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Essentialism is basically the view that all women, for example, are maternalistic simply by virtue of being women.
There's this game that I found on the Internet called "Virtual Villager." (This doesn't look like it fits with the discussion yet, but stay with me. ) In this game, you have a small group of people on an island who need to learn to survive. When they learn to do something, they get skill points. They get farming points when they pick berries, building points when they work on building a hut, breeding points when they make a baby, etc. They can also gain skill points by going to a table in the middle of the village and studying. When you start the game, there's already a character who has some building points. This character is male. When a male and female character have a baby, the female character has to walk around nursing the baby for awhile. She can't put the baby down for a minute or anything like that, she just walks around carrying it until the baby turns two. You can't make the father character carry the baby for a bit so the mother character can go get more skills. So if you want to build your population you end up with a bunch of women who have no skills except for "breeding."
Anyway, going back to luridarchive's question: More importantly, how should the struggle for gender equality be realistically and effectively pursued. I don't claim to actually know the answer, all I have are suggestions. Maybe when we see a game like Virtual Villager, we should write to the game developers and say something about it. Same with any type of medium that reflects gender stereotypes like this. Maybe part of the answer is not to keep your mouth shut.
Once I was working with a group of people and my friend said that her boyfriend shaves his armpits. One of the guys said, "Ugh, that's gross!" I said that I don't shave my armpits and the same guy said, "Ugh, that's gross!" People think that men should be big and hairy and women should be small and smooth, even though both naturally have body hair. There's the idea that men are one thing and women another. Maybe when people tell us this so matter-of-factly, we should speak up and tell them that's not always the case.
Feminism is not dead. It's already been said in this thread that it's attitudes that need to change, but attitudes are hard to change. Feminism still exists because even though it's hard, we at least have to try. |
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