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“Clear language – lucid, rational language – to a man at war with both truth and reason, is an existential threat. Clear language to such a man is a direct assault on his obfuscations, contradictions and lies. To him, it is the voice of the enemy. To him, it is fake news. Because he knows, if only intuitively, what we know to our cost: that without clear language, there is no standard of truth.”
-John Le Carré
This quote starkly lays out exactly what is at stake when it comes to the politics of gender and those who follow its dictates.
So no, feminism is not about being mean to the poor menz, it is fighting against the oppressive shit that hurts women. Focusing on how the conception of gender is problematic for everyone involved isn’t ‘phobic’ – it is an attempt to recognize, deconstruct, and tear down a bastion of sexism in our society that has been polluting our civilizations for hundreds of years.
I do like the Germans and their language specific words, here is a list of some of them. :)
Engelsgeduld: (lit.: angel’s patience) great amount of patience
Feierabend: (lit.: party-evening) the rest of the day that remains after work
Fernweh: the desire/longing to travel to faraway places/ foreign countries
Fingerspitzengefühl: (lit.: fingertips-feeling) good skill in handling things/ sensitivity and empathy
Fremdschämen: (lit.: foreign shame) shame that arises from the compassion with someone who made a fool of himself
Geborgenheit: more than safety, protection and invulnerability, it symbolises peace, warmth and calm you feel especially when you’re with the people you’re close to (e.g. family, friends)
Gemütlichkeit: feeling of comfort
Habseligkeiten: valuable and personally important possessions
Innerer Schweinehund: (lit.: inner pig-dog = weaker self) the part of a person that they have to overcome to be productive
Kitsch: objects with superficial beauty that are actually useless but are appreciated nonetheless
Konfliktfähigkeit: (lit.: conflict ability/skill) ability to deal with conflict / ability to constructively solve interpersonal conflicts
Kummerspeck: (lit.: grief/sorrow bacon (fat)) gained weight from emotional overeating (especially after a breakup)
Lebenslüge: (lit.: life’s lie) a lie that you tell yourself to make life more bearable
Mitdenken: (lit.: with-thinking) ability to think for yourself and do more than what you were demanded to do / trying to find a conceptional solution to a problem together with other people
Sehnsucht: intense inner longing for somebody, something or a place
Schnapsidee: (lit.: schnapps idea) a ridiculous and crazy plan/idea you have while you are drunk
Sprachgefühl: (lit.: language feeling) feeling/sense of language, instinctive feel for a certain language / intuitive feeling of what is linguistically appropriate
Stehaufmännchen: (lit.: little stand up man) someone who doesn’t give up and begins anew
Torschlusspanik: (lit.: gate-closing-panic) the fear of missing something important / not being able to do some things (because you’re too old)
Verschlimmbessern: (lit.: verschlimmern=exasperate, verbessern=improve) improve something for the worse / make something worse but with having had the intention of improving it
Vorführeffekt: (lit.: demo effect) the effect that something you’re actually able to do doesn’t work when you want to demonstrate it to other people
Waldeinsamkeit: (lit.: forest loneliness/solitude) the seclusion/solitude of the forest
Warmduscher: (lit.: warm showerer/ somebody who showers with warm water) a wimp / a person that doesn’t like to leave their comfort zone
Weltschmerz: (lit.: world pain (world weariness)) gratuitous melancholia / kind of feeling experienced by someone who believes that physical reality can never satisfy the demands of the mind / the feeling of anxiety caused by the ills of the world
Zeitgeist: (lit.: time-spirit, spirit of the time ) the dominant set of ideals and beliefs that motivate the actions of the members of a society in a particular period in time
Link to the article here.
Hi ho blog friends. Just another quick look into our patriarchal rape culture, yes our culture, the one we inflict on the female folk.
“Sam Smethers says that the minority of people who hold these views have “a drag effect on our society, [and] are holding us all back with their hostile, negative attitudes”.
She adds that blame culture prevails because “it’s what’s been normalised in our culture: that women fundamentally are the ones responsible”.
She says people have got to “understand that it’s nothing to do with what the woman wears or how she behaves – it’s all about what the perpetrator does”.
Yeah. Bald faced injustice like this has been going on for years and is certainly seems like we’re still in the naming the problem phase. So much more work is required to de-normalize this mode of thinking in our society. Fix your family first then your friends, the transmission of patriarchal norms stops with you.
The New York Times has featured Lindy West writing on the free speech conundrum on how entitled white dudes are getting their knickers in a knot because minorities and non white dudes dare to criticize features of society that make dudes happy.
See the flaming mound of poo that is “Gamer Gate” or any forum in which a feminist view/critique of society is presented. Good times. Today’s lesson is that criticism is not anti-free speech and conflating the two ideas because your pet notions don’t stand up to analysis is toddler level defence of your position.
Hmm. Time to give some side eye to queer theory as it seems to go against much of what feminism is about. Let’s examine a part of an essay by Susan Cox writing on the Feminist Current.
“Feminists defied patriarchal ideology by declaring that we do not have “wandering uteruses” that make us prone to “hysteria” and inherently inferior to men. Feminists also argued that men are not biologically destined to be a bunch of rapist cavemen, and that we should therefore hold them to higher standards, in terms of their treatment of women. We showed that these ideas were were social constructions artificially imposed on males and females.
Queer theory flipped that whole framework upside-down.
In a textbook example of what is known as “patriarchal reversal,” queer theory embraced the idea that womanhood is defined by femininity (described as gender “performance”). In other words, the things feminists worked so hard to show were not essential to women — makeup, skirts, and coquettish mannerisms, for example — are now said to be the things that make a person a woman. This implies that if a woman rejects her oppressive gendered role, it probably means that she was never really a woman at all.
Queer theory claims to have an interest in the feminist project, which has confused discourse on women’s issues. Recently, an email conversation I had with a male philosopher who has published on feminist theory revealed he didn’t actually understand the difference between sex and gender.
He wrote to me:
“I’m not a macho man. I don’t like violent sports, and I’ve undergone a lot of self-reflection and critique from feminist friends to get to a place where I don’t treat women in the brutish heteronormative way that patriarchy prescribes. So, in many ways, I’ve come to have an identity that reflects my gender and not my sex.”
He seemed to be referring to his “sex” as synonymous with masculinity and using “gender” to mean “personality.” I replied:
“Your sex (male) doesn’t automatically make you a rapey, macho asshole. That is actually the gender role you’ve been assigned under patriarchy. You rejecting the norms of masculinity is you rejecting gender — not identifying with it.”
You know we’re in desperate times when a young scholar has to explain basic feminist theory to someone who’s supposedly been studying it for decades.
Right now, it’s crucial that we remember the feminist critique of biological determinism. We don’t need to pretend as though biological sex doesn’t exist or isn’t important, because sexual difference doesn’t naturally cause male supremacy or female subordination. Acknowledging biological difference is, in fact, very important — we need to know who and what we are talking about, in order to address and remedy the unjust power relationship between males and females.
Patriarchy claims that male supremacy is encoded in the sexed biology of maleness and femaleness. And perhaps it’s an indication of something significant when queer theory says exactly the same.”
So much confusion surround the ideas of sex and gender, I wonder who that could be benefiting…
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