This article by Shankar Vedantam about the pay gap between men and women and the role of sexism is really interesting. It’s been well understood for a long time now that one reason that men get paid more than women is that men haggle over salaries more often. Vedantam trots out the usual evidence for this: Male doctoral students are more aggressive about asking for teaching assignments than female doctoral students, in experiments where subjects are given money to perform tasks men will ask for more than women more often, men are far more willing than women to haggle over salaries when they’re hired or ask for promotions.
The usual interpretation of the evidence by both feminists and conservatives and squishy sexist liberals is that men are more aggressive than women. Why men are more aggressive is usually the point of controversy. Conservatives would have you believe male aggression and therefore women’s second class status is biological and immutable, a matter of men having more testosterone and less estrogen or whatever the handy essentialist theory is today. (Read Woman: An Intimate Geography to see why biological theories of male aggression are suspect—female aggression isn’t as monolithically muted as people would have you believe nor is testosterone related to aggression as much as you’d been led to believe. Social pressure pushes women into a situation where they have to channel their aggression into passive-aggression while men are given social space to use their bodies in a more aggressive fashion, but that doesn’t say much about baseline aggression levels. Nor should assertiveness be taken as the same biological phenomenon as aggression. Someone asking you out on a date is not performing a muted version of a rape.) The mainstream of feminism has mostly taken to arguing that men are trained from birth to be more assertive, suggesting that the solution is finding ways to bring girls up to be more assertive. Feminists also maintain that discrimination is a factor in the pay gap, but that nuanced position is often lost in the debates over nature vs. nurture.
But Linda C. Babcock and Hannah Riley Bowles addressed what’s always bothered me about the parameters of the debate—what if, instead of saying that men are more aggressive, we rephrased the assertion to be, “Women are more docile by training.” It doesn’t initially seem like a big change, but if you refocus the question on what training women receive to be more docile, then you’ve repositioned the debate on actual discrimination that causes the pay gap. Women are more docile than men, because they’ve been trained to be more docile. And the way we are trained to be more docile is by having our attempts to ask for more smacked down while men’s attempts to ask for more are rewarded, aka discrimination. Therefore, women’s lack of aggression stems from a realistic assessment of the likelihood that asserting themselves will work, as is men’s.
Which is to say, if when asking the same question, women mostly hear no and men mostly hear yes, men will keep asking and women will start giving up and find better uses of their time than constant rejection.
Their study, which was coauthored by Carnegie Mellon researcher Lei Lai, found that men and women get very different responses when they initiate negotiations. Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that women’s reluctance was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more — the perception was that women who asked for more were “less nice”…..
In this study, Bowles and her colleagues divided 119 volunteers at random into different groups and provided them with descriptions of male or female candidates who tried to negotiate a higher starting salary for a hypothetical job, along with descriptions of applicants who accepted the offered salary. The volunteers were asked to decide whether they would hire the candidates — who were all described as exceptionally talented and qualified. While both men and women were penalized for negotiating, Bowles found that the negative effect for women was more than twice as large as that for men.
Subsequent studies used actors who recorded videos of themselves asking for more money or accepting salaries they had been offered. A new group of 285 volunteers were again asked whether they would be willing to work with the candidates after viewing the videos. Men tended to rule against women who negotiated but were less likely to penalize men; women tended to penalize both men and women who negotiated, and preferred applicants who did not ask for more.
In a final set of studies, Bowles’s team had 367 volunteers play the role of job candidates and left it up to them to decide whether to ask for more money than they were offered. Women were less likely than men to negotiate when they believed they would be dealing with a man, but there was no significant difference between men and women when they thought a woman would be making the decision. The applicants, in other words, were accurately reading how males and females were likely to perceive them.
“This isn’t about fixing the women,” Bowles said. “It isn’t about telling women, ‘You need self-confidence or training.’ They are responding to incentives within the social environment.”
