When my kids were little I volunteered at their day care. One 2ish year old boy named Buba [sp?] who was built like a front lineman LOVED the dress up box. Specifically the dresses and to twirl in them. One day his mom scheduled a meeting with the head teacher to address this. The mom could be described as blue collar. And she and her husband were gravely concerned the dress box was going to turn their son gay. The teacher did a wonderful job deescalating the worry and Buba got to continue wearing the dresses every day. Most Buba’s unfortunately are not so lucky. 
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This is me. Really.
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Style: you’re either born with it or you’re not.
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So, if my decoder ring works, what this means that:
he is super sensitive about his low IQ, he’s been called crazy, he had a bad experience with bleeding after a facelift, and Mika made his dick tingle but he’s having a tantrum because he can’t do anything about it.
Barf indeed.
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5 posts were split to a new topic: Trashbin – Deleted from Not Feminism 101
EDIT:
My apologies for the mess. I’ve lightly edited some posts to prevent further derail.
Yet, ironically, I am not, if we’re going by common usage.
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I don’t think you understand the importance of that discussion if you’d only consider it to be a data point that people didn’t know what certain words mean.
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it doesn’t really matter, honestly.
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You’re right, it doesn’t. I couldn’t resist, though.
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We don’t know why someone thinks or says the things they do. They have to tell us. Assigning intent to people is not a good way to communicate. Please, state your own feelings and opinions and ask questions of others to inquire about their intent. Did you intend to say this?
That’ s not about being Male or Female, American or Not, it’s just about communication.
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Not just treated as: apparently, up to 1450 or so they were called girls while they were young.
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This book looks interesting:
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As always, the comments don’t fail to disappoint. “I’ve got lots of experience teaching science and engineering (and apparently not learning science) and my anecdotal experience trumps any data the author may have.”
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Yup. I’ve never understood that. Even if we accept the premise that women are inferior, it does not follow that every man is superior to every woman.
It’s odd how so many people who insist on their own merit are horrified by the idea that they don’t need (or have) artificial advantage.
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Another book recommend:
It looks not only at our ideas of gender, and the supposed differences but how they are so entrenched in society that even parents’ best attempts to raise children who don’t follow and perpetuate those divisions are finding themselves sucked back into the black hole.
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Oooh, looks interesting. Been having this conversation with my daughter today about how we have this idea we are trying to raise our daughters with of a brighter future, but then have to live our lives in this present moment with all our own baggage and all of society’s and try to be a model to them while being so terribly flawed.
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I think a large part of this comes from the way men attempt to monopolize prestige. This takes a variety of forms, from disparaging women dominated activities as “women’s work” to forceably creating harassing environments in prestigious areas.
Just to take a brief history from my industry, software, the first programmer a woman, the first “computers” were women, and women did much of the important programming work at NASA and other places:
IIRC there were even sexist rationales at the time for why programming was naturally “women’s work;” it was simply operating office machines much like typewriters, or perhaps sewing machines. Why would men want to do that when they could be doing “important” things?
In modern times, centering a “computer science” degree as an entry point to the industry instead of something more mundane like practical programming or software engineering, is an attempt to bestow the field with extra prestige and barriers to entry. Nonetheless the share of women pursuing degrees in computer science seemed to be approaching parity until hitting a wall in 1984:
What happened in 1984? One theory is that with the availability of cheap home computers, middle class families only bought these for boys and so by the time they reached university, women were playing catch-up. But I think at least as big of a factor was this:
If software was a field where someone could be praised for having a singular brilliance and greatness, and even be a gateway to becoming a billionaire, that’s going to start drawing in the kind of guys – almost always guys – who see themselves as singularly deserving of that kind of high reward, and fighting other humans as pretenders to their throne.
And when someone supposedly possesses great, brilliant, irreplaceable intelligence, what is it if they are also sexist, harassers, "not people person"s; the victims they leave behind are supposedly nothing to what amazing insights these geniuses might achieve. I saw a quote from a Cosby lawyer recently, to the effect that (cw) fake rape accusations that damage a reputation are worse than rape itself! The very fact that the reputation of a man can be so important that damaging it is even worse than harming a real person is among the worst misfeatures of our culture. The idea of individual geniuses, “self-made men,” and other heroisms are myths not yet excised.
As you can see from the chart above, in recent years with the supposed computer democratization of the internet, there are even fewer women entering the industry than ever before, possibly because the rewards – and therefore the assholery – are higher than ever. And women who break into the industry still are often stereotyped into less prestigious roles – this is such a telling article – roles that, in fact, weren’t even coded as less prestigious until extremely recently.
The prestigious software roles are protected by an interview process that emphasizes minutia from four year degrees that’s almost never used in the course of a job, the privilege to contribute free labor to open source projects or have tech related hobbies, having read the right books, and “culture fit.” Even as they complain about a shortage of workers in the industry, few programmers are willing to admit the classist and anti-minority nature of that process. The sneakiest union is one that doesn’t even see itself as such.
(If I sound mad about this, I am. I saw over the course of the past year a talented young woman, a friend who grew up in crushing poverty, repeatedly rejected from jobs that I know for a fact any mediocre white man would have landed. She finally got something, but at the cost of a 10 month gap in her employment and the variety of desperate things someone with her history has to do to survive.)
I think similar historical trends have occurred in fields like psychology, biology, etc. When these areas were seen as prestigious, having individuals with great thoughts and insights, they were male-dominated; when they began to be seen as primarily hard work rather than the domain of geniuses they shifted to being mostly women. All of this is part of the evil process of men monopolizing prestige.
I think one of the best responses to this is to continually question the concepts of individual, singular “greatness,” “genius,” and any similar attribute a person might achieve to make them seem irreplaceable. The giants after all, stand on our shoulders. Any individual is replaceable; an entire class of people, cannot be!
But as long as the greatness myth exists, I suppose we must also employ it to demonstrate the incredible genius of women, both in and out of male dominated industries.
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