There can be some things in society that do not appeal to women. There are certainly things that women find appealing that most men are not at all interested in.
I always kind of thought that young geeks used comic books to escape their reality. This is just a guess, but could it be that some geeks are awkward around women because females weren't nice to them during their adolescence? Sex hormone levels peak at around age 17 for men, senior year of high school. Is it really that unexpected that men that get no positive female attention during their sexual prime don't embrace women exploring geek hobbies?
Perhaps the focus of all these stupid gender articles should be on encouraging young women not to alienate a large subset of people. I would be willing to bet that if geeks were more accepted at an earlier age, many of the perceived gender issues would disappear.
Sure. My girlfriend can randomly go up to random people and play with their babies, while my doing so is likely to get me arrested. A mother has the presumption of getting custody in a contentious divorce, etc. Nobody would take a sexual harassment complaint against a woman seriously.
But you know what? In pure economic terms, I'd take male privilege over female privilege any day of the week. I can't remember the last time a woman was sexually harassing me but nobody at work would take me seriously. Negotiating salaries, gunning for promotions, making trade-offs between career and family--these are things with huge economic impact that affects everyone and women have a disadvantage in these areas because of perceptions.
In pure economic terms, what price do we put on "forced to feel like a moral leper"?
Yes:
http://www.the-niceguy.com/articles/Checklist.html
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2008/06/08/female-privil...
http://mensresistance.wordpress.com/female-privilege-checkli...
(Note: I don't necessarily agree with or endorse everything on every one of these lists, but the point is very much made.)
It appears that I really never think about gender bias.
Murder is an incredibly rare occurrence in most countries and social environments. On the other hand, women are a huge majority among rape victims, and this is not exceptional: 5 to 10% of all women are sexually abused at some point (depends upon the country, again).
> Perhaps the focus of all these stupid gender articles should be on encouraging young women not to alienate a large subset of people.
Perhaps the focus of people like you should be to think about your attitude, just like this article conveniently talked about? Your arrogance and close-mindedness are astounding. Oh, before you ask, I'm a white, straight male too.
Rape makes up only 6% of violent crimes, and men are much more commonly the victim of violent crimes than women. In fact, excluding rape, as the severity of violent crimes increase, so does the probability that the victim is male.
And couldn't I also say that, while rape is relatively rare, men are over twice as likely to be the victim of severe physical domestic violence (the ratio of murder to rape and rape to severe physical domestic violence is the same). Or that perpetration rates for physical violence as a whole are significantly higher for women than men.
I personally think that these are all bogus arguments because they trivialize rape. At the same time, trivializing murder is no better than trivializing rape, unless you believe that men are expendable.
Perhaps the focus of people like you should be to think about your attitude, just like this article conveniently talked about? Your arrogance and close-mindedness are astounding. Oh, before you ask, I'm a white, straight male too.
Nice ad hominem.
Most victims of violent crimes are known offenders or their relatives. An overwhelming majority of offenders are male (see the proportion of male vs female in jail).
> Nice ad hominem.
It's ad personam if you want. You go straight to the usual tactic of pretending that it's the victim fault. Take some time to imagine yourself in the situations represented before being a judgemental jerk.
See this post for a good explanation: http://hugoboy.typepad.com/hugo_schwyzer/2004/09/guilty_unti...
First of all, the obvious point is that women's intuition, while not entirely the stuff of myth, is not so powerful that it can automatically separate "good guys" from the bad. No woman can walk down the street and as she passes a man, know with certainty that he isn't a threat. Given the high incidence of rape and assault and harassment and other forms of mistreatment, a woman would be a fool to leave herself continually vulnerable. The old adage "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" seems to apply here. When a simple smile is so frequently misunderstood and construed as a sexual invitation, American women generally do have to operate on the assumption that men are guilty until proven innocent.
Is this really an acceptable story that somehow illustrates your point? It seems like it could trivially be rewritten into something incredibly racist. If that is the case, than isn't this actually very sexist. But really, why would anyone expect random women to smile at them?
And how are women the victim? Because some products are not designed for them, but are instead designed to appeal to teenage boys? What if I feel bad because the quizzes in Seventeen magazine do not appeal to me, and instead give teenage girls ideas about the way men should be that I disagree with. Do you think this quiz (http://www.seventeen.com/fun/quizzes/celebrity/summer-movie-...) is sexist?
No one is even going to listen to a man complaining he has been raped, so I very highly doubt the validity of those numbers.
The wage gap is also curious because these days it results mostly from men and women doing different kinds of work, and campaigners demand totally different solutions for high-status jobs than they do for low-status ones. For stuff like tech industry startups there are lots of campaigns to include more women. On the other hand, if you take street-side trash collection (another job which is also largely male) instead there are campaigns for women to get the same pay for doing "equivalent" jobs like office cleaning.
Now, trash collection of this kind is an awful lot more dangerous than cleaning offices and this is both why it's better paid and why there are few women doing it; for various reasons people get more upset about a woman dying in a horrific industrial accident than a man so employers have an incentive to discourage women, and there's not so much social pressure for them to get dangerous jobs. Equality would require making people care more about men dying or less about women, both of which benefit men rather than women, so feminists go for the unequal option of paying women for doing less than men instead.