None of this is to say there’s anything wrong with teaching young girls to be more assertive—aka, concentrating on overcoming the sexist desire to slap down girls who assert themselves and treat girls more like boys. If people become more used to assertive women, then it might help erode the nasty retaliation against women who have the nerve to feel entitled to the same treatment men get. But we have to be realistic. The assumption that a woman who manages to keep her aggression levels in business as high as a man’s will go as far as him is simply wrong. There’s a realistic chance that such a woman will actually do less well than someone who keeps her head down, works hard, and takes her small raises and promotions with a smile while her male colleagues with equal or less talent blaze past her.
So what do we do? It seems like an impossible conundrum—if women are assertive, they don’t move forward but if they can’t use the same tools as men, they also won’t move forward. But there is a model for how to address the problem, which is collective action. Female professors at MIT tackled the problem by joining forces, comparing notes, and even measuring their offices to demonstrate the effects of discrimination against women as a class, an action that forced the university to quit ignoring the problem. One woman who says, “Hey, this is sexist!” will be written off as sour grapes. But if women as a class come forward together against the problem, it’s much harder to ignore.
54 Responses to “Study shows that egg preceded chicken”
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I think it has at least something to do with socio-sexual interaction: an aggressive woman, although in a business setting where such behavior would normally be valued, is viewed by a male employer from a sexual standpoint, and the woman becomes criticized based off of potential mate criteria. Here the man feels personally sexually threatened by the aggression, although he should be objectively evaluating the candidate in terms of probable economic success.
Does that make any sense at all?
Sort of, but that’s just the same general sexism. If a guy revolts against a woman asking for what she wants in the dating world (I mean, within reason, same standards as a man), isn’t that sexist as well?
I think it has much more to do with threats to power and the extant order that puts men in charge.
Most women over 40 in “non-traditional” occupations have had mostly male bosses. These men know how to deal with competetive males, but are often afraid of aggressive and competitive females, IMHO. They then “join forces” with male underlings against the perceived threat and undermine women who are aggressive - especially if they are aggressive and of equal standing in the organization.
In female dominated occupations, like teaching, it seems to be “newcomers” who are feared and undermined and women who are OUTWARDLY and not passive-aggressively ambitious and competitive are also squelched because they threaten the “girls clique” order. Many older teachers can be BRUTALLY passive aggressive (backstabbing and underhanded, never up front about their motives because they know it is all bullshit - like getting a parent to file spurious sex harassment papers against a male teacher who won’t “play along” - eg play house) and undermining to their colleagues that aren’t part of their long-time cliques.
I see it in the local school system all the time - there seems to be such tremendous fear of mid-career males and younger males AND females who don’t get the cheerleader clique rules that the whole mess gets codified in “union rules” and “tenure requirements”. In other words, a whole bunch of bullshit requirements have been created to attempt to keep them all out or keep them all down despite a purported teacher shortage. This is an unstated part of why math and science teachers are in short supply - mathematically and scientifically talented women and men don’t want to put up with high-school-all-over-again bullshit.
I think this is all the result of systemic bullshit sexism. These women were ambitious and were shut down and funneled into narrow cultures of nonsense where their ambition morphed into corrosive passive-aggressive backstabbing and was rewarded. Both cultures - male dominated professions and female dominated professions - resulted from sexism that so punished women they went away and “excelled” elsewhere. Both cultures have people who are now heavily vested in their perpetuation, and both are threatened by younger women who won’t play the bullshit.
The problem isn’t with women, it’s with our corporate culture. Instead of “fixing” women, let’s fix a backwards culture that is too easily impressed by pushiness, and insufficiently invested in putting the best people into the right jobs.
I suspect that, as much as anything else, this study simply reflects the ways in which men and some women justify their hiring biases.
While women are the victims here, this isn’t about sexism so much as it is evolving mores to justify the continuance of hiring practices that are medieval at best, and utterly arbitrary at worst.
I read this article with interest this morning. It verbalized my feelings about things I’d experienced in the workplace: the more I negotiated for promotion or raises, the less likely I was to get them; but so long as I kept my head down and did my job well, I was moderately rewarded (though not nearly as much as the less capable or less experienced men I worked with). Women in the work force are punished any way one looks at it, which is just frustrating. I admire the MIT women’s approach to changing the system and want to figure out how to apply that in other employment settings as well.
