I have to respond to comments to the last entry, but first!

[trinityvixen]

I'm sure the Whedon-files have read this already

Not to dismiss the Joss' opinion on the matter, but womb-envy is no more a predominant explanation for sexism and misogyny than penis-envy explains the psychology of women. It is, no doubt, a secret fear and source of mistrust, but the biological imperative of survival is more complicated than simply "You have what I want."

In fact, biologically speaking, men don't envy women; they envy other men (Bateman's Principle). This is true in non-sentient species as well as man, hence the multitude of adaptations of both male and female members of different species to select for and against particular individuals. Females, because of their larger investment of energy in the production of offspring, have to be choosey about partners, and the ones best evolved to select for favorable traits among partners will produce the most, healthiest progeny. Males must then evolve to compete for their fewer females in such a way that they both succeed in winning and mating and prevent other males from undoing their hard work.

Otherwise? Not a bad article from the Joss. I just wish that the Pandagon thread about it hadn't immediately de-volved into fans shouting down fans about whether or not his works count as feminist or not. As far as feminism goes, Whedon claims too much to say that Firefly's universe is gender-equal (not even true on the most civilized worlds), but he does a lot with the genre he set out to write and forwards it without completely losing the source material (I'll be able to write more and better about this once I take my class on Westerns). As for Buffy, I give him both more and less credit. Is it still about ogling the hot chick who, despite conforming to the Hollywood standard of beauty and stick-thinness, kicks ass? Sure. Does it also make a point to include characters with atypical gender roles? It does indeed.

You just have to weigh the good against the bad, and you'll find, I think, that Whedon comes out ahead. Having a "masculine" defender role placed on the shoulders of a teenage girl with girly-girl clothes and romantic leanings helps, and so does having Xander, who plays a "feminized" man--the weakest physical link in the army but still very much loved and loving despite that. Exposure to things such as homosexuality/bisexuality and unapologetic female sexual desire (Willow and Tara; Anya; Kennedy in season 7) goes a long way, too.

Womb-envy or not, there's nothing he's saying about how stupid and perverted the treatment of women is that is anything but right and righteous. It's been said before, true, and we shouldn't make a bigger deal of a guy saying this than a girl (equality is the goal, remember), but I support spreading this message around if only because it a) ends optimistically with a call to (positive) action; b) is being said by someone with the attention-getting power of a hundred or thousand voices; and c) is coming straight from one of geekdom's idols and thus is deserving of my fannish praise.

Comments

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

Sexism, like racism, homophobia, or any other prejudice, is inexplicable.

Okay, I'm no psychologist, but "fear of the other/outsider" seems like a perfectly reasonable evolutionary trait, and that would make racism/homophobia rather explicable, I think.

But regardless, saying that there is no explanation for behavior and can be no explanation is, well, useless to society as a whole. Even if we don't know them yet, there are reasons for everything. (Coincidentally, this is why Intelligent Design is stupid.)

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

(Let's see if LiveJournal will accept my comment THIS time.... I'd claim crappy response from web servers is inexplicable, too, but that's a whole other thing.)

As I said, I was being too utilitarian. The explanation could be an evolutionary one that's no longer useful in a modern context, or it could be a "dude had poor parenting" one that was never useful in any context, or any of a myriad of other things.... But what I was really trying to say was that there's no rational explanation. There's no way to say, "Oh, I hold this prejudice in order to achieve this end," and make someone else say, "Oh, ok, that makes sense." Regardless of the origin of it, prejudice is still self-defeating; I'm probably just giving people too much credit to call it inexplicable when they don't apply rational judgement to throw it out.

Although, suggesting that people simply apply some rational judgement seems at least as useful a contribution to society as suggesting an evolutionary origin of such beliefs, unless you're planning some major gene-therapy to weed it out. Personally, I think it's more likely to be societal than genetic, in which case changing ideas now is all you need to do to keep them from perpetuating. (I say as though that's easy.)

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

Regardless of the origin of it, prejudice is still self-defeating

I wish. I suspect prejudice has helped majoritarian groups in a lot of instances. Systematic discrimination against women maintains the power/dominance of men in our society; Hitler found anti-Semitism (and generalized hatred of other/"Inferior") an incredibly powerful and useful unifying force; entrenched racism supported and aided the Southern economic system for hundreds of years (and really still does underly a lot of the cheap service-industry labor throughout this country, for jobs that need to be done locally).

On the contrary, prejudice and discrimination are highly useful for certain ends in the hands of certain people. That's part of why it's hard to get society as a whole to give them up: they're wedded to the power structure.

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

underlie. Bah, proofreading.

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

Every one of those societies is suboptimal. They aren't using the resources available to them to the fullest. The inevitable conclusion is that they'll be overtaken by those that do.

In your examples, blacks and Jews and women - not small portions of the population - who are among the best and the brightest in those societies will not be able to contribute fully. The society will show less production, less innovation, and less advancement than others, and it will have to convert or be eradicated. Let's take them in turn.

The North won the civil war. That's a fact. But even if they hadn't... Considering the state of affairs in the mid-19th century, what do you think would have happened to the two nations? One refused to give up its old ways of doing things because those in power wanted to keep it, so it held onto its slave-powered agrarian economy. The other nation was building to be an egalitarian capitalist industrial powerhouse. Hell, look at the north and south today, even.

