username sucks said:
This seems like a topic that would go better on the R&P section of forums.
I'll be surprised if it doesn't get moved, honestly.
username sucks said:
Such a small issue as a workplace comment is nothing when you look at how women are actually held down in society.
Provide even a single example of explicit legal or institutional discrimination against women in the US (since it's where we're both from -- really we could use any western democracy for this more similarities than differences). It's actually easier to find examples of explicit legal or institutional discrimination against men, if you want I could provide some examples (VAWA is only the most obvious example, it shows up more often than you think, including the Affordable Care Act). Note that differences in outcome are not, in and of themselves, proof of discrimination unless all confounding factors have been adjusted for.
username sucks said:
Over 80% of congress is men.
First off, this is a fallacy of composition -- you are shaving off a tiny sliver of the population, looking at the demographic breakdown of that sliver, and making the supposition that this says anything about those demographics as a whole. Psychologist Helen Smith had referred to this particular form of fallacy of composition as the "apex fallacy."
Secondly, what is more interesting is that, although 80% of Congress is men, the majority of those who put them in power (voters) are women (women are more likely to vote than men, and are a slight majority of the population as well).
Thirdly, if you still feel it's a valuable piece of evidence I can counter with plenty of stats in which men and boys fare very poorly (though I suspect I wouldn't be allowed to imply the same kinds of things that most people pointing at the gender balance of Congress do, because when women are behind it is obviously sexist discrimination but when men are behind it is their own fault unless you have a smoking gun).
username sucks said:
And of course, there are the gender roles forced upon children, although this effects both genders.
So long as children are raised by, well, parents children will have social roles and expectations "forced upon" them.
tangoprime said:
A protected class is merely a group characteristic that has been identified by the law as protected from discrimination. Gender is a protected class regardless of the gender. Race is a protected class regardless of the race. Disability is a protected class.
The question is whether or not the procedures and policies by which the law is executed are also as egalitarian. For example, men get longer prison sentences than women for a given crime. Another example would be domestic violence police procedures that favor arresting the man in heterosexual couple violence cases even when it's likely the man was the victim (for example by assigning traits that slant male as being factors in choosing who to arrest, such as height and weight).
Esotera said:
The very fact that there's such a massive disparity between the two genders indicates discrimination. If the gender divide is above a reasonable threshold e.g. 70/30 then there is probably a social issue that is stopping women. And given that UK politics is mostly run by boarding school boys I find that way more plausible than not enough women being interested in politics.
Equality of outcomes doesn't indicate equality of opportunity. Or lack thereof. In no small part because there are almost always a *lot* of confounding factors in play.
Or to put it another way, I could name a virtual cavalcade of statistics in which men and boys fall far behind girls and women, but odds are you would be unlikely to accept that those statistics in and of themselves indicate discrimination against men and boys.
Esotera said:
OT: There have been a couple of articles in the news recently about how we should be trying to boost the number of women STEM undergraduates. Whilst this is probably the most pressing issue, that doesn't mean we should forget about the small percentage of men doing certain courses e.g. psychology, biology.
The STEM thing is a matter of moving goalposts. Back in the 60s-70s, the problem was that there weren't enough women in college/having graduated college, so accordingly special benefits were given to make it easier for women (special scholarships, mostly). Today, the male:female ratio for college students is the reverse of what is was back then, so instead of making a big deal about trying to swing things back the other way to some degree, we've simply decided that number is all but irrelevant (because it now shows a female advantage), and instead focused on the only fields where a majority of students and graduate remain male (STEM), declaring that to be the only part worth looking at. There's a reason we don't talk about law or medicine or what have you, and that's because they slant female today.
oreso said:
I would also mention that no one appears to be interested in convincing women to do other male dominated professions: all the dangerous and dirty jobs that lead to the workplace death rate being 90% male, for example. I wonder why that is.
If the workplace death rate went down to only being 90% male, it'd be all over the news media. Of course the headline would be something like "women dying at work has doubled!", with an emphasis on improving women's safety on the job.
Phasmal said:
But I'm sure this is feminist's fault, riiiight?
Only the ones who respond to any such complaint with the use of some combination of "mansplaining", "privilege", or "patriarchy" as a silencing tactic. I can Google a bit and see if I can find some examples if you need -- it's shockingly easy to find examples of feminists saying terrible things, but generally none of them count because "Not All Feminists Are Like That" and "Feminism Is Not A Monolith" (though ironically, MRA apparently *are* all like that and a monolith, to listen to arguments against them).
Speaking of "privilege" -- I've always found it incredibly amusing and ironic to hear a female feminist talk about privilege blindness one moment and how women certainly are not privileged the next. I always wonder if they can't hear the "whoosh" because they're the one pitching.
FallenMessiah88 said:
If a woman is allowed to be offended by a dongle joke, then men are certainly allowed to be offended by the word "penis".
So, men should be allowed to cost someone their job if they use the word penis in a private conversation with someone else, and the man in question eavesdrops and hears it? So long as we're on the same page.
Silvanus said:
I feel pretty confident in saying that the following designs;
...Were not designed to appeal to a female power fantasy. That they were, in fact, designed to titillate men. Male designs may be handsome (because people want their characters to be handsome), but they are rarely near-naked (because most people don't want their characters to be perpetually near-naked, if their characters are the same sex as them).
I think you know this too, but you're seeing equivalence where none exists.
Someone else beat me to it, but that pic is from a race in TERA where both the men and women have skimpy clothing. The people who the first time around tried to make a scene about the "objectification of women" in TERA used Castanic women in all their images specifically to rely on the fact that most of the people they'd manage to rile up weren't going to have any knowledge of the game and were going to accept whatever they were presented with as "typical" without question.
