(January 24, 2020 at 9:35 pm)Belacqua Wrote: These days trans and gender fluid people are asking us to look again at what we used to call biological differences. The whole thing may not be as simple as we thought.In my opinion, people must have the freedom to live as they want unless they are causing harm to somebody else.
Nor am I convinced that gender roles in certain hunter/gatherer societies were as hard and fast as we might think. And even if they were, we're not hunter/gatherers any more. People are adaptable.
The main thing is that we not reify tradition or habit and declare it to be pre-determined. It's nomos, not physis. Things change, and that's OK.
Physical harm is identifiable and easy to detect; while psychological harm must be conditioned to its physical conclusion -like causing depression to somebody via constant bullying-.
As long as no harm is caused; things can indeed change or stay the way they are.
Quote:Quote:I think and believe that nothing is wrong with women, but everything is wrong with the male-culture that enforces its image on women, forcing them to satisfy the male mind at all times -like making them dress as sluts to enjoy looking at them-.
This I think is very relevant. Social pressure on women is very strong.
I know it's not either/or, but sometimes you see side-by-side photos of women in which people claim liberation has occured: on one side they are wearing hijabs, and on the other side mini-skirts. Yet both choices may have been determined by others. Give up your hijab and wear this designer outfit. Liberate yourself from tradition so you can participate in the fashion which the media tell you is the only attractive thing.
If we say that someone is free because she dresses just like an American, that may be too simple. There are also pressures to dress like Americans that are, in their own ways, difficult to avoid.
I think it is probably easier, in one's own mind, to flout dress codes that are imposed from above, and harder to ignore dress codes imposed by one's peers. I used to live in a little Japanese rural village where the high school had a strict dress code. The boys' solutions to this were hilarious. For example, they would sew purple silk linings into their pockets that weren't visible during the day, but on the train ride home the would pull the pockets inside out to show their disobedience. It was a lovely decadent touch. When I lived in Spanish Harlem I used to see Catholic high school girls getting on the subway and rolling up the tops of their skirts, to make them much shorter.
This is in contrast to the high school I went to. We had no official dress code, but we all dressed exactly alike, and this was enforced by peer pressure. Ill-fitting jeans, or the wrong brand, brought mockery all day long.
People will rebel and get around anything forced on them, unless they are totally convinced with the rule implied. That's why I insist that freedom of choice is "a must".
I studied in a Saudi Wahhabi school and there weren't any girls. Boys resorted to homosexuality -just like the case in prisons-, they got around the rule of "no sex".