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Julianne Werlin's avatar

I enjoyed this. I'm the prime demographic for content about the travails of five-year-old boys, so that was fun!

Also agree with what I took to be your reservations about "the patriarchy" as a framing for what is going on. I mean, I suppose you can specify the contents of that concept to include pretty much anything, so maybe, but I took her position to be a pretty traditional one. Without a more comprehensive critique that situates current sex relations within the social and economic conditions of the present--increasing inequality and loss of good working class jobs, public loss of confidence in bureaucratic, educational, and political institutions, atomization and alienation, the effects of the internet on dating, etc--I just don't see how you get anywhere.

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Kc77's avatar

Like one of those quantum mechanic experiments, her observations changed the thing she was observing but she hasn’t adjusted. The gendered world she describes perfectly describes 1990s America, but not 2020s Portland, or Austin, or Ann Arbor.

In particular I don’t think she gets how performative agreeability has become increasingly expected of both sexes in a post industrial service based economy and in our education system.

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Julianne Werlin's avatar

Yes, well put. In fairness I think this is something that a lot of people don't get--or rather, that they grasp in practice but not in theory. (In many environments, to grasp it in practice actually entails not grasping it in theory.)

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Daniel Oppenheimer's avatar

I just recorded an interview with Terry Real where I pushed him on some of this, in particular whether that description of women as voiceless still made sense, and I think we arrived at some interesting nuancing of it. Didn't touch much on the social and economic points you made, though, or on the norms of performative agreeability.

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Julianne Werlin's avatar

Interesting. Looking forward to listening.

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