This was a great study. It points out one of many double binds women are put in. Keep silent and be trampled on; speak out and you’re a bitch. Dress up and be a slut or dress down and be frumpy. Be nice at work and you’re ineffectual, be assertive and you’re a man-hating witch.
Etc. repeat as needed…..
I wrote about the study too, Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t although the only thing I do question is the issue of the social costs might be more temporary than Babcock thinks because she performed her experiments in a lab setting. In the lab setting women judged both men and women more harshly for negotiating but men only judged women harshly. HOWEVER, in a real world setting how long does such “bad esteem” really last? Are their really lasting feelings to that moment of judgement?
There might be…that’s why the initial experiment is interesting, but I think further probing needs to explore that issue.
The study itself is no surprise, even if it is a refresher into the inequality women face in a “man’s world.” It all just comes back to gender expectations, as was mentioned in the original post: men are expected to be assertive and strong, women are expected to be complacent and docile, and the results of this study simply reflect these expectations in the real business world.
The solution to the problem is easy; just implementing it is the tough part.
I think a big part of it is that, especially in career situations, we’re often taught to fear that if we make any demands or ask for any “special treatment”, the job offer can just be yanked away. They don’t have to hire you, you know. You should just be lucky they even looked at your resume…
This is exacerbated, I think, when/if women have children, because then there are negotiations that really do have to be made, and women fear they’ll be penalized even further. To ask to leave early to pick up the kids two days a week and also ask for more money feels like a lot more than a man just asking for the money.
Well and it’s exacerbated because if you push for more money, the job offer is far more likely to be yanked if you’re female.
As for the “sexual partner” theory, well, lets just say that, like rape, this is all about power and privilege.
Way back in the 70s, The Peter Principle identified a potential benefit to society in having permanent underclasses — people in the underclass might have the same distribution of abilities as the rest of the population, but their class identification would prevent the most able among them from being promoted into jobs where they might fail. So you’d have a lot of lower-level jobs being done by highly-qualified people and society would run more smoothly. (Well, a certain kind of society where nagging concerns for social justice didn’t introduce other inefficiencies like strikes or revolutions or work-to-rule…)
That division maps incredibly well to patriarchy, and making the class division between men and women self-enforcing (and mostly invisible) just helps (!) matters along.
It would be nice to know what similar work has been done in past decades, so we could figure out whether things are getting better or worse.
The part about being perceived as “not nice” is relevant. That’s emotional manipulation, it’s powerful and needs to be addressed. It means seeing conditional approval by authoritarians for what it is, and a decision to turn to workplace equals for support and fond approval. How can we get back to that?
Meanwhile a woman who seeks approval from parent figures realizes it’s based on her willingness to please, she learns about power, and doesn’t like it, but approval is scarce, and it feels good so it’s hard to reject playing out the dynamic. If only we could use each other for validation and approval.
Really excellent, important post. It seems to me another thing that can make a difference is simply making people aware of the phenomenon. Lots of people in positions of power are genuinely committed to sex equality on some level, and believe themselves to be unbiased. Making them aware that biases like those described above are widespread could potentially make a real difference. This is a part of the solution that Virgina Valian (_Why So Slow_?) suggests for dealing with the effects of gender schemas.
Really excellent, important post. It seems to me another thing that can make a difference is simply making people aware of the phenomenon. Lots of people in positions of power are genuinely committed to sex equality on some level, and believe themselves to be unbiased. Making them aware that biases like those described above are widespread could potentially make a real difference. This is a part of the solution that Virgina Valian (_Why So Slow_?) suggests for dealing with the effects of gender schemas.
Still think the female is simply better socialized.
At not just a genomic but even chromosomal level.
She is a biologic entity closer to our essential -
Basic Human Template.
Still think.
