#social construct

[fixing-bad-posts]

[Image description: A tumblr reply, edited blackout-poetry style to read, "a social construct can be wrong".]

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a social construct can be wrong

[mamamissy]

Hear me out.

Angels can sense love.

It’s working.

But how does he know it’s working???

BECAUSE HE WAS AN ANGEL ONCE.

He can still feel love.

They all come from the same stock. Heaven and Hell is a social construct that means absolutely fucking nothing.

They have more in common than what is dividing them and anytime they spend an iota of time in the other’s presence, we wind up with epic love stories. Because it’s about finding that connection and not drawing arbitrary lines.

That’s your season three.

Anyway this has probably already been discussed at length. It’s almost 2AM for me and I just honestly don’t feel like apologizing for my brain today. So here, this is out and now you’ve read this. No going back. Kisses.

[prototypesteve]

Either/or.

(How an asexual cis guy explains gender as a social construct to my “anti-woke” cishet nerd friends, by blogging from a watch.)

Is this a computer or a watch? Because it’s shaped like a watch, but I’m using a an app called Drafts to start drafting this parable about labels, using as nerdy a metaphor as I can think of, so you can see how sometimes things are categorized using old “category rules” that don’t fit, and were arbitrary from day one.

Is the rule that “watches have straps and computers have apps”? Because watches used to go in pockets, and computers used to be people who did math, and many of them wore watches!

Or is the rule that watches are round while computers have square screens? Because lots of mechanical watches have square faces, and an E6B flight computer is a disc-shaped slide-ruler.

Or is the rule that watches have gears while computers have electronics, because the remarkable Curta calculator is entirely gear-driven, while the beautiful 1972 Hamilton Pulsar P1 has no mechanical clockwork in it.

Or is it just the case that the whole idea of a watch is just a set of rules that people or cultures or communities set for themselves. A social construct? And is it the case that the whole idea of what makes a real computer just a set of rules that people or cultures or communities set for themselves, too? Another social construct!

And are you reading this on a phone or a computer? Is it really a phone if you’ve never even made a phone call from it? Is it really a computer if you’ve never written your own programs to run on it? Or is it just the thing you use to read social media posts on, and you don’t worry about how other people insist you ought to either/or categorize your devices?

Anyway, now you know that you deal with social constructs all the time, even if up until 331-ish¹ words ago, you thought the phrase “social construct” was just some bullshit buzzword your enemies used.

¹ is 331-ish one word, or is it a word appended to a number? Is either/or one word because there are no spaces, or is it two words because we process it as two separate words, not eithershlashor. And is 331 words accurate because it excludes this 52-ish word footnote, and the title?

[blueteller]

(Just Cale being Cale, casually defying societal expectations since 2018 😂)

[viktheviking1]

Feminine urge this, masculine urge that.

I've got the spirit of darkness urge to go absolutely buck wild.

[void-galaxy-shenanigans]

The context was transphobic so I won’t share the video, but they said something ironically supportive and funny, so I want to share a quote.

“If gender is a social construct, then ¿what does that make trans people? ¿Gender construction workers?”

((Yes, I am a gender construction worker, thank you 🤣))

(Also, bit of an infodump because I’m in 3 different social science classes at uni: (1) Gender is a performance, according to sociology. Quote directly from our textbook, “we do gender.” Gender is how we behave, how we dress, how we talk, based on the context of our culture. (2) A social construct means ‘a concept that we (humans) invented to make sense of or justify our social world & its structure, &/or its inequalities’. That doesn’t make it not real, but it does makes it less concrete & fixed/stuck—importantly, it means that we can make new constructs. We invented it; we can change it.)

[river-taxbird]

Constructionism is the idea that things are social constructs, (Yes, even the thing you're currently thinking of when you read that sentence.) Constructionism tends to piss a lot of people off on the internet, because they hear social construct and think "Not Real."

But of course they are real, we each construct our own understanding of the world through our education and life experiences, and narratives, and that determines the things we think are real and important. While no one philosophy is the right tool for every situation, constructionism is useful for examining the underlying assumptions and ideologies, and narratives around a topic, that people doing more empirical and positivist research on the topic might not consider.

I think it pisses people off because it is a good tool for challenging worldviews, and it is useful for considering and critiquing why people believe the things they believe about the world. Constructionism serves to critique the assumption that research, education, communication, or any action done by humans can be value neutral and free of agendas. Social constructs are absolutely real because of the all encompassing effect they have on people's lives, but if you are not aware of them it makes it harder to consider alternatives.

[insaniquariumfish]

A significant portion of people nowadays do not have even a basic understanding of what gender is or what the phrase “gender is a social construct” actually means, and this lack of understanding is poisoning all discourse on the subject of sex and gender as well as semantically mangling the language that we use to discuss these things.

