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March 9, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
14:16
The Language of Oppression
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So I thought I'd just do an old school style video for International Women's Day, because why not?
I found this really great article on theconversation.com.
International Women's Day.
Women have been written out of power.
Time is ripe for a new language of equality.
Right from the offset, you know exactly what kind of person you're dealing with.
They're dealing with the politics of group power, the group dynamics between one another and their ability to exert control over one another.
That's what she's talking about.
That's a pretty goddamn hefty thing to start with, and it's so weird how such naked powermongering is considered acceptable by feminism.
I can only assume it's because they think that that's what men do with other men, which honestly, as a man, I do not think that any decisions that men make in general, almost, I mean, literally any decision, is made with the intention of preserving male power.
I don't think that that's true.
They begin with, as we mark International Women's Day after a year of renewed media attention to issues of gender inequality, it could be that there are more important threats facing women at the survival of our planet than mere words.
I love the way they've tied threats facing women to the survival of our planet, but accept that really what they're talking about are mere words.
But after the Me Too campaign's exposure of the gender pay gap and the recent publication of yet more research that challenges the idea of a gendered brain, I actually spent a bit of time looking into this and I'm gonna have to spend a lot more time looking into it.
But anyway, it's mind-boggling to see how gendered blindness, described as the one-size-fits-men approach in designing tech culture, lives on.
She's complaining that men invent things and they invent things to fit them and not women.
Because they're selfish that way.
Meanwhile, women's equal contribution to society and culture is ignored.
Well hang on, again, I hate to stop you after every sentence.
But how do we know that it's equal?
How do we measure that?
Do we just assume that you existing means your contribution is equal?
Because that's a remarkably entitled way of looking at it.
I mean, I would think that if I existed and didn't do any work, or didn't do as much work as the people around me, I wouldn't be considering myself to have been contributing an equal amount.
Visible women, those in the public eye, or who call out unfair treatment, are subject to scrutiny and treated suspiciously in a way that are not.
I don't know about that.
I think that men would be treated with scrutiny and suspiciously.
For example, Jussie Smollett, in a way whenever anyone's claiming victimhood, because we need to know that we're not condemning an innocent person.
I don't think that the treatment is unfair.
I think it's equal.
I just think women do it more often.
Gender scholars have argued that English is a language made by men for men, with the sole purpose of representing and perpetuating their point of view.
Yes, it's not scholars of language saying that.
It's scholars of gender saying that.
What a surprise.
I mean, they barely say anything else ever about any other subject.
If I was discussing the question of who made the English language, I would definitely expect a feminist to say that men did it to oppress women.
This is the answer that I would most expect from a gender scholar.
Because after all, the way we see the world is therefore shaped by patriarchal traditions, and this is evident in most areas of arts, culture, and society.
Because women have no hand in producing that.
In their mind, it's all men.
How disempowering is that?
It is no surprise then to see women are marked as deviant and deficient, or worse, made invisible.
In Women in Power, Mary Beard discusses countless examples of attempts to write women entirely out of the public discourse.
Brilliant.
Because men in the past didn't write history in the way that these people wanted, somehow I am responsible for this.
Go on then feminists, what kind of reparations do you want?
The words we use play a role in this because language has the power to perpetuate gender determinism, and in doing so to marginalize women.
Well my goodness.
But our words can also be used in inclusive ways to promote equality and social justice.
So it can't be fair that there are more derogatory terms for girls and women than boys and men.
I mean I imagine most of those were innovated by women and used by women, frankly, and that the continued use of generic words or forms, man-mankind, are supposed to be all-inclusive and designate human beings in general.
Meanwhile, when woman is used as a label, it is a category with a limiting criteria.
Yes.
I'm sorry.
Nevertheless, any discussion about the link between language and gender discrimination often results in predictable comments about the trivial nature of the issue.
I don't want to trivialize your problems, but they are rather first world, aren't they?
It is this attitude that contributes to perpetuating male power and authority at the expense of women.
This is what I mean when I say that they are talking about power blocks, groups of people that are chosen on innate characteristics.
As in anti-feminist women, these women are claiming you as part of their team.
Feminist men, if I were to talk in the same terms, I would be claiming you as part of my team, whether you like it or not.
And to be honest with you, the way you see the world, you're claiming me as part of your team anyway.
I don't agree that men generally operate with the interest of promoting male power.
So I just do not agree that this worldview is legitimate.
And that goes for the same as race as well, to be honest, and any other of these goddamn intersectional characteristics.
I don't think that people do operate with the deliberate intention of promoting that identity block generally.
I mean, I imagine that a lot of radical leftists absolutely do.
I mean, they're explicit about it.
That's what this article is.
But I don't think that normal people who aren't part of your cult do this.
Language defines women's position as inferior in relation to men.
Mm-hmm.
Go on.
Unlike some other languages, English is not a gendered language.
Then how does English do it?
But gender is still often arbitrarily used to some things.
Cognitive research suggests that language and the way people use it has a profound influence on the way we see the world.
No shit.
If we don't have a language, how can we think?
Of course it has an effect on how we see the world.
If you perceive the world, whether accurately or not, as a series of intersecting oppressions, then naturally you're going to have a profoundly negative view of the world, aren't you?
Whereas someone who doesn't see it that way might look around at the material wealth and freedom that we have and are losing and say, well, hang on a second, everything seems to be pretty great.
We should probably carry on doing what we were doing to get to this point.
AKA tearing down the foundational pillars of the West is probably a bad idea.
And this is where they get into the language of power.
fact the power of language and don't get me wrong this is actually a really interesting subject for me but i really despise the way that they're using it because you wouldn't use you wouldn't act like this towards people who didn't just see as your enemies you would You would not act this way to your fellow countrymen, in my opinion.
