“I don’t think there is an issue”
This is very safe and healthy and multicultural. Nothing can possibly go wrong.
The “schoolgirl” outfit is of course no such thing.
Tip Jar
This is very safe and healthy and multicultural. Nothing can possibly go wrong.
The “schoolgirl” outfit is of course no such thing.
“The “schoolgirl” outfit is of course no such thing.”
He looks more like Stephanie from LazyTown
https://lazytown.fandom.com/wiki/Stephanie
Not an expert by any means, but I think he’s going for the Japanese Lolita or maybe Kawaii styles. Either way, not appropriate for an adult working with children (or at all frankly).
Definitely lolita fashion. Creeeeeeepy.
Oh gawd. I didn’t think of that. I loathe Kawaii. A couple of months or so ago when out on a ramble I went to a residential street celebrated for its cherry trees to see them doing their spring thing. I had entirely forgotten about the Japanese passion for cherry blossoms, and got to the street to find it very crowded with student-age Japanese people. (There are lots at the U of Washington, a mile or two north of the cherry street). Drat, crowded, but oh well, I can share. But then as I cruised around I noticed…well, you know: high-pitched giggling and clothes appropriate for a six-year-old. Kawaii and trans ideology are birds of a (very sexist) feather. I lasted about 30 seconds and gave up.
Of course, China and Korea both have their own versions of kawaii culture. I’ve found several otherwise awesome drama series completely unwatchable due to lead actresses who talk like they’re four years old. It’s unsettling and creepy.
Kawaii culture always struck me as a weird, infantilizing cousin of Peter Pan Syndrome. Like trans, it’s a retreat from reality into an idealized caricature. Modern “geek” subculture channels the same shit, which should make it completely unsurprising that trans is overrepresented in that demo.
Yeh, it’s gruesome. I know a Japanese woman whose parents emigrated to the US when she was very young because they did not want her to grow up with the infantilizing. (It worked; she’s no giggling little girl.)
I believe it was Helen Joyce who once commented on what appears to be a bit of a contradiction on the gender critical “side” (if there were such a thing). After all many gender critical people have been talking endlessly about how boys/men should be free to wear dresses (as well as play with dolls, wear makeup etc.) if they want to without having to (pretend to) “become” girls/women. The very idea that there are separate “boy things” and “girl things” (interests, career paths, ways of dressing, behaving, thinking, feeling etc.) in the first place, is precisely the problem, remember? The goal is to make things like sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation etc. irrelevant [1] with respect to how people are treated or what is expected of them. So isn’t it blatantly inconsistent to complain about men in dresses when we do see them? I seem to remember Joyce making the point that, whatever we think about the desirability of having such gender norms in the first place, once we do, the very act of transgressing the norms in order to evoke a certain visceral gut reaction in women becomes a fetish in itself to a certain kind of male. I strongly suspect she’s on to something.
So as much as I sympathize with the principle that both men and women should be free to dress any way they like, I don’t think there can ever be too much shame, stigma, or taboo around forcing others to be involuntary participants in your kink. If a man wants to wear a dress because he just happens to like them (the way I tend to prefer shirts to sweaters) and it has nothing to do with getting off at other people’s expense, by all means. Let him do so.
[1] Or as close to irrelevant as they can be while allowing for some limited exceptions where different treatment makes sense on purely technical grounds, such as age limits, sex segregation in sports as well as any situation that involves nudity or vulnerablity, special accomodations for sick, elderly or disabled people etc.
Bjarte, I think that’s one thing that makes me uncomfortable about the whole trans movement. All my adult life (and most of my teenage life) I have fought against the gender stereotypes, and now to say a man can’t wear a dress to work is anathema to me (unless there is a strict dress code so that no one can wear a dress because it is unsafe, i.e. in an automotive repair shop or science lab). It is the reintroduction of these ‘norms’ as identifying us by gender that is most infuriating about the trans movement, other than their insistence on shoving into women’s spaces.
The thing I notice (and I know it’s been commented on here) is how many of the trans ‘women’ wear outfits to work that biological women would not wear because they are inappropriate in the workplace. I don’t see women at work dressing like little girls, and I don’t see them dressing like sexed-up blow up dolls. Most workplaces would put a stop to that if women dressed that way, but many of them are giving a pass, or even celebrating, men who do.
