John Lewis made the
headlines the other week by announcing they are going to make all their children’s
clothes ‘gender neutral’. Many reacted with dissonance, probably fearful that
John Lewis is pandering to the rising snowflakery in our society.
Sadly, these days it is quite
easy to encounter a tantrum from a social justice warrior who thinks that racial
associations are so rigid that you can't even host a continental fancy dress
party without written permission from the local Lord Mayor, but gender is so
fluid that some hairy-chested, bearded bloke called Kevin can put on a padded
bra and high heels and shout "Call me Kathy' and suddenly she's a woman.
But many have reacted to
John Lewis's move in a fairly phlegmatic way, stating that it doesn't really
matter much, as people are still free to shop as they wish, and are quite
capable of making their own decisions on the colour and style of the clothes
they buy for their children.
Whichever side you're on,
one thing is clear - our society did for a long time relentlessly reinforce the stereotype that
young boys like wearing blue and playing with action men and tanks and little
girls like wearing pink and playing with dolls and make-up kits. The common
view has been that this is less to do with biological hard-wiring and more to
do with the ways in which boys and girls are socialised at an early age,
particularly as for a long time our past society has perpetuated the
female-as-caregiver paradigm, and that this manifests itself very early through
(among other things) the toys children are given.
It turns out, however,
that in all likelihood the toy preferences of boys and girls are not primarily
driven by socialisation, but by genes. This study shows
that non-human primates show preferences for gender-typed toys similar to those
seen in human children. That is to say, sex differences in toy preferences
exhibited in non-human primates give strong indication that these are
independent of the socio-cultural mechanisms first thought by many to be the
primary influences on toy preferences.
That said, it still is the
case that socialisation plays a significant part in human development, and that
there are traits imposed upon children and young adults that are negatively
brought to bear on them as adults. A good example is how girls are frequently
discouraged from being direct for fear of being thought of negatively, whereas values
such as assertiveness and competitiveness (which one often needs to get to
high-powered positions in business) tend to be associated with masculinity, and
are explicitly encouraged in young males (and may well have political ramifications
in terms of women
and men on the left-right spectrum).
Identity politics has
always been a precarious thing, because the merits and demerits of intellectual
and ideological propositions do not stand or fall on the sex, ethnicity or skin
colour of the person making them. Currently the personal and the political
regularly become entangled to the extent that many tend to conflate criticisms
of their views with an attack on their personal identity - their biological,
ethnic, sexual, religious self.
Intellectual challenges
are (or should be) blind to things like sex and ethnicity, and as such, the
responses should be too. We've seen too many people whose arguments have been
challenged cry foul that the motive for the challenge has been their sex, skin
colour or religion. Alas, the contemporary mindset for a significant proportion of the population is
that political disagreement is taken as an assault on the entirety of their character
and sometimes on their sex or ethnicity too.
This engenders a kind of
paradoxical figure that becomes utterly supine when facing challenges to their
worldview, but at the same time hostile and intolerant towards those that
disagree with them, even going so far as wanting to censor or sometimes even
decimate contra opinions and viewpoints.
The very real danger is
that genuine threats of violence get lost in a wave of noise against people
who've offended them on Twitter or who've held a public opinion they want to
shut down. But it is very unwise to act this way: as I wrote a few years ago, affording people the liberty to
speak freely is also of huge benefit to the individuals trying to rob people of
that liberty:
"Whenever we hear a voice or read an opinion
which is vastly different from our own, or the common opinion, not only should
we give that person the right to express themselves, we actually deny ourselves
the right to hear or read the expression if we choose to seek refuge in the
false security of consensual opinion. Not only does the person in front of you wishing
to speak have a right to be heard, it is also the right of everyone to listen; and
every attempt to silence somebody makes the silencer a prisoner of their own
actions because they deny themselves the right to hear something. In other words, your own right to hear is as
involved as the other person's is to have his or her view. The freedom of
speech is incomplete unless it means freedom of speech for the person who
thinks differently. We may not agree
with everything we hear, but we do ourselves an injustice if we fail to hear
the dissenting voices."
Similarly, with the emergent (and awfully named) Westminster sex
dossier that's gathering pace at the moment (and ditto wider allegations
in society), there is a pressing need for genuine cases of rape or sexual
assault to not get lost in a barrage of witch-hunting from women who've merely been
on the receiving end of inappropriate jokes, improper suggestions and tasteless banter
and labelled it 'sexual harassment'.
Let's all work together in whatever way we can to expose sexual assault, bullying and tawdry abuses of power, and see that justice abounds. But let's also frame this in its proper context and speak out against blanket condemnations from extremist groups who want to believe that the whole of society is one gigantic, overwhelming, dangerous patriarchy where all women are subjugated under the thrall of male-dominated hegemony. Because if you're running with this narrative, you're not helping anyone, especially women.
People who present themselves lewdly and unsuitably can easily face the charge of being sad, immature, pathetic and of lacking urbanity if it helps - but unless there are better demarcation lines between serious sexual offences and ill-suited words, it is women who will suffer most by being categorised as feeble and overly-delicate by a small minority of feminist women who don't have their backs at all, but pretend they are speaking on their behalf. There was no better response to this than Julia Hartley-Brewer's response reprinted below:
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