2009-07-01 09:49 | Individual choices v. societal programming.
I posted something like this before, about the threefold path: conformity, rebellion, and individual choice. Conformity accepts the values of the culture and goes along with them, rebellion accepts the values of the culture and goes against them, and individual choice is skeptical of the values of the culture, and chooses whatever works for them (as individuals, as members of the group).
What makes this difficult is recognising, from my standpoint, when someone says they are making an individual choice, and that choice looks just like conformity. For an obvious example, shaving your legs if you're a woman. When a couple of women say "I prefer shaving my legs because" and whatever reasons they have (it feels good, it looks good, there's no chafing when wearing socks, &c), no worries. But when nearly all the women I know and see shave their legs, and nearly no men do? Suddenly, all those "individual choices" look very suspect.
Or changing your last name upon marriage, again if you're a woman. The usual reasons include "I don't mind because I hate/have no attachment to my family name", "I want to distance myself from my father", "It's my father's name, not my name", and "I want our children to have the same last name". I have my issues with the reasons, but they're not decisions for me, so whatever. But again, so many women have these reasons, and so few men do. Hmmm.
(I note that these come mostly from posts in feminist blogs about these topics. I can't recall the last time I've talked about either of those topics with someone in real life who wasn't a partner of mine.)
I am explicitly not saying it never happens. I have taken great care to say "many/few", and not "all/none". What I'm saying is I find it difficult to believe that the bulk of people individually, and without any coercion from society, chose to follow society's arbitrarily sexist rules.
As I do not have telepathy, and I don't plan on being rude enough to interrogate people on their choice-making process any time soon, and especially it's none of my business, the only thing I can do is continue to (a) take people at their word, because lord knows they don't need someone else doubting them, and (b) speak up about my own thought processes. And potentially stop being as judgmental as I am, hi.
3 Responses to “Individual choices v. societal programming.”
This is how I read it: If someone says they are making an "individual" choice, I do not interpret them as saying that culture and expectations did not influence that choice, but, rather, that they made a knowing decision in which they thoughtfully, carefully and properly considered cultural and social expectations, among other concerns, before reaching their decision.
It does not seem unusual to me that many of the times when people make that choice, they would end up selecting the direction that is also a conformist position; people who, after thought and consideration are drawn to the conformist position, include not only those who would naturally lean that way, but also those people who are either neutral or lightly inclined the other direction and who think that it is not worth the effort to fight/rebel.
The healthier and more vital the culture, the more useful that kind of default/bias would be.
I am hopeful, for example, that open-mindedness about homosexuality will soon become a dominant ethos, and the conformist position will change (as it did with regards to overt racism) rendering overt homophobia the aberration and not the default.
I also think that the right kind of cultural default can aid in resisting tyrants.
The particular one that gets to me every last time is women who "choose" to be housewives. Not to mention the husbands who "choose" to "let" them. An ex- of mine in fact is now married to a woman whose eventual life goal is to become a housewife, so his life goal is now to be able to support her. Until he's able to do so though, she's working part time for some preschool, so at least she's rational about this. As opposed to the ex's sister-in-law, who has a profitable degree, is popping out babies, doesn't work and barely does housework, and bludgeons her low-earning husband (my ex's brother) into working, doing much of the housework, and buying (then selling) a house well beyond their means.
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I'm totally with you on this. The last time I shaved my legs it was because I felt it was a good idea for the moment to conform. If it was purely MY CHOICE I never or even less rarely would.
I'll throw another outlier into your schema too, my husband wants to have his name changed because both of us feel much, much more connected to my family than to his.
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