Urban v's the Commentariat

[Theisticle]

I could generate a Penny tweet:

Dear women of the world, you are all beautiful. Don't let the patriarchy tear you down. Want advice? Buy 'Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution' in July.

 

[butchersapron]

Culture has to incorporate sexual difference. Gender abolition is false-conscience.

Drivel. Literal drivel. And you mean false consciousness.

 

[Greebo]

Culture has to incorporate sexual difference. Gender abolition is false-conscience.

Why?

 

[Ibn Khaldoun]

Why? Because that's why we have culture in the first place. It's part of our humanity that culture is adapted to.

False-consciousness because it is mecessary to resolve inequality between men and women, not possible to simply transcend gender stemming from a will to negate the other. It is a negotiated process.

 

[Greebo]

<snip> False-consciousness because it is mecessary to resolve inequality between men and women, not possible to simply transcend gender stemming from a will to negate the other. It is a negotiated process.

We seem to be talking at cross purposes here - do you agree that it's possible to slightly change perceptions and opinions (and even reality, in the end) by changing what you call something?

 

[butchersapron]

Why? Because that's why we have culture in the first place. It's part of our humanity that culture is adapted to.

False-consciousness because it is mecessary to resolve inequality between men and women, not possible to simply transcend gender stemming from a will to negate the other. It is a negotiated process.

That's right. There is no such thing as patriarchal culture. You prat.

 

[Ibn Khaldoun]

We seem to be talking at cross purposes here - do you agree that it's possible to slightly change perceptions and opinions (and even reality, in the end) by changing what you call something?

Changing what you call something - or the way in which we alter language - is part of an attempt to change behaviour / change how it it legitimated, so this can help improve reality. But it is insufficient and worse to address everything at the level of personal expression at the expense of what it is being expressed. This attitude ultimately tends toward an anti-political anti-culture. We are alienated as men and women, and in how we are taught to be men and women, and therefore as subjects engaged in war, in emnity against the oppressor (rather than an attempt to neutralize the deepest aspects of oppression, how it is experienced).

 

[butchersapron]

Changing what you call something - or the way in which we alter language - is part of an attempt to change behaviour / change how it it legitimated, so this can help improve reality. But it is insufficient and worse to address everything at the level of personal expression at the expense of what it is being expressed. This attitude ultimately tends toward an anti-political anti-culture. We are alienated as men and women, and in how we are taught to be men and women, and therefore as subjects engaged in war, in emnity against the oppressor (rather than an attempt to neutralize the deepest aspects of oppression, how it is experienced).

Does culture exist or is it only what you think that it should ideally be? If the former then shut up. if the latter then tell yourself to shut up and stop talking jargon-drivel.

 

[Ibn Khaldoun]

That's right. There is no such thing as patriarchal culture. You prat.

Or the basis of a non-patriarchal culture in the existing cultures?

 

[butchersapron]

Or the basis of a non-patriarchal culture in the existing cultures?

Wtf are you on about?

Look up what culture means then apologise for saying that it really means what you would love it...i would love it...to be.

 

[Greebo]

<snip>it is insufficient and worse to address everything at the level of personal expression at the expense of what it is being expressed. This ultimately tends toward an anti-political anti-culture. <snip>

Examples of this? and your definition of how long it takes to reach "ultimately" (days, decades, millennia?). If none, you've failed to show your working.

<snip>We are alienated as men and women, and in how we are taught to be men and women<snip>

Speak for yourself. Social conditioning can be reversed; the first step is recognising that it goes on and how it's done. Even assuming that your claim is correct, alienated from what?

<snip>and therefore <snip>in emnity against the oppressor, rather than an attempt to neutralize the deepest aspects of oppression.

Okay then, get off the net and onto the barricades.

 

[Ibn Khaldoun]

Wtf are you on about?

Look up what culture means then apologise for saying that it really means what you would love it..i would it...to be.

Well I can apologize for not being sure what the objection is precisely. Part of my argument is that gender always exists at least at the minimal level that it is an aspect of the human body (that needn't insist upon oppressive gender roles).

In any case, gender is inherent in our identity as people.

 

[butchersapron]

Gender exists. You fucking star.

 

[Greebo]

Well I can apologize for not being sure what the objection is precisely. Part of my argument is that gender always exists at least at the minimal level that it is an aspect of the human body (that needn't insist upon oppressive gender roles).<snip>

It need exist at no more a significant level than identity and discrimination based on eye colour, or skin pigmentation. Not that I blame you for believing otherwise, you are a product of your conditioning.

 

[Ibn Khaldoun]

Examples of this? and your definition of how long it takes to reach "ultimately" (days, decades, millennia?). If none, you've failed to show your working.

That was a description of an attitude, a will-suppress-difference that is reactionary.o

Examples on this thread . . . The example of those rejecting gendered pronouns, if I have to name one. But that is not all, because other posters (including BA) have been approaching towards the point about ideology.

