How to explain gender roles and related social norms to an antisocial rude rough savage genderless -but not sexless- creature?

In my world there is a race of extremely savage hominids. They are quite violent and ruthless with extremely barebones social structures. Their interactions with each other are limited to a handful, fights for territory, mating, raising the offspring, and they occasionally form bands around a strong leader that inspires fear on the subordinates, but everybody benefits as they get the numbers needed to raid farms and human settlements. In short their 'society' is as sophisticated as bear society, with the occasional formation of hordes. In short they aren't particularly empathetic, they treat each other with extremely violence and essentially their lives follow prison rules. They show no mercy for the weak, and even mothers will abandon a child that doesn't grow strong quickly enough. This treatment extends to every single member of their species, every single one. They all are equal opportunity jerks. As a result of this they never developed any idea or notion of gender. They still mate and the females raise their young -for a few years at least-, but beyond that they make absolutely no difference between the male and the female of the species.

Now a bunch of teenagers -they are all young heroes in training- have caught one of them. After many unsuccessful attempts they have convinced this hominid to give humans, civilization, and this idea of teamwork a chance. They have also shown that if the Hominid ever steps out of bounds, they have the combined ability to stop him. The hominid was fascinated by this and no longer will try to kill and skin them, but this still leaves a harsh, abrasive, and unsensitive personality to deal with. And the guy wastes no chance to be verbally -and even physically- abusive towards them. The problem is that he's specially nasty with many of the girls on the team. Not all of the girls on the team, one has a way to neutralize him, and another could break his arm if she wanted, but the rest of them consists on a squishy mage, a master of disguise, a quirky sleuth and a spoiled sweet heiress with sniper training. And they don't particularly appreciate this, one of them tries to explain him why that is wrong, but I have no idea on how she can do that in a way that: a) actually convinces him b) doesn't reinforce gender stereotypes, c) is something she can actually come up with, she is 17, not college educated, hails from a third-world country and this happens in the midnineties,

In short, how can she convince the guy that violence against women is wrong without the whole exchange being sexist? (And well most of the social rules built around gender roles so he can function in society)

Why does this have to be gendered? I think if this mixed-gender team has seen real combat, it's not particularly anachronistic or improbable for them to develop the worldview that all violence has consequences and hurts everybody involved, regardless of gender. Teaching someone that it's not okay to fight women in particular is inherently sexist, no matter how it's phrased, and it implies the equally sexist notion that it's okay to fight men whenever.

In addition, if his society doesn't have a concept of gender, why is he treating the girls the worst? It would make more sense with his worldview if he treated the noncombatants or smaller individuals regardless of gender poorly, and not just all of the girls.

But let's say that the team's noncombatants consist solely of girls anyways, and literally all of the guys are obvious fighters, because of how the teens' society is. One neat thing you could do with this is some Deliberate Values Dissonance.

The dude's picking on the noncombatants because he sees them as physically weaker than the others, all of whom happen to be girls. The one girl, not realizing that the dude is concerned only with their strength and not their gender, gives him a talking-to about how it's bad to fight women because human society doesn't expect women to be fighters, or something to that effect, and so they're excluded from the strength hierarchy. The dude goes "alright, that's dumb, but okay". Later that day, the dude starts a bunch of fights with the other guys on the team while they're trying to get ready for possible combat the next day, and everyone's like, "WTF, dude," and he's like, "what, she told me not to fight women, so I'm fighting you guys instead to establish dominance!" Cue an angry argument between girl and the other dudes, and they all walk away learning a painful lesson about how different their two societies are.

edited 13th May '18 6:56:06 PM by CrystalGlacia

That is actually the reason he picks on them, he sees them as small, weak, and worthless. The girl in question is still a rookie to the team at this point. She didn't exactly sign up for it (About half the teens got forcibly recruited by the team mentor, this girl is one of them), and isn't used to be treated as harshly. She isn't even combat trained, being there mostly for her being a magic user, a lousy one at that.

So far I cannot think of any arguments she could have. So far the only arguments she has are "You cannot treat me like that. I'm a girl, it is not okay to hurt girls!". And when prompted to explain why. She fails to come with an answer. She is not the most enlightened of people either, and the story is meant to happen twenty years ago.

And well, the group has a mixed approach towards violence. Their mentor's mentor is a sadist that relishes on violence. A guy on the team has no problems fighting his own sister. Another is apathetic to it. One of them is a Martial Pacifist, but most of them come from screwed up families and violent backgrounds or are troubled in some way.

Crystal's 'dissonance' suggestion is good.

Obviously, 'sexism' isn't the only challenge in trying to deal with the 'capturing and taming' of a 'savage' race. Such imagery also has a long and problematic history.

If you can't see how the female would argue 'convincingly,' that might be an acceptable approach itself. Perhaps they merely express the culture clash in a knee-jerk manner, being accustomed to their own social norms. They might be taken aback by the divergence, without being used to it or easily responding to it.

Having her 'convince' the person might come off as overtly moralistic, and too close to a 'taming' plot. Instead, perhaps have them 'talk past' each other - the captive doesn't see it in gender terms, however she assumes that it does. The captive could seem to agree in part, however that is merely her take on it. If it seems slightly 'convincing,' perhaps the captive person is only pretending interest in order to extract relevant information. In addition, the person is captive and might not be that likely to avoid aggression with its captors. A further problem is that their relation to the females is not the same as that of the males native to the society. The ideas governing the latter might not seem relevant to the former.

edited 14th May '18 10:18:47 AM by zeroflyingwherever

If the civilized people come from a society where girls aren't expected to be strong, just say so.

He may think is stupid, but it's the truth. What he gotta learn is that he won't make her strong by treating her badly, and if that makes him think she's a liability because of that, explain to him that she brings other types of strenght to the group, and if he wants to understand the concept of teamwork he gotta learn not to treat badly the people he relies upon, especially if they're physically weaker than them; and this may sound bad, but even though some people may let themselves be dominated this way, other people when treated this way may just wait for the best moment to backstab you for being a jerk.

One thing that people haven't mentioned yet is that in a group that is supposed to be a team, this kind of jackass behavior, is, well, jackass behavior that contributes to poor team moral and lack of cohesion. Someone's just beating up on literally anyone he thinks is weak is disrupting the team group.

You don't just have issues of sexism here, you have issues of a society that values teamwork versus the guy who's used to beating people into dominance when in a group. Its The collective versus the individual. If you want to avoid sexism, you can very clearly point out that his behavior is making the team collectively weaker.

It might even be best to have a different character address the problem. Like, say, the team mentor, who's supposed to be mentoring these kids. Or whichever kid's supposed to be the team leader here, since it would be his or the mentor's responsibility handle such an obvious fucking problem like this.

And frankly, if the boys also gang up on the girl because she's trying to address the fact that someone is bullying her, however poorly she does it, it kind of makes them the jackasses for not doing anything earlier about the dude who's bullying her, and apparently half the fucking team, going by your description. Like, that's an obvious disruption that someone with authority would notice, here. Team leaders that don't address that are poor ones.