Hacker News Reader

Some highlights of modern sexism:

* Women don't "dress like sluts" and you won't be raped (Canadian police officer advice ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13739876 ) ).

* USA politicians think that somehow women's bodies can recognise "legitimate rape" and prevent getting pregnant (* http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/us/politics/todd-akin-prov... ), which is just a way to stop rape victims getting abortions.

* The EU made an advert to get women into science. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA ). "Science: It's a girl thing". Just look at it. High heels! Make up! Lipstick! It's like something from Mad Men ('women won't be interested in a thing unless you have lots of make up!')

* It's amazing that so many films still don't pass the Bechdel Test. It's a simple game, where a film passes if it has 2 named women talked about something other than a man. Many many films don't have that. Many many films have 2 named men talking about something other than a woman, one would struggle to find films that fail the male bechdel test. What's going on here?

Your last point seems like it should be a function of market demands. If people wanted to see women talking about something other than men, those movies should dominate at the box office. Since women buy more movie tickets than men[1] and thus movies will be generally catered towards that demographic, if there is sexism at play here, it seems like it is coming from the female gender themselves which brings up a whole new set of "what's going on here?" questions.

[1] http://womenandhollywood.com/2010/03/11/guess-what-women-buy...

Your last point seems like it should be a function of market demands. If people wanted to see women talking about something other than men, those movies should dominate at the box office.

This is a correct deduction assuming (a) the film industry is a perfect market, that film producers will act as rational actors (how many "take my money" posts do we see?) and (b) that there is no institutional sexism at work in production/distribution etc. I think (a) & (b) are working here, making your "but people don't buy it!" argument false.

randomdata, the invisible hand doesn't seem to have developed such fine-motor control yet, and the media market has the special luxury of manipulating demand to suit its product ("hmm, would addressing real issues, encouraging honest dialog, and fostering fulfillment of folks's true potential ... sell as much popcorn? better not risk it...")

No, it's not just unpleasantness. Even digressing from the fact how much those words you talk about actually hurt, here's a neat link: http://www.endvawnow.org/en/articles/299-fast-facts-statisti...

Some highlights, cherry-picked for specific statements about "first-world" countries, because I don't feel like googling for more right now:

* In the United States, 83 percent of girls aged 12 to 16 experienced some form of sexual harassment in public schools.

* In Australia, Canada, Israel, South Africa and the United States, between 40 and 70 percent of female murder victims were killed by their intimate partners.

* Between 40 and 50 percent of women in European Union countries experience unwanted sexual advances, physical contact or other forms of sexual harassment at work.

As said before I don't really feel like googling, but from memory in the US at least 15% of women experience sexual violence during their lifetime, and stats for EU aren't really that much better.

As for OP, the issue here is that in case of a systematic bias against a certain group of people it isn't always possible to remove the possibility of perceiving the dividing factors. You can forbid asking about religion in interviews, but gender is, in many cases, immediately obvious, either from given name or from appearance.

Ah, and calling talking openly about gender an "obsession" is somewhat offensive, saying that the issue isn't treated seriously about EU is also patently false (we regularly have ideas like forcing a percentage of company boards to be women, for example, sadly still ineffective), and adding a dismissive quote by a woman at the end right after mentioning that women can be sexist too is sorta ironic.

> * In Australia, Canada, Israel, South Africa and the United States, between 40 and 70 percent of female murder victims were killed by their intimate partners.

Why is that a bad thing (except that you're killed)? If with men, the percentages are not so high, and the rest are killed by random people, then surely women are better off - it's easier to investigate murders, find and punish the killers, even prevent murders.

It points that there's a sexual background to a huge chunk of violence against women.

Half of Americans are women. Half are men. Give or take.

83% of Congress are men.

60% of college graduates are women.

91% of inmates are men.

84% of single parents are women.

If you think all that's left of ten thousand years of systemic discrimination is unpleasantness and stupid jokes, I just don't know what planet you live on.

What point are you trying to make? There are large differences on average between men and women? Why is this a problem?

So, seriously, what are the "large differences" you infer from these statistics? That women tend to be harder-working, while men tend to be more dishonest?

I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong.

Do you honestly believe that 91% of inmates are men because of sexism? That there are no differences in let's say propensity for violence between sexes?

I'm saying that on the day you're born somebody flips a coin and if it comes up tails you're about 15 times more likely to wind up in prison.

