I agree with you. What I’m perplexed by is this implication that the US isn’t one of the handful of countries leading the charge on breaking down gender roles and norms. (In large part because the economic changes you speak of haven’t reached other countries. Gender roles driven by the physical demands of subsistence agriculture are still the reality of life for most people.) As if folks in Asia and Africa are sitting around reading Judith Butler.
I’m not sure that a comparison of US to places like Afghanistan or the African bush are the most apt. Maybe some place that is closer to being a peer in terms of technological advancement / adoption like Iran, Korea, Brazil, Russia, or Singapore would make more sense?
The big irony for the US is that the people who are fretting about the “feminization of men” are the same who deny global warming; while technological advancement, increasing connectedness - i.e. rapid movement of matter and information - and global warming are all one singular spacetime event.
But that is a digression. There are certainly many places with less progressive than the US, though I am not sure how strong the average backlash is across places that are closer to the US in terms of technological adoption.
> I’m not sure that a comparison of US to places like Afghanistan or the African bush are the most apt. Maybe some place that is closer to being a peer in terms of technological advancement / adoption like Iran, Korea, Brazil, Russia, or Singapore would make more sense?
Those countries have far more conservative views on gender roles, among ordinary people, than the US. I don’t think there’s a single country in Asia or Africa where the median view on gender roles wouldn’t be to the right of your median American Republican.
> But that is a digression. There are certainly many places with less progressive than the US, though I am not sure how strong the average backlash is across places that are closer to the US in terms of technological adoption.
“Progressive” American views on gender would be outside the Overton window in most of the world. There is no “backlash” because there is no meaningful effort to mainstream progressive ideas on gender. There is nothing to react to.
I’m really not sure what you are trying to achieve by misrepresenting the social norms in those countries.
The US is currently experiencing a hangover from the social effects of the cold war. The intentional construction of a christo-national subjective identity as a counterbalance to the atheistic Russian communists continues to reverberate in the socio-political sphere. There are some obvious contradictions when this meets the business world like, "shouldn't businesses with feminine cultural practices outcompete masculinized corpos?", but I'd argue this is currently being played out in trenches of office politics in the micro and labor vs capital in the macro. If we embark on a process of self-selection into dichotomous gendered organizations I'd expect this to crystalize into more tangible, but it's too early to tell and business/orgs don't have coherent messaging even if they wanted to leverage this into an advantage so it ends up being sublimated into typical ineffectual neoliberal posturing.
Traditional gender roles aren’t a creation of “Christo-nationalistic subjective identity.”
Maybe that’s what’s responsible for OP’s confusion—the belief that Reagan invented these notions about gender, and they’re not near universal outside a handful of countries populated by descendants of Europeans?
Yup, even the "atheistic Russian communists" mentioned in parent post have held on to remarkably traditional ideas about gender roles, and this was in a context of promoting high female achievement in education, work and society in general.
