Sexism is...

Sexism is just like Racism. Being a sexist should have equal connotations and social implications to being a racist and it currently does not. The fact that you are discriminating against a larger group of people does not make it somehow more acceptable.

Let me start by drawing the parallels.

Racism is imbuing a set of characteristics and behaviours on a group of people that are loosely defined by observed and arbitrary physical qualities. The purpose of which does not make it any less or more racist. For example: If I were to say that all people of African descent like Hip-Hop, that is a racist statement. It does not even matter if I personally think Hip-Hop is great or not. Even if I qualify it by saying most like Hip-Hop, the racist connotation remains. There is no genetic predilection for liking Hip-Hop dependent of one's heredity. Liking Hip-Hop is in fact an entirely personal or cultural choice. Even if every single person you meet of African descent likes Hip-Hop it does not change the fact that it has nothing to do with their genealogy. What it probably means is that the group of people from African descent that you have interacted with have similar cultural backgrounds. If I take a person of northern European descent and raise them completely within the confines of said culture the likelihood of them liking Hip-Hop go up exponentially. Coincidently, if I take a person of African descent and raise them in a culture that does not value Hip-Hop, they are far less likely to enjoy it. Boundless examples of this exist. Obviously music is slightly more complicated because there is a cultural rebellion aspect to it that also governs taste, but this is merely a template that can be used on any characteristic that is deemed to be originating based on race.

Today, this is highly accepted. For the most part society has come to understand that the concept of Race is entirely bogus. Still the same enlightenment is not afforded to the concept of Gender and that is from what sexism is spawned.

Simple parallel: Males like cars / Females like like flowers.

The moment a statement is made of such a sweeping nature, it becomes fairly obvious how sexism is just like racism. We have, of course, seen examples of female car lovers and male flower aficionados. It should be more than understood that the liking of such things has nothing to do with the physiological differences between men and woman. The fact that there are more male mechanics and more female florists is entirely of social construction. If we were to create a society where men were valued as horticulturalists and women as mechanics we would see the inverse of the above statement. The argument is often made about hormones and how they effect behaviour as way to justify these cultural roles. The effects of hormones on behaviour is largely overblown. The primary effect of hormones is for physical differentiation. In other words they mainly make one part of our body grow over another. Their effect on the brain, and thereby action, is temporary and largely homologous regardless of sex. Hormones make you feel a certain way over another when present in the system, but this fact is relative to a baseline. The best example for this is by looking at the effects of testosterone on both men and women. We know that men have a great deal more of testosterone than women and we know that the effects it has on the brain is to make a person horny. By definition women must have lower levels of testosterone, otherwise their clitorises would look more like penises among other changes. But when we look at sexual desire between women and men the differences only exist on an individual per individual basis, not sex wide (despite what the mass media tells you, women like & want sex). So what governs sexual desire is not the sheer amount of the hormone, but rather the change in the level of the hormone based on baseline levels. From this we can see that even emotional characteristics we assign to one sex over another can be spurious. What is true is that men & women act and think differently based cultural conditioning much in the same way that people of a certain group like certain things and act in a certain ways.

We have gotten beyond the insulting and erroneous cliché that "black people are more likely to commit crimes" and understood that it is people who have been made poor and had hope taken away from them by social construction that are more likely to commit crimes, but for some reason the "men are more likely ogle and reduce women to sexual objects" cliché persists. The majority of society continues to draw on raw numbers to justify prejudice. It is true that more men reduce women to sexual objects, just as it is true that more people of African descent in the US commit crimes. But neither of these truths means that it is inherent to one group or the other. The fact of the matter is that society is raising people in a sexist manor that creates these exact relations. If we were to flip the script and raise girls in a way that they view men as being "Hot or Not" and little more, then we would see the inverse of the cliché. The truth is that this is the constant representation of women in the media. Even outside of sexual contexts they are being qualified as "Hot or Not". Just look at the past US elections and the discussion over Sarah Palin. The fact of the matter is that Sarah Palin is a repugnant human being, the calibre of Bush & Harper, yet the discussions of her centred more on her relative hotness!!! Did we qualify the Bush candidacy in such a manor? Were there discussions about how he is jerk, but kind of sexy? Obviously Bush's relative hotness was NOT a topic for mainstream media. But society is fed these subliminal messages from birth onwards and very few are able to divorce themselves from the this type of prescribed learning, so the vast majority act in sexist ways.

The "all men act this way" crowd have mountains of evidence to corroborate their claims because most men they have observed act this way. But as I have stated before, saying that most of a determined group acts a certain way is just as prejudice as saying they all do. The truth is that individuals act a certain way because of their cultural background and therefore the only way we should judge any individual person is by their individual actions. We can not infer how they will or will not behave based on what others we perceive as the same have done. It is insulting and wrong to lump in any individual with their sex. Each single man is not every man just as each single woman is not every woman and none of their thoughts or actions is determined by their sex. Gender is, in fact, a culture within a culture. Unfortunately it is the dominant mold for all the major cultures that persist today so people tend to believe in gender norms. If they exist throughout different cultures then they must be a universal truth. This is not the case. It is a matter of a subculture that is popular within the cultures that have become dominant. But even within these we can deconstruct gender because their have been instances of matriarchal societies who's gender based norms deviated wildly from the ascribed norms that we claim as inherent today. Societies where women were the decision makers and governed the means of production while men tended to the fields did exist. The fact that we as a society have almost always assigned tasked based on sex, probably has more to do with our obsession with genitals and the desire to put things in neat little boxes than anything else. And before you argue with me about the "obsession with genitals" line please read writers like Linnaeus who invented taxonomy and race.

The exclusivity of clubs and groups

Let me start by saying I am for complete freedom of the individual. Even if that means the freedom to be racist and sexist. But that said, we as a society have a responsibility to create world where such things adversely affect the grieved party as least as possible. Traditionally there have been clubs and associations that deny people entry based on the made up characteristics I have detailed above (race & gender). For a large part we have gotten rid of the racial ones because we are beginning to understand that those characteristics we view as being inherently white, black or asian or any other "race" have nothing to do with reality and are a mere social construction. Therefore you are excluding one group based on simple prejudice which we can pretty much all see as wrong. The groups that do still exist that exclude one "race" over another tend to be viewed as pariahs in society. One need only look at the Klu Klux Klan to see how you can pay a social price for being a racist. The same cannot be said for groups that exclude one sex over the other. My thoughts are immediately drawn to the Augusta Golf Club in Georgia that allows only for men to be members. They have received some bad press, but nothing on the scale of clubs that exclude by race. Could a Golf Club even exclude people by race today? I think the ACLU would put a stop to that relatively quickly. It is my opinion that members of a sexist club should be treated with the same sort of disdain we reserve for racists.

Moving on to the journal experience: When you create a club/community that excludes one sex over another in order to have a "safe" place away from actions that you believe belong to one sex over another you are being sexist. It is the same as creating a community that says "no black people allowed because discussions contained within will be about the fancy stuff we have in our homes and we don't want to get robbed". It doesn't matter if your discussions are completely sex specific. Even if it is a community about something as specific to women as menstruation, it is still wrong. Not that men menstruate, but perhaps a man has had a relationship with someone and an experience that has imparted him with invaluable knowledge on the subject. I, for one, have a great deal of knowledge and opinions on the use of menstral cups (in favour) because of a past relationship. It does not even matter if I am unique, by denying me the opportunity to join you would be denying my uniqueness and lumping me in with all men based on subjective characteristics and the idea that I cannot possibly understand what you as a woman are going through. This fails to take in account that understanding goes beyond personal experience and can be learned. Still, the right exists for people to act in reprehensible racist & sexist ways; I cannot deny that. What I think should happen though, is much in the way we stigmatize racism in society, sexism should have the same fate. A club/group that discriminates by sex should be noted as SEXIST, so as everyone who joins knows in exactly what they are participating. It is only in that way that we can hope to educate people on how sexism permeates throughout society and how even people who believe themselves to be enlightened can engage in sexist activities.

On a side note, I am baffled by how racism & sexism are viewed differently based on the perpetrators. A group that excludes people of African descent is viewed as despicable racists, but is it the same for a group that excludes all "white" people? I get the feeling that such a group would not receive the same amount of public scorn. It is true that historically it has been "white" people who have been the perpetrators of racism, but that does not make any other actions based on race any less racist. We must not use historical trends to create modern norms; it defeats the purpose of the attempt to rid ourselves of racism. Likewise there is this trend in sexism. I have given the example of the men only Golf Club in Georgia; would there be the same sort of (mild) outrage suffered upon a women only Golf Club (or any other club for that matter)? In fact, women's only gyms are quite popular for the same reason that these sexist livejournal clubs pop up (men cannot help themselves but to ogle women) and I have heard no outrage or protestations about them. Not that I am saying they do not have the right to exist, but the truth is that they are even more sexist than that Golf Club. The golf club allows women to play there, just not become members. Do these women's gyms allow for men to exercise there at a reduced role or a higher cost? The answer is clearly no. There is an obvious double standard when it comes to sexism and racism. This too is do to culturally learned norms. For most young people there is a constant double standard when growing up, (boys can have sex; girls must remain chaste - there are others that are far less obvious too) so it is no wonder that these double standards persist when dealing with anything that separates the sexes.

I think it is important understand what sexism is. It is NOT men oppressing women and denying them X,Y, or Z based on their sex. It is about any prejudice heaped upon one sex over another. Just as a woman can be denied a job based on her sex a man can too, and the fact that one is more likely than the other does not make the other any less valid. But it is NOT just about jobs, it is about exclusion at all levels. If we are to say that women are not to be denied X,Y, and Z then they should not be able to turn around and deny A, B and C from men. And if we are to allow for special clubs that are based on exclusion of race or sex then the burden of societal scorn should be equal. The outrage over a gym that doesn't allow men, should be equal to the outrage of a club that doesn't allow for people of African descent. There is nothing different about excluding people by race then there is by excluding them by sex. For me personally, being friends with someone that would join a club that is sexist is the same as being friends with a racist and I would expect that to be understood. SEXISM = RACISM = PREJUDICE