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What are constructs?

We live in a society with culture. The way we interact with each other is based on certain conventions, consensus, or norms, scripts and ideology/discourse. To say something is constructed, is to say it is forged – which has a double meaning according to John Caputo’s reading of post-structuralists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, forged in the sense of create something ourselves to serve a social (i.e. more than one person) purpose and that what is created is a forgery, it is not a natural necessity and is in some sense, fake, false or contingent.

Examples of social constructs

Race and gender are social constructs. Simone De Beauvoir famously declared ‘one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman’. Apart from the separation between biological sex and gender, what De Beauvoir is getting at is, ‘woman’ is something girls are taught to be from an early age and throughout their adult lives too. Another way to perceive race and gender is in terms of roles.
 

In cultures where pink is considered the appropriate colour for a baby girl and blue for a baby boy, babies become accustomed from birth to spending time wearing or even surrounded by, those colours. This makes it hard to know whether any preferences expressed later on are hard-wired. But a study from 2011 tried to get closer to discovering what’s going on. When one-year-old girls and boys were shown pairs of identical objects such as bracelets, pill boxes and picture frames, but with one object pink and another of a second colour, they were no more likely to choose pink than any other colour. But after the age of two the girls started to like pink and, by four, boys were determined in their rejection of pink. This is the precise time when toddlers start to become aware of their gender, to talk about it and even to look around them to see what defines boy and what defines a girl. But just like adults, even very small children show biases towards their own group.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141117-the-pink-vs-blue-gender-myth

Other experiments have been conducted whereby, a group of women who were well versed in feminist theory, were presented with babies in either blue or pink clothing. The colours were not fixed to sex or gender, some of the boys were wearing pink, some girls blue. The babies that were wearing pink were held closely to the chest, protectively, smothered and the babies wearing blue were held outwardly, projective and towards the world.

This fantastic PDF by No Borders describes from a biologically born female perspective, how she was treated differently than her brother and also by her father and mother. The same goes for her brother, social constructs of gender apply to men, boys, males too.

http://imaginenoborders.org/pdf/zines/UnderstandingPatriarchy.pdf

I was always more interested in challenging patriarchy than my brother was because it was the system that was always leaving me out of things that I wanted to be part of. In our family life of the fifties, marbles were a boy’s game. My brother had inherited his marbles from men in the family; he had a tin box to keep them in. All sizes and shapes, marvelously colored, they were to my eye the most beautiful objects. We played together with them, often with me aggressively Understanding Patriarchy bell hooks clinging to the marble I liked best, refusing to share. When Dad was at work, our stay-at- home mom was quite content to see us playing marbles together. Yet Dad, looking at our play from a patriarchal perspective, was disturbed by what he saw. His daughter, aggressive and competitive, was a better player than his son. His son was passive; the boy did not really seem to care who won and was willing to give over marbles on demand. Dad decided that this play had to end, that both my brother and I needed to learn a lesson about appropriate gender roles. One evening my brother was given permission by Dad to bring out the tin of marbles. I announced my desire to play and was told by my brother that “girls did not play with marbles,” that it was a boy’s game. This made no sense to my four- or five-year-old mind, and I insisted on my right to play by picking up marbles and shooting them. Dad intervened to tell me to stop. I did not listen. His voice grew louder and louder. Then suddenly he snatched me up, broke a board from our screen door, and began to beat me with it, telling me, “You’re just a little girl. When I tell you to do something, I mean for you to do it.” He beat me and he beat me, wanting me to acknowledge that I understood what I had done. His rage, his violence captured everyone’s attention. Our family sat spellbound, rapt before the pornography of patriarchal violence. After this beating I was banished—forced to stay alone in the dark. Mama came into the bedroom to soothe the pain, telling me in her soft southern voice, “I tried to warn you. You need to accept that you are just a little girl and girls can’t do what boys do.”

Social construction could not be more blatantly explained. Other examples include: 
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[*]Women are taught how to defend themselves if they end up in a rape situation, usually by holding keys in-between fingers, or yelling ‘fire’ instead of rape, as rape may be ignored.
[*]If women are raped, they are usually advised to forget about it and to ‘not make a fuss’, what were they doing in that place at that time with those people anyway? As if they ‘should have known better’, after all, ‘boys will be boys’.
[*]Women respond to clutter in homes differently too.
[*]Women as very young girls are repeatedly shown a script of being a mother as their ultimate purpose in existence.
[/list]
As I pointed out in another thread about patriarchy, which is the social construct which subordinates women and privileges men in society overall, the jobs market and paid employment has an asymmetry which is down to many years of social conditioning about what is considered a man’s job and a woman’s job, women suffer disadvantages due to domestic responsibilities and child care, are more vulnerable in marriage arrangements and many, many other norms that define woman from the outside.