“Man,” “woman,” “male,” and “female” are not genders. “Masculinity” and “femininity” are genders. People are not assigned male or female at birth. People are assigned masculinity or femininity at birth. The state of existing as a man or woman is not determined by gender and has nothing to do with gender. Gender is everything that is culturally associated with men and women besides the state of being a man or woman itself. Gender is “boys don’t cry” and “girls wear dresses.” Gender is not “boys are male and girls are female.” That is sex, which is a biological category, and not a social category, like gender is. A gender is not something you can identify your way into being, because gender is a social phenomenon that is socially constructed and socially imposed, and therefore has nothing to do with your personal internal thoughts, feelings, or desires. Gender is an act you perform, not an identity you feel. How gender applies to you is something that the people around you determine for you, because that is how social constructs work. You are only a feminine/masculine person if the people around you perceive you to be feminine/masculine. Whether you are male or female, on the other hand, has absolutely nothing to do with how you are perceived by others, or even by yourself. You are the sex that you are even if people mistake you for being the other sex, just like an amputee is still an amputee even if people can’t tell that their leg is prosthetic.

Gender is not objectively real, because it is based in subjective and arbitrary social norms that differ depending on culture and time period. No one is innately a gender by virtue of some psychological or neurological property present at birth, any more than they are innately a criminal or a geek or a celebrity or any other social category by virtue of some psychological or neurological property present at birth. Sex is objectively real. You would still be the sex that you are even if no one alive, including you, understood the concept of sex or had the means to determine it, just like you would still be the height that you are even if no one understood the concept of height or had the means to measure it. Meanwhile, you would not have a gender if there was no one who understood the concept of gender, because gender exists only as a concept, and a highly subjective one that is constantly in a state of being redefined, at that, and gender does not describe or indicate any property of objective reality.

[gayhenrycreel]

i reckon that autism actually gives me a better understanding of gender.

i always knew it was an absurd construct, not appearing in other species. i saw it being used to segregate people who were not that different at all. all around me other children were being actively bullied for their favourite colours.

people would buy me presents that i hated, that they surely knew i would hate, because of this weird thing called "gender". i just wanted a new dinosaur toy, but i was given sparkley pink diaries despite me always saying they are hideous and boring (honestly, the colours hurt my eyes. im too light sensitive to have that).

i was convinced that everyone around me was mentally ill. i was genuinely concerned for their health. people forced themselves and others to act a certain way, based on something that made no sense.

once someone asked my favourite colour. ive never had a favorite anything. its a foreign concept to me. i looked at the sky and said "blue". i was then yelled at and called slurs because of my hair not matching my favourite colour i had just made up.

why cant hair signify other things? identity perhaps? interests? metalheads signify their interests with hair. it says something. hairstyles could be used to identify culture.

but no, it has to be used to force people into categories, so we know who gets to be oppressed.

hairstyle is something someone should choose, but everyone in my life was forced into their hairstyle. some were fine with it. i hated it.

i was too young to buy my own clothes, so i was forced to wear things i hated. it wasn't until i inherited some clothes from my dad that i got to choose how i dressed. i wore those yamaha shirts all the time. i felt in control of my identity. i was no longer forced to be someone else.

i never understood the concept of homophobia. gender is not real, so it should not matter if someone loves someone of the same gender.

i never felt crazy.

as far as i knew i was stuck on a planet of victims of brainwashing. i could see that people were getting hurt because of what appeared to be a mass delusion.

turns out i was right the whole time.

i hope we can fix the damage.

[iamjadehawk]

creationists in my notes, being as always boldly and tragicomically bad at reality

EDIT: a super basic primer on social constructs, because why not: https://www.yourdictionary.com/articles/social-construct-examples

[converse-and-mnms]

i think a cannon ace experience should be not understanding why u would ever not “wait until marriage”

[colombinna]

Was listening to the Worlds Beyond Number fireside chat for arc 2 and the discussion of the use of D&D for a more narrative campaign got me thinking. In TTRPGs you have this great debate about system vs story or rules vs players/DM, and it's not unlike the debate you see in linguistics of language vs speakers. In linguistic studies we learn very early that a language should serve its speakers, and a big argument (and the one I agree with) on TTRPG spaces is that the system should serve the story and the game, and not the other way around. And those things mixed together got me thinking about how we as humans create and put in place so many systems that are supposed to make life easier or help us reach certain goals, but eventually we lose the thread and become chained and enslaved to the very systems that were meant to help us. I feel like this is a topic that not only I'd like to see addressed in SFF (specially in the dystopia AI rebellion sub genre) but also something we need to talk more about when we talk about the state of the world and what ideologies we buy into. Because in the root of every societal issue in the world is the naturalization and standardization of social constructs and humans being forced to conform to it, instead of changing those constructs to serve the materiality of humans as we are. Idk I feel like we need to start looking more at what lies in the core of the stuff we discuss, specially when it comes to media and art and entertainment

[gaaaaaaaayypr]

Third wave feminism is destroying America, children, women, men, and western civilization.

But let's keep doing it...

Trump 2024!!!

[soulofkole]

People cannot think critically, clearly, or abstractly and that's some scary shit. How can you be that close minded or dumb? Honest to earth.

[moonlovesskunks]

everything is a social construct

time

money

government

politics

laws

norms

marriage

gender

sex

race

ethnicity

sexual orientation

masculinity

femininity

childhood

adulthood

beauty

language

morality

mental illness

all of the words i'm saying right now!