Re:Men View Their Ex-Partners More Favorably Than Women Do: ...
by TallGuyShort on Friday October 25, 2019 @11:43AM
(#21356110)
No, I very intentionally never used the word sex, because everything I mentioned was gender. My concern is when stuff that is entirely social (okay, let's keep calling that gender) starts getting codified or labelled, and I'm still confused why we have discrete labels for things that, according to many of the same people using the most labels, are a completely fluid spectrum. I'm okay with completely fluid spectrum, but here's what happened in this HN discussion: someone commented about the research being about "biological genders", and everyone says they're confused. Do a Ctrl+F of the linked article for "Gender" and "Sex" and then tell me that the research isn't also confused because everyone is confused all of the time, especially people who are "confused".
Re:Men View Their Ex-Partners More Favorably Than Women Do: ...
by krapp on Friday October 25, 2019 @12:09PM
(#21356390)
>and I'm still confused why we have discrete labels for things that, according to many of the same people using the most labels, are a completely fluid spectrum.
Visible light is a spectrum, yet we still use labels for distinct colors, despite "color" being arbitrary (a "social construct".) Labels can still be useful for communicating concepts and establishing a common ground, even if they're imprecise, or if different cultures don't even agree on the difference between "blue" and "green."
>Do a Ctrl+F of the linked article for "Gender" and "Sex" and then tell me that the research isn't also confused because everyone is confused all of the time, especially people who are "confused".
Everyone isn't confused all the time. People do disagree, though, and society is still working out just what gender means in the modern day.
For instance - it was once considered perfectly masculine behavior for men to wear pantyhose, high heels and makeup, and to kiss each another on the mouth. Now, those traits would likely be considered feminine (or at least, not masculine.)
Does that mean men were formerly somehow more biologically female, because they expressed what we would consider feminine traits? Obviously not. Was their gender female, then? Not in the context of their own culture, they were men being what men were considered to be.
It does mean the constructs of "masculinity" and "femininity" are not innately biological, and that the correlation between sex and gender is mostly a manifestation of cultural norms, not biological imperative.
All of the confusion in your comment seems to stem from the assumption that sex and gender are a priori the same. You may find Wikipedia's article on gender to be useful[0].
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender