Also, actually, there is still a cabal of men in America forcing women to behave in certain ways: The systematic, coordinated campaign against women's reproductive rights.
So in your view, basically patriarchy == culture? Why use a new word then?
> Also, actually, there is still a cabal of men in America forcing women to behave in certain ways: The systematic, coordinated campaign against women's reproductive rights.
You could equivalently claim that there exists a cabal of women that is forcing unborn babies to die. Populist claims are populist.
You are presuming that traditional behaviour is pathological. Why? Why exactly is the nuclear family pathological? Two people in a partnership raising the children they love together using division of labour? This seems pretty rational. My mother did this. Was she a victim for doing so?
It is good to offer people the freedom to choose, but when they choose something other than what you would do not blame it on brainwashing.
The entire point of leaders is to do things that are unpopular that benefit the group. You don't need leaders to do popular things, they just happen.
Fundamentally if you want to make omelettes you're going to have to break some eggs, if your friends say breaking eggs is bad you have two choices, tell them off, or don't break eggs. Those that are willing to break eggs are allowed to be chefs.
You just have to look at all of the crazy responses to Target (a US retailer) removing the gender-specific labelling of toys (from "Girl Toys" and "Boy Toys" to just "Toys") to see how as a society we are not at a point where "we" aren't trying to impose a particular ideal (e.g. "Barbies are girl toys") on children as they grow up.
> Two people in a partnership raising the children they love together using division of labour?
This is more generic than the "nuclear family" traditionally is viewed. If it was just two people dividing up labour, then the "nuclear family" could equally have the father as the homemaker and the mother as the breadwinner. When people typically refer to the "nuclear family" they are referring to some idealized Leave It To Beaver type setup.
Is this a problem? Is the funneling people into an androgynous role any better than funneling them into traditional gender roles? If anything the current system seems more "natural" in that it's emergent behavior, whereas moving to a genderless society will require top down engineering.
Our society is free enough that regardless of the direction the masses take, people can and will step out of the role most commonly held by other people of their gender. I think we all agree that it's a good thing to have that option.
With that in mind I don't think there's anything "bad" about genders existing in society. People's free will is strong enough to live the life they want regardless of cultural nudging.
This happens in some tribal cultures: children treated as neuter until they reach a certain age, then choosing to go through an explicit ritual to "make them a man" or "make them a woman."
(These cultures aren't particularly modern otherwise; you can't choose to undertake the ritual to become a man if you are biologically a woman, and people would think you were crazy to not want to undergo the ritual. The point is more that it's possible for a culture to start doing the "treat people as agendered by default" thing with no top-down pressure.)
I suppose the real test would be to find a culture that's genderless for people who have reached sexual maturity.
Why would that be preferable to a society where people are assigned a default gender but can easily switch it later on (i.e. the present society)?
Also, while your suggestion might work for certain languages, it would be very difficult in others (e.g. in Slovenian) that use mainly gendered pronouns.
It's not about what they should prefer but about what they are more likely to prefer. We have studies that show this isn't merely a human social phenomenon [0] [1] [2]. There are gender preferences for toys and to most people it's silly to take offence at the idea that genders have different preferences. Now whether we should nurture these differences is a slightly different argument. The phrasing difference is important - and starting with something more people can understand (which color for "boys" has changed not only over time, but varies across populations) would help the discussion. If girls and boys are attracted to [type] of toy, can we nurture their interests in a different direction? The answer is "probably, yes". But that's a different debate.
The "crazy responses" you see are people irritated that a group of hyper-sensitive people who have placed a disturbing level of importance on their gender identity (and the gender identity of others) harped on about this non-issue until Target felt forced to change it to get them to shut up and leave them alone.
The constant bullying and what boils down to online smear campaigns done by these extremist self-identity-crisis groups annoys most people who don't place nearly as much importance on their (or others') racial/gender/sexual identities.
[0] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X08...
It's a non-issue in the same way that homophobia is a "non-issue" to straight white people living in suburbia.