Edit: For example, if you play video games take a close look at the gender of the mooks that you kill en-masse. That's just one of the subtle messages saying that men are disposable in mass media.
Men don't earn more money for being men (not any more at least, if it was ever true):
> according to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group. http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00....
Female genital mutilation happens as well in some countries. And the majority of cases it's much worse than the male equivalent. FGM often results in all or part of the clitoris being removed. That would be like all or part of the glans of a penis being removed. (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_genital_mutilation#Class...)
(As an aside, I think male genital mutilation happens more in the USA. Men in Europe of christian ethnicity don't usually get this done. Tis an odd the cultural practices)
As a circumcised male, I generally believe that FGM is much worse than the male equivalent, even though it is much more rare in developed countries. At the same time, I wonder if the facts that most circumcised men have no basis for comparison, and that the procedure is so common, colors that bias. The foreskin has over 20,000 nerve endings whereas the clitoris only has about 8,000. Men that have undergone foreskin restorations sometimes report vastly improved sexual sensitivity and much more intense orgasms.
As I said, I believe the female variant is much worse, but it does cause me to pause and consider that this may be caused by female privilege. I cannot help but wonder if my belief that there would be outrage if roles were reversed is valid.
Female genital mutilation is pretty explicitly about controlling female sexuality in a way that makes women more obedient male property.
Circumcision, though, seems to be a religious thing from a very patriarchal culture. The modern justification for which is hygiene and/or health, and sometimes it's definitely medically necessary.
So I'm not seeing how circumcision is evidence of a gender power differential.
It doesn't result from female privilege, it is considered a non-issue and discounted because of female privilege. There is plenty of evidence to support that, including the fact that FGM is considered a larger issue although it has effectively been eliminated in the west.
Consider this, if a father wanted to have his newborn daughters' clitoral hood removed because he didn't like the way it looked, he would be rightly ignored. If a mother wants to have her newborn son circumcised because she doesn't like the way uncut penises look, he will be circumcised. No matter how you want to slice it, both are genital mutilations. The difference is, one is ridiculous, uncommon and illegal, and the other is ridiculous, common, legal, and widespread.
Female genital mutilation is pretty explicitly about controlling female sexuality in a way that makes women more obedient male property.
It does happen almost exclusively in Islamic areas, and some religious leaders do mandate it, so I'm not too sure about that. In any case, religion is a poor reason to justify mutilation. Circumcision was performed on male slaves to make them "less likely to rape white women", so I also am not too sure about the underlying reason for male circumcision. Both practices seem kind of barbaric.
Circumcision, though, seems to be a religious thing from a very patriarchal culture. The modern justification for which is hygiene and/or health, and sometimes it's definitely medically necessary.
The hygiene and health arguments are bogus, and have been proven to be bogus. If women were having parts of sexual organs removed for "hygiene" reasons, it would not continue for a moment.
So I'm not seeing how circumcision is evidence of a gender power differential.
The fact that nobody questions male circumcision which is forced on over 50% of males born in the United States today, while FGM, which is much less widespread largely occurring only in Africa and the middle east, garners considerable attention provides evidence of a power differential. It clearly shows that male health issues are undervalued, even in relation to obscure female issues, reinforcing the matriarchal view that men are inherently less valuable than women.
Sure. And if you do that in the spirit of saying, "gosh, these are also nice problems to fix one day", that's great. But mostly people bring that argument up in the sense of "Gosh, your life is not 100% shitty, so I'm going to go back to pretending everything is fair now."
This argument is so common that it appears on the "Derailing for Dummies" guide: http://derailingfordummies.com/#butbut (Note that they include as an example your false equivalence between circumcision and female genital mutilation.)
Also, that there are reasons somebody might be a sexist jerk does not excuse them being sexist jerks. Suppose there's a correlation between sex hormone levels, lack of female attention, and rape. Do we say, "Gosh, that's not unexpected" and tell women to be more accommodating?
Honestly, your attempt at victim-blaming here is kinda repulsive. There's no particular reason to believe that the sort of sexism described by the article is experienced by the people who failed to be nice enough to (by which you mean: have sex with) the guys who are being jerks. And if they were the same people, then I'm still not seeing any justification: your theory appears to be that guys are somehow entitled to sexual attention just for being guys. Which, hello, is exactly the sort of sexism driven by male privilege the article's author is calling out.
This is really incredible, "Because the removal of a tiny flap of skin is entirely comparable to the crippling mutilation many young girls are subjected to.." Seriously? Why is the removal of a "tiny flap of skin" from a vulva a crippling mutilation, whereas the removal of the foreskin, which has over 2.5 times the number of nerve endings, no big deal? And also, it's not a false equivalency since I did not bring up FGM since it is irrelevant to a discussion that is not centered around third world issues, whereas male genital mutilation is, seeing as how over 50% of males born in the US are still altered. Or are you actually suggesting that any discussion of male genital mutilation is irrelevant because males are not important, or at least not as important as females? Or perhaps that female genital mutilation is so much more important that it is unthinkable to address male genital mutilation at all so long as it is happening to a female somewhere on earth?
And I actually fully believe that the female variant is worse (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3364906), but this language is incredibly inflammatory.
