Sexism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sexism is commonly considered to be discrimination and/or hatred against people based on their sex rather than their individual merits, but can also refer to any and all systemic differentiations based on the sex of the individuals.
Sexism can refer to subtly different beliefs or attitudes:
- The belief that one sex is superior to or more valuable than the other;
- The belief that one gender is superior to or more valuable than the other;
- Female or male chauvinism
- The attitude of misogyny (hatred of females) or misandry (hatred of males); as well as
- The attitude of imposing a limited and/or false notion of masculinity on males and a limited and/or false notion of femininity on females.
- A feeling of distrust towards the opposite sex, most frequently operating at unconscious level.
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[edit] Generalization and partition
Sexism can be generalized as a subtype of essentialism. Sexism can be partitioned as consisting of sexism against the female sex, sexism against the male sex, sexism against the intersex (hermaphrodite and pseudohermaphrodite), and sexism against the transsex (transmale and transfemale). Each type of sexism has its own history and form of intolerance to counter.
Sexist beliefs, as a species of essentialism, holds that individuals can be understood or be judged simply based on the characteristics of the group to which they belong—in this case, their sexual group, as males or females. This assumes that all individuals "fit" into the category of "males" or "females" and does not take into account of intersexed people who are born with both sexual characteristics. This also assumes a homogeneous characteristics of all males in the "male group" and all females in the "female group" and does not take into account the huge differences within a group. There are also XX males and XY females who are genetically one sex but have developed the sexual characteristics of another sex at fetal stage.
Certain forms of sexual discrimination are illegal in many countries, but nearly all countries have laws that give special rights, privileges, or responsibilities to one sex or two sexes.
[edit] Sexism against females
Sexism against females in its extreme form is known as "misogyny", which means "hatred of females". The term 'sexism', in common usage, usually implies "sexism against females", since this is the first form of sexism that has been commonly identified. This form of sexism is also often called chauvinism, though chauvinism is actually a wider term for any extreme and unreasoning partisanship with malice and hatred towards a rival group. A mildly related term is "gynophobia", which refers to fears of females or feminity.
Historically, in all societies, females were viewed as the "weaker sex". Women's lower status is evident in cases in which females were not even recognized as "people" under the law of the land. The feminist movement promotes women's rights to stop sexism against females by addressing issues such as equality under the law, political representation of females, access to education and employment, female victims of domestic violence, how increasingly available pornography hurts women, and self-ownership of the female body.
[edit] Sexism against males
Sexism against males in its extreme form is known as "misandry", which means "hatred of males". Since this is the second form of sexism that has been commonly identified, it is often known as "reverse sexism". A mildly related term is "androphobia", which refers to the fear of males or masculinity. While the view that women are superior to men is also sexism, only in recent years has such awareness begun to develop in public discourse.
Some critics such as Christina Hoff Sommers and misandry researchers such as Nathanson and Young, have charged that large segments of the modern feminist movement, such as radical feminism, difference feminism, and separatist feminism, have deviated from the original goals of feminism (creating equality for women), and have instead focused on the advancement of female power and dominance through suppressing and spreading misandrist views about men. Another source of sexism is the "old patriarchy" and "old matriarchy", which has historically restricted and limited the role of males in other parts of society and has looked down upon male homemakers[citation needed].
[edit] Sexism against intersexes
Sexism against intersexes has only been recently identified, and the general public remains mostly unaware of it. Historically, most cultures (with a few exceptions) hold that males and females are separate and distinct entities with separate gender roles and responsibilities. Infants that are born with both or ambiguous sexual characteristics are either killed or receive surgical alteration of their their sexual characteristics to disambiguate their sex. The unnecessary surgery has often been carried out without the knowledge or consent of the parents and some view this as "genital mutilation" and criticized the perceived need by modern western medicine to "correct" the occurrences of intersexuality, which is just a natural probability. Cosmetic alteration of the sexual characteristics should not be confused to consented, medical removal of non-functional, or undesirable sexual characteristics as a preventative step against cancers, or other diseases, e.g. removal of the testes in a woman with Androgen-Insensitivity Syndrome.
