We’re all familiar with the phenomenon. You’re arguing with some jerk in the comments section of a blog, and judging by responses, all your carefully crafted, brilliantly logical arguments seem like they’re coming out in the twilight zone, where they get mangled into terrible straw man constructions that should never be. “What the hell is going on?” you think, “How can this person not see what’s right in front of their face?”
When this happens, it’s likely that you’re arguing from different axioms — that is, your fundamental views about how the world is or should work are in conflict. Until that conflict is resolved, at least partially, agreement is impossible. It’s not impossible for someone’s axioms to change, but that’s relatively rare, and requires a larger volume of evidence than convincing someone to support a policy.
In the spirit of new blog and all, I thought I’d introduce myself by laying out my axioms around gender equality:
A person’s set of behaviors, expectations, and responsibilities should be chosen, not assigned.
What this means is that, just because I was born with a vagina, you can’t divine anything about my personality, my interests, my outlooks and desires and hopes and dreams. Likewise, had I been born with a penis.
From this follow a lot of my beliefs about social practices — that women and men should have equal opportunities, that women shouldn’t face stigma for doing “man things” and men shouldn’t face stigma for doing “woman things”, that the gender binary is a stupid thing and who cares about it anyway, and why did I have such a hard time finding good working/walking shoes in women’s sizes.
To change this view, I’d need good scientific evidence of significant inborn gender differences. My understanding of most inborn gender differences is that they likely work along something like an overlapping bell curve — while the statistical average man might be more analytical than the statistically average woman, that doesn’t say anything about any individual woman compared to any individual man. If it’s not like this — if the differences are hugely significant — I’ll take this back.
Each person has supreme authority over their own body. They have no obligation to do anything to it or to allow others to do things to/with it. This authority can never be given away.
From here come my beliefs about consent. For one thing, it’s a continuous process, a state, not a decision. Consent to something is the agreement that yes, someone is allowed to do x, y, and z, on conditions a, b, and c. It’s like inviting someone into your house — you tell them they’re welcome to come in, but they must take their shoes off and they can’t go into the bedroom. If they’re a jerk, you can always tell them the welcome has expired and would they please find their way out. Likewise, consent can always be withdrawn.
A reader may note that this axiom also implies various libertarian social policies, to which I just say “mmmhm!” and nod happily. But this isn’t about drug laws or any of that. One might also note that this precludes true BDSM slave contracts — to which I again nod, pleased with myself. That’s a nice fantasy, but it should still play by these rules.
The only way I’m changing this one is if someone can show me a suitably terrifying consequence of this axiom. I can’t find one, only good things.
My views on abortion and childbearing follow from this as well, with the additional axiom that I believe a fetus becomes a person as soon as it is capable of surviving outside the womb.
So that’s me. Those are my axioms, the things that underlie all the beliefs I’ll argue about on the internet. What about you? Where do you start from on the subject of gender, and what evidence would you need to move away from that?
I love this post!
I think the most common missed axiom I’ve noticed is your first axiom: I’ve had quite a few conversations where I say “gender roles are bad” and the other person says “you are condemning men for being masculine!” and I say “no, I’m not, I’m just saying that my nail-polish-loving drag queen friend is still a man” and they say, “men are men, you shouldn’t try to pressure men into being feminine and besides men aren’t like that except for a few exceptions” and around and around and around it goes…
Yeah — and if someone believes different on the first one, me and them almost won’t be able to talk, because that’s so central to how I think about gender. I might update it to include the idea that gender and gender roles are in fact separate things — one can be a man, but also act in stereotypical feminine ways, or a woman, and act in masculine ways.
I like the following phrasing:
If a boy is pressured to do something or to avoid something strictly because he’s a boy, that’s sexism. If a girl is pressured to do something or to avoid something strictly because she’s a girl, that’s sexism. It’s that simple.
It amazes me how nonobvious this is to most people.
I’m basically with you.
Red Family, Blue Family: http://www.gurus.org/dougdeb/politics/209.html
is the most sympathetic summary I have of the other side. Having a fuller understanding of the inherited obligation structure is crucial to my acceptance of what I see as the downside of the negotiated commitment world.
I think the downside (and it’s not a show stopper, just a downside) is that decoupling “motherhood” and “the bulk of the work of family life” is harder than it looks, at least when the children are babies and toddlers. My “negotiated commitment” family of origin frowns on my career sacrifices, and the inequality in parenting effort in my household, without being privy to the details of how it came about.
Thanks for the link, that’s really good, and a good example of what I was trying to get at in this post.
I’m not sure how that is, but I’m also not really qualified to speak on it, as I haven’t yet gone into this whole having-a-family business. I do think it’s silly to say that career sacrifices or parenting effort inequity are *wrong* — everyone will have their own way of finding satisfaction. Someone I follow on the internet once said that one of the things feminism sold us short on was saying that parenting was a bunch of awful drudgery and it was terrible that we stuck mothers with that, when actually it can be a whole lot of rewarding fun…just nobody should be obligated to do it, and the man involved should have the opportunity to be a bigger part of the kid’s life.
It seems to me that for many issues, inequalities in parenting escalate, at least in the early years. If you do night duty to feed and diaper the newborn one night, your sleep is going to be more enmeshed with the baby’s the next night… for many tasks, familiarity breeds both efficiency and success, and when the whole household is stressed, you can’t afford not to accept what is in economic terms “social efficiency” in the name of balancing equality. (If my sleep cycles can take waking up with the baby, and his can’t, for example, then I just can’t afford to ruin his night in the name of equality, even if more fairness would be in our long term best interest.)
Breastfeeding (and the lactation advice conspiracy) was what made my son wash out of daycare, and what made handling the children’s sleep and bed times far more my problem than my husband’s. I knew going into it that I couldn’t negotiate my way out of pregnancy mid-stream, but it came as a horrible surprise that I was not free (in any logistic sense) to say “these are my breasts and the baby doesn’t get to touch them again.”
If you are in the mindset of negotiating your role, it can be tough to recognize a logistic limitation for what it is, and not to blame your partner for not taking it from you.
Also, “inherited obligation” folks sometimes say things that sound a lot like making a negotiated commitment, when they are merely trying on a role that they will soon play. My mother in law described in detail how she is the kind of grandmother who stays for a month to handle toilet training, and likes staying up at night with a baby, etc. Well, she is that kind of grandmother, but not to my children, and she was not making a commitment to my future children when she talked about it. She was more or less just describing in abstract what grandmothers are, and she fulfills her “being a grandmother” with the grandchildren who are closer to her.
My own mother (who is “negotiated commitment”) made no promises to me, but she considers each child in terms of “what does a child deserve?” and does her best to offer something. That doesn’t mean she’d put herself on the hook to be full-time low-cost childcare, but my children are individuals to her, and are more interesting as children, than as “item that makes me a grandmother.”
“The only way I’m changing this one is if someone can show me a suitably terrifying consequence of this axiom. I can’t find one, only good things.”
Hi. My name is Drew, I’m new here and I really like the website.
I don’t mean to be argumentative, but, as a thought exercise: what about situations where withdrawing one’s consent causes a direct harm to people around them?
For example, if a man consents to marrying a woman and supporting her and a child, and then withdraws that consent – should he have to, at very least, pay child support? A more extreme (and less realistic example): if a doctor, midway through a surgery, decides to stop.. shouldn’t he be fired?
Is it wrong to punish people for withdrawing their consent if it hurts others? Does that mean that there are times when it’s morally unacceptable to withdraw one’s consent?