An Unabashed Imitation of an article by Peggy McIntosh
In 1990, Wellesley College professor Peggy McIntosh wrote an essay called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. McIntosh observes that whites in the U.S. are “taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.” To illustrate these invisible systems, McIntosh wrote a list of 26 invisible privileges whites benefit from.
As McIntosh points out, men also tend to be unaware of their own privileges as men. In the spirit of McIntosh’s essay, I thought I’d compile a list similar to McIntosh’s, focusing on the invisible privileges benefiting men.
Due to my own limitations, this list is unavoidably U.S. centric. I hope that writers from other cultures will create new lists, or modify this one, to reflect their own experiences.
Since I first compiled it, the list has been posted many times on internet discussion groups. Very helpfully, many people have suggested additions to the checklist. More commonly, of course, critics (usually, but not exclusively, male) have pointed out men have disadvantages too – being drafted into the army, being expected to suppress emotions, and so on. These are indeed bad things – but I never claimed that life for men is all ice cream sundaes.
Obviously, there are individual exceptions to most problems discussed on the list. The existence of individual exceptions does not mean that general problems are not a concern.
Pointing out that men are privileged in no way denies that bad things happen to men. Being privileged does not mean men are given everything in life for free; being privileged does not mean that men do not work hard, do not suffer. In many cases – from a boy being bullied in school, to soldiers selecting male civilians to be executed, to male workers dying of exposure to unsafe chemicals – the sexist society that maintains male privilege also immeasurably harms boys and men.
However, although I don’t deny that men suffer, this post is focused on advantages men experience.
Several critics have also argued that the list somehow victimizes women. I disagree; pointing out problems is not the same as perpetuating them. It is not a “victimizing” position to acknowledge that injustice exists; on the contrary, without that acknowledgment it isn’t possible to fight injustice.
An internet acquaintance of mine once wrote, “The first big privilege which whites, males, people in upper economic classes, the able bodied, the straight (I think one or two of those will cover most of us) can work to alleviate is the privilege to be oblivious to privilege.” This checklist is, I hope, a step towards helping men to give up the “first big privilege.”
The Male Privilege Checklist
1. My odds of being hired for a job, when competing against female applicants, are probably skewed in my favor. The more prestigious the job, the larger the odds are skewed.
2. I can be confident that my co-workers won’t think I got my job because of my sex – even though that might be true. (More).
3. If I am never promoted, it’s not because of my sex.
4. If I fail in my job or career, I can feel sure this won’t be seen as a black mark against my entire sex’s capabilities.
5. I am far less likely to face sexual harassment at work than my female co-workers are. (More).
6. If I do the same task as a woman, and if the measurement is at all subjective, chances are people will think I did a better job.
7. If I’m a teen or adult, and if I can stay out of prison, my odds of being raped are relatively low. (More).
8. On average, I am taught to fear walking alone after dark in average public spaces much less than my female counterparts are.
9. If I choose not to have children, my masculinity will not be called into question.
10. If I have children but do not provide primary care for them, my masculinity will not be called into question.
11. If I have children and provide primary care for them, I’ll be praised for extraordinary parenting if I’m even marginally competent. (More).
12. If I have children and a career, no one will think I’m selfish for not staying at home.
13. If I seek political office, my relationship with my children, or who I hire to take care of them, will probably not be scrutinized by the press.
14. My elected representatives are mostly people of my own sex. The more prestigious and powerful the elected position, the more this is true.
15. When I ask to see “the person in charge,” odds are I will face a person of my own sex. The higher-up in the organization the person is, the surer I can be.
16. As a child, chances are I was encouraged to be more active and outgoing than my sisters. (More).
17. As a child, I could choose from an almost infinite variety of children’s media featuring positive, active, non-stereotyped heroes of my own sex. I never had to look for it; male protagonists were (and are) the default.
18. As a child, chances are I got more teacher attention than girls who raised their hands just as often. (More).
19. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether or not it has sexist overtones.
20. I can turn on the television or glance at the front page of the newspaper and see people of my own sex widely represented.
21. If I’m careless with my financial affairs it won’t be attributed to my sex.
22. If I’m careless with my driving it won’t be attributed to my sex.
23. I can speak in public to a large group without putting my sex on trial.
24. Even if I sleep with a lot of women, there is no chance that I will be seriously labeled a “slut,” nor is there any male counterpart to “slut-bashing.” (More).
25. I do not have to worry about the message my wardrobe sends about my sexual availability. (More).
26. My clothing is typically less expensive and better-constructed than women’s clothing for the same social status. While I have fewer options, my clothes will probably fit better than a woman’s without tailoring. (More).
27. The grooming regimen expected of me is relatively cheap and consumes little time. (More).
28. If I buy a new car, chances are I’ll be offered a better price than a woman buying the same car. (More).
29. If I’m not conventionally attractive, the disadvantages are relatively small and easy to ignore.
30. I can be loud with no fear of being called a shrew. I can be aggressive with no fear of being called a bitch.
31. I can ask for legal protection from violence that happens mostly to men without being seen as a selfish special interest, since that kind of violence is called “crime” and is a general social concern. (Violence that happens mostly to women is usually called “domestic violence” or “acquaintance rape,” and is seen as a special interest issue.)
32. I can be confident that the ordinary language of day-to-day existence will always include my sex. “All men are created equal,” mailman, chairman, freshman, he.
33. My ability to make important decisions and my capability in general will never be questioned depending on what time of the month it is.
