Monday, June 15, 2020

Refuting Gender Stereotypes: The Unnecessary Nature Of Social Experience

If social experience was in any way relevant to "confirming" gender stereotypes, there would not even be a single man or woman who is slightly different from the asinine, arbitrary stereotypes of men and women prescribed by complementarianism.  There are large disparities between the degree to which some wrongly stereotype men and women, but many of the core traits overlap in complementarian stereotypes of different intensities.  It follows that any traits truly rooted in a person's gender would never be absent in the thoughts or behaviors of anyone else of the same gender.  In order to show that social experience is not consistent with complementarian fallacies, one only needs to find even a handful of people who are not afraid to defy the constructs that are hurled at them from many directions.

If gender stereotypes were tied to biology, as complementarians are forced to claim unless they want to abandon the only ideological basis for complementarianism, there would be no men who experience passionate emotions besides sexual desire and anger.  There would be no women who have a talent for leadership.  There would be no men who are not mindless brutes.  There would be no women who are not content to accomplish little besides becoming a mother.  There would be no men who are sexually or otherwise physically victimized by women.  There would be no women who are overtly "visual" when it comes to sexual attraction.  Indeed, there are numerous other examples one could point to.

Even on an empirical level rather than a strictly logical one (gender stereotypes can be deconstructed and refuted with reason alone prior to any social experience), the foundation of complementarianism is contradicted.  It would be impossible for any man or woman to deviate from gender stereotypes at all if being a man or woman truly ensured certain talents, psychological traits, and moral obligations!  The fact that anyone is not wholly identical to the imaginary, stereotypical man or woman necessarily means that a person's psychological features are not tied to the kind of genitalia they are born with, but are instead either individualistic features or are shaped by their cultural upbringing.

The scourge of complementarianism can be fully disproven by either of two methods: 1) by showing that personality traits and non-physiological abilities do not logically follow from the gender of one's body and 2) by showing examples of men and women who naturally defy stereotypes, oneself included.  Regarding the latter, using introspection to prove to oneself that one's own psychological characteristics do not match stereotypes is an easy way to falsify the claims of complementarians.  A person who does not align with gender stereotypes--despite heavy social conditioning, it is likely that almost everyone does not align with them at least in part--can have absolute certainty that they have their own traits no matter what Christian and secular complementarians fallaciously insist.

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