'Intersexuality' refers to the condition of being intersexed and the LGBTIQ movement has actively fought sexism against intersexes. From birth, intersexed individuals are neither in the male "box" or the female "box" and the classification used by most policies and laws of government fails to reflect this. Intersexed people are also often the target of hate crimes since the traditional notion of male (XY) and female (XX) is perceived to be threathened by the existence of atypical sexes such as Turner (X0), Metafemale (XXX), Klinefelter (XXY), de la Chapelle (XX male), Swyer (XY female) syndrome, and Androgen-Insensitivity syndrome (both XY males, and XY females).
[edit] Sexism against transsexes
Main article: Transphobia
Sexism against transsexes has also only been recently identified, and it has also yet to enter into the public discourse. Traditionally, transsexes are viewed as having psychological problem of "gender identity disorder", or more recently viewed as simply being radically homosexual. Despite these tranditional and more recent views, recent medical research of transsexed brains indicates that the composition of a transsexed brain may often display the composition of the identity sex and not the composition of the assigned sex at birth.[citation needed] This would support the theory that the brain of an individual could develop in a different path from the other sexual characteristics of an individual and thus would make transsexuality birth-related and not psychological.[citation needed] Regardless of the etyology of transsexuality, some psychological treatment, or therapy is strongly recommended for transsexuals, as psychological conditions are not uncommon as a result of the contention between the transsexual's personal identity and their socially assigned identity.
'Transexuality' refers to the condition of being self-identified with the opposite sex and the LGBT movement has actively fought sexism against transexes. The most typical forms of sexism against transsexuals are how many "women-only" and "men-only" events and organizations have been criticized for rejecting transfemales, and transmales respectively. Transsexed people are also often the target of hate crimes, as the traditional notion of masculinity and femininity is often perceived to be threatened by those who adopt a different sex later in life.
[edit] Sexism and sexual expression
The expression of sexual intimacy is a part of the human condition. However, various aspects of human sexuality have been argued as having contributed to sexism.
[edit] The Sexual Revolution
During the "sexual revolution", there was a change in the cultural perception of sexual morality and sexual behavior. The sexual revolution has been known as the "sexual liberation" by feminists since some saw this new development in the West as a leveling ground for females to have as many choices concerning their sexuality as males--hoping to elliminate the problematic virgin/whore dichotomy of traditional Western society.
Modern feminists like "Ariel Levy" have warned that the current state of commercial sexuality has created a "Raunch Culture". This cultural development, (which has largely occurred in the West) the commercialization of the sexual objectification of females, has been criticized as being limiting for men and women. Rather than being liberating, some feminists argue that the "pornification" of Western society has reduced and equated the scope of feminine power to sexual power only. Some feminists argue that females are themselves objectifying other females by becoming producers and promoters of the "Raunch Culture".
Some "masculinist" theorists posit that prior to the sexual revolution the idealized male was expected to be virile while the idealized female was expected to be modest. They note that after the sexual revolution, females were given more liberty to express virility while the reverse has not been true for males, who have yet to be given a choice to be non-virile. They argued that the dual identity of hypersexuality and asexuality is a luxury and special status that only exists for females. However, many feminists believe that this so-called "dual identity" rather allows males to condemn a female for her sexuality for being either modest or virile (see double standard).
[edit] Pornography
Some individuals express the view that pornography is contributing to sexism, because in usual pornographic performances for male spectators the actresses are limited to and presented as "pleasure-objects". The German feminist Alice Schwarzer is one representative of this point of view. She has brought this topic up repeatedly since the 1970s, in particular in the feminist magazine "Emma". The reverse, where female spectators are objectifying male actors, has also been identified as sexism.
On the other hand, some famous pornographic actresses such as Teresa Orlowski and Tímea Vágvölgyi have publicly stated that they do not feel themselves to be victims of sexism against females. In fact, many female pornographic stars and sex-positive feminists view pornography to be progressive, since they are paid immense amounts of money for performing consensual acts, and also since many directors and managers of the industry are women as well. Sex positive feminists often support their position by pointing out the situation of women in countries with strict pornography laws (ie Saudi Arabia) versus women in countries with liberal pornography laws (ie the Netherlands).
Those advocating against pornography often fail to take homosexual pornography into account. The same arguments used against heterosexual pornography could be adapted to homosexual pornography. If it assumed that watching pornography inherently involves objectifying the actors and that objectifying someone is a form of sexism, than homosexuals who watch homosexual pornography would also be guilty of sexism against their own gender. Many people find this argument absurd and this indicates that the arguments used against heterosexual pornography are unsound.
