it was introduced (really borrowed from grammar) as an academic term for the social construct thing during second wave feminism (IIRC by Simone de Beauvoir). Before that, gender only ever (AFAIK) referred to word inflections associated with sexes, like -o and -a in Spanish
According to Google n-grams, "gender" didn't come into common use in English until the 1970s, and the center of its sigmoid-curve of adoption was in 1992. As Thomas says, it referred to word inflections before the 1960s. De Beauvoir used the French equivalent, "genre", in the new way in French in 1949. I dunno if that was the first such use.
I think you're just in love and like whatever makes your girlfriend happy
Too real.
Yet, truth is not absent from love. She has been good for him, I think.
Eneasz is saying things that he needed to hear uears ago, and that I also needed to hear a decade ago. A lot of men don't even realize they still need to hear it. But for those that do, better they get it here than from people who will bundle it with misogyny, machismo, and strict essentialism.
Thank you :)
This is definitely a major factor. I've literally unlocked a new emotion that I didn't realize existed, it's nuts.
It seems to me that the term "gender essentialism" is an oxymoron. "Gender" is a very recently-invented term, invented specifically to mean "socially-constructed roles which we associate with sex." As gender is by definition socially constructed (and assuming the default interpretation of "social construction" which assumes that anything socially-constructed is arbitrary and could have been constructed any other way, which is idiotic--an airplane is socially-constructed, but it won't go far without wings--but I digress), gender by definition has no essential character. The /entire purpose/ of inventing the word "gender" was to assert that sex roles have accumulated a patina of socially-constructed roles as well. The idea that "gender" /replaces/ rather than supplements "sex" is even more-recent.
We really should get back to using the term "sex" when we mean sex. Keep these terms separate.
Recently I saw an article about "gender discrimination" by the Taliban. Which implied that the Taliban would not discriminate against women enacting the male gender. Absurd. The Taliban don't even have a concept of "gender"!
I think it's the other way around? When I was young gender was a 100% interchangeable synonym for sex, it was just more polite to say than sex. And couldn't be confused with "the act of having sex" version of the word. ("Sex? Yes pls.") It didn't start to diverge into meaning the social roles part until this century.
but yeah, I agree people need to start saying sex when they mean biological stuff, and only use gender when they mean social stuff. I don't think that'll happen tho :/
Well, it won't happen as long as people try to win political arguments by redefining terms. There was a big kerfluffle some time ago when some administration, maybe Obama's, declared that the word "sex" in laws would be interpreted as implying "gender", meaning all the protections previously given to cis women were to be extended to trans women. I read the top 50 Google hits to news arguments about the matter, and IIRC every one except some scientific websites deliberately ignored the question at hand--whether "sex" and "gender" should be treated as synonyms--and instead wrote an angry diatribe which "won" its argument by replacing all usages of "sex" with "gender" (if radical leftist) or of "gender" with "sex" (if not radical leftist). It was a very blatant case of everyone in the "debate" deliberately avoiding engaging in debate.
I think you're both right. On the streets, gender was just a more polite synonym for sex as far as I can remember (90s and 00s). But it was introduced (really borrowed from grammar) as an academic term for the social construct thing during second wave feminism (IIRC by Simone de Beauvoir). Before that, gender only ever (AFAIK) referred to word inflections associated with sexes, like -o and -a in Spanish
According to Google n-grams, "gender" didn't come into common use in English until the 1970s, and the center of its sigmoid-curve of adoption was in 1992. As Thomas says, it referred to word inflections before the 1960s. De Beauvoir used the French equivalent, "genre", in the new way in French in 1949. I dunno if that was the first such use.
Machinehead the song, or the band?
The song. It's actually not my favorite Bush song, but was recently mentioned on twitter by Matt Ygelsias https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1805289612924862958#