34. I will never be expected to change my name upon marriage or questioned if I don’t change my name.
35. The decision to hire me will not be based on assumptions about whether or not I might choose to have a family sometime soon.
36. Every major religion in the world is led primarily by people of my own sex. Even God, in most major religions, is pictured as male.
37. Most major religions argue that I should be the head of my household, while my wife and children should be subservient to me.
38. If I have a wife or live-in girlfriend, chances are we’ll divide up household chores so that she does most of the labor, and in particular the most repetitive and unrewarding tasks. (More).
39. If I have children with my girlfriend or wife, I can expect her to do most of the basic childcare such as changing diapers and feeding.
40. If I have children with my wife or girlfriend, and it turns out that one of us needs to make career sacrifices to raise the kids, chances are we’ll both assume the career sacrificed should be hers.
41. Assuming I am heterosexual, magazines, billboards, television, movies, pornography, and virtually all of media is filled with images of scantily-clad women intended to appeal to me sexually. Such images of men exist, but are rarer.
42. In general, I am under much less pressure to be thin than my female counterparts are. (More). If I am fat, I probably suffer fewer social and economic consequences for being fat than fat women do. (More).
43. If I am heterosexual, it’s incredibly unlikely that I’ll ever be beaten up by a spouse or lover. (More).
44. Complete strangers generally do not walk up to me on the street and tell me to “smile.” (More: 1 2).
45. Sexual harassment on the street virtually never happens to me. I do not need to plot my movements through public space in order to avoid being sexually harassed, or to mitigate sexual harassment. (More.)
45. On average, I am not interrupted by women as often as women are interrupted by men. (More.)
46. I have the privilege of being unaware of my male privilege.
(Compiled by Barry Deutsch, aka “Ampersand.” Permission is granted to reproduce this list in any way, for any purpose, so long as the acknowledgment of Peggy McIntosh’s work is not removed. If possible, I’d appreciate it if folks who use it would tell me how they used it; my email is barry.deutsch@gmail.com.)
(This is an occasionally updated document; the most current version of The Male Privilege Checklist can always be found at https://amptoons.com/blog/?page_id=2402 . The views expressed here, which I started writing in 2001, unavoidably fail to precisely express my current views; that’s life, isn’t it? To see posts discussing the Male Privilege Checklist and various items on it, please visit this archive page).
Related links
For another feminist list with a different thematic approach, see Andrea Rubenstein’s “Think We’ve Already Achieved Equality? Think Again.”
gijoe sports fan:
Not if you’re trying to make an argument which a scientist accepts as credible. There are excellent reasons why casually remembered observations are among the most inferior data for most purposes. Important among these excellent reasons are sampling error and confirmation bias. Jake Squid alluded to the latter, above, and we are all vulnerable to it, which is one reason for other aspects of good scientific practice, like good experimental design and peer review of whatever we do. Skilled scrutiny is key. One way of scrutinizing someones work is doing it again to see if it happens again.
That’s what Ruchama is getting at when she asks you to cite the studies you referenced. She would like to look at them and see if they were well-done and on topic.
Are you willing to clarify something for me? Are you asserting that scientists who are women are incapable of investigating a question like this without taking sides or advocating for a position? If that’s what you mean, do you think that men are likewise incapable of it? If both are incapable, how would you propose that we investigate questions like these?
Grace
I don’t believe you. I think you’re making these 4 articles up because you’re so clearly in the wrong, or at best these are four “articles” rather than studies … like some Reader’s Digest anecdotal unscientific “Isn’t it funny how women always talk so much” shit.
If I’m wrong, prove me wrong.
—Myca
Hill Guthrie, thanks for the link–quite interesting.
gijoe:
Men and boys talk more than women and girls in mixed-gender classrooms. You can find many such studies easily with a cursory Google search. EDIT: “Encouraged to talk more” could mean “talk less so they receive more encouragement to talk than the people who already do”, but that doesn’t seem to be your point.
I don’t doubt that you feel like the girls in your classrooms talked more–but that doesn’t mean they did, for the reasons Grace outlined above: we have an imperfect understanding of the things that happen around us, based on our cognitive biases, and in addition we imperfectly recall prior events. But in this case, there are people with recording devices and stopwatches, which are as close to unbiased as we’re going to get. And they tell a different story than your memory does.
I’m very sorry to hear that you felt pressured to do that.
(As a random lighthearted note, I keep thinking your name is some kind of transliterated Japanese word. No matter how much I know I’m wrong, I don’t look at your name and see “GI Joe” unless I really concentrate.)
I, too, would like to see your four articles that have the potential to prove me wrong.
Yes, gijoe sports fan, I think you’re being incredibly disrespectful.
Elusis is a professional scientist. She’s taken to trouble to research this topic and found that a highly respected mommy blogger watched her daughter on a bunch of play dates and published a commentary in the Slate Journal of Social Justice Warfare. The approval from the science community clickbaited this right to the top of the google science rankings. This deserves more than mockery. But no, like a troll you just carry on insisting we should instead get evidence from randomised controlled experiments and then call the top scientists on this blog morons.
