The opposite of a man.
What is a man? A miserable pile of secrets.
Which makes a woman a joyous iota of public.
But enough talk, have at you!
I remember an old 4chan joke from, I think, over a decade ago. It's an old memory so I hope I don't butcher it:
A 4chan user found a genie. He was tired of getting no action, so he told the genie his 1st wish was the ability to turn on sight that would let him see everyone willing to sleep with him. "Your wish is granted", replied the genie. "You can now close your eyes."
In the modern version I'd make it one of these misogynist assholes.
"What's a woman?"
What's a man?
A miserable pile of secrets.
But enough talk, have at you!
I think the best response that's always worked for me is:
"Who cares!" Person riled up about this inclined to agree with me because they think I'm on the two genders "side of the debate". "Just try your best to call people what they want to be called and move on. If someone's name is x, try call them x, if they say 'I am a y', try calling them a y. If you get it wrong accidentally, oh well, just say sorry and try again. Why are we even still talking about this? It's such a non-issue"
Highly effective on those who aren't super conservative and just been swept up in the (in my opinion) astroturfed outrage.
<Smashes glass on the floor>
Wait no go back, you're getting a lecture filled with maximum toxicity!
a genetic experiment.
Everyone is an X until a weird little Y comes along.
I like the premise of the joke but it's confusing sex with gender. 😅
Boy here, identified as a boy, and definitely still covering my drink.
I had to drive a friend of a friend to the hospital because some scumfuck drugged his drink. I don't even like the guy but I obviously wasn't going to leave him like that.
When talking to the doctor I was surprised to find out that men also often get drugged and it's not talked about for some reason.
I've had it happen to friends and I'm pretty sure it happened to me once but at least in my case I think I was collateral damage. That said, without really knowing the strategies of that sort of thing hitting the wrong target seems like something that would happen fairly often if you don't care about other people which, presumably, you don't.
Nobody is getting laid for talking about men's problems except maybe the dadvocate on YouTube. It's all a game to a huge portion of the population.
Hell I’d cover the dog bowl
If bro can sedate my little rage monster, I'm gonna let him.
Sees woman in public
"Quick! Cover your mouth! That's how they get inside you to lay their eggs!"
A woman is sugar and spice and everything nice. Until she is scorned. Then hell hath no fury.
I thought the first part only applied to little girls.
an old cake still has the same ingredients in it.
Women were little girls until they were scorned?
Little girls != women
It's a quip, not a manifesto.
🔥
Idk who is that, and probably is a moron.
But it is a genuinely good question: "what's a woman?" "what's a man?" "what's gender?"
Not an easy question, with not universally accepted answer.
Honestly I think, as a cis man, cis people are probably very bad at answering the question.
humans tend ignore "harmony". When you walk through the field, do you look each blade of grass or at the cow? Do you feel "non-pain"? How could you possibly explain someone pain that doesn't know pain? Do you remember the last time, you sat next to your friend watching a show on tv, in the same detail, you remember the conflict/discussion that you had with them?
Generally we will remember and pay attention to the things that are "wrong".
If your gender is right for you, why would you pay attention? What would you even pay attention to?
If it is wrong for you, you feel the "pain", see the cow and remember the conflict.
Outside of a philosophy discussion, it's not a genuinely good question because it is irrelevant to our daily lives. In any way that matters to society, a woman is a person who says they are a woman. It's that complicated.
"Is irrelevant" and "should be irrelevant" are two different things. Fighting by saying the issues are not there—regardless of your actual opinion—has rarely, if ever, worked. It's the same as the "I don't see color" argument.
Also, why would we exclude philosophical discussion? The point is to make you think. I also don't know who this particular person is in the OP, but the question itself has no bias. Maybe this highlights our philosophical differences, but I firmly believe that understanding a system is the most crucial step to revolutionizing it.
So long as society feels it necessary to provide protections for women, the distinction has real consequences. Drawing a line anywhere is a tradeoff between inclusivity and effectiveness.
Taking the party line "high ground" stance of either conclusive self-determination or dodging the question entirely is why this question is so effective.
I don't think it is that simple.
Women are treated different that men in many societies. In my country there are multiple laws that apply different to a person if it is a woman or a man.
If we are making legislative differentiation because those words, we ought to have them well defined and understand what we are meaning and why we say that a women gets X law applied that a man gets not.
If it is irrelevant it should be, at least, legislatively irrelevant. If it's meaningful we should be clear on what we are defining by woman (or any other gender that gets particular legislation applied for all that matters).
That without talking about the social importance of being a gendered society. I don't know any single society that is not gendered. Once again, if it is irrelevant then we should aim for genderless society. If it is relevant we should know and agree on what it is to be one gender or other.
When does the answer actually matter? Maybe in situations where sexual assault is a concern, like bathrooms, etc? In that case, just get rid of gender identity and distinguish based on if the individual has a penis or not.
I talked in other comments about the legislative implications. But here I would like to give a more personal one.
For instance, I would love to have the answer for myself. Because I have asked myself plenty of times "Am I a woman?", and that leads to de subsequent question "What it means to be a Woman?", "What I want to be is a Woman or is anything else?". I know that only I can answer that question. But I want to know why I have to make that question to myself. Why society considers "being a Woman" something? Because that question didn't came out of nowhere. It came because I, as a person who lives in a society with other people, see people who calls themselves man, woman or other things. And while trying to decide what I want to be, or what I already am, need to take what other people are into consideration.