The failure of so many people to understand the subtle (actually, not subtle) differences between what feminists want (the erasure of stereotypes) and what trans want (using the stereotypes to determine what ‘gender’ you are) is one reason it becomes so easy to brand gender critical feminists as hypocrites…or worse. It looks, superficially, like the trans are breaking the stereotypes while the GC feminists are trying to support patriarchal stereotypes, because few people look closely enough at what is happening or ask the right questions to figure out that it is actually the opposite.
To make sure I had it straight what kawaii was, I googled it and found that “Hello Kitty” was one of its early manifestations.
This reminded me of the webcomic “Hello Cthulhu”. Yes the Eldritch horror in the world of the insufferably cute.
Maybe something more could be done with that now.
An intractable problem (as I see it) is that the formation of stereotypes and norms is a natural and automatic process. Linguistic innovation, for example, spreads because people tend to mimic each other. As mimicry spreads, behavior becomes (statistically) normal. When things are normal for long enough, which really isn’t very long at all, they become (normatively) normal as people begin to see deviation as wrong or indicative of potential danger. A pet example of this is how quickly it became a red flag for potential employers and romantic interests that someone didn’t have a social media presence. Another is how using punctuation and proper capitalization in text messages became rude. Humans are norm generation machines. We can’t help it.
Formation of stereotypes and norms is also epistemologically necessary. The universe is unfathomably huge, while we are so very, very small. Abstractions, simplifications, and heuristics are the only things that let us do anything at all. Ethics, as a philosophical discipline, sees a similar problem in “act consequentialism”, the evaluation of moral correctness according to the consequences of discrete actions. This original formulation of consequentialism was eventually observed to be an impossibly heavy cognitive burden. Forced to evaluate every possible action and its totality of consequences whenever deliberating, we’re left in a state of analysis paralysis. Rather than being action-guiding, act consequentialism becomes action-denying. “Rule consequentialism” seeks to resolve this paralytic problem by moving the ethical calculus from evaluation of individual acts to evaluation of rules. [I’ll leave for another day the issue of whether it collapses to act consequentialism.]
Elimination of gendered stereotypes is, perhaps unfortunately, an impossible goal. Any observable trend can and will lead to the formation of a new statistical or normative expectation; i.e., a stereotype or a norm. If something trends among boys, then that will likely become something expected of boys. If something trends among girls, then that will likely become something expected of girls. A commitment to the erasure of gendered stereotypes becomes a commitment to eternal whack-a-mole against the essential nature of human reasoning and belief formation.
The best we can hope for is to minimize maladaptive stereotypes or norms and to proscribe certain domains as off-limits for legal enforcement. Norm transgressions of the “man in a dress” or “woman in a tuxedo” sort, for example, would have explicit mention in law. Essentially, it would be the type of non-discrimination protection that we see for traditionally oppressed or exploited groups. One does wonder whether such a list of exceptions would be manageable, as it very easily could grow too large or vague to be useful.
More fundamental is that we could run into Chesterton’s Fence. Norm transgression itself can be a reliable indicator of danger in many cases. A man who is willing to break norms regarding sex-specific restrooms is probably one who’s willing to violate other norms, and that should give us pause. To what extent is violation of any given norm potentially a reliable indicator of other transgressions, and to what extent does violation of certain norms facilitate harm? An example of the latter is that allowing males into female restrooms interferes with women’s and girls’ ability to defend themselves by recognizing a male presence as the warning sign it absolutely is. Another example would be that repeated violation of child safeguarding norms desensitizes children and adults to threat signals, such as those that could alert us to sexual predators.
One might respond to the second example by saying that we ought not relax any norms having to do with child safeguarding. Confounding this response, however, is the spectre of the act vs rule consequentialism debate: we can’t be sure whether holding a particular stereotype or adopting a particular norm is tied to child safeguarding, because the universe and human society are complex systems composed of nearly infinite variables that interact and interpenetrate in unknowable ways. Every rule choice and every decision in the moment to follow a rule is an act to be evaluated under our ethical calculus, leaving us once again paralyzed by reality’s irrational immensity. [And here I said I’d leave the collapse of rule consequentialism to act consequentialism for another day. Whoops.]
I don’t know. Pessimism’s got me today. I’m going to go back to my June project of turning the first seven chapters of Journey to the West into Just So Stories. Because haven’t you ever wondered why so many monkeys on so many mountains never grow old or how seas and rivers got their tides, O Best Beloved?
Well, sorry, stay pessimistic; it seems to inspire you.
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