> This always drove me insane - people seem to confuse value equality/congruence and strict identicality. The latter seems to either try to create a female default and punish men for not living up to it, or create some weird fuzzy default that nobody really fits comfortably.
It creates a female default and punishes men for not living up to it in some areas (like public school in the US), but it creates a male default and punishes women for not living up to it in other areas (academic careers in life sciences, the job market, etc).
> The answer isn't to change the (currently relatively male-normative) norm, it's to defenstrate the idea that having a norm in the first place is a remotely good idea.
Agreed.
> What we want is to say that women are as valuable as men, and then let individuals figure out who they want to be.
Agreed here too. The question then is, how we address this.
It creates a female default and punishes men for not living up to it in some areas (like public school in the US), but it creates a male default and punishes women for not living up to it in other areas (academic careers in life sciences, the job market, etc).
> The answer isn't to change the (currently relatively male-normative) norm, it's to defenstrate the idea that having a norm in the first place is a remotely good idea.
Agreed.
> What we want is to say that women are as valuable as men, and then let individuals figure out who they want to be.
Agreed here too. The question then is, how we address this.