Being disrespectful how? To a pretend scientist? How so? Lol….you want prove of my articles and I want proof of her credentials. I could say that I am a scientist just to say it. It doesn’t make it true (it isn’t true, I am currently a kinesiology major, looking to also add a 2nd major of nutrition since those are my 2 focuses and areas of expertise). And I don’t owe her any kind of respect. Respect is earned, not given. That is another gripe that people clamoring for “equal rights” should talk about. Women often wanting or demanding respect without being willing to give any in return. I didn’t demand or even ask for any respect when I was in the army, I just did what I felt I needed to do and would rather not receive any recognition for it…but anyways back to the topic at hand. If you were to do a survey on this subject matter and were to ask boys whom are struggling in class (which the majority of high school dropouts are boys and the majority of college students are girls), why is it they are struggling or what are some reasons for their subpar academic status, they would give many reasons, not the least of which is that they are made to feel that they don’t belong or that the girls are given more attention and are often considered the “ideal student” for being seen as “more disciplined” or “more focused” or “more bright”. And yes, these may be generalizations, but they are for the most part true. I would guarantee you that, just gather a large group of struggling male students and ask them. You would be in for quite a surprise. I prefer personal experiences and doing my own experiments. Hell I may do a study on this at some point. It sounds interesting.
Well, Franz, apparently gijoe sports fan missed your point, there, and I’m tempted to invite you to try again, but this time more obviously.
But don’t.
You, also, are not discussing in good faith. Harlequin did not say, “I have scientific training and therefore I’m right.” She did NOT make the Appeal to Authority which you apparently want her to have made. She mentioned her education as part of an aside to Jake, by way of commiserating with him about the condescension she was receiving.
I referenced her education, but I also did not make an argument from authority. I referenced her education and experience, and mine, to suggest that gijoe sports fan would be more successful in his argument if he provided evidence, which is how Harlequin and I generally work.
The same would be true of your contributions. If you’ve got evidence, let’s see it so that we can test it and see if it changes our conclusions. Whether or not you have evidence, kindly stop wasting our time until you’re able to participate civilly. Right now, you’re not showing yourself to advantage.
gijoe sports fan:
The two aren’t equivalent. She never said, “I’m right because I have an education”, but you did say, “I’m right because I have studies.” That’s why people have asked to see the evidence, because you said you had it, and you described a little of it. The longer you go without doing something as simple as linking to what you’re talking about, the more I’m convinced that Myca is right.
It does sound interesting, doesn’t it? If you want to do a study, go for it. I’d be interested to examine the study and the results.
Grace
I would venture to say that our good friend gijoe sports fan is being disrespectful when he writes:
That was the point at which I said to myself, “This guy isn’t worth it. He won’t provide evidence for his position because he doesn’t have any. And what an asshole, to boot.”
Before that I was willing to take him as your generic, opinion encased in lucite dude who was too embarrassed to back down on the subject when he realized he didn’t have any actual evidence to support his position. Now I believe that this is a generic bad dude who I hope never to run into in the meatworld.
I am surprised that the next comment following his was not a banning. I mean, I stopped reading at that point and only now just went back and read the rest of his odious comment. That is one nasty misogynist writing that:
Holy fuck, dude. No wonder you can’t be bothered to click any of the links provided for you. They came from women. Useless!!!!11!1!!!
Moderators have a lot more patience for that shit than I do.
One last note..
I too, prefer to run my own experiments. I mean, sure, they tell us that getting run over by a train will kill you but that doesn’t make any sense at all. Why would I take the word of others for something that important? I’ll just shove somebody in front of a train and then tell you what happened. That’s much more reliable than “studies” – especially studies done by women and not done by me. By the way, the person I shoved in front of the train was just gently moved aside by it and didn’t die.
Franz:
While you may feel as though your snark is providing something useful in this conversation by calling the author of the article I linked to a “mommy blogger,” your invocation of “Social Justice Warfare” suggests to me that you aren’t interested in any kind of good-faith critique. Because indeed, the link I offered hasn’t been published in a peer-reviewed journal (which I hope it will be, or a replication of it). But if you’d looked at the author note at the bottom, you’d see:
“Kieran Snyder holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania and has spent the last decade leading teams of software designers and engineers.”
If a PhD in linguistic can’t design an informal study that produces results that are at least worth discussing and getting curious about, who can?
Yes. I think I do need to try again, as people are having trouble picking up on some of the nuance.
This is all set-up, we’ve had the most nauseating collective display of condescension, trumpeting of scientific credentials and respect for evidence from the usual clique. But when it came to it, not one of you actually proved capable of distinguishing between the lowest newsmill social justice warrior clickbait and professional science. I’m going to play on this for comic effect.
The joke here is that while we’ve had much bloviation about research, with very minimal effort you could find a better source than a Slate blog.
The author has a decade out of date PhD, in her more recent accomplishments “She is a mom… and she blogs about… kids” – her words not mine. I’m drawing attention to her lack of contact with current research.
This a factual description of the study. She admits to telling her daughter off for interupting, and then stood over her daughter with a clipboard counting how many times she interupted. What happened next will amaze you!!!
What I’m getting at here is that Slate isn’t a peer reviewed academic publication and publishes intentionally politicised content.
Again, I’m contrasting the total lack of reception from the scientific community, with the articles real purpose of creating ad revenue via outraging social justice warriors.
I think this is very funny.
Of course, the study was not randomised, badly controlled and not an experiment, you would think calling for this would be positive.
I’m questioning whether many commentators are in fact top scientists.
Grace (myself):
Franz:
Franz, when a moderator tells you specifically not to do something, and you put any value on your own participation, it’s best not to do the thing.
