Ciarán12 wrote:Varislintu wrote:Jurgen Wullenwever wrote:2 There are women in Sweden, but it is usually frowned upon to act as if they form a category of their own, different from men.
Regarding #2: But what does that
meeeeeean?
Act how? Put some meat on the bones of your complaint here. "Women" and "men" (or "real women" and "real men") not as biological beings but as targets of behaviour that is not afforded to both groups similarly are not obvious things that need no description.
I don't really like the phrasing of the position being put forward. It's like my complaint with "Feminism": it's a case of nominclature. Can't we just say that there are such things as men and women in the biological sense, but just be smart enough to realise that both should be given the same opportunities, that society as it is now engenders certain behavioural norms which is something we should endevour to eliminate, that people should stop thinking of biological gender as an important aspect of a person's personality or base assumptions of their behaviour or opinions on that. Why do we have to say men and women don't exist? Are people really so dim that they can't process complex concepts without them being boiled down to a sound bite (and in the process blunt the nuances of the concept)?
Personally, I agree we with you that we don't have to say that women or men don't exist. I'm trying to find out if "Swedish feminists" are saying that either.
Simplified charicatures of positions are often used to criticise those positions, and can sometimes boil them down helpfully. But I feel this one makes the position more obscure and impenetrable. What are the "Swedish feminists" really saying?
Apparantly it's mostly about language and terminology according to Jurgen. I don't feel I know enough about
hen, the gender neutral pronoun, to comment. But I can totally see people's point on the gendered profession names.
Präst to me sounds not masculine, but neutral, a default.
Prästinna, the female form, sounds loaded. It's like it means priest, but with a disclaimer. It carries with it many old attitudes about women. It's like it's not quite as much a priest as
präst, because the gender becomes more defining than the profession in the term. And why on earth do we need to define gender in profession names, if nowadays the expectation is that people should do their jobs equally, no matter their gender?
Jurgen, if there were separate profession terms for black people, would you better understand why black people might find them old fashioned and problematic? Without knowing the details of this case, I can even come up with an alternative formulation for the position. The people who want to abolish gendered profession terms are not saying that women don't exist, but that they
do exist. They exist (or should exist) in the same normal, neutral mental category as the one men occupy, rather than being penned into a loaded area "for people of female".