The Grene Knyght wrote:First of all I'm not suggesting any sort of legislation to that effect. Nor am I expecting "men and women to become genderless clones of one another with no tendencies or preferences unique to them." Rather what I would like is for the unique tendencies and preferences to come from the individual themself, not from their gender. Secondly, while you make a good point with the "black underwear" thing, I'd argue that fits more within sex than gender. There are many people who see themselves as men, and who act as such, who get periods.
I would furthermore say that nothing you have said has convinced me that people don't conform to gender due to social pressures. when you say "Men and women can and often separate themselves down arbitrary lines without prompt for a variety of reasons," are these reasons not social reasons? Without prompt here seems to mean subconsciously, no?
Let me give you some counter examples. Wouldn't most men be mortified to be seen dressed up in a dress, in full makeup? Don't most men feel some sort of pressure, at some point in their lives, to be more 'masculine'?
I did not say there is no social prompting of gender norms at play, you'd have to be a complete idiot to think that there isn't. What I'm saying is that gender tendencies do not SOLELY arise out of social prompting, because there are examples of gender norms arising even in the face of social discouragement. By "lack of social prompting," what I mean is that men and women can and often do cluster as a gender around certain behaviors and interests without it having been drilled into their heads that that is what they HAVE to do, what they HAVE to like.
In school, we were taught of an incident in which a company designed a mini game website and targeted it at teen and preteen boys, advertising the site in online spaces where young men gathered and filling the site itself with ads for things like skateboards, energy drinks, CDs for the newest rock bands, etc. to pay for itself. The site's numbers soared, however, they found that they were not making any money from the advertising. This prompted investigation which lead the company to learn that although they had spent all their time targeting the site to young boys, it was actually dominated primarily by women in their late 30s, who played the games but were not interested in the other products advertised. The site was a "girl's thing" despite social pressure for it to be a "boy's thing."
A show called "Tower Prep" was rather infamously cancelled because unlike the primarily young male demographic the company wanted, viewership was showing a high number of older females.
Pop star Justin Bieber, famous for being a young girl heartthrob, has recently been analyzed as gaining a steady adult male fanbase.
I don't think it needs much explanation about what happened when the fourth generation of "My Little Pony" was released.
We already understand that specific gendered preferences can come about due to social conditioning, however, there is as of yet nothing to suggest gendered preferences in general will not still come about naturally without social conditioning. To draw an analogy, just because alcohol and drugs can make people violent and is a big contributor to a lot of violent crimes doesn't mean that without alcohol and drugs there will be no violence. Feminism has often proved that our specific ideas about what men and women will do are wrong, however it has yet to prove that men and women will never divide themselves in any particular fashion without social conditioning in play.
In other words, many of these preferences ARE coming from individual choice, it's just that individuals who exist within the same group are likely to have similar preferences. We understand that this works for age groups, income levels, and region of living, yet it is only when we see this trend with genders that we suddenly want to deny this pattern as natural. The fact that genders may gravitate toward certain preferences says nothing about what those preferences will ultimately be, nor does it assert that those preferences will be universal among all members or groups of that gender, only that preferences will exist in some fashion. This could just as well mean that women in general prefer fighting and men in general prefer ballet as vice versa. And when it becomes common for a certain group to like something, that often comes with the casual assumption that any member of that group you meet is likely to also like that thing, which won't always be right, but it's not an illogical assumption to make. The black underwear example still works because just because there are men who will need to deal with periods doesn't mean that the overwhelming number of people following such an issue won't still be women, thus creating the association - a practice does not need to be exclusive or universal to a demographic to still garner an association with that demographic.
You claim to not want sexless clones, but given that you seem to deny the possibility of tendencies and preferences among the genders without social conditioning, it's hard to extrapolate exactly what else it is you are envisioning. You have to paint us a portrait of a society if you want to sell us a society, not give vague descripts and expect the rest of us to just get it.
In a "genderless society," do females still gravitate toward nursing and males toward business, or are both 50/50? Do females still gravitate toward slice of life stories and television programming and males toward action and fast plots? What is everyone wearing? Are fashion trends equally popular with both sexes from long nails to combat boots? Are there no foods or musical idols that are more popular with one sex than the other? Do they not have spaces, online or otherwise, where they are more likely to gather? "Gender" is a vague word that offers very little in term of what exactly it is you would remove from society and what effect it would have. To me, what it seems like is that it's not gender you want to do away with, but rather certain specific expectations on the genders and the outright enforcement of them, which no one disagrees with and to which I repeat -- acceptance of deviation is possible in a society with norms. Just because acceptance is achieved doesn't mean norms will cease to be. Equal opportunity does not guarantee equal outcome.