Idk, if I'm explaining myself. I'll give a dumb example: Maybe I want to be an Astronaut, but before becoming an Astronaut I need to know what an Astronaut is. Because Astronaut is a profession in our society, and it can be defined. In this context is easy, because I would love to be an Astronaut because I would love to go to space. But, if I love to be a Woman, why is it? What is the "going to space" of being a woman?
Why base it on the existence or nonexistence of a penis? How do you enforce that? You're in a bathroom, ideally no one is seeing your genitals.
Just get rid of gendered bathrooms in the first place. A toilet doesn't care what shape of butthole poops into it
Is it a good question though? Even if we set aside the fact that it's a loaded question, what are we going to do with the information?
It has a similar character to the question 'what is a race?'. Information that people look a certain way is not particularly useful, on the other hand we feel it viscerally. If we don't stop to think we end up making unhelpful judgements.
Race, gender, nation states, money, the past and future, these are just concepts and if we confine ourselves to the domain of concepts we run the risk of mistaking them for our actual experience, out in the world. We stop listening and start assuming that our internal narrative is infallible, because it is.
I agree to an extend.
I would love to live in a word where all of that does not matter.
But for instance, imagine if we stop taking race into account in the USA (not American but I'm soaked in American culture). How would people know and being able to prove that some race is being discriminated against if the people does not have a definition on some people being part of one or other race.
I despise racial classification. Seems wrong, it works wrong as races are all mixed. But it can work against racism.
For instance, in my country, racial classification is ilegal. There cannot exist any registry on anyones race whatsoever. So black people here does not have statistical data to prove they are being discriminated against. They have a harder time fighting against racism somehow because their race is not allow to be recorded anywhere.
So I don't really know if, same as gender, I want to know people's race or not. Feels wrong, but also useful to fight against discrimination.
Man xy, woman xx.
Nah. That's just sex.
But there's been long proved that what we call gender is not 100% defined by sex.
For instance, our traditional gendered bathrooms. The concept does not work if we just take sex into account. As the reasons we have for segregating bathrooms in genders does just not work if people have a different presentation, external sexual characteristics or behavior, that it is traditionally assumed for one sex or the other.
To put intro crude words. Women that would like to have a women exclusive bathroom would really not be happy if someone walks into that externally looks and behaves, and even have the sexual characteristics of what they perceive as a man. It would not matter if that person would have XX instead of XY.
Biology isn't that simple. A person can have one fewer sex chromosome, monosomy, one extra, trisomy, and many extra, polysomy. In fact it's starting to show that a significant minority of people have trisomy 47 (the name for having one extra sex chromosome) but live perfectly normal lives because those extra genes are suppressed. You could have an extra x chromosome and never know it, does that exclude you from being a man or a woman? Which brings up the topic of gene expression and epigenetics which is even more complicated. If you're looking at science to give you a certainty about sex and gender you're in for a long search.
It's interesting that this question seems to be some sort of gotcha that almost always a posted response is a snarky joke. Just makes me wonder how do those people define a woman.
The actual answer is that a woman is a person who identifies as a woman. What bugs me is that conservatives disagree vehemently, but they don't seem to have a consistent answer themselves
Most of them appeal to "basic biology" but biology is anything but basic. Just because you learned about chromosomes in your high school biology course doesn't mean you're actually knowledgeable on the subject. It's much more complex than that. The best argument against this idea, in my opinion, is to bring up intersex people, which there's a huge variety of different conditions and always one that will contradict whatever they believe.
This is all ignoring the fact that none of this matters, so maybe it's best to not be baited into it at all. Gender is not something that needs some precise thing to point at. It's whatever we want it to be.
They define it in all sorts of ways where there are immediate exceptions they have to hand wave away. We have someone like that in this thread.
Is the latter dude calling the former a creeper? Or complaining about agency from rufinol?
he has the patriot emojis but also a pirate one so I assume he's a leftie that somehow still enjoys living in America
Maybe libertarian
he's american and illegally downloads foreign movies not available to him
Yes
w ryugewwus
What is naive realism?
A woman is a person that adheres to gender roles assigned to them by society. These gender roles are typically attributed but not limited to the female sex.
Simple.
A woman is whatever they fucking want to be.
No, no they're not. Genders exist. They haven't disappeared. They also have meaning, words haven't lost meaning all of the sudden because of inclusivity.
It's idiotic statements like this that continue to fuel Anti trans rhetoric because obviously you yourself can't even define what the word means.
And even biological sex is a bimodal spectrum. People always ignore the existence of intersex people, but I believe it occurs at a higher number per 100k people than trans. I could be misremembering.
Intersex people exist in the same capacity that people that have down syndrome exist.
People don't go around going. Oh they're fine. They're just intersex. It's considered generally a birth defect that brings with it a lifetime of medical issues that otherwise would not exist.
It's perfectly fine to accept them for who they are or even who they want to be, but has absolutely nothing to do with the idiotic question that anti-trans people pose such as "what is a woman".
In the same sense that people don't say, what is a human being in reference to down syndrome.
What bothers me is that even talking about this such as my original definition gets me downvoted because I don't immediately agree or accept the prepositions in this post.
I have no obligation to blindly accept anything!
And it's 1.7% of births in the world which is quite a high number considering.