What I do here is entirely volunteer, and frankly I have better things to do with my time than worry a lot about whether I’m being perfectly fair to someone who has added very little of substance to this discussion, and has mischaracterized and insulted some of the participants.
After some thought and a bit of discussion with Amp, I let your comment through.
If your snark-to-substance ratio does not improve on the next comment, I will ban you.
This is in accordance with the moderation policy, which for convenience I reproduce here:
Grace
My moderator hat is now off, and I’m replying to some of the substance of Franz’s post.
Franz:
Anyone who has read this thread can see that this is not so. Feel free to quote specific examples if you disagree.
College degrees have expiration dates? I wonder how often a Ph.D. has to re-dissertate, or how often a medical doctor has to re-attend medical school.
Maybe she hasn’t followed the research. Maybe she has. The fact that she published her study in a specific location doesn’t speak to that question. Also, whether she has kept up with the research doesn’t say anything about the particular study. It would speak to whether she can generalize accurately about the state of current research.
That’s not an accurate summary, but fortunately anyone who wants to know that can go find out for themselves, because Elusis actually linked to it. That’s why people want to see the studies — so that when one person claims that they were good or bad for some reason, someone else can check and see if it is so.
Sure. No one claimed otherwise. Not all studies are created equal, and you can legitimately place less value on this one because it has not been peer-reviewed or because you disagree with the methodology.
Of course, you didn’t say any of that. Instead you mocked.
Since you introduced the phrase “top scientists” yourself — in other words, since no one has made that claim — it doesn’t matter, does it? It’s a strawman.
Grace
Yes I did, while I mocked you all for your inability to distinguish science from hack journalism, I quite clearly flagged the study’s main flaws in my mockery: it was not peer reviewed and had no contact with the academic literature, was not randomised, had poor controls, wasn’t an experimental design and had observer-expectancy effects.
You can carry on ignoring this and insisting that I’ve added “little of substance to this discussion”, all that is going to demonstrate is that you’re not only incapable of working any of that out yourself, but you’re also incapable of seeing it even after it’s been pointed out to you twice.
If you’d like to tell me who exactly I’ve “mischaracterized and insulted” I’d be interested to know. You’re offended simply because I have a very different view of your scientific compentence than you all seem to possess and you don’t like it being pointed out. Not because I insulted anyone, it’s a statement of fact you all confused obvious crap with professional science, you’re only taking it as an insult because it cracks your self-image. I’m at least glad that people seem more reticent to post about their scientific competence now.
Why are you focusing on this one study, among the many we have mentioned? (There’s Hill Guthrie’s link on why these things are hard to measure, my link to the Language Log post and all the references therein, and Amp’s original links from the post, which I also referenced in this discussion–possibly others I don’t remember.) If this study was our only piece of evidence, our case would be flimsy indeed. But it serves just fine as a colorful illustration of points that are already well-studied by existing research.
Actually, for that matter, why are you focusing on that study, and not the other one by the same person that I linked, discussing interruption rates in tech meetings? Come on, stop beating up Elusis’s link, take a stab at mine! :) (Which is even more problematic, since the observer was actually part of the conversations she was studying.)
The fact that she’s a mom is totally irrelevant, unless you conclude that being a mom and having kids makes you unsuited to do science. If what you wanted to do was point out that she hadn’t worked in the field in a decade, by her own admission, you could have said “The author has a decade out of date PhD, in her more recent accomplishments she ‘has spent the last decade leading teams of software designers and engineers… and she blogs about … women in technology … and careers.'” Conveys the same information.
It’s true, “mommy blogger” has less cultural cachet than “works in the software industry.” But that’s because…widespread misogyny! (And even if you, yourself, are not sexist–and it doesn’t matter to me either way–you were accessing sexist memes to make the author look worse.)
“It’s true, “mommy blogger” has less cultural cachet than “works in the software industry.” But that’s because…widespread misogyny!”
============================
No, it’s because the job of mommy involves different skills and work areas. Work in the software industry is going to keep skills fresh, and expand skills, that are more relevant to the issues here.
Franz,
Not enough improvement on snark-to-substance. Best of luck elsewhere, but do not post anything further here.
Grace
If a man is more likely to get a job than an equally-qualified woman, and more likely to get a promotion than a woman, then people would suspect that men, not women, got their jobs because of their sex. You can claim #2, or #1 and #3, but not both. One of those sets has to go the other way.
But a man is far more likely to be unjustly accused of sexual harassment.
But a man is far more likely to be put in prison.
And yet men are far more likely to be assaulted on the street than women are–check the crime stats.
But if a man has children and provides primary care for them, his masculinity will be called into question.
I’ve got good news for you! You don’t have to do that if you’re a woman, either!
Of course, you can choose to wonder whether every episode and situation in your life whether it has sexist overtones. But then you’ll probably wind up writing long blog posts about male privilege.
8. On average, I am taught to fear walking alone after dark in average public spaces much less than my female counterparts are.
And yet men are far more likely to be assaulted on the street than women are–check the crime stats.
Wait a minute, that can’t be true. People are always rational! After all,
If a man is more likely to get a job than an equally-qualified woman, and more likely to get a promotion than a woman, then people would suspect that men, not women, got their jobs because of their sex. You can claim #2, or #1 and #3, but not both. One of those sets has to go the other way.
But then you’ll probably wind up writing long blog posts about male privilege.
Says the person writing a long comment on said blog post.
