Yes, our world is constructed in certain ways, but that’s only because we decided to construct it that way. If we as individuals within that world decide to build a new construct, or to view the current construct in a different way, we can make bubbles that aren’t constructed in the same ways. Eventually those bubbles can coalesce into something large enough to rival the default construction. There’s no point in only seeing the world as we built it without also seeing that it can always be renovated.
Most of your post centers around the question you posed: “what is the role of bounding this statement to half of the population if not to exclude it from the other half?” The simple answer is that we often only know our own experience and the experience of those we’re intimately familiar with. I’m a man, and I know many other men, as I spend most of my time around friends of the same gender. Like most men, I’m less close to women outside of those who are in my family and those I’ve dated. I can speak confidently about men in society in ways I simply can’t about women. Therefore, if I talk about something that I can tell affects many men, but I can’t reliably extrapolate that effect to women, I word my remark along the lines of “this affects men” not to exclude women, but to leave the discussion open for women to impart their own experiences that I’m unaware of.
I pose my own question to you: why assume mentioning one party excludes the other when we have perfectly good language to do just that? If we want to exclude women, we can use words to exclude women. We would say “this affects men, not women” or “this affects men more than women.” I wholeheartedly believe that someone who doesn’t include women in their comment is doing so because they’re simply deciding not to comment on women. It need not be more complicated than that.
Many men’s assumptions about men are similarly a problem when applied to me, for the same reasons of framing the binary and existing gender stereotypes, while sometimes useful, is often over applied and overly made real by shared affirmation.
To answer your question, I’m not implying intent by the author, rather just stating that the way it has been framed, consciously or otherwise, is relating a very general experience as if you should expect it to be gendered. We can decide to construct it like that, or we can make the framing more salient and fix a lot of the inevitable downstream issues of attempting to communicate when people are making expected differences more salient and real that shared (even if slightly different). Experiences that we can collectively identify and change.
Again, if atheists could have kept focus on countering groups like the heritage foundation, rather than defending against weird assumptions about their general group that they are being inappropriate related to, or if the lessons learned from academic feminism can be applied by other groups rather than being devolved into nonsensical associations with SJWs and weird claims like “trying to make circumcision illegal in the USA means you hate women because FGM is a more important issue”. Further devolves into “being an atheist or supporting causes that help men means you hate women and want to destroy advances in women’s rights.”
Which I think we can all agree is stupid, and not representative of any serious work being done by academic feminists.
Would be an easy voice to stir up division, and make defensive arguments built around bad framing problems and associations more salient than the actual issues these groups should be making salient. Such as the heritage foundation and other extremely important obstacles that we should all be finding ways to cooperate against.
I assume that noting one party excludes the other because I see it like “we have blue cups and red cups. Be careful the blue cups are hot.”
And then “oww i burnt my hands on the red cups, they are also hot!”
Followed by “i didn’t say the red cups couldn’t be hot, only that blue ones were.”
I think someone chiming in on the original statement with “all the cups are hot, just generally be careful.” shouldn’t be a contentious addition.
Hopefully that comparison makes my framing problem more clear.
Yes, our world is constructed in certain ways, but that’s only because we decided to construct it that way. If we as individuals within that world decide to build a new construct, or to view the current construct in a different way, we can make bubbles that aren’t constructed in the same ways. Eventually those bubbles can coalesce into something large enough to rival the default construction. There’s no point in only seeing the world as we built it without also seeing that it can always be renovated.
Most of your post centers around the question you posed: “what is the role of bounding this statement to half of the population if not to exclude it from the other half?” The simple answer is that we often only know our own experience and the experience of those we’re intimately familiar with. I’m a man, and I know many other men, as I spend most of my time around friends of the same gender. Like most men, I’m less close to women outside of those who are in my family and those I’ve dated. I can speak confidently about men in society in ways I simply can’t about women. Therefore, if I talk about something that I can tell affects many men, but I can’t reliably extrapolate that effect to women, I word my remark along the lines of “this affects men” not to exclude women, but to leave the discussion open for women to impart their own experiences that I’m unaware of.
I pose my own question to you: why assume mentioning one party excludes the other when we have perfectly good language to do just that? If we want to exclude women, we can use words to exclude women. We would say “this affects men, not women” or “this affects men more than women.” I wholeheartedly believe that someone who doesn’t include women in their comment is doing so because they’re simply deciding not to comment on women. It need not be more complicated than that.
Many men’s assumptions about men are similarly a problem when applied to me, for the same reasons of framing the binary and existing gender stereotypes, while sometimes useful, is often over applied and overly made real by shared affirmation.
To answer your question, I’m not implying intent by the author, rather just stating that the way it has been framed, consciously or otherwise, is relating a very general experience as if you should expect it to be gendered. We can decide to construct it like that, or we can make the framing more salient and fix a lot of the inevitable downstream issues of attempting to communicate when people are making expected differences more salient and real that shared (even if slightly different). Experiences that we can collectively identify and change.
Again, if atheists could have kept focus on countering groups like the heritage foundation, rather than defending against weird assumptions about their general group that they are being inappropriate related to, or if the lessons learned from academic feminism can be applied by other groups rather than being devolved into nonsensical associations with SJWs and weird claims like “trying to make circumcision illegal in the USA means you hate women because FGM is a more important issue”. Further devolves into “being an atheist or supporting causes that help men means you hate women and want to destroy advances in women’s rights.”
Which I think we can all agree is stupid, and not representative of any serious work being done by academic feminists.
Would be an easy voice to stir up division, and make defensive arguments built around bad framing problems and associations more salient than the actual issues these groups should be making salient. Such as the heritage foundation and other extremely important obstacles that we should all be finding ways to cooperate against.
I assume that noting one party excludes the other because I see it like “we have blue cups and red cups. Be careful the blue cups are hot.” And then “oww i burnt my hands on the red cups, they are also hot!”
Followed by “i didn’t say the red cups couldn’t be hot, only that blue ones were.”
I think someone chiming in on the original statement with “all the cups are hot, just generally be careful.” shouldn’t be a contentious addition.
Hopefully that comparison makes my framing problem more clear.
I really appreciate your thoughtful and level-headed replies here. Thanks.