Tired and Angry

I was inspired to make this post because of the mass confusion on tumblr about what social constructs are and how they function. I will start with a simple example:

This is a one dollar bill. It is an excellent example of a social construct. This piece of paper represents a specific amount of spending power in the society that it exists in (the USA). An individual person could decide personally that it represents 1000$ worth of spending power, but it would not matter because like all social constructs, the collective agreement between individuals in society is what determines the meaning of the construct. There are laws on the books about currency but it doesn’t stop society from changing the meaning of a dollar; after all, in times of scarcity a dollar is a much more valuable asset than in times of plenty. The exact value of a dollar is something that fluctuates in tune with other factors, including things like consumer confidence- meaning, how consumers feel about the economy. Social constructs can change based on changes of opinion in the population. 

One way to test if something is a social construct is to remove it from its native society and see if it retains the same functionality. The US dollar is accepted in some foreign countries, but in other places, it is just a piece of paper. 

Another way to test if something is a social construct is to remove people from the picture entirely and see if it retains its functionality. Without people to give a dollar meaning it simply becomes paper. 

Contrast the attributes of a dollar with say, biological sex.

Male humans produce sperm and much higher levels of testosterone than females. Females produce ova and offspring if their eggs are fertilized and implanted. Individuals who are sterile still have either male or female anatomy which serves sexual functions for the individual. Virtually everyone on earth qualifies as one sex or the other, with or without malfunctioning or variations. Is this binary a social construct?

Does the collective agreement of society give male and female organs their functionality? Absolutely not. Humans did not always have an understanding of how pregnancy happened, and yet it happened anyway. Individuals who don’t know about or understand reproduction can and do get pregnant via sex. No matter how many people got together and decided that females inseminate males there would be no change in the function of testes or ovaries. 

The functionality of human reproductive organs is also impervious to cultural or geographical differences. All over the world people get pregnant and have babies by mixing sperm from males with ova from females. There is no exception. 

Removing humans from the equation also has no effect on the biological reality of mammalian reproduction. Male mammals are male, female mammals are female, and only one of the two can give birth. 

Biological sex is not and never has been a social construct.

Another example is gender. Femininity is the easiest example to discuss. Lets look at different examples of femininity from around the world:

As you can see, what it means to be feminine or girly is very different depending upon the society. None of these is the “correct” femininity, just different versions from different cultures. There is no objective way to determine what makes someone feminine in any given culture- you have to ask people. 

"You can qualify for a GLP-1 regardless of size" ...Regardless of size?? So you can be severely underweight and qualify for a fucking weight loss drug? We're openly selling ozempic to anorexics now?

Fans when a Female author has socially unacceptable views:

They also don't know that women go through life auditing the position of our bodies and the position of our clothing on our bodies 24/7/365. An underrated but truly massive privilege/freedom.

All of those men who called themselves polymaths and geniuses, who had such well rounded educations in science and philosophy and government, who made networks of fellow scholars and intellectuals and were directly involved in growing literacy rates bc of the sheer volume of letters and pamphlets and books and treatises they published, who had a hand in society evolving and becoming curious, none of them gave a single solitary thought to women in an academic sense unless it was to espouse how foolish and inferior we are or that we are submissive and servile by nature.

(DON’T try and comment about Nicolas de Condorcet as a gotcha, I know he was an early male feminist but he was an extremely rare outlier)

Those men acted like they were god’s gifts to society, like they were brave heroes defying the church and the king and the institutions, pioneers on the frontier of scientific and mathematical and philosophical discovery, but the second they got called to task for sounding even marginally too anti-church or anti-monarchy in their writings they apologized and toed the line and wrote retractions or edited their manuscripts. They were only anti-monarchist until a sitting monarch sponsored them and took them in as favored members of their court. They were only anti-church until they actually upset the church and risked being jailed or executed for heresy.

Ultimately they were cowards and hypocrites. They called themselves humanists and abolitionists while owning slaves, they talked about how the church had it wrong but how there was obviously still some kind of divine creator, they talked about economics and poverty and the exploitations of labor but they were mostly lords and aristocrats themselves, they talked endlessly about the human condition and they didn’t bother to consider or consult the other 50% of the living humans on the planet alongside them.

None of them would have been able to produce the sheer amount of work and writing as they did if any of them had ever washed a single dish or cooked their own meals or did their own laundry. Their “genius” was literally only possible because of the uncredited labor of wives and servants who took care of them daily and allowed them to work nonstop. (PLEASE read who cooked the last supper by Rosalind Miles)

Some of them (I’m looking at you Jefferson and Voltaire 👀) went so far as to pat themselves on the back for being enlightened egalitarians while simultaneously writing literal examinations on what they believed was an objective inherent biological inferiority of black people

That type of cognitive dissonance is identical to the way liberals today will preach culture relativism while conveniently ignoring atrocities done to women and girls all over the world in the name of religion and faith. They’ll say in the same breath that circumcision is wrong but that female genital mutilation and child marriage are important cultural traditions that we can’t possibly ethically interfere with.

"Why is he gray?"