Sexism -- what should the term mean?

[judyserenity]

I said: 
>> the very term "racism" implies that some races are treated worse
than others, not just that each race is treated differently.<<

To which Naama replied:
> You don't think that a society in which members of a certain race
are *limited* to certain occupations is deeply racist? I do.<

I definitely wasn't trying to argue that it is possible to treat races
"separately but equally." (I really have no idea whether it's ever
possible to treat races differently, without treating one of them
worse; separate certainly wasn't equal in the US.)  My point was that
the term "racism" definitely carries the connotation of one race being
treated worse, and I think the term "sexism" should carry the
connotation of one sex being treated worse.  Amy was saying that
dividing up tasks based on gender limits both males and females, which
sounded as if she saw sexism as something that might impact men and
women equally.  I don't want the term "sexism" to lose its meaning of
unfair treatment of women, and come to mean limitations that apply to
both genders equally.

Several people here have said that they think "sexism" should refer
both to dividing up work on the basis of gender and to treating women
unfairly, because they think dividing up work on the basis of gender
is intrinsically unfair to women.  If I understand correctly, AV,
Naama, and Cindy feel this way. With this usage, sexism still means
"treating women unfairly", and therefore means basically the same
thing I think it means, although we have a difference of opinion as to
whether dividing up work on the basis of gender is always unfair to
women or not. 


I said:
>> If there is no term that specifically refers to mistreatment of
women, then won't that problem become invisible? <<

I actually ran right into this problem in my last post.  I needed a
word that referred to mistreatment of women in general.  I wanted to
say, "I'm going to talk about the biggie first-- whether division of
labor is the cause of sexism."  But, since sexism is also being
defined as "division of labor", this wouldn't have made any sense.  It
would have sounded as if I were saying, "I'm going to talk about the
biggie first-- whether division of labor is the cause of division of
labor."  Using the term "sexism" to mean both "mistreatment of women"
and "division of labor" can lead to the unexamined assumption that
division of labor is the cause of mistreatment of women.


A. Vulgarweed said:
>>"mistreatment" sounds like what happens when you beat your
cart-horse too hard--i.e., when you overstep your bounds with this
creature that you have a charge to be responsible for. You know, sort
of like the way marital rape used to be a contradiction in terms,
because after all, a husband has a *right*.<<

This is exactly why I want to reserve the term sexism to refer to all
ways in which society treats women worse than men.   There simply
isn't any other satisfactory term.  When I tried to substitute
"mistreatment of women", I appeared to be trivializing things such as
domestic violence. I didn't use the word "oppression" because it's
associated with the failed ideology of Marxism. (And every time
someone says "oppression", I think of Monty Python - I think a lot of
people tune out as soon as the word "oppression" is used.)  Cindy
suggested the term "sexual discrimination", but this already has a
strong implication of job discrimination, and probably makes people
think primarily or solely of denying equal access to jobs, not of
domestic violence and other problems that exist outside the workplace.


I said:
>> I can say right off the bat that radical feminists almost never
define sexism as referring primarily to a gender division of labor.

And AV asked: 
> which schismatic sub-school of radical feminism do you mean? Cause
there are hundreds, and they sure all don't agree with each other on
much of anything.<

A lot of people use the term "radical feminist" to mean extreme
feminist.  However, the term originally meant feminists who want
separate institutions for women.  I think that's still the best
definition of a radical feminist, and it's the one I use.  Separate
institutions for women would make it almost impossible to eliminate
the gender division of labor. So, despite the wide range of radical
feminsits, one thing they have in common is that eliminating the
gender division of labor is almost never their main goal. 


-- Judy