Women's Issues

It's a bit off-topic, but I am reminded of Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus. Art's father is a Holocaust survivor with very narrow-minded views of black people. This is illustrated when he scolds Art's girlfriend for helping a black man stranded on the roadside. Some readers found this perplexing and even anti-Semitic as it supposedly reinforced the belief that Jews are miserly and uncaring of non-Jews. I can't remember her name, but a famous public speaker who is also a Holocaust survivor defended Spiegelman in basically saying "Why do people believe that tragedy automatically makes a person more accepting and open-minded?"

Similarly and somewhat more relevant, I've noticed that many women from the baby boomer generation are convinced that feminism is largely responsible for many of their familial and marital problems. Gloria Steinem received death threats and other forms of harassment from other women for this reason.

edited 20th Sep '14 2:31:45 PM by Aprilla

To see internalized misogyny, one only has to spend time in a high school listening to what a lot of the girls say. And/or see their social media output.

I suspect the same reason that people like to claim they are oppressed regardless of whether they actually (ie, the war on Xmas) or who even go so far as to suggest victimhood is a privileged status (George Will's brainfart about campus rape): because people romanticize suffering an thus feel it gives one a special cachet.

edited 20th Sep '14 2:33:14 PM by Achaemenid

American Healthcare Is So Bad for Women of Color It May Violate the UN Convention

Cross-posted with the Race- Privilege, Relations, Racism, etc. thread.

And the medical thread.

edited 20th Sep '14 3:13:16 PM by unnoun

I swear, if I had a penny for every time a fellow black person has told me how "real" life in the ghetto is... ("Real" meaning better, because Misery Builds Character, since you Had to Be Sharp and use Simple-Minded Wisdom.)

Blacks where I live often see themselves as better people because of their lack of education and legal means of making money. Part of this is religious: they take their poverty as comparable to those favored by God in the Bible.

While working at my university, I've had to subtly correct a lot of girls on a few things here and there.

edited 20th Sep '14 3:08:27 PM by KingZeal

I'm considering cross-posting it to the general economics and/or U.S. politics threads as well.

And if we have a thread for the United Nations, that too.

It's a very intersectional issue, and checks a lot of boxes.

anything perceived as womens work immediately sheds its value

Oh I've been saying that for a while. Any influx of a numbers of people results in a drop of the value of labour. I noticed it when I was doing journalism after I left high school.

I would like to say it just supply and demand of labour and not sexism but sadly the reverse seem to be true. Having males start working in a previously female dominated profession will cause the value to artificially inflate. Male nurses on average get paid more than their female counterparts do.

edited 20th Sep '14 3:47:12 PM by joeyjojo

That's a profession which for the most part the stigma has been lifted, that can't be said for being a male school teacher or social worker,and I remain skeptical of male receptionists being paid more or equivalent to women.

I already posted this, actually.

Teaching, social work, and clerical/secretarial work were, for a long time, initially, done by males, and were respectable positions.

Mycroft Holmes was a secretary.

But when women started entering those fields, they started losing all respectability.

Also true of poetry and Young Adult novels.

I'm a secretary. It might be interesting to reference that job, too.

Nowadays, though, it's called "Administrative Assistant" or "Office Support Specialist (my official title is the latter). Possibly to fight the very gendered stigma.

edited 20th Sep '14 4:11:50 PM by KingZeal

The lower paid medical specialties tend to be the ones that are female dominated.

Teaching used to be done by males until education in America became universal. Then they switched to mostly female teachers, who got paid less.

It's a real trend, both currently and historically.

@terl: While that is a point that should be talked about, it belongs in the men's or general sexism thread. By bring that up here in that manner, you are setting the conversation up for us vs them mentality. I've seen you do this multiple times.

Not my intention, and yeah could go in those threads as well.

And it does have relevance here,perhaps indirect relevance,but relevance still.

I'm just very wary of blanket/absolute statements like I was responding to,something seemed missing from it.

You can see how the term "secretary" used to be held in high regard by looking at how the British Civil Service is named. Though the sexism is actually highlighted in a brilliant Yes Minister sketch.

edited 21st Sep '14 7:29:21 AM by SilasW

So we talked about Cracked being cool earlier.

But Cracked is kinda cool.

That they even bothered answering old Mr. Cap is amazing. Then again, Tumblr's ask/message system doesn't have a spam filter :P

Cracked is click bait net tabloid garbage and you all know it. But hey give 'em all a cookie if you want.

Sad but true.

It's clickbait, but it's a far sight better than Buzzfeed clickbait. Probably in part because it's a humor website and it's not trying to masquerade as proper journalism.

Has it ever pretended to be anything else?

But that was an amusingly touchy reaction.

edited 22nd Sep '14 5:26:38 AM by Achaemenid

Not all the stabs at equality will be smart, or entirely on point or even helpful. This form of feminism is new, chillingly new for how long this shit has been going on, and not everyone is good at it yet, but holy shit, friend, how can you argue against the aim of basic respect for another human being?

I want to frame this.

edited 22nd Sep '14 6:14:53 AM by probablyinsane

Cracked has a tendency of getting interesting people who they interview though. For instance, they interviewed a guy lost at sea for a few months, and mentioned common misconceptions.

Some of their stuff is bullshit, other stuff is not, and if they're trying to be casually feminist, I see that as a bonus.

Humor is humor. So while one cannot take cheek-in-tongue jabs as the furthermost example of proper journalism, one canot deny that comedy and humor touch subjects which are very much real. We can laugh at George Carlin's "Words we can't say on TV" (or something like that) because, well. It was true. To put an example linked to a theory, Isaac Aasimov suggested that humor comes from the juxtaposition of things that do not fit. So, we see an older gentleman, in our minds, old gentlemen with glorious moustaches must be prim and respectably proper, but if he suddenly starts singing in a high pitched tone and dancing with a pink umbrella, our brain freezes up, goes "What the fuck! You are not supposed to do this!" and then the response is...laughter.

So perhaps, if you subscribe to that sort of theory, one could say Cracked is indeed a humorous intended website, but it doesn't mean its points are any less valid because they are funny. They might be valid because they are funny. "So while misogynerds praise the ability of women to forge a path of their own they lambast the personal life of the possibly worst example they could have ever found to make their point, and proceed to furiously masturbate to the cause, incidentally generating the first ever one man hatefuck in internet history".

Or to veer away from that subject, and to use simply as an example, there is any Jerry Seinfeld joke that begins with "What is the deal with..." and then he simply proceeds to describe something. Which would otherwise be normal, or frustrating, but putting it to light, it becomes...funny.

edited 22nd Sep '14 8:25:07 AM by Aszur

Casual Feminism - I like it, for several reasons. One that it makes the feminist state of being more... ?normal? like that it does not have to be like an alien concept.