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From: jdravk@speech2.cs.cmu.edu (Jeanette Dravk)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: gender roles (SORTA LONG)
Message-ID: <9101141810.AA16898@rutgers.edu>
Date: 14 Jan 91 22:49:05 GMT
References: <1991Jan2.155342.1414@arris.com> <15207@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> <1991Jan5.142726.5081@arris.com> <15414@sdcc6.ucsd.edu>
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In article <15414@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> bloch@thor.ucsd.EDU (Steve Bloch) writes:
&"You" in this post refers to Richard Shapiro.  I've posted this rather
&than emailing because I think it may be of interest to others than the
&two of us.  If I'm wrong, tell me :-)

&>I don't agree that the existence of gender
&>per se is a problem. I don't see any reason to believe that any and
&>every gender system would priviledge one gender at the expense of the
&>other.
&>...
&>No, oppression is something else -- a specific
&>set of relations between the sexes in which one sex has less access to
&>subjectivity than the other. In our society, women are oppressed in
&>this way, and men are not.
&
&OK, you're defining "oppressed" as "on the losing end of an
&inequality", while I was using something more like "unnecessarily
&restricted in freedom".  By your definition, certainly, it's
&mathematically impossible for everybody to be oppressed simultaneously
&(at least on the same dimension).  By mine, it's quite possible.

By this definition, isn't it not only possible for everyone to be
oppressed but impossible for everyone to *not* be?  I'm restricted
from killing the next person I meet (by law and the current definition
of a person), however, I would never kill someone.  So for me, the
murder restriction of my freedom is unnecessary and I am therefore
oppressed.

But is it oppression?  Society demands that everyone be restricted in
some way so that we can all co-exist as peacefully as possible.  Hence
the need for restrictions such as the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights wherein the acceptable parameters of our behavior are defined
and limited.

So maybe what's needed here is a re-tuning of your model so that it
can give something a bit more useful.  A model which demands that
*all* people must be oppressed is not very helpful when trying to
decide where and how oppression exists in our society.


j-

--
#*#*#*#*#*#	Transient Creature of the Wide, Wild World	#*#*#*#*#*#*#*

   "Time is not linear to me, it is a nebulous web of existential freedom."