Is affirmative sexism a good thing?

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You mean like constantly whining that "women have it easier?" Seriously, you can't swing a dead cat around Wrong Planet without hitting a moron blubbering about how much better things are for women.

And I'm still waiting for directions to this magical land where I, as a woman, don't have to work, get free money, and have absolutely no expectations placed on me.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHAEeRbnpe0[/youtube]

Your links and my links do not contradict each other. The articles you link to assert that men are taken more seriously in academia and the workplace, which is not nearly the same as saying that professors and employers (and judges, as I believe you are implying) believe they have no agency.

Pointing out that men are treated better in some areas does not negate my argument, because I never said men didn't have certain advantages. Just that women also have their own advantages.

I have noticed a trend in feminist arguments. Every advantage men have comes from an unfair perception of women. Every advantage women have also comes from an unfair perception of women. Why do men do better in work environments? Cause we hate women. Why do women do better in the courts? Cause we hate women.

I could just as easily take mens advantages and use them as an example of how men are oppressed. "Well, the only reason men get better jobs is to facilitate their role as primary provider. That is to say, wage slaves who spend the majority of their time toiling in order to support a woman and her children (and I say hers because the second she decides to leave he will, almost automatically, lose most of his rights to them). Really, all these raises and promotions, while they may be good for the individual, are just another way of holding the group back."

But I don't argue that. Because its nonsense. Because we don't know anyone's motivation for hiring a man over a woman. In the same way that we don't know a judges motivation for being more lenient with a woman.

Either way, the reason for those advantages actually matters little. The fact is that they exist. I doubt that many women, after receiving an exceptionally light sentence, are upset about the assumption that they lack agency. Just as I doubt that many men, after receiving a raise or promotion, are upset about the assumption that it is their responsibility to be sole provider for a family.



Couldn't find any evidence about that specific circumstance. But one of the studies I linked to did find a much stronger general in-group bias among women.

Here are links to decent summaries of that study

http://www.apa.org/monitor/dec04/women.aspx

https://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/2004/041213.Goodwin.gender.html

I don't think that either of those things have to do with "hate," but rather with a general lack of respect. If you think of women as being child-like, you don't punish them as harshly, and you don't hire them for important positions. The explanation is parsimonious and fits the data.

Do you think that she isn't working, too? Isn't it two wage-slaves, toiling to support *their* children? The only true 'women (or men) of leisure' are trust-fund brats who, if they do decide to have children, hire someone else to raise them. Working-class women are not any more lazy than working-class men, and you betray a profound ignorance to imply that they are.

Not if he puts as much time and effort into raising them as she does. Custody battles favor "the primary caretaker," not "the woman."

You don't give someone a raise out of disrespect.

It matters if we find the inequality galling, and want to change it. Don't you want more equality in the courts? Don't you want equality in the workplace?

Gotta love how the author chalks up the results implicitly to female vanity and explicitly to an intrinsic female logical fallacy.
Thanks for the links, though; it's an interesting study.

If you think of someone as childlike, that is lacking in responsibility (or agency), you don't give them the immense responsibility of caring for children. Your explanation only fits the data if you ignore a big chunk of said data. You can't cherry-pick the areas where women are at a disadvantage and extrapolate from them what people's attitudes toward women will be in every other situation.



I said nothing about working class or any other class, nor that women are lazy. I pointed out that women do not have the same societal pressure to be providers put on them as men do. A woman can choose to work or choose to stay with the kids, depending on the family's needs, and not be considered a failure. For a man, there is only one choice.

And why the defensiveness? Why the assumption that I am calling women lazy when I point out one disadvantage of being a man?



Didn't you just say, just one paragraph ago, that women are working outside of the home just as much as men?



And you don't let them off the hook for a crime out of disrespect either.



I think changing the behavior is more important. The change in attitude will follow.

Last edited by mds_02 on 25 Jan 2014, 1:35 am, edited 2 times in total.

Yeah, I agree about that bit. The study demonstrates that the bias exists, what it does not do is demonstrate the reason for it. If the author wanted to discuss the reasons behind that bias, there should have been a separate study to determine those reasons. Or, you know, maybe just asking the participants afterwards what their reasoning was.

You do if you gender caring for children as less important, less deserving of good pay, not serious, etc. In this very thread, women who are homemakers and whose main job is to care for children are described as freeloaders who mooch off of the work of men. Which is it?

You referred to "...wage slaves who spend the majority of their time toiling in order to support a woman and her children..."
which, to me, strongly implies both working class and lazy, non-working women who can't support themselves.

For the majority of women, there is also only one choice. Most women, even in dual-parent families, cannot afford to not work. In addition, I (and most feminists) strongly believe that men should have the option to stay home with the children as well, if the family circumstances and the personalities of the parents in question make that the best decision for the family. It's not generally feminists who criticize stay-at-home-dads.

yes, I did. What does that say to you? Ever hear of the second shift? I certainly saw it with my parents.

