>>5470The tribe I'm from as an American Indian historically had boys and girls learning a lot of the same skills and had several professions that were mixed-sex. Men and women did mostly work separate jobs, but that separation is a little different to what you see in Christianized society. There was more fluidity to gender roles, but not a whole lot of it. Gender roles were based on a strict, sex-determined binary with socially sanctioned exception given based on certain conditions, but that was usually the desires of a child's parents than on anything religious. Although, there were tribes where that kind of thing was based on religious experience.
I think this kind of points at what is a bit of a misconception on your end about how gender was thought of historically. To the best of my knowledge, actual 3rd genders aren't really a thing as you suggest, but rather gender and sex were intrinsically linked if not seen as the same and were absolutely grounded in a normative binary. What gender you were was principally about filling a social role more than anything. It's like a bunch of ritual and tradition meant for that is given a spiritual ground after the fact but that spiritual ground in turn influences how the tradition evolves. I do think that common religion and spirituality is important, but I think the tradition and culture is much more so. It's also kind of impossible at this point in globalization to somehow fix the matter in that respect. I think we have to buckle down an embrace the sort of "melting pot" idea of America in a respectful way that also builds trust and community to see any kind of upturn in this "gender nihilism" thing.
>>5488>To be more clear, it is not racist per se, but rather it is clearly fetishization of attributes from non-Western cultures grounded in racist European perceptions of other cultures that arose during the Enlightenment and later. It is a bad take because that grounding is one of some pretty big falsehoods.I think you're being a little too on guard here. The noble savage myth is definitely a big problem in white society, but I think it's pretty clear that the OP is talking about the past in general than about just non-white cultures even if they are influenced by their perceptions of
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