I don't really care why that is. It's not the world I want my kids to grow up in. Let's not give up trying because we think there's an easy out.

There's clearly some injustice at work here, we must fight to have more women put in prison! Stop the injustice!

Uh, let me think.. yes? The biological argument cuts every way, and if you're going to use it, you only end up cutting yourself.

What? We can't accept that things that might be true might be true, because you might cut yourself with that argument?

I'm not sure these numbers show anything but that men are more violent (hormones and culture, maybe?) and women are more "attached" to their children (a side effect for carrying one on her belly for 9 months, perhaps?)

And I'm not sure how that's supposed to matter. We are all of us predisposed to live in caves eating roots and nuts and anything we could kill with a pointy rock, but somehow we got past that.

You referred to these numbers. I totally agree with you now - they don't mean a thing (and we'll never know why you included them here in the first place)

I included them because they are facts, unlike the idea that men are inherently violent or women inherently nurturing.

But sure, keep guessing.

And thats why we don't have equality. Men are violent and bossy, women are nurturing and caring, let's parade tough on crime and the nuclear family.

It's funny how some "mass stereyotypes" (like "men violent, women nurturing") tend to take longer to die. Let's look at some other "mass stereyotypes" that are no longer so accepable to say in civil discource:

• Women can't do maths (like at all, their brains are tiny and incabable of abstract thought) It's in the nature!

• Men can't look after babies, they'd probably hold them by their heads or something! It's in their nature!

• Jews are only concerned with money, it's in their nature!

• Women lack the mental capabilites for politics and shouldn't be allowed to vote, it's in their nature.

• Women are very emotional, and hence are unsuitable for high pressure jobs (high level political leader, CEO, doctor, military commander), they'd just have some sort of emotional break down when the going gets tough, it's in their nature.

• etc. etc. (I haven't even touched on non-noble people, black people, LGBT people, catholics, prodestands, muslims, etc. etc.)

All of these things have been said about natural differences between various groups, mostly due to what we now realise as massive biases. When one says "men are naturally violent" or "women are naturally caring", the burden is on you to show how this time it's different, rather than it being just another (false) statement born out of bias. All these claims had some sort of evidence behind them. The burden is on you to come up with a standard of evidence that supports your biased claim, but doesn't show that women are incable of high office (say).

The "mass stereotypes" you're mentioning here are respectively called "testosterone" and "oxytocin". It could be that, one day, someone is able to prove that there is more to it, but I'm certain that obtusely comparing a hormonal effect with "jews love money" won't help much...

Right so how do you know lack of testosterone (and/or presense of oestrogen) doesn't cause someone to be bad at maths or cause them to have an crying fit during high pressure situations

BAN WOMEN CEOS

No. This argument has been dismantled so many times by so many (yes, often "feminist") scholars ... it pains me a little to recapitulate.

Gender is a construct. It is /tethered/, but not mapped, to sex. They are in no way identical, and often, in so many ways, orthogonal. Sex (ie, sex difference) has a finite number of dimensions, and the ones we can identify with confidence are physiological (currently, we understand neither the connection between neural function and behavior, nor the mechanics of culture, in enough detail enough to draw clear conclusions about what might really be "male" vs "female" characteristics in the realm of culture or behavior). Gender, OTOH, has unlimited, fluid dimensions. The prospect of discovering or creating a simple mapping between sex and gender, begets a vain project. [Similar to the project of mapping Jewishness to thrift, ethnicity to ability, sexual orientation to morality, etc.]

Moreover, the process of peeling away the layers of what may be constructed / learned, or may be more-or-less dictated by genetics -- to varying degrees depending on an individual and a set of circumstance -- is /exactly/ the process of dismantling gender, which we can also hope will lead to a more equitable distribution of power.

So if one is sincerely curious about the underlying realities, keeping at chipping away the presumptions, is the way to go.

Historically, a number of great cultures used Eunuchs, or people who weren't allowed to marry in high-ranking offices (the Chinese, Byzantine, Ottomans, and the Church). Apparently, good leadership is not tied to testosterone.

I don't think I made or implied any such connection... The link in question is that testosterone (both in males or females) greatly increases the propension to violence in individuals (although it's not NECESSARY that violent individuals have high levels of testosterone or that anyone with high levels of it is automatically the Incredible Hulk)

Protestants

(a side effect for carrying one on her belly for 9 months, perhaps?)

The fact that one partner can literally walk away has nothing to do with it?

