Some people push it like that, but that’s not really what the observation is about. It’s meant to highlight that it’s not preordained. Life is mostly made up and we should learn to acknowledge that openly. Especially when aspects of that made-up-ness actively oppress people
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vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
I’m low key annoyed about the whole “it’s a social construct” to mean “it’s not real”. Social constructs are real as fuck and they can fuck you up good.
The economy is a social construct. Days of the week are a social construct. I still need to show up to work on Monday morning so I can give my socially constructed fiat currency to the grocery shop in order not to fucking starve.
tdawg@lemmy.world 5 months ago
xilliah@beehaw.org 5 months ago
I’ve socially transitioned and I can safely say it’s like going through a portal into a different dimension.
I mean it’s a bit like saying software is just 1s and 0s. Ya great but I still need to run Krita to draw.
exocrinous@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Babies do not have gender, because baby minds aren’t developed enough to understand that kind of social construct. A baby’s gender is both a social construct AND not real.
Jknaraa@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
What bothers me is when people use that argument to advocate for replacing ‘constructs’ which evolved more or less naturally over tens of thousands of years, even before the dawn of civilization, with something deliberately engineered by individual humans. Is a cis-normative nuclear family the only way that it’s possible to live? Of course not, but it’s also what the vast majority of the population wants in their lives, which is why it’s the standard.
chumbalumber@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
This is patently absurd. For one thing, the nuclear family itself is not currently what the vast majority of the population wants; if you look at the global population, both now and historically, the extended family is dominant. I might as well argue that children abandoning their parents and home is an unnatural construct, that’s replacing the ‘tribal’ way of living that was natural for humans for millennia. I could further argue that (since the nuclear family only became the most common type in the US in the 1960s and 70s), that it was done in corporate interests to sell more cars and suburbs, and that it is in fact you that is slobbering all over corporate cock.
But I wouldn’t make that argument, because it’s reductive and, frankly, a bit silly to let a narrative take the place of actually reading some sociological studies.
meteorswarm@beehaw.org 5 months ago
You might enjoy reading some analysis into how capitalism requires the nuclear family in some ways
…wpmucdn.com/…/DEmilio-Capitalism-and-Gay-Identit…
chumbalumber@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
It’s a very interesting article. I broadly think its argument is sensible, but there’s a couple of places I’d offer some dissent:
I think the idea of greater socialisation of child raising is framed as avoiding turning back the clock to a time when the nuclear family was stronger. I’d disagree with this framing of the suggestion; in many ways this is a return to tradition. Capitalism and the autonomy it represents has led to a loss of the kinds of community the author is describing. It has allowed the destruction of the ‘village’ in the idiom ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. There is now enough wealth for parents to leave the extended family and the local community to form their own, isolated nuclear family, which I personally think can be damaging for children’s socialisation.
I think the author makes a good point about ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ as identies having the space to exist as subcultures with the greater autonomy afforded under capitalism, but I would take issue with the suggestion that queer identities are only able to exist as a result of capitalism. There are numerous examples of historical transgender and homosexual identities, not just behaviours (e.g. two-spirit people in Native American culture).
Overall I think it’s an interesting narrative and a good point about the distinction between homosexual behaviour and desires, and queer identity.
chumbalumber@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
Thanks – I’m familiar with some of Engels’ analysis on it, but will have a look at this. Seems interesting!
daltotron@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I think if “you wouldn’t” make that argument, because it’s reductive, then you should refute it, after you have spelled out the narrative in your comment. I would appreciate that. Or just point me in the right direction idk that might be good enough.
chumbalumber@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
My personal view is that you should always be wary of people asserting “this is how it is”. We’re in a science sub; we know that the purpose of a hypothesis is to rigorously attempt to disprove it and find counterexamples.
To discuss an area that I know some specifics about and can be more confident on: the historiography of the French revolution. Starting with George’s Lefebvre, the Marxist historians had a clear idea of what the revolution represented: a movement from the feudal mode of production to the capitalist, and so while their work is incredibly important and academically worth studying, they also tend to go into their work with a clear idea of what they wanted to find. So when the revisionists (starting with Cobban) come along, they find a lot of inconsistencies; the facts of the period don’t directly align with what the Marxist narratives wanted it to be (his disagreement is that he thinks the feudal mode was near extinct by the time of the Revolution, and that it was more a political conflict than social).
Bringing it back to your question: I disagree with the narrative I put because I think reductive narratives aren’t helpful, and cause us to miss a lot of nuance. The nuclear family was dominant in England from the 13th Century onwards, but to leave it there misses a host of interesting social structures and changes (e.g. the role of the church and monasteries as social institutions that exist wholly separate from the family).
As for reading, Foucault on how we like to categorise everything is quite interesting. If reading isn’t your cup of tea, the Thinking Allowed podcast from the BBC has an episode on Foucault that covers him that’s worth listening to.
vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
That’s a huge strawman jk. We really just want the hets to stop trying to harm/kill people that are different from them.
Jknaraa@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
I know very well that this is what the majority of people want, but bad actors attempt to take advantage of the situation with bullshit, like DEI initiatives, which are really only thinly veiled plots to maximize profits that hurt people who just want to be left alone by weaponizing their lifestyles for political gains.
vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
So DEI is DESTROYING TEH FAMILY now?
You need to l lay off the glue jk.
daltotron@lemmy.world 5 months ago
How do they make a company more money? Is it that it makes them more morally acceptable to buy from, giving them a larger audience? I always thought that the common argument against DEI, and shit like it, was that some morally neutral omnipotent objective third party somewhere wouldn’t be able to hire all of the extremely highly qualified straight white men, and would be forced to hire everyone else who are by implication, less qualified, and that would tank productivity metrics.
DessertStorms@kbin.social 5 months ago
How convenient of you to ignore not only a much bigger chunk of human history than the last couple thousand years (if even that), and so so many cultures that aren't the handful you're familiar with, but also all of the vast systemic social man made influences that make it that way, like religion, patriarchy, and even capitalism...
Anticorp@lemmy.world 5 months ago
What bothers me even more is that for a lot of these subjects they’re keen to tear it down, but don’t have anything to replace it. People are creatures of order, and patterns. We can’t operate effectively as a society without structure, and mutual understanding.
vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
Who is “they” anticorp? Tell me, who wants to destroy the nuclear family?
Custoslibera@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Immigrants and trans people! Obviously.
/s
exocrinous@lemm.ee 5 months ago
I want to destroy the social construct of reality and replace it with tolerance.
Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com 5 months ago
That’s what people do because they were told so.
God has an elephant head and loves pancakes?
Thunder comes from Thor hitting, … Clouds with his hammer?
You go to geaven/hell if you do this don’t…
…
It’s just what many peoples software run on, because that was how they were taught/indoctrinated from birth and they didn’t really have the need to break out of it. And well, if it works it might do it for them, the problem is they might think your life/lifestyle is the wrong way to live.
Jknaraa@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Nah, man, I happen to think that women are amazing and the idea of living with a woman who loves me is pretty damn cool.
Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com 5 months ago
I’m not talking about love, but the artificial idea that when you found someone, then you must stay with them “forever” and other things christian marriage enforcing.
exocrinous@lemm.ee 5 months ago
How come you’re defending something deliberately engineered by individual humans recently, right after saying that behaviour bothers you?