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comment by aidrocsid
aidrocsid  ·  3199 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why Rape Is Sincerely Hilarious

    Isn't stratified power along gender lines exactly what sexism gives sexism its power?

Not at all.

    How can society be sexist without power stratified across gender lines?

Because we judge people based on their gender and prescribe behavior based on gender.

    Race x Economic Class = :(

I'd certainly agree that race is a significant factor and contemporarily you can't extricate it from economic class. Just as you say, the effects of sexism are statistically enhanced when you apply them to women of color. They're also enhanced, though, when you apply them to men of color. Black men are, like men, overrepresented in prison, in the military, and on the streets, while being underrepresented in college.

  
  1 (plus) 3 = 2 (plus) 2
'Three plus one' and 'two plus two' (sorry, Hubski formatting) in this equation are, as you might say, "two sides of the same coin". This is true. Does that mean, though, that only 'two plus two' is legitimate? That only 'one plus three' is legitimate? Regardless of how we frame it, how we break the numbers down, the point is that 4=4.

If that's a little less than clear, I'll be more explicit. We've got this dichotomy of agency/vulnerability, yeah? You can describe it either way. You can say that men are considered to have more agency, more culpability, and less vulnerability, or you can say that women are considered to have less agency, less culpability, and more vulnerability. These two statements mean the same thing, the only thing that's different is who we're focusing on as our object.

The only difference I see in what we're saying, as far as our description of sexism, is that an explanation supporting patriarchy theory insists on emphasizing one side of the coin over the other. So we'd say men may die in droves in the military and at work while women don't, but that's because we don't take women seriously. That doesn't do anything to deny the legitimacy of the statement, but it attempts to invert it to dismiss male vulnerability as objects of industry and war in favor of a specific narrative in which power is stratified by gender.

It's tricky but it doesn't really mean anything. Does that make sense?

We basically need a transitive property of sexism to clarify. The interconnected set of biases and double standards that make up the sexism faced by both genders (and thus, lest we forget, all human beings) is universally needlessly limiting.

Again, nowhere else in intersectionality do we see a supposed privileged class that faces any form of discrimination or increased statistics for poverty, imprisonment, mortality, or at-risk behavior. Nowhere. How are we to believe that this is an anomaly when it comes to men when we've got documentation of institutional and systemic sexism against men?





arguewithatree  ·  3199 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Absolutely men of color face their own struggles. As men of color. White women have a history of abusing men of color for their benefit (Emmett Till, any of the "I was attacked by a black man oh wait no I wasn't tee hee" stories). Which again falls back on the issue of women's agency. Both groups face disadvantages, but they play out in different ways.

I think I understand where you're trying to get with the transitive property, but you can't quantify oppression; hence the term there's no Oppression Olympics. You just can't quantify it because of the ways that race, class, etc overlap.

What doesn't really mean anything? The issue of men being considered disposable still boils down to women being viewed as lacking agency and strength and vim and vigor and whatnot -- all positive "masculine" traits, a dichtomy which relies on inherently defining "feminine" as weak. In no situation is masculine considered weak. There is no inverse there.

Men are viewed by patriarchy as disposable because they are desired for their masculinity. Masculine women aren't desired, only masculine men. Ideally, there would be no war, then no one would be shipped off anywhere to die. But what would people say about a leader who refused to go to war? In this way, men suffer at the hands of men. It's not sexism against men; it's patriarchy back firing on men for valuing masculinity and devaluing femininity. And I don't think you can reverse the two. In no situation is femininity valued over masculinity.

Have I been chasing my tail? Are we back where we started at patriarchy theory?

arguewithatree  ·  3199 days ago  ·  link  ·  

give me just a second i'm editing my last response to make up for running away mid post

edit; ok edits made, now i'm going to address this post

aidrocsid  ·  3199 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Haha, sorry if I wind up doing a bit of that too. I tend to do a first draft, edit once, post it, and then edit a lot more.