Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on “I don’t think there is an issue”.
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?