Speak for yourself. Social conditioning can be reversed; the first step is recognising that it goes on and how it's done. Even assuming that your claim is correct, alienated from what?

I think you don't you get it. Social-conditioning is too profound to just be reversed (in its entirety anyway).

Alienation from our general being and powers.

Okay then, get off the net and onto the barricades.

I can take time off [...]

 

[Ibn Khaldoun]

It need exist at no more a significant level than identity and discrimination based on eye colour, or skin pigmentation. Not that I blame you for believing otherwise, you are a product of your conditioning.

Rubbish. Sexual difference is completely universal. Race is not - it is a modern invention bound up with the emergence of capitalism.

 

[Ibn Khaldoun]

It will take at least a century to acheive full gender equality. We can only know our true grounds of being in fully developed socialism.

 

[xenon]

Rubbish. Sexual difference is completely universal. Race is not - it is a modern invention bound up with the emergence of capitalism.

You are mixing up sex and gender I think. And even then sex isn't universally binary. Someone will be along in the morning to explain I expect.

 

[Ibn Khaldoun]

You are mixing up sex and gender I think. And even then sex isn't universally binary. Someone will be along in the morning to explain I expect.

No, I'm not. I'm understanding their deep, dialectical relation.

 

[xenon]

I don't know what that even means TBH.

 

[Ibn Khaldoun]

"This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism . . . "

 

[barney_pig]

"This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism . . . "

Marxplaining(TM. Proletarian Democracy).

 

[Greebo]

It will take at least a century to acheive full gender equality. We can only know our true grounds of being in fully developed socialism.

1) Given that fully developed socialism (let alone communism) was still a significant way off (money was still in use, there was still a privileged minority at the top of the hierarchy etc) when the iron curtain lifted, how can you judge what will or won't become possible under it, let alone how much time will be needed? Even China and Korea haven't got rid of money or got rid of hierarchical structures.

2) Gender equality is not to be conflated with sexual equality. This is slightly before my first coffee so I'll make this simple (at least for me):

Which set of genitals you prefer your sexual partner(s) to have has little to do with whether you show more so-called feminine or masculine characteristics (not universal across all cultures and all of history). It also has next to no link with which genitals and reproductive organs any given individual currently has or was born with. It used to be widely believed and claimed (mostly based on observations of Europeans at the time) that men were innately the best knitters, clerks, and linguists; that only changed within the last two and a half centuries.

If something matters and will take a long time to achieve, there's little to gain by putting it off until the perfect conditions arrive, better to start now. Unless, that is, the current system keeps you near the top.

 

[ViolentPanda]

It's called monetesing laurie.

A concept one would hope that Ms Penny is familiar with, given how often her work uses her own (sometimes tenuous) feminism to "sell" the bourgeois-opinion-dressed-up-as-informed-comment that she retails.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Culture has to incorporate sexual difference. Gender abolition is false-conscience.

If you're going to talk clichéd shit, could you at least use the correct phrases in the correct context?

Thanks.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Why? Because that's why we have culture in the first place. It's part of our humanity that culture is adapted to.

False-consciousness because it is mecessary to resolve inequality between men and women, not possible to simply transcend gender stemming from a will to negate the other. It is a negotiated process.

No-one is attempting to transcend gender. The idea, primarily (IMO), is to render it irrelevant in the context of socio-economic relations. That doesn't require transcendance, it requires acknowledgement of the status quo, and requires the emplacement of parity.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Changing what you call something - or the way in which we alter language - is part of an attempt to change behaviour / change how it it legitimated, so this can help improve reality. But it is insufficient and worse to address everything at the level of personal expression at the expense of what it is being expressed.

Socially-constructing or re-constructing an idea through changed meanings doesn't "improve" reality, it re-defines the idea away from current usage, toward a new norm, and usually operates "across the board", not just at the level of personal expression.

This attitude ultimately tends toward an anti-political anti-culture. We are alienated as men and women, and in how we are taught to be men and women, and therefore as subjects engaged in war, in emnity against the oppressor (rather than an attempt to neutralize the deepest aspects of oppression, how it is experienced).

Yes, because cultures are static and rigid, and are never fluid and/or flexible, and the ways in which we are "taught to be men and women" never changes, does it?

 

[ViolentPanda]

Rubbish. Sexual difference is completely universal. Race is not - it is a modern invention bound up with the emergence of capitalism.

Sexual difference isn't universal. Please don't make sweeping statements. It's not even the case that sexual difference is universal so far as we currently know, given that we're well aware of single-sex organisms within our known biological categorisation schemes.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I don't know what that even means TBH.

To put it far less pretentiously, he means that the two things are co-existent and mutually-supportive - you can't have a conversation about gender without acknowledging the fact of sex, and vice versa.

Don't worry. He has a hard time posting anything in non-academese.

 

[butchersapron]

He has an even harder time posting in academese going by the confused nonsense he posted last night.