ClosetPuritan
Your juxtaposition Bad horse’s comment about the logical fallacy of points 1, 2 & 3 with his reply to point 11 could be confusing and possibly mislead others to believe that was his factual response. If you would like to retort his reasoning I included his response below.
If a man is more likely to get a job than an equally-qualified woman, and more likely to get a promotion than a woman, then people would suspect that men, not women, got their jobs because of their sex. You can claim #2, or #1 and #3, but not both. One of those sets has to go the other way.
Every time I try to read the most recent comments on this thread, it sends me to Page 7. Does that happen to anyone else?
Do you click on the specific comment, or on the post title?
Clicking on the specific comment does that to me, too. I think there’s an algorithm that figures out it should be page 7 based on the number of comments, but either it’s not counting pingbacks or not counting deleted comments or both. Clicking on the post takes me to the right page, though (and then I just hit “end” and scroll up until I find something unfamiliar).
You can see something similar in that the last comment page ends at comment #979, because there are 21 pingbacks on the page. But this comment page starts with #1001.
I click the specific comment–in all other circumstances it takes me to the right place. Only this thread isn’t working.
I can always work around it (as you can see by my comments!) but thought a mod might want to know.
gin-and-whiskey:
We know, or at least, Amp and I know. We have no idea why it happens or how to fix it. Suggestions welcome if your suggestion might actually lead with little effort on our part to a solution. :)
If it helps at all, I just click on the link, which gets me a link I can edit in the URL field, and I select the end and edit it to this:
https://amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/comment-page-11/
Then I scroll to the bottom. It’s kludgy, but it works.
Grace
You can just delete the “comment-” part entirely; the main post shows the most recent page of comments. Or just clicking on the name of the post in the recent comments bar, rather than the comment itself, will do the same.
(Actually, I should say, it does that for me. I don’t know what it does for people logged in as mods!)
The problem, as far as I can tell, is that the first comment in the thread is #601. There are 600 lost comments. This is causing a miscalculation of what page comment number 1021 is on. That’s my theory. My theory dictates the addition of 600 dummy comments, numbered 1 through 600, to fix the problem. That won’t take much effort will it? Good. That’s settled then. I expect we’ll see a fully functional comment thread by 5 PM PDT.
How so? I can find comments in the 110s (everything before that is a pingback). I don’t know if you can go back with the “older comments” links, but if you manually edit to comment-page-2 or whatever you can still see them…
The math doesn’t work out, anyway: we should be on pg 5 if we start from 601, but g&w gets sent to pg 7.
My best guess is that the problem is different pieces of the backend treating pingbacks differently (the code that figures out which comment goes on which page thinks the pingbacks are comments; the code that figures out the comment number takes its starting point from the page number, but ignores the pingbacks; the code that makes the links in the comments sidebar ignores the pingbacks entirely and divides the number of comments by 100). But that means you probably can’t fix it without changing the code itself. And without looking at it I couldn’t know for sure.
Also, you can just delete the “comment-page-7/” part but leave everything after the pound sign, and it will take you to the right comment (or at least that’s what it does for me).
Harlequin has consigned my theory to the ashbin of history. Alas and alack!
http://people.uncw.edu/hakanr/documents/genderandinterruption.pdf
This is the metadata statistics pool for data gathered by dozens of studies about whether men or women interrupted more.
Yes, the women found men interrupted more.
Yes, the men found women interrupted more.
The statistics assign a variable to account for the bias of both sides.
What was found that all the studies vary depending on how the interruptions
were categorized, and that the observers were looking more critically at the other gender.
When all of this data was compiled, it was found that- gasp-
there’s not a difference.
This is from DOZENS of studies being compiled- not just 2.
Hey Chris of the Logic People, thanks for the interesting link. I’ve read the paper through, and they do good and reliable things with the statistics, from what I can tell as a non-statistician anyway.
But I have to disagree with your characterization of the conclusions, sorry. When you say
this is true, but the magnitude is quite surprisingly different–studies whose first authors were men found women interrupted more at a level you could get by chance in 10% of tests, but at a negligible level, while studies whose first authors were women found men interrupted more at a level you could get by chance in 0.1% of tests (so they’ve measured it very reliably), and the difference had a moderate effect size (so it’s noticeable, not negligible, in the real world). I’m astonished at how different they are, actually. Of course that doesn’t tell us who’s right–the women may be overcounting or the men undercounting or both–but I think just saying “Both genders found the other gender to interrupt more” actually makes the gender difference here seem less than it is. And I say that as someone who usually thinks gender differences are wildly exaggerated. (I say “both genders” above since these studies only assign male or female, and make no assertion that this is representative of the real world.)
Well, more precisely, they speculate about that: they don’t have any way to measure or infer it.
That’s not exactly true either. The authors say there are three ways to count interruptions:
1) Count every time someone talks during another person speaking, including stuff like someone saying “Uh-huh” while the other person is talking (active listening feedback), or people talking over the end of people’s sentences in the way cohesive groups sometimes do as a community-building thing, or what they call “intrusive interruptions”, when someone takes over someone else’s speaking turn.
2) Count the talking-over-the-end-of-sentences and the intrusive interruptions, but don’t count the “uh-huh”s.
3) Count only the intrusive interruptions.
The authors don’t find an overall gender difference for #1 or #2. They do find a difference if they only look at the intrusive interruptions–the kind most of us find annoying–but that difference has a small effect size, meaning that, while they can measure it, it’s not very important.
