that there are more than two biological sexes is scientifically established at this point. there are at least five chromosomal sexes, which aren’t even situated on a spectrum between male and female but are something different altogether (check out Hanne Blank’s book Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Sexuality on this and confer with Foucault). there are intersex people who have XXY chromosomal makeups—a pattern which is simultaneously male, female, but neither. at least 20% of people might be constituted of different chromosomal patterns but are not aware of this because doctors usually determine sex at birth by glancing at your genitalia.
and therein lies the bifurcation between the “natural” and the “social” in one sense. society still reproduces a sexual division based on patriarchal custom, society still categorizes based on male and female bodies. hence the compounded oppression of queer bodied, trans people, gender fluid non-binary people, etc.
it is in this sense that the female body has social reality, in that it is an object of pseudoscientific inquiry; the case of the “female orgasm” in science being one very important example reflecting this reality (it was believed to be a myth for centuries since it had no ‘evolutionary value’ in that it wasn’t necessary for a “female” to orgasm in order to conceive; only recently did this come into question—check out Elizabeth A. Lloyd’s The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution).
telling women not to talk about the female body because it is, in most ways, socially constructed, despite it’s pervasive social influence, is like telling members of ethnic groups to ignore the social reality of their ethnicities because they aren’t biological categories.
there are ways to discuss “the female body” that, not only pay attention to and lend themselves well to anti-transphobic activism, but also expand on the discourse of the embodiments of gender
(via young-earth-lysenkoist)
"Every time a plane flies over New York, we think, “Oh my God — is it another Atlantic think piece?” We mean, “an Atlantic think piece about women.” The two have become synonymous, and they descend upon their target audience with the regularity and severe abdominal cramping of Seasonale. “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” “The End of Men,” “Marry Him!” These are articles intended to terrorize unmarried women, otherwise known as educated straight women in their twenties and thirties, otherwise known as a valuable market, if not for reliable lovers then at least for advertisers. Their purpose is to revive one formerly robust man of the house, who for years has been languishing on his deathbed: the cigar-smoking, suspender-snapping, mansplaining American general interest magazine."
You’re a Pussy if You Think There’s a War on Men
For some men, women—especially feminists—are terrifying. Not in the normal oh-my-God-I-can’t-ask-her-out-what-if-she-says-no way that middle schoolers and characters on Friends experience, but “afraid” in the sense that women will take their money, try to get pregnant on purpose, invent false rape claims, and use feminism to generally abuse men. In this narrative, men are either an oppressed minority (or about to become one), or have to “fight back” against feminists to preserve their rights.
If you want to see what this kind of thinking looks like, take a dip into the river of the Men’s Rights section of Reddit, where a bunch of dudes go to complain about getting raped by women and talk gibberish about how their “clans” are getting attacked by “Statism and Feminism.” Currently, some of the most popular posts on the subreddit include a complaint about how if you owe more than $2,500 in child support payments you can’t get a passport (in the Men’s Rights universe, deadbeat dads are often victims of a misandrist court system); adiscussion, inspired by a Walking Dead plot point, about how getting beaten up is worse than being threatened with rape; an account of some guy squabbling with an obscure feminist blogger (these guys are always getting into internet beef with feminist bloggers, and vice-versa); and a screenshot of some gobbledygook about patriarchy that probably sounded smart to the high-schooler who wrote it. Like a lot of Reddit, the Men’s Rights forum is a way for predominantly white, predominantly rich young men to pat themselves on the back for how smart they are. It gives them something to do, I guess, and it gives the Shit Reddit Says subreddit something to react against.
But the idea that feminism is harmful to men, and women have declared war on people with penises, isn’t confined to Reddit’s nether regions anymore. It’s now mainstream enough for Fox News’s website, which published an awful, troll-baiting op-ed about “The War on Men” written by Suzzanne Venker. Her thesis is that while women want to marry men, men don’t want to marry them because, “Women aren’t women anymore.” She goes on:
“Women are angry. They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly. That’s because they’ve been raised to think of men as the enemy. Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs.
Now the men have nowhere to go.”
What she’s describing is a pretty standard anti-feminist narrative: The evil feminists “convinced” women to want things like the same careers and pay and power that men had (they didn’t really want these things, see, but they were persuaded otherwise), thereby causing them to lose the status they were too short-sighted to have valued.
Penis is a male organ. Learn biology. Male and female are biological realities.
You can call yourself a “woman” but you cannot call yourself “female” if you have normally functioning XY chromosomes.
Penis is not a female organ.
Male and female relate to gametes only. Male and female are defined on gametes if a species has two kinds, and one is smaller. The smaller one is male. Thus ends the biological definition of male and female.
Chromosomes and stuff are how evolution builds a body to hold male or female gametes in the context of human sexual dimorphism. Different species do chromosomes differently, or use something else like how warm the egg is. Gametes are fundamental, X/Y chromosomes are just mechanism. Different species don’t necessarily have only one kind of male-plan body or female-plan body.
Evolution doesn’t exactly build a body as “male” or “female” either. There’s a lot of slippage in the process that constructs male-plan and female-plan bodies, and that’s clearly “deliberate” (evolution could tighten up the error checking, but has chosen not to). Complicated genders and complicated bodies seem to be an evolutionary advantage, in small numbers, such that there are enough cis straight people left over to breed.
Now you have learned some biology. Time to learn some sociology.
Privileging the biology as an explanatory excuse is something our society does to create castes called “sexes”, that relate only in the crudest way to biological reality. Defining two-and-only-two sexes is something our society does because they are castes, not because they relate in any reliable way to having large or small gametes, or the ability to carry or fertilize a pregnancy.
Penis is defined as a “male” organ because facing the biological reality that not everyone constructed with a penis has a male-plan brain would break the caste system.
When you define it as a “male” organ, you re reinforcing these patriarchal castes.
Now you have learned some sociology.
(via sterwood)
"Straight, white men are the least likely people to experience exclusion and inequality first-hand during their youth, and are therefore the most likely to disbelieve its existence later in life. Unless they seek out ‘feminine’ pastimes as children – and why would they, when so much of boy-culture tells them not to? – they will never be rebuked or excluded on the basis of gender. Unless someone actively takes the time to convince them otherwise, they will learn as teens that the world is an equal place – an assertion that gels absolutely with their personal experiences, such that even if women, LGBTQ individuals and/or POC are rarely or never visible in their world, they are nonetheless unlikely to stop and question it. They will likely study white-male-dominated curricula, laugh ironically at sexist, racist and homophobic jokes, and participate actively in a popular culture saturated with successful, varied, complex and interesting versions of themselves – and this will feel right and arouse no suspicion whatever, because this is what equality should feel like."
This took a while. DAMN YOU JUDITH!
this.
Not bad, but this is still the best LOLButler:
Diaspora, the potentially great next-generation social networking site currently under development, made one important change a couple of weeks ago in a line of code. It impacts millions and millions of potential users throughout the world, many of whom are current users of a social networking site that alienates them, relegates them to a subperson with a subgender. That site would be Facebook and those users are the masses of transgendered people in the world that don’t fall into Facebook’s two profile options of “male” and “female.”
More here
This is not just about how it gets better when you get older.