[Aggression’s part of that]
[And I’m betting the -absolutely is- a ‘5′ in the anti-spam scribble is a ‘6′…here goes]
The study made some good points, but it overlooked a glaring difference between men and women - women tend to take responsibility for children, which will affect their work. The real gap is between mothers and others, not men and women. On top of that, aggressive and assertive women are penalized for acting like men are expected to act in the business world.
Also, note that I have a new blog! I haven’t finished updating it yet. A work in progress.
Well..that got lost.
Last time the comment showed up…later.
Here…again with apologies
What I said is…
That I still think the female is simply
better socialized [neuro-scientifically]
at not just a genomic but a chromosomal level.
She falls more cleanly onto our essential and
Basic Human Template…think embryology.
Still think
[Aggression’s part of that.]
Third try..just for documentation…
***Well..that got lost.
Last time the comment showed up…later.
Here…again with apologies for reps
What I said is…
That I still think the female is simply
better socialized [neuro-scientifically]
at not just a genomic but a chromosomal level.
She falls more cleanly onto our essential and
Basic Human (highly social) Template…think embryology.
Still think.***
[Aggression’s part of that.]
Hmmm.now I gotta go. Hope you get it fixed.
Maybe it’s the antispam…itself?
Well, the good news is, it seems to me that corporate America is trying hard to make everyone feel that way.
(Sorry, dark humor there, no, it’s not good news, and no, it wouldn’t fix the issue at all, women would still have offers yanked more often. It just gives me an additional chance to complain about something I often complain about. The idea that a company does something benevolent by creating jobs is one that’s being pushed hard by the GOP and other, similarly dishonest, pro-business shills.)
Actually Countess - women who are not mothers recieve similar (if not as much) discrimination in the workplace. Caring for children exacerbates prejudices that already exist. To say that the real gap is between only mothers and others ignores the data that this post presents. The people in the study do not respond to the presence or lack of children, but to gender. Gender!
How do you believe a passive-aggressive leader of a company in a very competitive market would perform, compared to one that is purely aggressive?
I’m beginning to see it all a somewhat different way. Men penalized women for pushing, women penalized men and women for pushing. The end result is still the same old sexist discrimination, but a slightly different flavor than I’ve been reading: instead of men and women focusing on keeping women down, it seems to be men giving their ol’ buddy-boys a leg up.
Gotta protect the old boys club.
But yet conventional wisdom says that women can’t be in charge, b/c of their hormones. Men need to stop thinking with their dicks. The number of potential mates for someone is mighty small, considering the number of humans in the world. So, I think we should be demanding a little more professionalism from men.
Gotta protect the old boys club.
The old girls clubs, too. When genders segregate into professions, “male” behavior from females or from males will be met with brutal hostility expressed through passive aggressive means.
That isn’t to say “poor men” but to point out that segregational behavior has created two messes from one patriarchy - one where males domininate select occupations and where the females who are relegated to the caring occupations build social structures which are also non-inclusive in the quest for retaining privileges and status quo. Google “massachusetts teachers association” and “pay premium science math” to get a good start on this.
Very interesting study. I think it applies outside the work world, too. Women are less likely to ask for or demand more space, privacy, etc.
“How do you believe a passive-aggressive leader of a company in a very competitive market would perform, compared to one that is purely aggressive?”
a) Financial success is not the only measure of a company or its leader. This kind of reasoning is why we have Walmart sweatshops in China.
b) Pushy aggressive men in business (aka, “dicks”) are a really poor goal for anyone whose life ambition involves more than gobs and gobs of money. How about building better businesses by firing all the dicks, male AND female?
There have been eggs around a lot longer than there have been chickens.
Some women don’t know that negotiation is even an option when they are starting out–for example, 8 hundred thousand years ago, when I was in retail, and was promoted to “assistant manager,” I was offered $17,500 per year. I took it. I was thrilled! I was getting a promotion!
I later found out that a male colleague with the exact same qualifications promoted to the exact same position was given $20,000. Why? He asked for it. Turned out the district manager was authorized to give us both between $17,500 and $21,000.
That initial difference would have affected me throughout my career with that company, because my initial base would always have been lower. Later, I knew to negotiate. But by then the damage to my base was done.
