I'd love to go to that kind of party, where rainbow cake is served along with a slice of anthropological oration. But even though I'm gay (and therefore supposed to accept every odd idea that comes along, apparently), I'm not sure gender is a "social construct" alone. There are so many other things that can play into it including hormones and body image and psychological stuff - yet I still feel it was so much easier and breezier when we could just call ourselves men or women or he or she. *(not that I'm against people calling themselves whatever else they want).
Let's goooooo
Submitted 11 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/53f83f2a-fd8f-4119-b386-f49b6e97ca0f.webp
Comments
tygerprints@kbin.social 11 months ago
flicker@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Oh! I’m going to present the following in good faith.
You’re referring to sex. Sex is biological, gender is a concept. Sex is related to your hormones and your healthcare and what’s in your pants, but the idea of masculinity or femininity being tied to specific behaviors or clothes is a social construct. (Gender.)
IE; I’m a woman. Very much a woman. Super secure in that. I’ve got all the parts, enjoy having them. When I go to the gym or when I drink my cousins under the table or when I work on a car, those things shouldn’t be tied to an idea of being masculine, because I’m not suddenly more masculine for doing them. I’m definitely still a woman the whole time. That’s the difference here, is that there’s a concept of gender which is different than sex.
candybrie@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’m not sure your explanation really argues that gender is entirely a social construct. You identify strongly as being a woman. It doesn’t matter how many things you do that society views as masculine. You innately feel like a woman. So it isn’t an identity that society really defines. There’s something more to it.
blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Baby sex parties all around!..
Yeah, unfortunately the wide use of sex ruins it when dealing with babies and reveals. There’s a reason people use gender and not sex for those parties lol.
bdonvr@thelemmy.club 11 months ago
Of course it’s not devoid of the effects of sexual dimorphism. It’s just that how one’s sex determines societal roles and stereotypes (a closer definition of gender), shouldn’t be so rigid and unmovable.
tygerprints@kbin.social 11 months ago
I agree we need to move beyond stereotypical old fashioned ideals of what is feminine or masculine, those have always been so narrow and actually many times were totally lies. I hope we can embrace sometime the idea that we're all people with multitudes of possibility and behavioral traits, and we are all full of change and huge potential.
Guajojo@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Wow careful with that logical thinking buddy, we don’t like that here \s
rmuk@feddit.uk 11 months ago
Careful with them thar backslarshes, city boy, this ere is furwudslash country.
Laticauda@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Body image and psychological stuff still fall under societal influence rather than biological influence, and hormones are a sex thing, not a gender thing.
Something being a social construct doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a tangible influence on how people feel, it just means that it isn’t based on intrinsic biological fact. What constitutes being a “man” or a “woman” differs between cultures and between people, it is often tied to biology, but it doesn’t come from biology. Something like pink being a girl’s colour or women wearing makeup or men drinking beers instead of daquiris, those are all arbitrary performances people put on based on what society tells them men or women should do. Even the pronouns he/she were invented, some languages don’t have gendered pronouns by default like English does. None of that comes from biology, biology doesn’t tell us what pronouns we use or what we should wear.
tygerprints@kbin.social 11 months ago
I agree with you totally. There are more factors in gender than just body image or genetics alone. Also I wonder - what happens if you're a girl in western society, but you don't like the color pink? When you go to Toys 'R Us, doesn't it feel weird that all the girls toys are pink and in pink boxes - but you don't see boys toys in blue boxes or just with one predominant color.
(That's appropo of nothing, just something I've been wondering about for awhile).
heyitsmikey128@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Aren’t there skeletal differences?
Waluigis_Talking_Buttplug@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Humans have sexual dimorphism, but it’s a cultural thing that women wear skirts and men drink themselves to death instead of talking about their problems.
Also, genetics is tricky, there a plenty of examples of people who do not fall into one category or another for these sexually dimorphic traits. There are people who have genetics from both sex, as well and differences in hormones distributions will causes these traits to appear or not appear.
Is a huge grey area.
MamboGator@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Anyone who doubts this should look up Emily Quinn. She’s an intersex woman who spreads awareness that people like her exist. She’s biologically male but due to Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome she developed phenotypically female.
tdawg@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You’re confusing sex with gender
magic_lobster_party@kbin.social 11 months ago
I want a sex reveal party. Who’s having sex in the bedroom right now? Let’s find out!