They also break down the data by a bunch of contextual things, as you note, and for many of them they don’t find a gender difference. But they do find that, for intrusive interruptions: in groups of 3 or more people, men interrupt more, with a small effect size; men interrupt more when in groups of strangers, with a moderate effect size; in single-gender groups, men interrupt more than women, with a sort of borderline-negligible effect size; men interrupt more in naturalistic settings, with a whacking big* effect size, but there’s no evidence of men interrupting more in lab settings; and there’s a large effect size for men interrupting more in “unstructured” activities like normal conversation, but no effect of men interrupting more during more structured activities, such as when participants were asked to complete a task together. The effect size and significance (how well they’ve measure the effect) were reduced in the samples where they considered all interruptions, not just the intrusive ones, but some of them still appear as noticeable effects, especially the group size and naturalistic settings ones.
So, basically, my takeaway from this is that: if you’re in a largeish group of strangers having some idle chitchat, men will interrupt more than women to a probably noticeable level, but if you’re in a small group of people you know working on a task, there are no gender differences. Which is good news for women in the workplace and stuff. Plus, most people spend most of their time interacting with people they already know, so that also weighs against these interruptions being important in everyday life.
Note, of course, that–as the authors point out–the studies involved in this meta-analysis mostly focused on WEIRD (Western, educated, from industrialized rich democracies) people and specifically middle-class white college students, so general applicability is uncertain. (That link is super interesting, by the way, though not strictly relevant here.)
*scientific term, obvs
Saying something like “Men interrupt women more than women interrupt men” suggests this behavior is an inborn trait rather than cultural, while I think the issues at hand are mainly whether such things are inborn or cultural. The thing of interest is not whether there is a gender difference, but how the variations in behavior correlate with all the factors we can think of, including sex, ethnicity, region (e.g., New York City versus New York State, urban vs. rural, east vs. west), class (upper / middle / lower), education, marital status, age, and so on.
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I started out wanting to respond to one of these. And then I found a second one that I disagree with, then a third. Now that I’ve read them all, I think about 90% of them are completely backwards.
But who has that much time?
So let’s take just one:
I saw two different men get “sexually harassed” at work today. Or at least, had they been women, it would be considered sexual harassment. The difference is that when women make off-color jokes or flirt with men at work, men do not feel the need to file a lawsuit over it because: 1. It would be laughed out of court, and 2. it’s just not that important. Men usually just laugh it off and go back to work.
If we used the same standard for men as for women (hey what a novel idea! No double standard!), then I’d say far more men are “sexually harassed” at work, because women know there’s no consequence for it. Men, however, can lose their careers over it.
Funnily enough, I can count a number of instances where I too could have claimed sexual harassment if I were a woman and if the women in question were men. One particular time, walking to school (I was in 9th or 10th grade at the time, and having 2 women (I found NEITHER of them to be attractive) smacking my butt each as I walked by and cat calling me as I kept walking (and laughing), and I didn’t do anything about it. You want to know why? BECAUSE IT WASN’T A BIG DEAL. Who cares? I found it funny, so I laughed and went on my way to school. Hired Mind is definitely right on this issue.
You know, someone stole my bike last year. It wasn’t a big deal to me. It was a cheap bike I’d owned for many years, and honestly, I was happy to have an excuse to buy a better bike.
So because it wasn’t a big deal to me when someone stole my bike, does that mean that it’s wrong for anyone to consider bike theft a big deal, or to object to having their bike stolen? Obviously not. The logical error you’ve committed is called The Typical Mind Fallacy – just because you don’t mind something, it doesn’t follow that everyone else does or ought to feel the same way.
This is ignoring, of course, that there may be major differences between your experience and those of many women who object to street harassment. For example, a lot of women have had an experience something like having some guy saying “nice night.” She responds “nice night” as she walks past. “Can I have your number” he says, friendly. “Sorry, no,” she replies. “Fucking stuck-up bitch! Don’t ignore me, bitch!…” and so on, he yells, following her for half a block or more as she walks on, hoping like hell he doesn’t escalate further into a physical attack.
That isn’t what happens EVERY time street harassment happens, obviously. But it’s always the way a street harassment encounter with a stranger COULD go, and for some people, that makes ALL street harassment encounters tense and frightening. And your encounter, luckily, wasn’t like that.
But even the encounter you had could have been distressing. Just because you’re not bothered by it doesn’t mean that someone else wouldn’t have been bothered, or that they’d be wrong to be bothered, or that what the women did to you wasn’t sexual harassment, or that they weren’t acting like assholes.
I expect that sexual harassment at work is more disturbing for women than for men, if only because they’re more likely to face awkward situations having to work with unattractive men who’ve expressed interest in them.
But they are more likely to face these situations because they enjoy the privilege of not having to ask men out. Women don’t have to take the initiative in dating. With today’s long work hours, and dissolution of any social structure outside work, people probably rely increasingly on meeting mates and dates at work. And this is one more place where most women want to have all the power and none of the risk. The only possible solution to the inequity of harassment at work is for women to ask men out at work; but most women prefer the situation we have, which is more advantageous to them. They want men to approach them at work, and they want strict sexual harassment laws that give them the power to admit the attractive ones and punish the unattractive ones.
This is the basic problem with equal rights. Women want equal rights, but have no interest in giving up any of their privileges: They expect men to ask them out. They expect men to pay for them on dates. They have the right to a career with equal pay, but if they prefer, they will find it easy to find a man to pay for their college, or to work a boring high-paying job while they do something they want to do that pays little, or to exploit any of the many ways it is still acceptable for a woman to take the 19th-century role of dependent. And the women who choose to act this way always skew the statistics to make it look like we haven’t achieved gender equity, even if we have already gone past equity.
