If Mort Divine ruled the world

[Oblivious Maximus]

The best comment I saw was "tfw you can't even stand up for your rights".

 

[Dak]

None of those people are happy, nearly all look incredibly unhealthy, and protesting isn't going to fix any of their problems. At best it merely provides a brief respite from the misery of their pointless lives in a fleeting feeling of imagined meaning.

 

[Dak]

 

[Oblivious Maximus]

 

[CiG]

 

[CiG]

Yeah but Alyssa Milano says:

 

[Dak]

 

[Einherjar86]

This might be a bit heavy-handed for the Mort thread, but it's a good discussion of gender's relationship to language (or more broadly speaking, communication, i.e. social acts), and also relevant to prior posts:

https://aeon.co/ideas/gender-is-dead-long-live-gender-just-what-is-performativity

These descriptions share the common assumption that gender is mutable, not fixed. Most contemporary public conversations about what it means to be men and women will engage with some version of this thesis – a development that’s due, in large part, to the work of the American philosopher Judith Butler. Her theory of ‘performativity’ upended ideas about gender by shedding light on the many processes that produce it, and the theory’s far-reaching consequences are still widely misunderstood.

It’s unfortunate that popular culture often reduces performativity to the idea that ‘gender is a social construct’. This catchphrase sets the ‘social’ against the ‘natural’, and implies that gender is merely an artificial layer, encrusted by choice onto the supposedly more fundamental reality of sex. But Butler was careful to avoid arguing for a simple split between nature and culture, or sex and gender. For her, gender wasn’t predetermined by nature or biology, nor was it simply ‘made up’ by culture. Rather, Butler insisted that gender resides in repeated words and actions, words and actions that both shape and are shaped by the bodies of real, flesh-and-blood human beings. And crucially, such repetitions are rarely performed freely.

What’s at stake in performativity stretches into the minutiae of the everyday. I was recently on a road trip with a group of friends, and one woman observed that she always lets her partner, a man, drive her car instead of doing so herself. Such an acquiescence feels feminine, she said. The question Butler would want us to ask is: does my friend do this because she is a woman, or does the act itself contribute to making her so?

Although Butler is its most famous advocate, the concept of performativity is rooted in earlier observations about how language works. In the mid-1950s, the English philosopher J L Austin pointed out that language is often a way of accomplishing things in the world, not only a means of describing it. To make a promise, for example, is to do the promising, not just to say something about it. In How to Do Things with Words (1962), Austin described these types of statements, which entailed performing actions, as (you guessed it) ‘performatives’. This focus on the functionality of statements, not their truth or falsity, proved to be revolutionary, and the interdisciplinary enterprise of ‘speech act theory’ was born in its wake. In a wonderful way, the neologism did exactly what it was describing – it made things happen in the world.

Roughly 30 years later, Butler linked performativity to gender, making explicit reference to the American philosopher John Searle’s work on speech act theory. Butler was interested in Searle’s analysis of the way that performatives don’t simply do things, they also commit the people involved to future actions. For example, when a judge declares a case closed, she’s not simply ending the trial, she’s setting off a chain of events – plaintiffs will be acquitted or indicted, and the courtroom adjourned. What Searle noted is that, in order for a performative (the judge’s proclamation) to have any impact on the future, it has to adhere to certain conventions that have already been established. Society needs to accept the authority of the judge and the form of her declaration. A performative, then, is as much a repetition or re-creation of what’s expected as it is an act of individual agency.

Austin opposed performative utterances to constative utterances. A constative, for example, would be "The milk is in the fridge." Performatives, however, cannot be extricated from the action associated with them. The author uses the example of "I promise," but they also include "You're under arrest" and "I now pronounce you husband and wife."

Performatives aren't "socially constructed" statements in the sense this notion is often tossed around (by social media progressives, usually), because if they were, then they wouldn't refer to anything taking place in social reality. This isn't the case. Performatives refer to very real (i.e. material) situations, but these situations also wouldn't be complete without performative statements. Butler says this is how gender works. There is no purely original state or situation of gender because gender as it relates to sexual anatomy is in a constant state of feedback with gender as it is socially performed.

