One piece of evidence that women are no longer socially oppressed is the lack of gatekeeping around womanness.
For example, I just witnessed an argument among sex workers about whether a tech guy in the sex work industry could call himself a 'sex worker.' The argument went, 1/
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"it's not ok for someone who hasn't experienced the stigma of selling your body to identify as a sex worker."
They saw the title as 'earned' by experiencing the negatives, and were upset that someone was claiming the title without going through the associated hardships. 2/
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So why doesn't the same thing apply to women? I suspect people who are ok giving the "woman" title to people who haven't "earned" it (e.g., grew up with the difficulties of people treating you as female) are ones who haven't seen women actually significantly oppressed. 3/
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It seems likely then that less privileged people from cultures with stringent gender roles, who see more downsides from the struggles of growing up as women, are more likely to try to gatekeep the title of woman, and people from more equal cultures will care less. 4/4
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A tech guy in the sex work industry is no more a sex worker than a man who builds and sells pickaxes is a miner
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Is that ironic? People do gatekeep womaness, transphobia is basically that, gatekeeping gender.
Also, women who aren't "feminine" suffer a lot of backlash, that seems like a kind of oppression to behave a certain way
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damn. womanness, gatekeeping, oppression, tech guy, sex work... that's a lot of controversy in one thread. bravo!
fwiw, i don't think this cleanly generalizes, but small steps towards progress are still to be lauded.
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This argument is disturbingly similar to the argument of “racism doesn’t exist be because Jim Crow is gone and there are anti-discrimination laws!!”
Just because you are colorblind doesn’t mean racism doesn’t exist, and it doesn’t mean you don’t perpetuate it. Similar for sexism
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as a man (feel free to shoot me down after that point alone) in a very sexist industry, yes. women are still oppressed. but the idea that you have to be discriminated against to be able to call yourself a sex worker is just strange i think? a sex worker is someone who sells (1)
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I actually agree with them, but not because of their reasoning. Part of my job requires me to ask people what they DO for work. A significant portion of the time the response i get is "i work for blah blah company". I have to reiterate, what do you do, not who you work for... 1/
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but women arguing among themselves about who belongs- who can resolve that? Fork seems inevitable