Putin talks gender

Itz the old paradox. Ideological norms are not rooted in nature but claim to be. When ideological norms are accepted deep down as truths, they ground and stabilize what counts as real. The problem though of course is that nothing can make a cultural/ideological norm stable. If that could happen we would all still be Hittites, or something. Anyway. When ideological norms crack and fracture or wear down, we don’t necessarily experience that as ideas of things being challenged by different ideas of things. We can instead (and often do) experience it as reality being challenged or threatened.

I talk to my daughters about this. When I was young I was the oldest and had a much younger sister (by 8 or 9 years). As the oldest, when I reached a certain age, with 2 working parents, I was expected to contribute to the child care and kid raising. So I had a little taste of that as a teen. And then decades later I had daughters. I know automatically that the assumptions about raising a girl when I was young v. now were vastly different. Gender (being a cultural construct and ideological norm) had just mutated a bit. So for example both my daughters are into science, as majors in college and in terms of career. Now there’s a world out there for dedicated, fully identified female science nerds. There’s still progress to be made but they aren’t breaking any big norms being female scientists. Years ago, when I was my sister’s big brother, baby sitter, and confidant, there was no such thing. We didn’t even know we didn’t have that. It was an invisible possibility.

So those are my ramblings on this issue.

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