Default masculinity = humanity?

  1. Module
    Module
    bloody_capitalist_sham brought up a point in the thread 'Why I Want a Wife' that I thought was quite interesting,
    Is the gender role changing, or is the male gender role becoming a gender neutral role?
    This is something that I have considered before hand, and it would be interesting to discuss this with you ...

    Somebody on this board once suggested that for women to gain a sense of independence she should go hunting ... for example, but this is also reflective of an attitude towards women's struggle.

    I think people know that women are not oppressed simply for being women, but also more specifically for abiding by the female gender role, which is seen as being of lesser quality than the male gender role.

    Something I've noticed is an attitude that for women to liberate themselves, they simply have to start acting more like men.

    I'm sure we've all noticed the tendency for people to assume an non-gendered individual to be a 'he', as well as, I think, the use of the word 'man', and 'human' as interchangeable.
    Has the male gender role become the default for a sense of humanity?

    What say you?
  2. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    To say women should act like men is wrong. It refrases the causes of gender oppression to this: women are oppressedbecause they are women; and then the answer would be: in order to avoid repression women need to be more like men.

    The reason why this is wrong is because this solution doesn't care about the historical and material reasons behind gender oppression. Women were oppressed because men had a better position in the production relations of class societies. This has nothing to do with the fact that women are women/not men and men are men/not women.

    Btw, the reason behing the slow but limited emancipation of women today is their involvement in production of commodities combined with the emancipation of the workers movement. Especially that last condition is important because emancipation (or freedom) can only be achieved when classes are abolished, which is the goal of the class struggle.

    Saying that women need to act more like men also ignores the simple fact that men can also suffer from oppression. The reason behind this is again the class based society. Capitalists exploit workers; this capitalist could be anyone (woman or man).

    To further answer your remarks (or to conclude): the neutral role of the male gender can only be achieved on a linguistic basis, I think, because language is "neutral" and gains from inventing a neutral gender in order to simplify speech and writing; while society isn't neutral at all and the making the male gender neutral or universal wont cure the problems, as the class based society is the source of all problems.
  3. Module
    Module
    Thanks for your reply, though I think there's been a little misunderstanding.
    I'm not saying that women should act more like men, I'm suggesting that this attitude may exist.
    That is, if women want to be taken seriously, to liberate themselves, they must abandon their own oppressive gender role, and that means to take up that of a man's ... and this may be due to a few reasons.
    I also was not saying that the male gender role should be the 'default' gender, linguistically or otherwise, simply that it is. I don't think that there are any benefits (although disadvantages!) to this whatsoever.
  4. Qwerty Dvorak
    Qwerty Dvorak
    I think there is merit in this idea, as is evident by the fact that men who act in ways which are commonly considered to be feminine will also suffer discrimination and oppression in society. However, I also agree with Rakunin to an extent. Perceived gender roles cannot be the only reason for discrimination against women; a woman who acts "like a man" will still be at a disadvantage to a man who acts like a man.

    I think the idea that fulfilling the perceived male gender role will increase one's standing in society regardless of one's sex must be balanced against the contempt that many have for people who outstep their own gender roles. So while a woman who acts more "manly" may be viewed more favourably for being closer to the "stronger sex", she will also incur the disfavour of many of acting "unladylike".
  5. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    I re-read my post after I finished my exams on "Discourse-analysis" (which also includes Gender). I now believe that language isn't neutral at all. Language is a product of society and it affects society (would anyone disagree?). "Default masculinity" can never be neutral if we look at the material basis for today's evolution towards this phenomenon: the surpression of femininity combined with the slow "emancipation" of women. Because femininity is oppressed women who emancipate or the simple envolvment of women in society created the contradiction of "default masculinity" in discourse. It is not a neutral adaptation of language, it is still rather sexist.
    Yet it exists, and if it does for a long period of time maybe even the classless society wont be able to end this contradiction from existing.
  6. TC
    TC
    Obviously the 'male as the default human' model is not the cause of gender inequality.

    There are two major causes; the cause is primarily patriarchal family structures that create a gendered division of public and domestic labour giving men power over their wives while saddling wives/mothers which disadvantage them in the public sphere;

    A secondary cause is the state and ruling class interest in maintaining positive population growth in order to stave off a declining rate of profit, while instilling politically useful ideology in children in order to maximize their usefulness as workers, and preference for utilizing the existing social framework to protect this interest. I would say this is a 'secondary' cause in that the state and bourgeois interests are autonomous from patriarchal interests in that they sometimes align and sometimes conflict with them.

    A third more minor causes is the entrenching cultural and social factors which arise out of the former two principle causes (such as the superstructure arising out of patriarchy, i.e. church and religious movements, the superstructure arising out of the public consequences of patriarchy; the so called 'old boys network' in the professions and male chauvinist culture in some working class occupations)


    Having said that (principally in response to Rakunin who seemed not to understand the original post), I think the pervasive attitude, even among women, of the default human being as male and of women being a differing variant on that default model, is a noticeable and significant effect (and if you like, a demonstration) of the fact that while society isn't 'male dominated' (i.e. dominated by men collectively) it is dominated by men (dominated by individuals who happen to be men, to the exclusion of both the vast majority of women and a smaller majority of men).

    Its not just a matter of the presumptive masculine pronouns, but a broader attitude where each individual woman is often felt to be reflecting on women in general whereas individual men are never considered to reflect on men in general. An obvious example of course is that gender is an issue for Hillary Clinton but not for Barak Obama even though they clearly both have a gender; i.e. when Clinton cried publicly media commentators of course discussed it in the context of her gender, when Barak makes macho comments or does a 'one of the guys' buddy routine, no one says 'well you know he just does it cause he's a dude!'.