Yes, it does - but given one of the creatures is HORMONALLY ATTACHED to the child, which one do you think is more likely to walk away?

(Hint: statistical data has the answer...)

Or do our sexist views make us believe men are more deserving of jail time? A good example is the way we look at a man raping a woman vs. a woman raping a man. The former is the most heinous crime one could commit, but the latter, in the eyes of many, isn't a big deal, if even a positive experience.

Sir, you have confused a term. /Consent/ is the opposite. Look it up.

herval, a handful of numbers can't show anything conclusively.

Volume one of Simone de B's epic "Second Sex" covers your points in depth. Worth reading - some of its 1953 English translation is online at : http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir...

Your critique of rmc is a bit of a Catch-22: if everyone can agree that it's unjust sexism, then it's just making it "easy and risk-free so more people join." More controversial examples than that, though, and you'd see a bunch of people arguing it's not Really Sexism(tm).

To prove the point, here's some actual struggles against sexism. Racism will have to wait for another day.

1) Rape culture. A large proportion of women are the objects of nonconsensual sexual encounters. People make excuses for this, saying that it was not "legitimate rape" or arguing that lots of women "rape easy." Note that this isn't a super odd or rare occurrence pushed by hillbilly conservative legislators but happens in the highest seats of power, from candidates on the Presidential ticket trying to pass legislation only providing protections for "forcible rape" to the New York Times saying a gang-raped 11 year old child was sort of asking for it.

2) Access to healthcare. Many women are not covered for even the most basic protections. In some areas, a hospital is allowed to refuse access to abortions for women who have been raped or are victims of incest. While men have for ages been given insurance coverage for Viagra and baldness treatments, it was only recently that it was mandated that women should get coverage for birth control, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Probably worse of all, it's become incredibly difficult in many areas to get even a first trimester abortion. Those legislators banning abortion, I'll point out, are the same ones minimizing rape and opposing laws that enforce against gender discrimination in the workplace.

3) The glass ceiling and sexism in the workplace. Yes, they're real, and just because it's a bit more subtle than disallowing women to own property or making it legally impossible for a husband to be subject to legal penalties for raping his wife (which in the USA only ended in 1993) doesn't mean that they're not sexism.

4) Sexism in the home. People love to point out that women are more likely to have jobs than men now and more likely to have a degree, sometimes in an attempt to say "well aren't men the oppressed ones now?" But on top of those responsibilities, women still do a disproportionate amount of the housework in opposite-sex coupled homes. You might laugh and say "well what's 15 minutes of work extra a day, it's nothing compared to not being able to own property" but that kind of thing is deeply pernicious.

I'm sure you can also point out places where men are screwed by sexism in our society. And you know what? Those suck too, and everyone should oppose them just as much as sexism against women.

I'm struggling with the idea that you don't think these recent examples are 'actual' racism/sexism. I'd like to think that you're characterizing the people who see the situation as 'risk free' but the more I read your comment, the more I think you really are trying to trivialize recent events.

To take a small step into the oppression Olympics you're trying to play, being told "don't dress like sluts" by a police officer is a direct indication of how your police will handle cases of rape and sexual assault, i.e. poorly. Comments made about "legitimate rape" by politicians reveals the sexism to the point of disregarding reality these politicians hold. And these are the same politicians trying to pass anti-woman legislation. And an government ad campaign is not just words, it's tax dollars and policy.

So sure, I'll grant you that women aren't being sent away from the bank teller outright and non-whites aren't barred from employment explicitly, and I would say not because the -isms have become trivial, but because they have become more complex and/or structural. They manifest in forms where it is difficult to point your finger at something blatant, until someone slips up when speaking and reveals their true feelings and intentions (and no, I don't mean in a Freudian-slip way).

Or sometimes, the effect is so drastic that even though it's not obvious what factors are responsible, we can tell that something fishy is going on: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1cdxtcX2ICdWA2gWMW74...

And it's not 'risk-free' for women to speak out about sexism at work. Many fear backlash at work, and many get long-term harassment and rape threats online. I'd provide examples, but I've already taken so long writing this that now I'm one of many similar responses to your comment. But if anyone asks, I can dig some up.

The flipside of this "new generstion" is that racism/sexism matters are being taken to an extreme absurd. In my country, for instance, you can get sued for racism for calling a black person "an idiot"...

Citation needed? saying something like "all black people are idiots" or "you people are idiots" is racism.