DessertStorms@kbin.social 11 months ago
pythonoob@programming.dev 11 months ago
Which no one would then know at the point of a typical gender reveal party.
PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 11 months ago
The anthropologist might see skeletal differences but they’d also pay attention to the manner in which the subject was buried or what possessions survived with them that could also serve as clues of the subject’s identity in life.
grue@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Exactly; for instance, if two people of the same (biological) sex were buried together, it means they were definitely just very good friends.
fossilesque@mander.xyz 11 months ago
It’s a cultural anthropologist, obviously! :)
Laticauda@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
You’re thinking of an archaeologist not an anthropologist, and skeletal differences are related to sex not gender.
exocrinous@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Not in a fetus.
HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
Actually, we should go the other way and have more reveal parties for other genetic traits, and elevate them to the same level of perceived importance as apparent biosex! Let’s have blood type reveal parties! Joint mobility reveal parties! Relative nose and eye position reveal parties! Roof of mouth topology reveal parties!
blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Sex, like all genetics, is way more important to how people turn out than people give credit for lol. That’s beyond the cheating route and using strictly physical differences. Height, weight, puberty, etc.
It’s kinda like the back swing to people complaining that parents should be lynched for something their children do. The Sins of the Father runs both ways. People really don’t like to think that the genetic roll of the lottery can give you a serial killer though. The entropy of life is a hard thing for pattern seeking humans to deal with.
Boys and girls are different, but most psychological sex differences are modest in size. For example, gaps in verbal skills, math performance, empathy and even most types of aggression are generally much smaller than the disparity in adult height, in which the average five-foot, 10-inch man in the U.S. is taller than 98 percent of U.S. women. When it comes to mental abilities, males and females overlap much more than they differ.
scientificamerican.com/…/brain-differences-in-boy…
Helicopter or hands-off parenting? The choice won’t impact a kid as much as you think
DillyDaily@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Oddly is think parties like this would be more beneficial to the child.
If my parents had thought to have a joint mobility party for me, then maybe my hip joint deformity would have been found in infancy, when it’s treatable, and not when I was 17 after years of being told I had “growing pains”.
HiImThomasPynchon@hexbear.net 11 months ago
I motion we re-name them “genital reveal parties”
ryannathans@aussie.zone 11 months ago
Yeah let’s reveal your child’s genitals… doesn’t have the same ring to it
HiImThomasPynchon@hexbear.net 11 months ago
Better yet, don’t even mention a child. Just invite all your friends to a Genital Reveal Party and see what happens.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
Hoho, I’ve been to plenty of those
exocrinous@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Giving gendered pronouns to a child too young to understand gender accomplishes only one thing, and that’s telling strangers what genitals the child has. It’s pedo bait and child abuse.
Afghaniscran@feddit.uk 11 months ago
AngryishHumanoid@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Finally one I’d ACTUALLY want to be invited to.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Make it ice cream cake and I am in
JackLSauce@lemmy.world 11 months ago
My favorite part of this is that anthropology majors can find inconsistent gig work not involving food delivery and they still have to be a professor to qualify
BananaOnionJuice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
And … The gender is cake! 🌈🎂🎉
I_am_10_squirrels@beehaw.org 11 months ago
The cake is a lie
grue@lemmy.world 11 months ago
JustUseMint@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This is retarded and so are gender reveal parties
Kuori@hexbear.net 11 months ago
wildly based science posting rat-salute
butt_mountain_69420@lemmy.world 11 months ago
TIL my dick is a social construct.
mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
Gender ≠ Sex
tygerprints@kbin.social 11 months ago
I've heard that about you. Isn't it also a certified historic site?
Anticorp@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You and I have vastly different interpretations of the word “party”…
RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Was this part of an actual thought, or…?
vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 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.
Jknaraa@lemmy.ml 11 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 11 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.
vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 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.
DessertStorms@kbin.social 11 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 11 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.
Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com 11 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.
exocrinous@lemm.ee 11 months ago
How come you’re defending something deliberately engineered by individual humans recently, right after saying that behaviour bothers you?
tdawg@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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
xilliah@beehaw.org 11 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 11 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.