You know, people who I guess you would consider part of like a moral community.
You wouldn't act this way to them because it is turning them into an enemy and making sure they can't be anything but.
But anyway, the way we communicate with others can be influenced by a number of things, including relationship of the speaker, their age, social status, and gender.
If we view language as a form of social practice, then the way in which words, whether spoken or written, are received and interpreted by the listener reveal a great deal about how power relations are established and reinforced.
Even the allocation of names and titles can be seen as an act of power.
A name or a label denotes a person's social place, and women are still often singled out by marital status or nobility titles, misses or miss, despite the fact other options exist.
Allocation of titles is an act of power.
Yes, these things do denote social place, but these things are not given arbitrarily.
There is some power in the term misses because it denotes that you are part of a family unit.
And a family unit is actually a thing that the state recognizes, that society recognises.
It has a place of prestige.
It does have some power within it.
And so obviously, allocating the titles that makes other people recognize that there is something more here than just a young single person who has no particular dependence.
Nothing that they are necessarily a part of.
These things matter.
These social structures matter.
And what they're doing when they're singling all of this stuff out is saying, in fact, this is just as good as anything else.
And frankly, that's just not true.
The family unit is an important building block of society.
It tends to produce healthy, well-adjusted children.
It is not just as good as the alternatives.
It seems to be better.
It seems to be the optimal choice.
The preferred form of address for many women is provided as a choice on a number of forms and drop-down menus, but it is not used as a default.
Another alternative, mix, is gaining popularity among transgender and non-binary communities, blah, blah, blah.
What's nice about mix as a title is it tells you nothing about a person.
It doesn't tell you their gender.
It doesn't tell you their marital status.
It doesn't tell you their qualifications or not.
In the widest possible sense, it is for everyone.
And that's true.
In the widest possible sense, it is for everyone.
It's also next to useless because it doesn't convey any information about the person.
These titles are not bestowed arbitrarily.
Nevertheless, this does not yet appear to have caught on in mainstream communication.
Women tend to be addressed based on their apparent gender and the speakers and assumptions and cultural conditioning.
No kidding.
And you're trying to change those assumptions and cultural conditioning.
You're quite open about it.
But what you're doing is only applicable to a very tiny percentage of the population, which is why it hasn't generally caught on in mainstream communication, because it's not actually very useful for most people.
And the thing is, getting indignant about that is not exactly a very persuasive way to get people to try and change their minds.
Like, acting like assholes about it is the quickest way to get someone like Ben Shapiro to go, you know what I'm just going to call you a man because you look like a man.
Deal with it.
But you can't approach this from a position of kindness because you feel aggrieved.
You feel you are the victim of male power, the patriarchy, keeping you down with the power of language.
As if anyone using any of these words has ever put this much thought into any of this.
As if the history of mankind wasn't one of struggle and suffering and sacrifice and people just doing the best that they could just to keep it together.
So we end up in remarkably middle-class bourgeois societies for you to go, you know what, this isn't perfect.
The entire history of humanity was horribly oppressive to people like me.
Rabble, rabble, rabble.
Give them a break.
Like, go back 100 years, and the women don't think that they're being oppressed by their husbands.
That's not how they view the world.
The alternative is way worse for most of them.
So it's like the way you're acting as if men and women have been historic enemies is not correct.
But listen to the aggrieved former slave.
For hundreds of years, only women suffered discrimination on the grounds of their sex.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Men suffer discrimination on the grounds of their sex as well.
Societies were very stratified in times gone by for both men and women.
It's just that you only have the record of the men, so you assume, oh, look at all these rich, powerful men.
They must represent the majority of the male experience throughout history because they're the ones writing about it.
No, dude, we get to hear from an unbelievably tiny and unbelievably privileged slice of ancient societies.
We don't get to hear from most people in those societies.
This is emphasized in early feminist writing, such as that as Jermaine Greer and Florence Kennedy to illustrate this.
And it happens in situations that demand the sharing of power.
When a more powerful group is asked to make concessions to a less powerful group, resistance is the likely outcome.
I'm not even sure if I agree that women are the less powerful group.
I just think their power is more indirect.
But even then, yeah, of course.
Of course, you mean, by what legitimacy do you have to come along and demand someone else's power?
Just what, why?
Just because you're you and you don't have it?
How does that justify anything?
Like, you would acquire power if you demonstrated competence.
This is what John Peterson talks about all the time.
The West is built on competence hierarchies.
This is why Margaret Thatcher was like, I don't owe anything to women's liberation.
Feminists can get bent.
Because she didn't.
She just did it.
She was competent and she did the things that she wanted to do and she achieved her goals because she could.
But obviously, resistance just demanding you give up power.
Yeah, I mean, Margaret.
The point is, Margaret Thatcher took power.
She didn't just say, excuse me, men, can I be Prime Minister?
Because that just wouldn't have worked, would it?
The role itself requires something greater than a victim.
It is not easy to change culturally conditioned ways of behaving and thinking, but the continued perpetuation and reinforcement of cultural and social stereotypes through language cannot be dismissed as something trivial.
The need for a conscious change or awareness of how words are used has become ever more urgent for inclusivity in communication and support gender equality.
That's all the reason for me to not have to worry about it too much, then, really, isn't there?
I mean, I don't support what you consider to be gender equality.
I don't agree that men and women should have the same material conditions imposed by a third party, presumably the state.
I don't agree that we should have a leveling of society or open racial and sexual discrimination against one group that we consider to be the majority and the oppressor of another group.
I don't agree, especially when the institutions themselves are not particularly discriminatory.
And again, if anything, discriminatory in favour of the minority groups.
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