Why didn’t I ask for more, counter-offer, negotiate? Frankly, I had no idea that was how it was done. Why would I? I’d never had a job like that before. I’d never had cause to negotiate anything. I didn’t even know there WERE jobs like that, in which salaries would be negotiable within a range, until that exact moment. I wasn’t worried about being nice, or about seeming overly-aggressive. It just didn’t even dawn on me to counteroffer.
Part of that is definitely gendered. Who teaches men to do that? Part of it was also class-based, though. No one in my family had ever had a job in which the salary was actually negotiable until me. There was no one to teach me.
Where do men learn to do that? Male mentors. Who teaches men the importance of having mentors? Male mentors. I’m sure there were women who were willing to mentor me, but I didn’t even know I needed a mentor. I didn’t know these sorts of “traps” existed. Had I asked for $21,000 I would have gotten it, but there was no one to teach me to ask.
Thanks for reporting on yet another study that confirms that gender discrimination in the workforce is a REAL problem. I’m getting tired of the all the rationalizations of the evidence that make it seem like women CHOOSE (or are biologically programmed) to take lower pay and less promotions.
I think in academia this problem is particularly bad. When you have 300 highly qualified applicants for a single tenure-track position, women are far less likely to rock the boat if an offer is extended their way. They know that if they negotiate and the department rescinds the job offer the official story will be that she “rejected their offer.”
Actually, what they don’t point out is that female aggression is often punished severly, as if the woman were “going against her nature” by being directly spoken. This has happened to me a number of times, as someone quite aggressive by nature.
The title of this story on the MSNBC site something like, “Why do men get paid more? They ask.” Perfect, just perfect.
I am surprised how long it took these researchers to figure this out. We all know that the reason why we can never win no matter what we do is because society deems is wrong–by nature. As if somehow our gender, by its very existence, was hostile to the existence of humanity.
Stuff like the situations demonstrated in the study is why I love consulting. There’s a real shift in the power dynamic when you’re a consultant, as opposed to just another prospective wage-slave; doubly so if they called you first.
I really notice this kind of thing, because besides being a woman in a male-dominated field, I’m also handicapped. The discrimination becomes, if not overt, at least palpable by that point. Being a consultant wipes out a lot of that, because they want a job done, and they don’t really seem to care as much about the look and feel.
As I wrote quite some time ago,
Granted, consulting’s not for everyone, but I recommend it to people who are really desperately looking for a way out.
If the “more aggressive/more successful” thing was about testosterone, then wouldn’t women with PCOS, who have higher testosterone levels than the average female, also be more aggressive and/or more financially successful than the average female? As a PCOS-er myself, I can tell you that’s surely not true of me. I am a giant marshmallow and I type for a living.
Part of that is definitely gendered. Who teaches men to do that? Part of it was also class-based, though. No one in my family had ever had a job in which the salary was actually negotiable until me. There was no one to teach me.
DING DING DING DING DING!
My parents didn’t know they could negotiate my financial aid package. So when MIT continued to insist that a $500 travel allowance was adequate for two one-way and one round trip to Oregon each year, they didn’t know they could squawk for more grant money.
As I was paying most of my way, you better believe that I did!
I also filed a grievance against a financial aid officer who sat on my application and then lied about losing it until it was too late to apply for loans - and then scolded ME for missing a deadline I did not miss and threatened me with disciplinary action if I called one more time (I was 4 months late on my rent!!!!).
I found out later that other people who had parents with money and white collar jobs 1) didn’t have to put up with a lot of this shit in the first place because their parents would step in and bust heads (not in helicopter fashion - in emergency cut the shit fashion) and 2) knew that what was printed on the paper was a “first offer” not an “only offer”.
“Actually, what they don’t point out is that female aggression is often punished severly, as if the woman were “going against her nature” by being directly spoken.”
heh. I have a reputation among the managers at work for being argumentative. I always need to know why we are doing something and I often have an opinion as to whether this is a good idea or not. I’ll still do what I’m told, but only after I’m clear on the reasoning and have said my piece. I’ve always known retail Does Not Like That. I kinda wonder if the fact that I’m a woman makes it worse.
