by sidewalk » Mon Jul 21, 2014 1:59 am
In an aim to remain (or attempt to) intellectually honest with myself, I want to address some of the things that I said that may have caused controversy. I do admit that some of what I said came from a place of ignorance on the topic.
First I want to talk about where I believe I was wrong, and then I will get into where I think those who responded to me were wrong as well. Charybdis answered most of my questions just by mentioning racism, and the negative aspects that a societal view can create without it being intentional. Thank you for mentioning that, as it helped clear a lot of the issues I had understanding the issue. I also failed to take into account the disadvantages that women have even in America, such as rulings for abortion and birth control, which make it harder for women to have an equal footing to men. On the other hand (and something I also am looking for insight on), if a woman can't get an abortion, the male will still pay a price. The price that often comes with fathering a child, such as child support.
With that said, I want to understand the negative response I got. A portion of my post was simply questions that nobody actually answered, and instead chose to pin-point single pieces that didn't make sense given the rest of my comment, since they were used to build my argument. It's like if you build a tower out of blocks and somebody pulls a couple blocks from the bottom, causing the whole thing to fall. Is that tower no longer the same tower that it was because it was reliant on every piece working together? At face-value it seems like a lackluster attempt at making a point, but the purpose of my post was to create thought as I looked for insight.
A lot of the flack I got was for my disassociation with 'feminism', which seems equally as ignorant as what I admitted to. Humanism and feminism are not interchangeable, and have conflicting ideologies on several topics/issues, alongside having vastly different histories. Defining myself as a humanist isn't a position of ignorance, and therefore I fail to understand the reaction. Also, I never claimed feminism was an ideology of women's rights, although I can understand the confusion (in this instance) somewhat. I did say that females being treated different throughout development isn't a feminist issue because males are also treated in an unfair way, but the point was that it's not an inequality issue at that point. I suppose the "separate but equal" criticism could be applied to what I said, but I am simply having difficulty understanding how circumstantial expectations for child can be reduced to gender. As I said in my original post, it's something that doesn't seem testable or reliant. I'm just looking for answers.
Finally, there was a criticism against how I brought up biological factors. I want to understand that position, because from my perspective, gender roles exist in nature without these societal constructs that are supposedly the cause of these gender roles (lions, elephants, alligators, birds). Also, gender roles existed in homo-sapiens before "society" itself ever existed. Men would hunt because they are biologically stronger, and women would be out of commission for months at a time due to child birth. Because of this, women needed a man to provide protection and food for when she couldn't herself. Now, I'm not claiming that you can't intellectually move past gender-roles, but the innate negativity that I received for mentioning biological factors seems invalid given the fact that males and females do have biological differences, and I refuse to believe that they should be ignored in the sake of equality. It honestly sounds like somebody saying, "I don't see race". Sure, it may not be racist as a tactic to not judge/act on race, but it also claims that we need to ignore our differences in order to be seen as equal.
Thanks fellas, hopefully we can understand each other better.