Race is pretty much the same. Throughout history, dark skinned people, mainly of African descent, were enslaved via the Atlantic Slave Trade and were segregated in society, they could only ever have jobs that nobody else wanted to do such as janitor work, housekeeping etc, or unskilled hard labor of all kinds.

Breaking the constructs

As these constructs are forged and are forgeries, they can be changed, we can improve conditions in society that alleviate the constraints on race and gender. This can happen from the outside, or there can be self-determination through care of the self  which sets the active role of self-determination into action and projects of resistance and change occur.

In non-racist and non-sexist environments however, the roles can still seep through as much of what roles are is deeply unconscious and very subtle.

[kFoyauextlH]

What a sickening story about beating a little girl with a construct (the forged piece of wood).
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I don’t think there is any way to really talk it out with someone capable of hurting a little girl. I think the only way to deal with people like that is to terrorize (for pleasure) then execute such people and their accomplices (the mother) and then the whole society if they decide the torture and execution of the parents was in bad taste.

I don’t believe people simply have the right to live just because they do. Human neings largely happily kill diseases and infections, why not those spreading them as well. They have the right to try to save themselves, but not to actually be spared. I’m really only satisfied by the idea of utterly terrorizing and killing certain people. I celebrate the deaths of people too, sometimes its the best news ever to hear the menaces are finally dead, after knowing what they did and do, and I hate Nature and God and Justice or the lack thereof for not killing these scumbags earlier. They keep spreading vileness until the day they die. They also often wish me dead without justification just because I am a default bad guy in their views or a pest. These people are womanizers and terrorists. I would, if I could, happily terrorize and end their lives, but do not do so because of consequences and fears and not wanting to get in trouble.

If I were a justice ghost though, unable to be stopped, I would visit them, and question them, and in their horror of the supernatural they would shudder and admit to their crimes. I would then make them out of fear change their ways until such a time as the children are fine, and if the person slips up either a reminder or death for them. That is only because sending children into child services can be another mess, really its better to just have all these humans killed once and for all or utterly enslaved. Everyone cries oh no. Why? They consider themselves the sort of people who want to retain their freedom to take a piece of wood and beat a little girl with it? Yeah, anyone who wants to maintain that freedom needs to be in chains or dead themselves.
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I hate that she calls her Mama. Sick. In the case of this girl I’d try to convince her to take her own life since she is polluting my world as well now that she has become so damaged. Her crime is calling the accomplice to her beating Mama.

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I don’t think there is any way to really talk it out with someone capable of hurting a little girl. I think the only way to deal with people like that is to terrorize (for pleasure) then execute such people and their accomplices (the mother) and then the whole society if they decide the torture and execution of the parents was in bad taste.

How to change constructs is a mammoth of a task, but I am ever the optimist that if we can perform new roles that are less constrictive, they will congeal enough over time to develop much freer forms. We are either happy or unhappy with roles and those who are unhappy will probably do more to change them for the better.

I don’t believe people simply have the right to live just because they do. Human neings largely happily kill diseases and infections, why not those spreading them as well. They have the right to try to save themselves, but not to actually be spared. I’m really only satisfied by the idea of utterly terrorizing and killing certain people. I celebrate the deaths of people too, sometimes its the best news ever to hear the menaces are finally dead, after knowing what they did and do, and I hate Nature and God and Justice or the lack thereof for not killing these scumbags earlier. They keep spreading vileness until the day they die. They also often wish me dead without justification just because I am a default bad guy in their views or a pest. These people are womanizers and terrorists. I would, if I could, happily terrorize and end their lives, but do not do so because of consequences and fears and not wanting to get in trouble.

Meh, I don’t know, but most of the time this only leads to tit for tat and only strengthens the validity of certain norms.

If I were a justice ghost though, unable to be stopped, I would visit them, and question them, and in their horror of the supernatural they would shudder and admit to their crimes. I would then make them out of fear change their ways until such a time as the children are fine, and if the person slips up either a reminder or death for them. That is only because sending children into child services can be another mess, really its better to just have all these humans killed once and for all or utterly enslaved. Everyone cries oh no. Why? They consider themselves the sort of people who want to retain their freedom to take a piece of wood and beat a little girl with it? Yeah, anyone who wants to maintain that freedom needs to be in chains or dead themselves.

I love a Christmas carol 🙂
 

I hate that she calls her Mama. Sick. In the case of this girl I’d try to convince her to take her own life since she is polluting my world as well now that she has become so damaged. Her crime is calling the accomplice to her beating Mama.

She’s from the Southern States I believe, but yeah, often abusers have the most respect given to them.

The good news is that little girl grew to be an important voice that spreads awareness of patriarchy.

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