On this, we will have to disagree - unless you are better at finding data on cause than I was.
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changing behavior is easier if you know why people behave in certain ways.

This is a self-selecting community of people with a specific mental disorder and, as has been pointed out many times on the L&D forum, a magnet for men whose feelings of personal powerlessness have led them to rampant misogyny.  You can't take the attitudes of people on this board as reflective of those of the general public.



Okay, now I can see how you interpreted it that way but it's not what I meant.  

I said specifically that I was not making that argument.  I was using it to illustrate the way that an advantage can be twisted to appear as a disadvantage.  Which is what I believe you are doing wrt the whole "leniency in the courts" thing.



Never said it was feminists who do that.  I'm not trying to put blame on feminism for the ways in which the world sucks. What I'm trying to say though is that feminist thought and feminist ideas have real influence out in the world, real influence on peoples decisions, even influence on government policy.

And the idea that our society is inherently anti-female, a belief in "male privilege" without any recognition of corresponding "female privilege," which is pushed primarily by feminists, gets in the way of us as a society addressing those issues (some of which are extremely serious, literally life or death matters) which primarily affect males.

And one example of that in action is the tendency to do what I described above.  To take an advantage that women have and attempt to present it as an example of the way women are oppressed.  And that, as an unintended side-effect, deflects attention away from the real question.  The real question being how we fix this situation in which one gender is getting screwed.

Situations where men are thought better of, or more capable than, or are shown more sympathy are rightly called sexist toward women.  Situations where the opposite is true are thought of as "benevolent" or "affirmative" sexism directed at women. Which is BS, its time to call that what it really is, sexism toward men.



I think its easier to change behavior first.  Which is counterintuitive, I know.  I just typed out like twenty pages explaining why but, not wanting to get so far off topic, I left it out.  If you care to know why I believe that, feel free to ask.  Otherwise, we can just agree to disagree about that too.

Last edited by mds_02 on 25 Jan 2014, 5:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

....prepare for LKLs snort! And asking for links and more evidence please! *prepares to hide in his bunker* But seriously though sexism against men does exist whether we acknowledge it or not, sometimes it is the result of women who were oppressed by men over time decide to give men back the same medicine and give the media to ok sexism and emasculation towards men to allow empowerment for themselves. This leads to radical feminisms ideas "two wrongs make a right men havent learned their lesson yet so lets keep drilling it in their heads more and more to the point they feel they are useless and worthless, lets let them know we dont need them or want them for they have no value. Once they feel emasculated and worthless our mission is accomplished for they must bow to our feet we are superior to men we are smarter than men and all men are stupid!" Ya know that kinda deal. Now lets ask the Tumblr Feminists![youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS-yXY__pAo[/youtube]

http://translate.google.com/translate?s ... %2F3790558

http://translate.google.com/translate?h ... 09%26a%3D3

http://www.cfids.org/sparkcfs/women.pdf

Men still work 3,5 hours more every week (with everything taken into consideration) than women do. Despite this fact, women get diagnosed with CFS four times as often as men, and it will almost automatically give you disability pensions, even when you do not really have it.

There are plenty of ordinary looking women on Facebook who are employed in low paying jobs that still live in expensive houses and drive late model cars.



http://translate.google.com/translate?s ... 7722667%2F



Non sequitur.



Women are four times more likely to get a CFS diagnosis, despite working less. CFS is one of the most common reasons behind disability pensions among young people. If you're 20 years old and have never done anything more challenging than high school, then you do not have CFS, unless you get mononucleosis before the final exam, in which case you can recover from it. If you're a single parent who works overtime to make ends meet for a decade, you're a more likely candidate.

If you want evidence, then just search for "women sick leave" or "women disability pensions" on Google.



You can make a lot of money by blogging if someone is willing to sponsor you.



http://business.time.com/2008/02/05/why ... e_sick_le/



Then we agree on that. More female doctors, lawyers and engineers would be a good thing--and this is getting more common.



Explain. White people get away with more than black people; this is exlusively harmful to black people and not to white people.

The idea that caring for children isn't as important as "men's work" is quite common in the general public as well.



......unless the reasoning behind those supposed "advantages" is that women are thought to be less capable/intelligent than men, in which case they are not "advantages." I wouldn't consider a situation where I'm treated better than a man because I'm perceived to be less intelligent/capable to be one where I received an "advantage." Obviously, YMMV.

That's the crux of the issue. We can sit here and speculate on the reasoning behind why a particular person was treated a certain way in a given situation, but it's most likely going to remain in the realm of speculation.

However, I agree with you that we should spend more energy into fixing these problems than finger-pointing (which is why "male privilege" isn't part of my world-view).

Making generalizations about which gender "has it easier" and which gender is somehow "oppressing" the other is dumb.

Especially on a site that's run for and run by autistic people.