Those women who get angry if a man holds a door open for them–I won’t say they’re right, but they’re definitely onto something.
I dated a woman who was going to college to get a PhD in psychology. The female:male ratio was about 30:1. Tuition at that time cost $45,000/year, so by graduation she would have a debt of about $240,000, for a degree that would enable her to earn an extra $10-15K/yr. I showed her that the extra earning power would never be enough to pay off the interest on the loan. And this wasn’t a good college; it was a notoriously bad college.
So I asked her to ask her classmates how they were paying for college, because I was perplexed as to why anyone went there at all. And every last one she asked had a husband or boyfriend paying her way through college.
As long as there are women still willing to exploit men this way, surveys will indicate that women get less money for equal work, because these women will accept less money for equal work, because they CAN. Equal-pay laws, plus a society that still tolerates women falling back on the old ways, results in a situation advantageous to women, which shows up (in statistics that don’t measure non-monetary trade-offs) as being advantageous to men.
The most basic of these societal advantages to women is that women still choose, while men must approach. Our young lives center around finding a mate, and women have all of the power in this. Most women who abstain from relationships have, in one way or another, chosen to do so; about 1/4 of all men suffer long-term unwilling singleness. Women end up married to men they have chosen; men end up married to the one women out of a thousand they approached randomly who happened to say yes. Women complain about the stress of being constantly ogled by men; they have no notion of the horrible stress of needing to be on the prowl, all day, every day, suffering rejection 99% of the time, just to have any love life at all. I assure all the women out there that however stressful they find it to be continually approached by men, those of us men who aren’t alpha males find it far more stressful to have to do that approaching. Women have no conception of the permanent emotional damage suffered by the vast number of men who go their entire lives without being able to get a date.
Women have no idea how many of the morals society endorses regarding relations between men and women are feminine preferences that men go along with because they have to, and women have no conception of the emotional damage it does to men who internalize these morals and convince themselves that their nature is inherently evil. This is why men don’t talk about their feelings; society teaches us, from the time we’re little boys, that we’re evil beasts if we don’t feel like women. We know that our women would be horrified and self-righteously indignant if we told them everything we really felt; we ourselves would be horrified if we admitted to ourselves what we felt. (This isn’t all the fault of women. The role of men in pre-historic times was largely to fight other men and keep them away. Civilization is the process of figuring out how to keep making social groups larger and population denser. Maleness is inherently incompatible with that, and so civilization requires continually delegitimizing masculinity. But it is the fault of women that they punish men who act civilized for being less masculine, and reward the throwbacks for patronizing them.)
The previous set of relations between men and women, in most situations, put the burden of action on the man. It is easy, then, for people demanding equal rights to point to those actions and say “Stop doing that!” But no one notices the luxury of the hundreds of little daily inactions that a woman, but not a man, is allowed. No one points at them and says “Stop not doing that, so that men don’t have to do it for you.” The only counter-example I can think of, where legislation has forbidden inaction, is child support.
If you are a woman and you don’t own four screwdrivers, a hammer, a socket wrench set, a drill, pliers, and duct tape, you’re part of that problem. If you’ve ever asked a man to fix your computer, you’re part of that problem. Not that I mind fixing a computer for a woman. The problem is the sense of entitlement it creates in the woman, and the subservience it imposes on men. These were only appropriate in a society with distinct gender roles. If you don’t want gender roles, don’t ask a man to fix your computer.
The discussion of gender inequity in the West has been framed to talk only about situations in which women have a disadvantage, and to exclude any talk about the ways men have a disadvantage as merely reactionary. This made sense in 1960, but doesn’t today. The blaze of indignation that was so useful in firing up support has burned out of control now, so that sometimes even addressing women’s problems is forbidden. (Consider the dialogue on rape, where any mention of any of the ways shown to reduce rape–improved security, reduced drinking, legalizing prostitution, therapy for convicted rapists, making it easier for women to get concealed weapons permits–is immediately shouted down, because the women who claim the right to control the discussion find using rape to demonize men more rewarding than actually reducing rape. Searching for solutions like a common male only shows your patronizing insensitivity.)
This is why I generally oppose further economic and work-related gender inequity “reform” in the US, even if the specific inequity being addressed is real. Addressing women’s problems, but never men’s, leads to inequity. Until we are allowed to talk about the disadvantages men suffer, equality requires retaining some counter-balancing disadvantages for women.
A key female privilege is the privilege to talk about male privilege. If women really want equality, rather than just whatever advantages they can get, they should talk about that.
And I realize a large part of the problem is that men won’t talk about their problems! Women find it very unattractive for a man to admit to being in competition with women over anything. Even without the social stigma of being perceived as speaking out “against women’s rights”, any man knows better than to admit to feeling threatened by any woman. He must always present; his public face must always be attractive to women. Even a married man will lose status if he behaves in ways unattractive to women.
Every attempt at equality eventually runs aground on this basic fact of biology: Men display and women choose. We will never achieve equality, or even equity, until we can either change or acknowledge this fact.
Good Lord, there’s so much wrong with your post, Bad Horse.
