Strong Women

I was doing some housecleaning of my computer files and came across an old post I made on a message forum.  While reading it, I decided I should archive it somewhere and possibly share it with those who care about this sort of thing.

I do not consider myself a "feminist".  I consider myself both egalitarian and an individualist.  I believe in equal opportunity to do whatever it is each individual wants and is capable of doing, even if that means what the individual wants to do is currently what is considered "traditional" or if it is the exact opposite of what is considered "traditional".  I also believe people should be allowed to not participate in activities for which they are not suited and not be forced to comply or not force society to make compensation for them (women in the military ... if you can't lift your male teammate, you shouldn't be allowed in infantry!).  I believe that everyone should be allowed and encouraged to do whatever suits them best, for the good of all.  I believe it hurts a family, group, society, race, when people are not allowed to participate in whatever activities they have the skills for, especially when people are discouraged from said activities based on arbitrary groupings or distinctions that are made on false premises.  I believe it hurts the family, group. society, race when people are expected to uphold certain roles even if the individual is not suited for that role in the slightest.

Because of these views, I often get offended by even casual statements regarding race or gender, particularly gender biases (I really hate people saying "you guys" then adding "and women" after a pause when the notice a female in the group).  Most of what offends me is not so much that the statement is untrue (which does offend me too), but that it is uttered with such acceptance and those speaking such statements never question the statements' validity.  With the more intellectual minds, when someone finds themselves a victim of social programming and makes the type of statement to set me off, I find myself in a discussion of Nature vs. Nurture.  

Our western-centric view of "how things should be" is quite skewed and often taken as "fact", using tradition and historic precedent as "proof" that it has been so for this long, therefore it must be so by nature.  We tend to put this filter over our eyes when observing other cultures, so it is often believed that other cultural organizational structures reinforce our own setup, and therefore is more "proof" that a totally seperate culture evolved the same way, so it must be natural.

I got into an argument on a message forum sometime last year.  The headline was something like "purtecting the wimmenfolk".  It was a guy who noticed when a female is in an uncomfortable situation (imagine an obnoxious guy hitting on her in a bar), he wants to jump in and help her, but he does not feel the same desire to help men in similar situations.  The women in his life apparently got upset about this and it prompted a thread asking how many other people do the same thing.

I, of course, chimed in about the unfairness of the behaviour and added my offense to that of his women.  The strange part about the whole thread was that many women were on the other side of the argument!  Both women and men, in this thread, appeared to accept the statement that "a woman should be treated like a Queen by her lover" and other silly comments.  People on the forum seemed to want to lump in "opening doors for women" with "women should be the cooks and take care of kids while men were the provider" type statements.  I tried to clarify that I was not against common courtesy, but that courtesy and polite gestures should be performed regardless of gender and with individual preferences in mind and none of that had anything to do with the roles each gender was expected to play.  So naturally this included nature vs. nurture type arguments about how women were biologically more suited to X and men were biologically inclined to do Y.  I proposed that it has very little to do with biology and much more to do with cultural programming.  Some people got (unreasonably) upset over my proposal and my character was attacked (as is to be expected in an online message forum) and I was challenged to offer proof of my theories, since the opposing side had all the "proof" they needed, in the idea that Western culture has been patriarchal for all of history, and all other cultures are also patriarchal and have gender-defined roles.  Now, it has been quite some years since I majored in sociology and anthropology, but I did provide quite a lengthy response:

( My answering post )