as small as a world and as large as alone, clatterbane: I probably just end up sounding...

6:24pm September 15, 2014

I probably just end up sounding nitpicky sometimes, like with the “not only men” earning warbonnets observation. (Especially since I have no connection to Plains cultures, in that case.)

But, I do just get so aggravated sometimes, especially when it’s assimilation and imposed gender BS getting in the way of people knowing their own history. (Maybe not so much in that particular small example.)

I’m from the Southeast. We appalled the Engish in particular with the gender equality and not such rigid prescribed roles, not to mention all the big scary women who kept fighting them. I mean, they were not shy about screeching about any of it at the time. IME things are *still* not nearly as rigid, after all the attempts to change this.

(And honestly we’re still likely to come across as big, scary, and “unfeminine” by current standards. :-| And get less day to day respect in Greater London than I am used to, no doubt for multiple reasons. But, basic misogyny and different ideas about gender and “deviance” are way up there AFAICT.)

But still, I go to look at info about making traditional blowguns out of river cane. And get all of this gratuitous stuff thrown in about “a boy’s first hunting weapon”, and so on. From officially affiliated sites supposedly dedicated to preserving and promoting culture. It’s alienating.

I mean, where I’m from we all learned to hunt and fish as kids, because that can be very handy knowledge for anybody, and you never know when you might need to rely on that. Besides the fact that being a good hunter has nothing to do with assigned gender, and some people just like to hunt. Same goes for a lot of other skills. If a boy can’t cook enough to make sure he and people relying on him get decently fed, he is badly prepared for life to the level of negligence. I never got discouragement from doing anything because assigned gender until I was in school. In my family at least, girls actually got more training in how to fight effectively, because my Papaw knew we were unfortunately likely to need that at some point. And so on.

Or talking about stickball in male-only terms. Or talking like only men were fighting, or honest to Glod referring to Culture X “housewives” in the past. Where to paraphrase one observation, a SAHM in current terms would have been one cold and hungry lady. Because different responsibilities. Not even going to start in on the whole imposed binary thing, as more important than the actual people making your society.

It’s disturbing, it seems to justify more sexist attitudes now, it props up more authorian BS—and it also erases a lot of contributions both now and in the past.

Besides things being less rigid to begin with, with different ideas about social roles, this crap wipes out all the women who did end up going warrior out of felt necessity and helped make it possible for the modern sexist revisionists to exist.

Half your family has gotten killed, your sister and her kids just got caught up in a slave raid, etc.—so what are you going to do? Right. And who’s even in a position to tell you you can’t? *hollow laughter* This shit happened for centuries, and we made it through largely because people did what needed to be done to help their people get through it. We still do, even if the details have changed somewhat in a lot of cases.

It makes me angry to see a lot of these contributions ignored and swept under the carpet. It also helps obscure the fact that change for the better is even possible, and things don’t have to be the way they are. That is kind of built into the imposed ideologies there: that this is just the way things inevitably work, and some people are just inevitably going to end up on the bottom. It turns self-perpetuating.

I know this stuff isn’t just a problem with our specific culture. It definitely is a problem.