“Men tended to rule against women who negotiated but were less likely to penalize men; women tended to penalize both men and women who negotiated, and preferred applicants who did not ask for more.”
No doubt some of this same sentiment ends up working against labor unions, as well. It might also explain to me why my mom and grandma were such strong supporters of their unions - it did the haggling for them, so they didn’t have to do it.
Gotta agree with amanda w, a lot of this is dudes looking out for their buddies. As someone currently experiencing discrimination in the job environment (i.e. being seated far away from the people on my team, all men, despite seating being available right next to them; not being addressed in casual discussion by my manager or invited out to lunch with management/staff when other members of the department have been invited out to lunch; not being invited to key meetings other male staff have been invited to, etc.) I can definitely say, if I get less of a bonus or raise come March of next year (when the paychecks actually go out) it won’t be because of any less effort on my part or any lack of business skills - it will be entirely because my manager has chosen his buddies, the guys he wants to protect and hang out with, and as I do not have a penis nor do I discuss sports/idiotic pop culture, I am not among the chosen. Thus, wage disparity. I’ve tried talking to my manager about this and he just doesn’t care, so the only next step is HR, and how many women want to go into HR with a sex discrimination beef against their managers? Frankly, I’m really scared about it, and am desperate for another option.
I remember one scene I saw during college about five years ago. All my friends and I went out to eat when we saw a special room, in which it was filled with men, about 25 or more, with the exception of one–one–woman. We found out it was a dinner party for a high-caliber architecture firm. That woman looked absolutely alone. That room was a perfect example of what awaited us and we knew it.
I can still see her looking distressed.
instead of men and women focusing on keeping women down, it seems to be men giving their ol’ buddy-boys a leg up.
Since I see no good reason to penalize anyone for negotiating, it seems more like women treat everyone the way everyone’s treated them.
I tend to agree, and I think it’s a horrid justification to say “since we were treated a certain way, we’re gonna stoop just as low to get back to you”.
But if that is the way feminism wants to utilize in order to move backwards (because it’s regression rather than progression, we’re just swapping genders), then that’s OK by me.
Interesting - I covered this at my place yesterday too.
“what if, instead of saying that men are more aggressive, we rephrased the assertion to be, “Women are more docile by training.” It doesn’t initially seem like a big change…”
I mean, if nothing else just *asking* the questions this way is eye-opening. In this case it’s a little funny since for once putting men in the normative category leads to insights but I think it’s worth it — the improved contrast makes it easier to look for overall distortion.
Not to beat my own drum here but reversing the standard assumption that men perceive women as the sex class has just dumped the bottom out of my conceptual silverware drawer. If men perceive women as the “no-sex” class, not naturally desiring sex and therefore needing to be bought or coerced, then one might expect to see pressure women into being more economically deferential in order to increase leverage.
I tend to agree, and I think it’s a horrid justification to say “since we were treated a certain way, we’re gonna stoop just as low to get back to you”.
But is that what is happening? I don’t see that it’s necessarily deliberate or malicious.
It seems more likely that 1) men learn one set of rules - which includes different rules for men and women - which leads to 2) women learning different set of rules (and not always realizing that the rules change depending on who you are) and that, with more women in positions of greater power, they are now simply using the rules that they learned in the first place.
One thing I’ve noticed is that, outside of the question of whom to hook up with, women tend to judge men by the rules they’ve learned to follow themselves. I know this is where a lot of the fights my brother and I had as kids came from. It took me a while to realize that I was expecting him to act in a way he’d never been taught to do. Not that I still shouldn’t have expected him to pay attention to body language in addition to my words, (for example, yelling isn’t the only way of being emphatic about what you say) but it’s still important to realize that it did need to be pointed out to him.
By expecting women to not punish people for asking for a raise, we are expecting them to follow rules they may have never learned.
hmmmm……the blockquotes looked good in preview, I don’t know why they didn’t work in the post.