    A less obvious example in a subject important to radical feminists which at the same time betrays just how much they've internalized men as the default is tat in seeing photos of conventionally attractive, minimally clothed (or, say naked) women in magazines and advertisements, they feel these are objectifying to women in general and depict women in general as sex objects, or as thin, or as degraded, or whatever. They look at an individual person, take the fact that the person is female, and extrapolate from that that the person as a non-default model reflects on others of the non-default type. Compare this from how images of individual persons who are male are treated. There are many many many advertisements and magazines with minimally clothed conventionally attractive men often in very sexually suggestive ways but these are never felt to be reflective on men in general.

    When a radical feminist or anyone else looks at the cover of Men's Health and sees someone who clearly invests far more time in maintaining a sexy body than the female model on the magazine next to it, they don't think 'This is a sexually objectifying depiction of men', they think its a photo of a man, without reference to men in general. This suggests that when the person involved is a man, the fact that they are male is not taken to be relevant to how one characterizes them and the context they're in but when the person in question is female, this becomes relevant to how they and their situation are seen.

    One time when for some moronic reason I was discussing politicians against video games (something i have no real stake in since i dislike both bourgeois politicians and video games) a friend, to paraphrase said something to me like 'In Grand Theft Auto, your character kills prostitutes. Doesn't that offend you as a woman that its sexist that way?' What I gather however of the game is that the main character kills tons and tons of men in it, but this didn't seem to her to mitigate the significance of female video game characters being killed, she seemed to feel like this somehow reflected on not just those individual fictional women, but herself, and women in general, and for that matter me so my failure to be personally offended was strange; whereas killing male video game characters wasn't felt to reflect anything about the games attitude towards men, suggesting that on a certain psychological level, even though she was arguing from a psudo-feminist perspective, she saw men as the norm so that them being male did not add any additional dimensions to what was going on in the game.


    I have to say one of the recent linguistic conventions that really pisses me off, is that, and i think this is a relatively recent phenomenon, "woman" and "women" have become acceptable to be used as adjectives (rather than 'female'), whereas "man" and "men" have not. It has become not only acceptable but to some people aware of the issue, preferable to say 'women workers', 'women students', 'women attorneys' 'women prisoners' 'women doctors', whereas one could never say 'men workers' 'men students' 'men attorneys', 'men prisoners', or 'men doctors', the word 'men' would have to be substituted for male. The difference here is that the word 'women' is not primarily an adjective but a plural noun so while a 'male doctor' is a doctor being characterized as a male, a 'woman doctor' is spoken of where 'doctor' and 'woman' are equal terms or part of a single noun phrase. This trend suggests that on a psycho-social level the identity as a woman is what the person in question is on a level that the identity as a man is not. (I realize of course that 'male' and 'female' can be used as nouns as well but this is a rarer use and used mostly of things that aren't people, and in any case, 'men' is never attached to another noun except when used in the old fashioned non-gendered sense)
  7. feminist dyke whore
    feminist dyke whore
    I'm sure we've all noticed the tendency for people to assume an non-gendered individual to be a 'he', as well as, I think, the use of the word 'man', and 'human' as interchangeable.
    It's funny how inanimate objects are referred to as a "she".

    I do think that the male gender is the standard of "default humanity" and traditionally male traits are seen as more right then traditionally female ones. Carol Gilligan's analysis of a societies perception of morality, it's celebration of masculine values such as justice and its disregard of traditionally feminine values such as compassion and forgiving, I think, contends with that idea.

    An example is insistent belief that women are as more emotional, when in reality I believe it is just women expressing emotion in a different way, because thats the way they've been conditioned to act. If I cry, as a woman I receive affection and comfort - a positive re-enforcement of my behavior. If a male cries, in my experience, it is ignored or ridiculed - a negative reaction to their behavior resulting in a different mode of expressing their frustration - anger.

    I don't see acting more like a "man" as a "bad" thing if it is in an attempt to better yourself. Women are conditioned to behave "feminine" and many of these traits are self destructive. Therefore I can understand women wanting to take on traditionally masculine traits and the same for men wishing to acquire more traditionally feminine qualities, in the endeavor of more fully developed complete human beings.
  8. Decolonize The Left
    Decolonize The Left
    I, too, believe that male is being treated as the default gender in society - and has been, for many, many, years. Why? Language always gives us away. Let us look at basics first, then dive into more conventional uses.

    Sex: Male and female. Note how female contains a prefix, denoting that it originates from the word male - an offshoot of sorts. This, of course, is coherent with the Christian belief that God made Eve (the Christian female archetype) from Adam's rib.

    Gender: Man and woman. Note again how woman is derived from man. Once again man is the primary word - the default.

    Contemporary usage of certain terms, as rightly noted by numerous members, often involves the use of masculine terms to refer to a general body of people. "Hey guys" is the simplest; "Hey man" is another; "Dude" etc...

    Furthermore, we can trace this back to the notion of referring to humanity, or all peoples, as mankind. "Man" was/is also used to denote human beings.

    I think we can safely conclude that male is being treated as the default gender, and that this is unacceptable. Possible alternatives? I choose to refer to groups of people as "folks," or "y'all" if I'm feeling country. I had several female friends in college who referred to groups of people as "ladies" in an effort to draw attention to the masculine-centered speech of others.

    There is always the alternative of redefining man and woman. What about making man the word for human beings, and applying a prefix to man to denote males? Hence we would have "man" for everyone, "woman" for females, and "poman" for males. Pretty neat huh?

    - August