Published on 12, July, 2020
I've been mulling over this for a long time. In the workplace it's expected that the female/female identifying colleagues will take care of the soft skill aspects of being in a team. Team member has a birthday? Well you're expected to arrange flowers, cake, card, gift, lunch, dinner. Male members are not expected to do this kind of work. In my most recent position I have been open about being autistic yet all the time I am aware that the males get away with not giving a damn if it's someone's birthday or what a team member is going through, yet I'm expected to do the work of putting myself out because what? I have secondary sexual characteristics that in their eyes define me as woman/ nurturing/should care. I don't care unless I actually care about the person. It's stupid and unfair that in the NT world we have to survive in I'm expected to make this effort for some stupid sexist notion about what it means to be female.
I hear you. Well then maybe just stop. My boss announced that she was pregnant the other day and I couldn't bring myself to pronounce the word "congratulations". I'm still stressed about it worrying that it was rude and I might lose my job! But she seems like she moved on. They will move on too. If you want the stupid sexist notions to stop then women need to stop accepting or living by them .. I find people appreciate honestly and authenticity a lot.
My boss announced that she was pregnant the other day and I couldn't bring myself to pronounce the word "congratulations".
I once heard a woman describe the point at which you transition into middle age as the moment when your friend says 'I'm pregnant' and you no longer know whether to say 'are you alright' or 'congratulations.'
I'm surprised by the level of sexism in this forum. People passionately debate about how sexism is such agreat thing. It makes me sad.
I know I'm going to get myself in some trouble here, but I simply cannot read "stupid sexist notions" without throwing a psychological "attempt to divide by zero error"
Sexism throughout a lot of human history has been far from a stupid way to organise our lives, it was based on practical neccesity and managing limited human resources for the maximum efficiency in a more brutal world.
The primary social unit used to be the family which was effectively run by the women whilst the mans function was primarily to supply raw materials and whatever other resources the family needed.
Sexism has worked successfully for pretty much all of human history to ensure the perpetuation and expansion of the human race, some people say too successfully.
As a hetero sexual Autistic young electronics engineer, I was really, really looking forwards to the influx of hot young women into my field of endeavour. Genuinely, I'm not kidding, I thought "Equality" was going to mean just that, women would be freed from stereotypes, enter the engineering professions, and well, I'll attach the song of "Lola the engineer" obviously written by one of my type for further explanation of my young expectations of "equality".
Sadly in the real world even after 40 years of waiting, I've not seen that influx of gifted female engineers appear.
This search conducted more diligently as I got into my twenties looking for a woman to marry, gave me the first clue that women and men are in fact possessed of essential and pretty much universal DIFFERENCES. My O/H is one of the very few women I've ever seen who can reverse park a curved approach and nail it in one, with a neat well aligned ending.
More tellingly, the sexual drought of my twenties only ended when I stopped living how people were telling me I should and started treating women like, well, women. I.E. Embracing the sexism.
But ONLY in certain areas.
Fortunately, my partner is an ardent feminist. She keeps my sexism in check.
In fact our roles are reversed somewhat and SHE earns the money and "calls the shots", and I try and keep house and complain endlessly about not having enough pocket money.
Previously I lived in a more traditional M/F relationship where I went out and earned the money etc. It's taken me a great deal of time to adapt to this newfangled way of doing things psychologically, but now I have, I still can't see men and women as interchangeable and fungible.
Men are just more suited to "spider wrangling", and women are more inclined to be "thoughtful" in real life, outside of the sloganeering, and those written simple truths would suggest that sexist roles although unequal can be very fair, when the assigned roles play to the natural strengths and mitigate the weaknesses are are statistically unique to each of the clearly quite separate and definable sexes.
To call that basic human reality "stupid sexism" and rail against it seems to be missing the point altogether.
The point of emancipation was not to free women, but to get them involved fully in the workforce and economy to make rich and powerful men richer and more powerful.
And that's EXACTLY what happened. And the kids of the sixties and beyond apparently paid a heavy price for this emancipation, as the skyrocketting MH would indicate.
If you ask any old fogey they'll talk about "how things were better", they aren't lying, things were better for the majority when we had more rigid social systems that were less accomodating to "edge of the bell curve" requirements.
Using "ISMs" just over simplifies things, and leads to polarisation and is the very opposite of tolerance and respect.
If you want the stupid sexist notions to stop then women need to stop accepting or living by them
What makes you think I accept or live by them? I don't. I say when I won't do something. It's the expectation that annoys me. I feel like there's a secret way to be female where they get some kind of dopamine hit by caring about stuff that I just don't care about. I guess this comes under "difficulties with social communication". It's a mystery to me why some skills would be considered gender specific.
I don't agree that it's as simple as women need to stop accepting sexism for it to stop. It's way more nuanced than that.