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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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Charitably, the core of feminist analysis would be that gender norms exist, and if you fall outside them, you will have a worse life than if you met them. Even if you meet them, there'll be parts of them that meaningfully hurt your well-being. I think few people would argue against this, and it's not a huge leap to go from there to saying that they should be loosened if not dismantled.

Where much feminist analysis falls short is in trying to shove all gender norms into the oppressor/oppressed dynamic. I'd go so far as to say it's self undermining: if women inherently lack all agency in the matter and are just flotsam on the tides of the patriarchy, it removes all recognition of the individual agency women have to dismantle those norms.

To take your analogy at face value:

There is no norm re. drinking hydrofluoric acid. You are free to purchase, free to imbibe, and free to die stupidly.

Likewise gender rolls. Even if they provide some sort of benefit along the lines of not drinking deadly acid, that still doesn't mean they should be enforced. People should be allowed to make idiot decisions as long as they only kill them selves, and let Darwin sort it out on the back end.

Counterpoint- if people for some reason wanted to drink hydrofluoric acid, it would quickly be made illegal. Heroine(far less harmful) is illegal for that reason.

Likewise if we determine that gender roles are necessary and good, then not officially providing state favoritism to them is, from non-libertarian frameworks, no longer the default- it has to be specifically justified.

Not if gender roles are something which requires collective buy in to exist. If so, then defectors are in fact harming the group, and thus something you would want discouraged, in the same way you would want to treat any other tragedy of the commons defector.