This is an argument between two groups of socially disadvantaged people arguing in generalizations, and neither is actually speaking to the same people they're complaining about.

How has an average autistic man oppressed an autistic woman socially?

How has an average autistic woman oppressed an average autistic man socially?

Is the average autistic man running a major company and refusing to hire female executives?

Is the average autistic woman out committing crimes and benefitting from reduced prison sentences for her gender?

I judge people based on their individual circumstances and interactions, and when I see autistic men arguing as if every woman is in a position to benefit from gender bias or see autistic women arguing as if every man is in a position to benefit from gender bias, I think that it's amazing that the people involved in these arguments don't consider their own situations and understand that they(the people making the argument) might be coming from a disadvantaged position compared to people in general, but that the group they're arguing to(the people of the other gender on this site) are also coming from a disadvantaged position compared to people in general.

On this site both are arguing from positions of significant disadvantage, while accusing other disadvantaged people of significant advantage. How is this helping? Is anyone going to be convinced?

Certain people from a supposedly disadvantaged group may be extremely privileged. And certain people from a supposedly privileged group may be extremely disadvantaged. It doesn't do any good to lecture the disadvantaged about their privileges. It only accomplishes anything to treat everyone with respect by default and to consider individual people's circumstances.

Ok, how is a working husband/father in a dual-parent, dual income family a 'female advantage'?

In this case, though, the 'real effect' of feminist thoughts and ideals has been to allow men to have more presence in the lives of their children. Feminist thoughts and ideals are part of what shifted court bias from 'women' to 'primary care giver,' for example.

I actually, absolutely agree that women have some advantages or privileges in a patriarchal society. What I do not agree with is that these 'advantages' come from a helpful sociological place, or that they are actually beneficial to women in general in the long run. To take the parenting example, always assuming that the woman is better at caring for children, and thus always awarding custody to the mother in divorce cases, simultaneously locks all women into the child-care track (if they have kids) whether they want to be there, or not. It makes any issue with the child, be it behavioral or physiological, primarily the mother's fault in the eyes of society.

*both* genders are getting screwed.

That's not quite right, by definition. 'Patriarchy' isn't quite the same as 'sexism against women.' There are plenty of ways that a patriarchal system both benefits and harms both genders, without any kind of ill feeling or disrespect towards them. 'Sexism' implies disrespect or/and ill feeling, combined with a position of power such that the sexist person can enforce or establish their ill feeling.
'Sexism towards men' is what happens when a stay-at-home dad is criticized for being a stay-at-home dad, or when cleaning commercials make men out to be bumbling idiots who can't even start a washing machine; it's not when a guy pulls out a chair for his girlfriend but not for his brother.

I think that sometimes you are correct; for example, forced integration in the armed services is said to have done a lot against racism in the US. Where the problem is simple lack of understanding or knowlege, forcing a behavior change such that people are forced to learn what they didn't know (ie, 'black people can watch my back and be just as good of soldiers as me') can be extremely useful. Integration in the schools hasn't worked as well, though; kids in integrated schools still tend to sit in racially divided groups at lunch, because school is somewhat competitive as compared to the cooperative environment of the military. Merely forcing proximity hasn't helped there.

These are interesting links, and I agree that the issue merits more attention. However, it does not necessarily support your contention that women are taking time off to socialize; nowhere in the articles is the possibility addressed that women are more likely to pay attention to their own bodies and take time off when they are actually sick, whereas men get sick in equal amounts but go to work anyway and spread their germs (or make themselves sicker, and then die earlier). Women visit the doctor more, which supports the contention that they simply take better care of themselves, as opposed to 'taking time off to socialize.'

This is an interesting article, but it does not support your contention that CFS is psychosomatic, nor that women are being falsely diagnosed with CFS. Men are diagnosed with Autism much more than women, but that does not make Autism psychosomatic nor a false diagnosis.

There is no evidence that I know of suggesting that CFS diagnosis has to do with how much a person works per week.


And your conclusion, based on FACEBOOK, is that these women are all sugar babies?!?!?!

No, actually, that's an ad-hominem. And a justified one, in this case.

Ok, sorry, you're full of s**t on this. CFS does not mean 'I'm tired.' It has nothing to do with mono, nor with work schedule. Despite the one-page flier that you shared, you seem to not know squat about what CFS actually is.

Yes, that is true. What percentage of bloggers are sponsored? What proportion of male vs. female bloggers?

See my comments above wrt, for example, custody disputes.

This translation is barely readable, but it looks like men and women are both spending pretty similar times both at home and work, and, despite the title, the only 'complaining' by women is an article in the popular press; in addition, it does not seem to support (or even address) your contention that women take time off of work to 'socialize.'

This article also does not suggest that women take time off for socialization or for laziness, nor does it clarify that men *aren't* spreading their rhinoviruses or coronaviruses around the office in an effort to 'tough it out.'