Still other feminists, outside of the sex-positive feminism and anti-pornography feminism, feared that censoring profit-oriented pornography would lead to censoring legitimate non-profit female expression of their sexual experience. This is because historically, indecency acts in various countries had, in the past, been used to censor sexual educations, which are vital to the sexual independence of females and females taking ownership of the decisions over their bodies.
One other important point to be considered is the role that stores such as Ann Summers have played in making pornography available to women too. Books and DVDs are available in such a way that women may enjoy watching them.
[edit] Sexism and linguistics
It has been argued that sexual dichotomies exist in language, though it is disputed whether certain language causes sexism or sexism causes certain language (see the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).
[edit] "Sexist language" and Gender-neutral language
Nearing the end of the 20th century, there is a rise in the use of gender-neutral language in western worlds. This is often attributed to the rise of feminism. Gender-neutral language, as a part of political correctness, is the avoidance of gender-specific job titles, non-parallel usage, and other usage that is felt by some to be sexist. Supportors feel that having gender-specific titles and gender-specific pronouns implies a system bias to exclude individuals based on their sex. Opponents question whether such avoidance campaign is themselves engaging in semantics injection. Some opponents dismiss this trend as "political correctness gone mad" and protest against what they see as censorship. Others like misandry researchers Nathonson and Young see the term 'gender' as a blatantly biased "front" for what they call "ideological" feminism.
[edit] Anthropological linguistics and gender-specific language
Unlike the Indoeuropean languages in the west, for many other languages around the world, gender-specific pronouns are a recent phenomenon that occur around the early-20th century. As a result of colonialism, cultural revolution occurred in many parts of the world with attempts to "modernize" and "westernize" by adding gender-specific pronouns and animate-inanimate pronouns to local languages. This ironically resulted in the situation of what was gender-neutral pronouns a century ago suddenly becoming gender-specific. (See for example Gender-neutrality in languages without grammatical gender: Chinese.)
In those parts of the world, some feminists, who are unaware of the etymology of their own language, complain about what they perceived as "sexist language" with arguments like "traditional language fails to reflect the presence of women in modern society adequately" similar to the west. However, other feminists, who are aware of historical linguistics, realize that the traditional language in their part of the world is inherently gender-neutral. They instead decide to revive the original gender-neutral usage from over a century ago with reclamation projects.
[edit] Reappropriation and reclamation
Reappropriation (aka reclamation projects) describe a cultural process by which certain groups reclaim or re-appropriate terms, symbols, and artifacts that were previously used to discriminate. Within the English language, terms like 'bitch' and 'slut', which had been historically used as pejorative sexist remarks against females. They have since been used to refer to a "strong, independent, unattached female" and a "sexually liberal, hypersexual female". Similarly, terms like 'girlie men' and 'tranny', which has been historically used as pejorative sexist remarks against transsexes, have since been used to refer to the varying degree of transexuality for "pre-operation" and "non-operation" as whether they had undergone or will undergo sex-reassignment or not. The success of these cultural process has been disputed.
On the flip side, the word 'dude' as a pejorative has crossed the sexes and is being applied to males. In politics, the term 'girlie men' has also been used by Governor Schwarzenegger to attack his political opponents, who are not transsexes. This has lead to Schwarzenegger being accused of being sexist.
[edit] See also
- Adultism
- Allophilia
- Antifeminism
- Gender Egalitarianism, Feminism, Masculinism, Father's Rights
- Gender role, Stereotype, Sexual stereotyping
- Gender and religion
- Good wife's guide
- Homophobia, Heterosexism, Sexualism
- LGBT, Transexuality, Intersexuality
- Lookism
- Patriarchy, Matriarchy
- Misandry, Misogyny
- Female chauvinism, Male chauvinism
- Racism, Rankism, Triple oppression
- Rape, Domestic abuse
- Sex in advertising, Pornography, Erotica
- Sexual education, Sexual revolution
[edit] External links
- National Organisation of Men Against Sexism NOMAS, USA
- Sexism and Sexuality in advertising
- Reverse Sexism Rears its Ugly Head
- Middle Sex
- Father Phobia of the Family Court
- Father's Day Lament
- Federal and California Sex Discrimination Laws
- Hate Crimes: Criminal Law & Identity Politics
- When It Happens To Men
