Sexism, Logic and Intuition II
I
was originally intending to write on ‘Socialism and the ethics of gender
rôles’, but I got bogged down.
Anyway, this article is of course going out on the Valentine’s Day
Issue, when very recently Rupert Murdoch was thinking aloud that perhaps Page
Three might well be scrapped.
So I am now adding a Part
II to the paper I wrote last year, where I argued:
“Let
us know get to the substance of the issue: certain activities are regarded as
‘treating women as objects’. Well
firstly, an argument condemning activity between consenting adults on the basis
of a simile is a very questionable ethical argument. Many things have a resemblance to something else: if I lift
somebody up from the floor, in a sense I am treating somebody as an object, so
one must go directly to the basis of the similarity that causes concern.
“But
even if we accept this description of the activity: treating some adults as
objects with their consent does not imply we should treat all such adults as
objects regardless of their consent.
“So
we cannot condemn say beauty contests for treating people as objects, but I
believe we can go back to intuition: if our intuition is that the people
present at such activities ‘treat blondes as stupid’ and the like, then we may
feel that even if the event is not intrinsically sexist, in practice that is precisely
what it is. But we must also avoid
making generalisations.”
I think that Mr Murdoch’s
reasons for having (and perhaps not having) Page Three are entirely cynical: he
wants to boost his circulation.
Indeed it is a perversion of democracy that opinion-formers can attract
a readership by such cynical methods – not least those who push their views by
scare-mongering against Trades Unions, and thereby induce working people to act
against their own interests.
I don’t believe in
banning Page Three: if in our idealistic monogamous society the numbers don’t
match, let the remainder of dividing by two pursue their needs privately and
unobtrusively, perhaps towards the end of the paper.
But Mr Murdoch is to my
mind a sexist since he has so little respect for women that he can use them in
this way. I think that if he wants
to drop Page Three, this will also be cynical and disrespectful to women –
particularly the moral self-congratulation - and he should be compelled to run
it, and endure the loss of circulation he fears would happen.
Note on the ethics of
gender rôles: in previous articles I have discussed
(i)
the
importance of rôle combination in gender rôles, probably any rôles – permitting
the learning of skills at a young age,
(ii)
the need for
socialism to relate society and/or customs through skills to the environment.
Skills and technology are
to my mind pivotal to the egalitarian goals of socialism, and I believe that
whatever customs are evolved for effective combination of rôles, there should
not be the stereotyping between the genders at the level of skills and
technology.
But then, if there is no
aptitude stereotyping, so that each subject attracts equal numbers of men and
women, will the sciences attract more women. Or the humanities attract more men?
Martin Prior
The Philosophy Takeaway 'Gender' Issue 38
