from the top of the social heap

[piranha]

interesting discussion over at matociquala's. check it out. i am just pulling my main comment across.

As a woman in modern society, I have to understand the male perspective if I am going to succeed in navigating society. They, on the other hand, have the luxury of making a parlor game of wondering "what women want," and so forth--because they are not forced to understand the dominant (and external) paradigm.

hm. ya know, i buy this for ethnic, religious, sexual/gender minorities, but not entirely for the big gender divide. here's why: caucasians in the US don't have to care and know what people of colour want and go through. they can live their entire lives without giving a second thought to the experience of non-whites, and without actually interacting on a meaningful level with anyone who's of a clearly different skin colour.

on the other hand, what women want is still quite important to most men, and much more than a parlor game. they grow up having a mother, having sisters. if they're heterosexual, they have to interact with women not only for sex, but also to be married to, and start a family with. men cannot go through life completely oblivious to women's experiences.

women are not actually a minority, they're all around men. and that changes the dynamic you're describing.

they really don't understand that what a single black mother of three with no high school education wants is to go to bed at night not worrying that her kids are hungry or coming down with something

this is also about class in addition to sex and ethnicity, isn't it? and possibly more about class than about the other groupings. the guys and gals who run the country have no more of a clue what it's like for a young black man in harlem who's trying to provide for his family either. in fact i am surprised you left class out of your list.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

Completely separate piece of the gender divide, but suzimoses just sent me this link, and I thought it was something you'd likely find interesting, and this seems a convenient place to put it: Washington Post article on opinions about gender bias from a male scientist who was, up until nine years ago, a female scientist....

After he underwent a sex change nine years ago at the age of 42, Barres recalled, another scientist who was unaware of it was heard to say, "Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister's."

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I agree with your point about class.

[squirrel-monkey.livejournal.com]

Hi, here via the post you referenced. You're right about class; I think it also bears mentioning that class and race are too often confounded. And thank you for not saying 'white males are oppressed too.'

[bastets-place.livejournal.com]

I guess I have to ask:

Am I more female than I am a single mother?
Am I more poor than I am educated?
Am I more white than I am female?

I think one of the biggest mistakes is to try to separate people into catagories without trying to understand that everyone stands on a spectrum of some sort. I will never know what it is like to be a wealthy, black, homosexual high school dropout; no more than I would expect anyone anywhere on the charts to understand - wholly - anyone else.
The question, I suspect, is more one of perception.
I do know men who are heterosexual, with sisters and wives and mothers, who really, honestly, truely don't care what women *really* want, as long as the women in question are not actively disatisfied, complaining, or asking them to do anything differently than they have been. Then again, I am undergoing a divorce, and this may color my opinion a little. What holds true for someone - or even a whole group of someones - in one region might not hold true for a similar group someplace else. I live in Maine, with the smallest percentage of nonwhites out there, in the USA (or second smallest, I don't remember, exactly...); my experience with people here in Maine who are not of my race, gender, SES background differs strongly from my experiences with people in, for instance, New York City who differ from me similarly.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

I will never know what it is like to be a wealthy, black, homosexual high school dropout; no more than I would expect anyone anywhere on the charts to understand - wholly - anyone else.

well said. *nods vigorously*. this is what always gets my goat, the idea that just because we share certain traits, such as "female" or "white", we're somehow sufficiently the same to draw any conclusions from that about our personal experiences. the conclusions will be haphazard even when narrowing the traits down to purposely acquired ones such as "christian" or "republican", but they're definitely not going anywhere much with inborn traits. trying to narrow the field by throwing such inborn or not consciously acquired ones into a melange like "single black female mother" doesn't get down to things that really matter either.

i am coming to believe that generalizing and stereotyping, things that are eminently useful when surviving, are actually enemies of civilized interaction.

i too know men who seem to not really care what women want as long as it doesn't require any change from them. and i know men who seem to objectify women to a degree that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. and i believe that there is definitely such a thing as patriarchical oppression. it's just that i think going at injustices with the attitude that men do it to women because they don't care nor have to care what women want is much too superficial. aside from knowing too many men for whom this is far from the truth, if it indeed were so, we'd still live in the dark ages regarding gender relations. it has required the conscious participation of men to improve those all along.

how do your regional experiences differ, if i may ask?

i am sorry about the divorce. it's hard to live with something as important as a marriage falling apart.

[bastets-place.livejournal.com]

Well, it is interesting. My high school class of 300 had two or possibly three students in it who might qualify as something other than white. There was ONE black person in the class. As it happens, he was from a fairly important family in my state's capitol, fairly well off, professionals and politicians. He was our homecoming prince two years running, and dated whomever he wanted to in the mid 80's. No one made a huge deal over his race, and the three most unique things I remember about him was that I was better than him in geometry (I had the second highest grade in our class in it), I was worse than him in history, and he could make his eyeballs make an odd squitchy noise when he rubbed them.
I wasn't him, obviously, and he may well have experienced TONS of racism, but whenever he and I were together, I mostly remember curiosity and questions being posed, rather than offensiveness. I remember being really interested, for example, that he could get a sunburn. Hey, when less than .001% of the population around you are African-American, you don't know these things.
When he failed to get anything, he expressed that it was generally because he hadn't wanted it especially, he didn't (genuinely) qualify for it, or because they couldn't afford it just then.

When I lived fairly close to New York, I had some friends who were African-American, too. They mentioned that they were African-Americans fairly regularly. It was understood that I didn't ask questions of them regarding anything having to do with race. If they didn't get something that they wanted, they tended to express that it was because they were African-Americans, or because they were female (or male), or because they were poor. They were, universally, astonished that a black family had wound up in Maine; that the family was considered "upper class", that they ran for office and WON in a town where they were such a significant minority - this was simply shocking.

Now, this is ONE example; there are others that support my view that regionalism has an impact on how one tends to view one's own situation.
I picked on my friend, there, because (by happenstance and by the magic of alphabetical seating) I sat near him in home room all four years of high school, and he and I talked a lot.

Now, the discussion is on the subject of trying to understand what "others" want, what the perspective of others is, and how one can use that understanding. Obviously, I feel that I understand my friend from HERE; and much better than I understand my friends from THERE. This isn't because I have race, class, or gender in common with my friend from HERE - he is much better off than me, male, and of a different race (and religion, if that is significant).

Also interesting is that THERE, I knew people of my race, gender, and general economic status that also blamed race, gender, and poverty for thier inability to do things. I understand them (I believe) far less than I do my friend here.

Patriarchal oppression exists, but to pretend that all men are the same would be as wrong as pretending that all women are. What men want differs within the group as much as what women want within the group. Now, there are organizations of men who are very focused on attempting to enable women to return to the kitchen, where they firmly believe that women not only belong, but where they believe women want to be. Heaven help me, my husband is one of them. There are organizations of women who go so far as to change the spelling of the WORD "wymyn" so that they can stay as far away from the icky male as possible. To put equal numbers of each group into a small room would be to court a battle royale to which we could sell tickets at a reasonable price.

Now, where in this reply, I make comments implying that I understand the thought process of someone else; I would like it understood that I go by the simple process of believing that I understand what they said to me at the time. Any of these people may well not actually believe what they said, but have felt for various reasons that they had to espouse such beliefs. I no more understand them than I imagine they understand me - we can but try, only to succeed, at best, imperfectly. My tenses are mixed up, but I hope I make some sense.