internet user pedestalizing young attractive women or interpreting their behavior much more charitably than they would for another demographic: being nicer to women is feminism, yes? I am fighting the incentives that make things weird and bad?
// incoherently getting this out before going for dinner
there's a person on twitter who's a friend of a friend through multiple links, shows up on my feed sometimes, generally makes funny and enjoyable posts. Once made a post that was like, "when men have messy apartments I'm like yeah okay, but when women have messy habitats I'm a little freaked out and I judge them more"
I was. amazed by this. My dude, this is literally sexism! You have wrapped around all the way and returned to normal sexism! How do you not recognize this! I almost pointed this out, but decided we didn't have the rapport / character limit for this conversation to have P>0.8 of going well, and scrolled on.
almost everyone in my extended irl and internet sphere wants Equality in some vague way. they want the Dynamics to not Be Fucked, and they mill around doing things that are not "literally trying to treat people the same way regardless of gender". And my axe to grind is that (1) this will tend to deposit you back into Literal Normal Sexism land, (2) even if you're in some New Weird Sexism land, it's still sexism and you should cut that out.
when I was younger I used to be a hardliner on "literally treat people the same way". then I became more corrupt or less autistic or whatnot and now recognize this isn't possible, but I still think genderblindness should be the starting point. And people seem so freaking interested in doing anything but this. They want to analyze the differences and digest them into different treatment. They themselves have personal or social incentives for wanting or giving certain kinds of treatment. And those incentives will win out over (my) (genderblind) ideology
I was hosting a party last week, and found out a potential woman attendee had (1) drunkenly gone around grabbing men's asses at a prior event, (2) made public posts complaining about being shot down unnecessarily cruelly when one of them declined to cuddle with her. Said guy was telling me this in an uber back from buying alcohol and I was amazed, like, wait, you're relaying this so casually – don't you want her banned? I will if you want.
And he just – didn't. He said that while he now disliked her, and felt slightly violated, he didn't mind that much, and he didn't want her banned just for fairness's sake. Which was his prerogative. And it was one of many moments when I realized that very few people on any ideological branch are on board with this program that seems obvious to me, which is that we will not have equality until we are willing to treat people equally. The forces of unequal treatment are just that powerful.
(Not that I've, you know, gone around with a megaphone and said "HEY, DOES ANYONE ELSE THINK, NAIVELY, THAT WE SHOULD JUST – TRY THIS LITERAL EQUALITY THING –")
sigh. I'll soon shut up and hit post and go out for dinner, and probably during dinner I'll start squirming about participating in culture war and delete this
but. come on! I know this isn't 100% possible, but can we shoot for 90% or 80%? Can people not see that new double standards, of any kind, are not the way out?
Well there’s not consensus over what the form of equal treatment should be. In the 1980s-90s, the view that women should adopt the male practice of accepting petty unwanted sexual aggression with equanimity – which would ALSO represent gender-equalized norms – was very widely attested.