Also, the "crazy responses" I refer to are people getting upset that Target was "encouraging boys to play with Barbies" which "goes against the Bible." Or that Target was "trying to turn people transgender." Are you saying that these people are perfectly normal and represent the way that we want to run society? Do you honestly believe that Target's actions will "turn people transgender?"
No more than I believe that by labeling the toys "boys" and "girls" Target was supporting the patriarchy and perpetuating rape culture by marketing violence-orientated toys towards boys while objectifying woman and furthering the "house wife image" by marketing girls with dress-up and doll houses.
Thank you for clarifying you meant the more extremist "crazies". There happens to be extremist viewpoints on both sides and when either political side speaks of "crazies" from the other side, I immediately think of the moderates from that side to account for political biases.
It's rare they mean the actual extremists, as you did. :) So thanks for clarifying who you were regarding as "crazy". And no, I don't agree with the extreme right either.
Mechanisms like this exist in large part to defeat a sort of social entropy that would arise if everybody made their own descisions. It is desirable to be able to have expectations about others behavior and a larger shared social game like 'Nuclear families and husband/wife'. Pretty much necessarily you're going to get something like a competing access need[0] where some people are going to be really hurt by these games because they don't want to play or can't play[1]. We only have a select few remedies to this which aren't 'destroy all the social rules and let anarchy reign', and while some people think that option would result in good outcomes I have a hard time finding faith that it would.
A position likes yours worries me massively because it seems to be something like 'systematic coercion to maintain social norms is never okay unless it's explicitly part of the law and then it's still not okay because the intent is to maintain a social norm rather than keep the peace'.
[0]: http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/100561778176/safe-spa...
[1]: http://www.meltingasphalt.com/personhood-a-game-for-two-or-m...
Seems like a fragile argument to make.
I'm not saying that we need to force people into some sort of agender roles, but the way we run society now with these ideas that there are "proper" toys for a child to play with, re-enforces the ideas that lead to people beating up their kids because "I'm not gonna raise no fag." What you seem to be saying is that we as a society throw those kids under the bus as part of some sort of "plan for stability" and because you benefit from that stability you support the plan. Am I reading that right?
No, and that's a strawman. (I never said the only option was to 'let anarchy reign'. I said that our options for remedy were not particularly spacious.)
My understanding is that direct single-person targeted interventions like that don't seem to work particularly well. (And to the extent that they 'work' they often do so by breaking people. Broken people are not desirable.) I'm not a child psychologist, but I doubt that children need to be micromanaged in their play or that such micromanagement would avoid 'raising fags'. I don't really feel qualified to comment beyond that.
EDIT: You keep silently editing your post, perhaps you should write a reply instead?
I also think this statement is very extreme:
> Also, actually, there is still a cabal of men in America forcing women to behave in certain ways: The systematic, coordinated campaign against women's reproductive rights.
I don't think that's a mainstream view.
Regardless the GOP is not a "cabal of men in America forcing women to behave in certain ways". Even if they believed that (I don't think all republicans do) they in no way have the authority to "force" women to do anything. Abortion is legal in the US.
Also GOP != patriarchy.
I never said GOP = patriarchy. Just that there is a "systematic, coordinated campaign against women's reproductive rights" and that certainly isn't a fringe statement. This campaign is indicative of one of the OP's definitions: "interwoven social structures that promulgate certain ideologies, doctrines, and social customs."
You're really stretching the original comment to try to make it less extreme.
A group, the large majority of are male, are trying to limit what a women can do with her body. The same thing the OP said.
1: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/upshot/gop-women-in-congre... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Women
While I can't find good figures on male/female split in the GOP, the fact that the US has overall a slightly lower than 1:1 male/female ratio [0] and the fact that women are substantially more likely to identify with the Democratic Party than the Republican while (including leanings of independents in both cases) men are about equally likely to identify as Republican as Democratic, suggests that that presumption would be wrong.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio
[1] http://www.people-press.org/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-into-part...