Women are more docile than men, because they’ve been trained to be more docile. And the way we are trained to be more docile is by having our attempts to ask for more
This is kind of like philosophies of the truth that claim the truth cannot be known. Okay, so then how do we know the skeptical philosophy of truth is true? I mean, clearly the women who post on this blog aren’t docile. Neither are the female commenters. So, did some of you miss your training sessions?
And what exactly is the solution? Train men to be more docile by smacking them down? (That explains the lechery posts.)
It seems the viewpoint of the italicized quote buys too quickly into the idea that human beings can just be trained like leg-humping dogs. Frankly, I have an astronomically higher opinion of women than that.
But is that what is happening? I don’t see that it’s necessarily deliberate or malicious.
Or mabye women and men are both sexist. Men like to negotiate and so favor men who negotiate. Women don’t like to negotiate and so penalize anyone who negotiates. Men want only men to act like “men” and women want everyone to act like “women.” Both biases are sexist.
Men need to stop thinking with their dicks. The number of potential mates for someone is mighty small, considering the number of humans in the world.
Doesn’t the second sentence contradict the first?
instead of men and women focusing on keeping women down, it seems to be men giving their ol’ buddy-boys a leg up.
Well, maybe the men are protecting the men because it’s the least they can do. The women have the power and are out penalizing everybody!
If a guy revolts against a woman asking for what she wants in the dating world (I mean, within reason, same standards as a man), isn’t that sexist as well?
No. If that were true, refusing to date a non-Jew because you’re Jewish and want to marry a Jew would be akin to racial discrimination.
We worked long and hard hours learning to un-learn them.
Oh, please. As if half those pictures showed a fraction of the disdain for their subject that 99 percent of porn or ads featuring women show.
Which would rather be the point of the lechery posts.
Ah, I see now. It’s not that you’ve stopped by this blog, it’s that you’ve stopped by from a planet other than earth.
Casual troll who just stopped by:
Actually, most of us learned lessons from the patriarchy we are STILL struggling with. One of the reasons places like this exist is so we can learn from each other where we’ve been given false assumptions, and help each other find better ways. And we sometimes take each other down for sexist remarks.
As for the lechery posts, someone always complains, but I don’t even think most of the comments end up being objectifying. Mostly, people are going, “Ooo! I like him!” But as you’re only a casual troll reader, you missed the beginning of the series, which was a defiance of the assumption often made that women don’t care about looks in men. We are still sticking to the spirit of that, with the odd foray into whether variants on kilts water down the connection to Scots pride.
“Sort of, but that’s just the same general sexism. If a guy revolts against a woman asking for what she wants in the dating world (I mean, within reason, same standards as a man), isn’t that sexist as well?”
No. He has free will and can chose what he will and won’t tolerate, just as she can.
Men are not to live their lives to do whatever women want, and refusing a woman is not sexism.
If you’re fighting a supreme patriarchy, that rules out the chance of winning. It would be like a peasant revolt, but with more royalty, who have nuclear weapons while the peasants were still wielding pitchforks.
It’s just not the case. But then the question becomes how much you are willing to concede to this reality without sacrificing the propaganda points it gets you. And also to what extend doing that is even possible.
I don’t know, a lot of the time it seems like everything is trying to bend reality to make things comfortable for someone who feels the current societal standard is not focusing enough on them, or that “life isn’t easy enough” for. A battle to fight indeed.
But futile. For simple reasons soon to be illustrated. Some times I’m glad I’m not in to politics, because as Spider Jerusalem said in the cult-comic Transmetropolitan:
“You wanna know about voting, I’m here to tell you about voting. Imagine you’re locked up in a nightclub with sinners, whores, freaks and unnameable things that rape pitbulls for fun. And you’re not allowed out until you all vote on what you’re going to do tonight.
YOU like to put your feet up and watch “Republican Party Reservation”. THEY like to have sex with people using knives, guns, and sexual organs you didn’t even know existed.
So you vote for television. And everybody else, as far as the eye can see, votes to sodomize you with a switchblade.
That’s voting.
You’re welcome.”