The Nazis also lost their war. In their case, the prejudice was simple scapegoating; they didn't even want to directly exploit their targets. It got people's hackles up and helped mobilize an army, sure. So what? America's industry once again ramped up - starting from virtually no military at all - and crushed them. Not to mention at least one individual who exemplifies my argument: Einstein fled Germany to the US and helped design the atomic bomb that ended the war.

Today, women are continually gaining more and more power in business. Why? Because men are being generous and giving up their prejudice out of the goodness of their hearts? Or because money talks, and if the best CEO candidate is a woman, that's who the board will approve? It's no different in politics, which - for all the back-room dealing - is still probably even more egalitarian. Hillary can't lose if women vote as a bloc, after all.

In the end society is made up of individuals. That's the source of the prejudice. But just as an individual, in the absence of a power structure that reinforces prejudice, won't prosper if their prejudices overwhelm their good judgement, a power structure won't prosper in the global community for exactly the same reason. Someone, or some society, somewhere, won't make the stupid decision, and they'll conquer, be it militarily, economically, or culturally.

The only way to see even these examples as beneficial to anyone is to view them in a terribly short-sighted way. Even if some of them could have been self-sustaining had they existed in isolation, in the real world, these prejudices were still self-defeating.

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

The inevitable conclusion is that they'll be overtaken by those that do.
Even if you agree to the basic premise that reality naturally drives towards a maximization of utility -- which I think is still an open question -- there's nothing to prevent the window on this "historical inevitability" from being so wide as to make it irrelevant, or to at least invite far more cheating than we'd like.

Consider, for example, apartheid in South Africa. First, it lasted a good fifty years, during which time the interests of the white minority were quite effectively served by oppressing everybody else. Sure, the whole pie of unspecified economic-and-social-good was smaller than it (presumably) could've been, but they got a much larger share of it, so as self-interested (rather than socially-interested) rational actors they did the right thing by taking 95% of 50 instead of 10% of 100. And sure, the Apartheid era is over, but most of those white South Africans still have far higher standards of living than the majority populations, even when they've turned exile. Or look at Zimbabwe -- another deeply racist society that's been overthrown, though in this case I'm not prepared to argue that it was because Mugabe was somehow better; and those white folks that survived are still far more wealthy than they'd've been had they never oppressed anyone.

The North American slave trade is another example: it wasn't just Southern white plantation owners getting rich on slavery. The oppression of black people is what financed the growth of the North; those fortunes were built selling cheap salt cod to the slavers of the Caribbean, and making rum with the proceeds, or engaging in the triangle trade (even if they didn't keep the slaves themselves). Those fortunes built up by supplying slavery were what gave Northerners the capital to get into industrialization in a big way.

Ignoring the extent to which (white) Northerners benefitted from Southern slavery, one part of the impetus for civil war was that the South had a captive labor force and was beginning to industrialize in the 1850s-1860s. It's unlikely that they would've remained agrarian, and had their industrialization experiments borne fruit, they could've really taken off, probably better than the Northerners thanks to all those slaves to work in the factories. But we're getting into hypotheticals, so I'll leave that. The bigger point is that the South could benefit from the genius of, for instance, Benjamin Banneker, while still mercilessly oppressing his black brethren, and getting rich from the oppression.

The Nazis lost their war, yes, but that was because of stupid military decisions, without which Europe was screwed, regardless of what Hitler did to the Jews. (And since the A-bomb was never used on the Germans, I don't think we can count Einstein's contributions to the Manhattan Project; I was of the impression the Nazis were pretty close to coming up with it on their own anyway, and the suboptimality of fascism was probably more of a drag on their progress than the suboptimality of oppressing minorities). Similarly, the Japanese lost because of a shortsighted military decision, not because of what they were doing to Nanjing (and to Korean women).

As for women in business, we're dealing with less concrete examples, but I'd contend that women's progress is much slower than it would be without continued entrenched sexism/prejudice against people who want work-life balance, and that women's progress in business is due less to an inherent drive toward meritocracy, and more toward a massive effort on the part of professional women as a class. Women voting en masse for Hillary, incidentally, wouldn't be an example of meritocracy, either; it would be an example of a marginalized group recognizing the power of numbers. It'd only be meritocratic if everybody voted for Hillary because she was widely recognized as the superior candidate. So I think that one's a red herring.
...

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

The only way to see even these examples as beneficial to anyone is to view them in a terribly short-sighted way.
I don't think it's that clear-cut, unfortunately.

Even if some of them could have been self-sustaining had they existed in isolation, in the real world, these prejudices were still self-defeating.
Well, as I laid out above, I don't think they were. They prevented an optimal result for the entire group, but that doesn't mean that they necessarily resulted in a lesser distribution of power and goods to specific parties than those parties would've gotten through their fair share of the benefits of a more optimal society.

I appreciate your perspective, here -- it's nice to think that racism et al is stupid and self-defeating. And I wish that were true. But I suspect that the reality is that it will take a lot more work to eliminate those problems. While I agree with you that they're suboptimal, I think that the measure of that inadequacy has to come in moral terms rather than in economic/utility ones, since I don't think the utility argument is as clear-cut as we would wish it.