#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.)

[icarusredwings]

Explaining this because I don't think people are getting it. Ft. One of my favorite mutals. @the--quotifyer--innit

The Master's issue isn't that the Doctor is poly. His issue is that he can not feel second best.

Tw: Mention of toxic jealous behavior, social/ romantic hiarcys, a lot of dog metaphors because its easier for me to explain, someone who's really autistic yapping about fictional old man yaoi, lots of misspelling, Apologies if I seem upset/rude, Im very passionate about the phycology behind social/romantic hiarchys and similar behaviours.

I was asked; Hey what would you think Sax would do if he met tentoo and rose?? With or without 14.

Me: Without 14? Like pre saxteen or just him not there? I think either way he'd beat the fuck out of tentoo. (Because he'd think he's cheating on him at first) He'd try to best up rose too depending on if we were talking s10 sax, pre saxteen, or established saxteen. Hed probably fail, but he'd try.

Yeah, sharing is definitely not his thing

No, definitely not (with Rose). Also, he'd probably lecture her, and then she'd be like "dude LOOK WHOS TALKING" and he'd be like, "WELL- ....☝️ 🤨.... actually... erm (you got a point)." Especially if we're talking Torchwood Rose? It would also piss him off how many traits she has picked up from the doctor. He'd become so emotionally jealous about it. (That Rose has the Doctor's traits)

Because he's not stupid. He's extremely smart. If this is pre/ established, the Doctor talks about her all the time. Even now. Little things. "Oh, there's this little shop down the road that Rose worked at. They have some sales sometimes. " He would SEE how much he actually loved her and feel extremely defeated, which would probably turn to rage and try to kill her. Then have a mental breakdown and sob by himself.

Probs blackmail her Bout how long he's know the doctor compared to a pathetic human girl. Rose would not be impressed.

You can't really use that as black mail but brag? Yes. (He'd definitely brag about knowing him much longer)

I could write a whole thing about this (and I did), but bassically, the fact that she's just a human girl is PART of the reason he'd get so upset. He's a fucking TIME LORD with MORE credibility then the doctor and one of the top loves of his eternity he's ever had is some 20 year old blonde girl????

Because with the master (and all of Gallifrey in general) Reputation and status means a lot. So the fact that the doctor chose her (someone who has zero of both) over him (someone who has a lot of both) it would mean that he likes her PURELY for love and this? That crushes him entirely.

Donna: The doctor is currently locked in the shed writing ' I love you, I promise' notes on the window.

If this ever happened, they'd probably get a divorce on the spot because the doctor CAN'T deny that he loves her still. And will. Forever. Saxon would kill him again and not even want to regenerate. He is a "You said til death do us part, and I said until all of time collapsees. We are not the same" kind of guy. He'd kill them both and be sure they fall in the same grave. It's very poetic. (In a way)

See he's okay with River because her physical body is dead as fuck. She can never leave that computer. So this automically puts sax on top of the metaphotic food chain in his head.

Because the doctor comes to him and asks if he can visit his wife and then comes back home to him. That's what matters. Meanwhile, the doctor would go to a different universe to go home to Rose. (If given the chance) And he knows it.

It's like having a dog tolerate/dominant dog. I'll use Minpins because I own one. Minpins have a pack status, and the top one has to be seen as the top by the owner, mainly rather than the other dogs. So if the doctor has multiple lovers (like always), sax has to feel he's on top and receives the most attention. If the doctor starts ignoring or punishing him for "defending" his spot as the top, he'll actually get MORE aggressive towards the others.

He has to be the one at the top of the list, the most special to the doctor, just for his own weird lil reasons

No, it's not really his own weird little reason. It's social psychology.

The thing is, he doesn't *actually* have to be the most special to the doctor, but he NEEDS to think he is. For me personally, and what I know, I like to think that Rose and The master are actually pretty equal, he just says stuff about her *because* he can't do stuff with her anymore which is just the process of longing.

I know I keep coming back to the dog metaphors, but im autistic like that, so give me a chance.

It's like for me, i had a dog named bailey. I love bailey even now, and often I compare my current dog fern to bailey. Its part of the healing process because im comparing them less and less. Especially with the fact that they're VERY different breeds. Bailey was a live stock guardian, an anatolian shepherd, to be exact. 90 pounds. Hairy. Fern is an 8 pound chihuahua miniature pinscher mix. Short hair.

Both are protective of the kids, both bark at men, both are silly and cuddly, and I love them both a lot. But its unfair to compare them because they are so different.

Though there's nothing wrong with liking the similars.

It's unfair for the master and rose to be compared. That's how the doctor thinks about it. The master is his top time lord on his list. Rose is his top human.

In my head anyway.

I'll probably add to this later, but for now, feel free to add on yourself

[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!!!

[funky-brainedwhaletransgender]

Okay so gender is socially constructed and some of us decided that it wasn’t enough so we constructed queerness to defy, nuance and tailor the social construction of gender. We have been very intentionally working and reworking this queerness we constructed since we laid the foundation. I think that intentionality of the process of building the concept of queerness is odd. We regularly, through less than ideal means unfortunately because we have a bad habit of yelling at each other about it, redefine transness amongst ourselves. Ask the first people who identified as transsexual what that identity meant to them and you will get a wildly different answer than you would get from your average modern day trans kid. We are weirdly self aware about this process. I mean. Not totally. Obviously. But in comparison to straight people who are typically mind blown when the 13 year old nonbinary child of someone they graduated with explains to them that gender is a social construct we are hyper conscious of how we’re talking about our genders and attractions. Spend some time scrolling through old asexual forums. Watch the four hour video essay YouTuber X made about respectability politics and transmedicalism. Straight people generally put less thought into being straight over the course of their entire lives than a gay teen spent thinking about gayness in the month following the realization that they’re not straight. This level of intentional consideration going into the development of this social construct is weird, right?

I will be thinking more about why we do this (probably as a way to defend our existence and because queerness in its current form has only really gained traction in this recent age of science and philosophy where we think about everything more but that’s its own thought soup to cook) and what effect this intentionality has on our community and society at large. Are there benefits to this method of social construction? Harms? Are other concepts being socially constructed in a similar way right now? In the past?

Anyone have thoughts on this? Sources? Has someone else already done this thinking for me that you’re familiar with? Strategies for sleeping when your brain won’t shut up about your gay ponderings?

[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!

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

This is - hopefully obviously - parody, but it's worth a moment.

When people insist that describing reality accurately is some kind of bigotry and that you're an istaphobe of some variety, what they're really saying is that they and their beliefs are disconnected from the real world, and they object to the imposition of reality into their fantasy world.

It's the same thing as when Xians call you "mean" or accuse you of "hating god" for pointing out the bible's complete and obvious lack of coherence with reality.

It doesn't matter if they don't like it, if it's true.