And oh shit, please bear with me while I try to remember HTML. I forgot you could have a multi-paragraph unordered list item and the first incarnation of this formatting was hideous. Yes, that's why they all have bullet points; I know no more elegant way to indent than ul. *cries in shame*
In response to a comment (which was in response to a comment, and had all gotten rather off-track from the original post) on another blog (I’m genuinely curious: What, exactly, would have to change for you to believe that “society” *did* behave as if women were people?).
I'm not Red Stapler , but I'll take a crack at this. A society -- and by this I mean, approximately, the prevailing attitudes and practises in the United States, since that's where I live -- where women were treated like people, like equals, would look something like this to me:
We'd have an approximately equal number of male and female presidential candidates. And Supreme Court nominees, and congresspeople, and state governors...
An equal number of men and women would be raped every year (and that number would, I'm guessing, be rather smaller than it is now). Ditto the numbers on sexual violence perpetrators. If there were a disagreement on the consensuality of a sexual act, one party's word would not be taken over the other's as a matter of course without other evidence.
Advertisements would be equally as likely to use a man as a woman in an attempt to use sex to sell the product, and they'd be dressed equally skimpily.
There would not be a significant difference in pay between women and men, overall. I'm not saying all jobs would be evenly split between the genders, but that if you took a slice of people doing similar (education requirements, position in the company heirarchy, experience generally required to reach that position, etc) work, you wouldn't see a difference in pay between men and women. And that the "most traditionally female" jobs would not pay, as a rule, less than the ones with the most men working them. One would be equally likely to encounter women as men at any point in a given hierarchy, and as many men would have a female boss as women would have a male one.
It would be equally normal for a man as a woman to be the stay-at-home parent. Women would not be discriminated against in hiring because it was assumed that they would take time off or leave to have children.
Women and men who chose to have a lot of casual sex would generally be treated equally because of it. Ditto people who chose to have no sex. Both sexes would receive equal education on and be considered to bear equal responsibility for practicing safer sex.
I'm sure there are several more important things that would be different in a country or world where we behaved like the genders were differentiated mostly by their plumbing and not by their intrinsic social status, but I can't think of them at the moment. I hope these provide food for thought on the ways in which women are *not* treated like this right now in the US, and why that might be.
nietzscheansmut
2007-04-25 09:08 am
I tend to think of these as two separate questions. I do think of women as being treated as people in modern America, but definitely not as equal. In many cases woman are treated as dumber, more fickle, or weaker than men, and that's stupid, but you don't see it justified on the grounds that woman aren't human, whereas you do, for example, in a lot of writing and commentary about black people from around 1850 to 1950 (the term "ape," for instance, crops up a lot).
That aside, I think these criticisms are basically dead on. Especially the ones about pay/occupational discrepancies, and the differing attitudes regarding promiscuity/celibacy depending on gender. The only one I'd really take issue with is the one about the number of people of each gender who are raped: that to me is also a matter of plumbing. It's not that there's anything fair or right about it, but it is physically harder overall to rape a man.
But yeah, good commentary.
- eavanmoore
2007-04-25 09:12 am
Ditto to everything [nietzscheansmut] said. - kestrelct
2007-04-25 09:56 am
Ok, the "people" is a good point. It's often used mostly hyperboleically for the shock value, I think.
If I substituted "sexually assaulted" and put in a gentle reminder that not all sex is penis-in-vagina, would that flow better? I suppose I use rape as an inaccurate metonymy for sexual assault, not remembering that definitions vary widely. And, uh, totally forgetting about the plumbing issue in my assumption that rape of males will be perpetrated by another male and therefore penetrative, an assumption I'm chucking in my more-perfect world. Thanks for bringing that up. - nietzscheansmut
2007-04-25 12:29 pm
I still think it would be uneven in a perfect world by those standards, but it would be a lot less uneven than it is in the current world.
I mean, it seems to me we can break sexual assault/harassment down into four basic categories: 1. Verbal harassment (hoots, whistles, and objectifying comments), 2. Unwanted touching (pretty self-explanatory), 3. Uncoerced nonconsensual sex (getting someone into a state in which they wouldn't object to having sex with you whereas they normally would, e.g. very drunk), and 4. Coerced nonconsensual sex (the classic "fuck me or I kill you" rape scenario). The first three would presumably be fairly equal in a world where the genders were equal. The fourth, which is mostly a matter of biological equipment, would still mostly be a crime committed by men.
eavanmoore
2007-04-25 09:11 am
Advertisements would be equally as likely to use a man as a woman in an attempt to use sex to sell the product, and they'd be dressed equally skimpily. We're not there yet, obvs, but we're on our way, and it really bothers me. If naked-woman advertising is a failure to see women as people instead of bodies, then naked-man advertising is no better.
It would be equally normal for a man as a woman to be the stay-at-home parent. Women would not be discriminated against in hiring because it was assumed that they would take time off or leave to have children. And there would be no financial penalty for taking time off!
No one would attribute a woman's behavior to her "nurturing" or "emotional" character and oppose to it a man's more "rational" and "aggressive" behavior.
- kestrelct
2007-04-25 09:59 am
Objectifying people as sexual objects is lame. Objectifying only women as sexual objects is lame and scary. *shrugs* It seems weird that I'm more comfortable with more people being objectified. Huh. - kestrelct
- eavanmoore
2007-04-25 10:04 am
Yes, people do that shit. At this moment I'm thinking specifically of an online discussion about female bosses. Someone actually said that a female boss had a more "nurturing" approach, I shit you not.
2007-04-25 10:01 am
No one would attribute a woman's behavior to her "nurturing" or "emotional" character and oppose to it a man's more "rational" and "aggressive" behavior.
People *do* that shit? I sometimes feel a little out-of-touch, being a rich white person from a privileged background. I've only rarely experienced things that I know, intellectually, are common-place for people in other situations, and it throws my intuitions all off.
azurelunatic
2007-04-25 09:18 am
And if two people are in an office with a big shiny desk, the default guess as to "whose office is this" would probably be "um... what does the name plate on the desk say?" rather than "it's his office".
- kestrelct
2007-04-25 10:03 am
And women in tech jobs would never hear "Can I talk to someone who knows what they're doing? Like, a *man*?", or having it assumed that they're a receptionist. - eavanmoore
2007-04-25 10:06 am
Mom told me about an older woman who was more comfortable with a male gynecologist. Of all people.
I keep coming up with more. This could be a whole website, here -- "In a Perfect World..."
beckyzoole
2007-04-25 10:54 am
In a world like that, we wouldn't need to call equality between the genders "feminism".
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