There is a larger argument here that performativity precedes identity, which I'm in agreement with--because to suggest that identity precedes the way we present ourselves merely reinforces the idea that gender identity ultimately should refer back to some original sexual state. This contests the typical conservative argument that wants to view gender as relating to a real thing, that real thing being the body as it developed biologically. That there is a body that precedes our socialization doesn't mean that an identity precedes socialization. To claim that the body = identity is to participate in metaphysics; it makes an absolute association out of materially unrelated situations. A newborn baby has no conception of an identity related to its body. Its identity is pre-established for it by its elders, who expect particular behaviors from it; but this merely returns us to performativity. Gender identity arises from what you do, although it's inextricable from the embodied situation that you have. That's the anti-metaphysical argument of performativity (the author quotes Nietzsche here: "there is no 'being' behind doing … the deed is everything").

 

[Dak]

This contests the typical conservative argument that wants to view gender as relating to a real thing, that real thing being the body as it developed biologically. That there is a body that precedes our socialization doesn't mean that an identity precedes socialization.

There may not be an "identity" that a 2 year old could elucidate, but male children tend to prefer trucks as toys at a greater rate than female children.

 

[Einherjar86]

There may not be an "identity" that a 2 year old could elucidate, but male children tend to prefer trucks as toys at a greater rate than female children.

I'm curious what the value-judgment is behind that statement (I'm not sure there is one, I'm just assuming).

 

[Dazed and Brutal]

Yeah but Alyssa Milano says:

View attachment 14046

I would to see metrics on the education level and degree types amongst those demographics. I think there should be a push into women in more marketable fields overall.

 

[Dak]

I'm curious what the value-judgment is behind that statement (I'm not sure there is one, I'm just assuming).

My default answer would be that it's an is. I'm sure there's a value judgment somewhere, but it doesn't arise unless someone thinks that boys playing with trucks is a bad thing.

 

[Einherjar86]

My default answer would be that it's an is. I'm sure there's a value judgment somewhere, but it doesn't arise unless someone thinks that boys playing with trucks is a bad thing.

One that more boys playing with trucks means that all boys should play with trucks. That's what I was getting at.

 

[Dak]

One that more boys playing with trucks means that all boys should play with trucks. That's what I was getting at.

Well that makes more sense than saying that because a couple don't, they are being oppressed by people thinking it's odd or whatever.

 

[CiG]

I would to see metrics on the education level and degree types amongst those demographics. I think there should be a push into women in more marketable fields overall.

It's raw numbers man, basically meaningless horseshit.

 

[Einherjar86]

Well that makes more sense than saying that because a couple don't, they are being oppressed by people thinking it's odd or whatever.

I don't think it makes sense to say that giving young boys fire trucks is oppressive, but it doesn't make less sense than saying that boys should play with fire trucks.

Neither one makes sense, and I don't think there are varying degrees of senselessness.

 

[Dazed and Brutal]

It's raw numbers man, basically meaningless horseshit.

I understand that those figures were meaningless taking at face value, but isn't it telling of other issues? For instance, I think the computer science department at the college I went to was 90% male at college that was around 70% female. I'm trying not to blame some lizard-patriarchy, but what are the social conditions that give rise to this kind of issue?

 

[CiG]

I understand that those figures were meaningless taking at face value, but isn't it telling of other issues? For instance, I think the computer science department at the college I went to was 90% male at college that was around 70% female. I'm trying not to blame some lizard-patriarchy, but what are the social conditions that give rise to this kind of issue?

Is it even an issue? I'm sure if you looked at more repressed countries the computer departments would be more equal between the sexes. A college that is 70% women is probably the best example to simply show it's about choice, I doubt underhanded sexism could deter that many women from entering something they want to enter.

 

[Dazed and Brutal]

Is it even an issue? I'm sure if you looked at more repressed countries the computer departments would be more equal between the sexes. A college that is 70% women is probably the best example to simply show it's about choice, I doubt underhanded sexism could deter that many women from entering something they want to enter.

It just seems bizarre that the radical left would bellyache about a "wage-gap" when the most lucrative career paths are being pursued by males. You would think that they would push for integration into those fields by way of recruiting. I could imagine with such a small sub-set of females entering certain position that certain employer's hands are forced to hire a less qualified candidate just of "quotas" or w/e. I understand that the females at my school were choosing to pursue other majors, but what are the underlying forces driving such a parity in choice between genders?

I'm not trying to blame "sexism" per say because the issue could very well be a result of something from female culture.

 

[CiG]

Like I said, it's choice. How many women are really willing to make their whole life about work in the same way men are? On paper women tend to choose a more balanced life, just is the way it is.

To the SJWs/feminists, they're not really looking at the stats in a nuanced way, they're just screeching about the raw numbers and demanding that be fixed. If they instead formed some kind of initiative to get women interested in the fields that also pay more, that would be fine. Instead they look at economics as if it's magic or something.