I vacillate between a few views on social construction in general. My least charitable take on it is that it is the most intellectual way we have invented for calling everyone sheeple. But I suspect this undersells why this idea is unreasonably popular in feminism, which leads me to a suspicion that may be better or worse: women are more…
I vacillate between a few views on social construction in general. My least charitable take on it is that it is the most intellectual way we have invented for calling everyone sheeple. But I suspect this undersells why this idea is unreasonably popular in feminism, which leads me to a suspicion that may be better or worse: women are more the product of social construction than men. They're generally more agreeable and more motivated to confirm to social expectations. So often when I hear a feminist say "society socializes women to be X and men to be Y", if this instance sounds preposterous, I substitute it with "society socializes women to be X and fails at socializing men to not be Y", and now I have a more plausible sounding statement that sounds more in line with my own experience... but I can't really judge how that version lines up with women's experience.
Of course the generous take is it's all a mix, which is true. But I do think most public discussion on the left today overestimates the truth of social construction, and I do think this is a problem, both because it makes us ineffective but more importantly I think it makes us not nice. It leads us to affirm preposterous-bordering-on-gaslighting beliefs in the hope society's problems will be solved when others believe them and to police each other's speech out of recognition of everyone's responsibility to be a good puppet master of everyone else in society, and it provides a way to dismiss others' desires as simply not real. It isn't *entirely* wrong, but we need to dispense with this idea that it is uncomplicatedly pro-social whenever we can find it in ourselves to believe in social construction a little harder.
You have hit on something here. It explains stuff like the 'mommy wars'. (Why do I care if another man has kids or not? Why is that any of my business?) Or why women seem to spend so much time obsessed over whether their forms of attraction are problematic or not? (OK, you're into tentacle anime. Just don't show me any and we're cool.)
There's a huge motivating reason why the left in general goes in for nurture over nature, though, and not just for gender. If something's socially constructed, it can theoretically be changed. If gender, racial, or class distinctions have any biological basis, then they are going to be much harder to change, and existing social hierarchies are 'natural' in the way earlier eras said they were divinely ordained and therefore trying to change them is counterproductive. There's a long history of nurture=left and nature=right; it's the reason Boas and Galton's busts face each other at the University of Chicago.
There are actually 'reactionary feminists' and radical feminist who believe in human nature, mostly about how irredeemably awful men are.
Yeah, that's part of it, too. I have joked elsewhere that the nature/nurture distinction only has political implications if you're trying to decide whether you want the kind of authoritarianism with reeducation camps or the kind with death camps. I much prefer the politics of people who don't see this question as important to their politics.
While you are generally correct I don't think it's that simple. For example most conservatives think it makes a difference whether a society is Christian or secular or Muslim or Buddhist, whereas the left doesn't think this matters, or maybe thinks it only matters whether a society is secular or not, or maybe it only matters if the dominant West is, or maybe it only matters if they are of the globally dominant Christian religion. Meanwhile, the left is blank slatist about many things but also believes firmly in "born this way" for sexual orientation and now gender identity. And not only can you be a feminist and believe in natural differences in how much men suck, sometimes you can even get away with implicitly believing in natural differences in the context of claiming that the norms of society are built around what works for men and not women. Tema Okun even pulled off that last one with some classic racial stereotypes, though I'm uncertain if her ideas are still in vogue.
I vacillate between a few views on social construction in general. My least charitable take on it is that it is the most intellectual way we have invented for calling everyone sheeple. But I suspect this undersells why this idea is unreasonably popular in feminism, which leads me to a suspicion that may be better or worse: women are more the product of social construction than men. They're generally more agreeable and more motivated to confirm to social expectations. So often when I hear a feminist say "society socializes women to be X and men to be Y", if this instance sounds preposterous, I substitute it with "society socializes women to be X and fails at socializing men to not be Y", and now I have a more plausible sounding statement that sounds more in line with my own experience... but I can't really judge how that version lines up with women's experience.
Of course the generous take is it's all a mix, which is true. But I do think most public discussion on the left today overestimates the truth of social construction, and I do think this is a problem, both because it makes us ineffective but more importantly I think it makes us not nice. It leads us to affirm preposterous-bordering-on-gaslighting beliefs in the hope society's problems will be solved when others believe them and to police each other's speech out of recognition of everyone's responsibility to be a good puppet master of everyone else in society, and it provides a way to dismiss others' desires as simply not real. It isn't *entirely* wrong, but we need to dispense with this idea that it is uncomplicatedly pro-social whenever we can find it in ourselves to believe in social construction a little harder.
You have hit on something here. It explains stuff like the 'mommy wars'. (Why do I care if another man has kids or not? Why is that any of my business?) Or why women seem to spend so much time obsessed over whether their forms of attraction are problematic or not? (OK, you're into tentacle anime. Just don't show me any and we're cool.)
There's a huge motivating reason why the left in general goes in for nurture over nature, though, and not just for gender. If something's socially constructed, it can theoretically be changed. If gender, racial, or class distinctions have any biological basis, then they are going to be much harder to change, and existing social hierarchies are 'natural' in the way earlier eras said they were divinely ordained and therefore trying to change them is counterproductive. There's a long history of nurture=left and nature=right; it's the reason Boas and Galton's busts face each other at the University of Chicago.
There are actually 'reactionary feminists' and radical feminist who believe in human nature, mostly about how irredeemably awful men are.
Yeah, that's part of it, too. I have joked elsewhere that the nature/nurture distinction only has political implications if you're trying to decide whether you want the kind of authoritarianism with reeducation camps or the kind with death camps. I much prefer the politics of people who don't see this question as important to their politics.
While you are generally correct I don't think it's that simple. For example most conservatives think it makes a difference whether a society is Christian or secular or Muslim or Buddhist, whereas the left doesn't think this matters, or maybe thinks it only matters whether a society is secular or not, or maybe it only matters if the dominant West is, or maybe it only matters if they are of the globally dominant Christian religion. Meanwhile, the left is blank slatist about many things but also believes firmly in "born this way" for sexual orientation and now gender identity. And not only can you be a feminist and believe in natural differences in how much men suck, sometimes you can even get away with implicitly believing in natural differences in the context of claiming that the norms of society are built around what works for men and not women. Tema Okun even pulled off that last one with some classic racial stereotypes, though I'm uncertain if her ideas are still in vogue.