There are the wildly implausible factual claims – for example, as a general rule “notoriously bad college[s]” don’t charge $45,000/year for tuition. Also, there’s pretty much no way in hell that psychology department had a 30:1 female:male ratio. The most generous interpretation is that you made a typo and meant 3:1, which is certainly a plausible ratio; a more cynical interpretation is that you’re just making shit up (an interpretation strongly supported by your claim that “every last one she asked had a husband or boyfriend paying her way through college” – as someone with a fair bit of experience at a number of colleges and universities and at both the graduate and undergraduate level, I can assure you that claim doesn’t pass the sniff test at all).
There are the bizarre attributions of motive that make absolutely no sense – for example, why in the world would women accept less money for equal work just “because they CAN”? You have to do some pretty impressive mental gymnastics to reach the conclusion that large numbers of women actively choose to get paid less than their labor is worth “because they CAN,” and that they’re somehow taking advantage of men in doing so.
There are your repeated attempts to universalize your experiences and your subjective impressions of others’ experiences – for example, “women end up married to men they have chosen; men end up married to the one women out of a thousand they approached randomly who happened to say yes”, despite the fact that your experiences bear virtually no resemblance to my own experiences, the experiences of the large majority of people I know, and based on other comments here the experiences of many other Alas readers as well.
But it appears to all come down to an atrocious understanding of basic biology:
This statement, applied to modern human societies, is pure horse shit. In no sense are your personal impressions of gender interactions a “basic fact of biology.” It would be worth your time to consider what other pressures or influences might be involved – influences that go beyond an extremely simplistic understanding of male/female mate competition and choice.
gijoe sports fan:
I know a guy — a close friend of my wife’s family — who is a Vietnam veteran. Nice guy. He lives with some after-effects from his time in combat. He’s somewhat hypervigilant, and sudden, loud noises can provoke a dramatic startle reaction and an adrenaline dump.
Years ago, he was at a neighborhood party. It’s one of those old neighborhoods where everyone knows everyone, and he was very comfortable, relaxed, enjoying time with friends and family. Some neighborhood kids thought it would be funny to set off a firecracker behind him, and they did.
But no harm done, right? No big deal. Who cares?
Context matters. Personal experience matters.
I think it’s great that you didn’t care about the women smacking your butt as you went by. It’s great because it means that you don’t have scar tissue on that issue; it’s not a sore spot; and why would I wish for another human being to have those tender spots, those negative re-livings, which can result from past trauma?
But the fact that you can count a number of instances, by itself, is telling. Many women can’t count the number of times they’ve been harassed in the last month, or the last week, because they’ve lost count, because they block it out so that it does not drag them down.
They care.
Grace
“There are the bizarre attributions of motive that make absolutely no sense – for example, why in the world would women accept less money for equal work just “because they CAN”? ”
_____________________
Lots of women even accept zero money for work. I know a few who are married to men with very good jobs as executives – and a doctor – who volunteeer during the day. They actually get zero.
You know why? The stress of having to perform for pay is not good, but they still want the contact with people during the day. No one is going to sue them for malpractice as a volunteer.
And it’s easier to marry a doctor working ungodly hours than to BE a doctor working ungodly hours. You have exactly the same lifestyle, but not the stress, even working part-time at the perfume counter.
That’s why.
First of all, please tell me one person who can’t count the number of times they have been harassed in their whole lives (excluding of course racial discrimination, ethnic discrimination, religious discrimination or sexual orientation discrimination, because we know those things happen QUITE A BIT more often than sex discrimination). I will wait. Hell even in a whole month, you have had what 1 sexual harassment experience at the most? If any at all. It happens to men at the hands of women, women at the hands of women, women at the hands of men, and men at the hands of men. Hell I had a guy basically hit on me at night and I just was like, “yeah whatever” and went to my apartment which was just across the street from this incident. I refuse to apologize for showing no sympathy on this issue when women don’t show sympathy to any of the issues that men face, to include sexual harassment. Hell when I was in 7th grade, I remember sitting in front of a girl who handed me a note, saying “hey sexy” and I turned around and faced her and smiled and went back to paying attention to the teacher. She then handed me a 2nd note that read, “how big is your dick?” And I just smiled and brushed it off. Because it again wasn’t a big deal. They are just WORDS. Unless someone is threatening physical harm upon you, it is just WORDS!
And as far as the Vietnam vet, hell I can relate. I don’t like fireworks. But guess what, fireworks are NOT verbal. They are an action. You shoot them off and they can sound very similar to a mortar going off or a howitzer shooting a round (likely with a lower charge, but still is bothersome.). You can’t compare that. I don’t like hearing fireworks either, because of having been artillery in the army.
But anyways my assertion still stands, people need not be so sensitive. Men don’t scream harassment, because if we did, every time that a man OR WOMAN did something similar to what happens to women when they are screaming harassment, the stats would be VERY SIMILAR in frequency….and also it is a proven fact that women get paid as much as men do, when all factors are equal (no taking maternity leave, same amount of sick days taken, same credentials, same experience, SAME OCCUPATION (that’s a big one that stats seem to neglect)). If you want to make more money, don’t have kids. If you want to have kids, don’t expect to get back into the work force and make the same amount of money. When I came off active duty and was placed in the reserves and got a civilian job, if I had been deployed again, I would have been able to keep my job but I wouldn’t have automatically moved up in pay grade upon coming back. You have to work for that. Also men generally work more hours than women in a work week. Men also take on the dirtier and more dangerous jobs (92% of all work-related deaths are men). Women want equal rights, petition to be able to sign up for selective service. DO WHAT’S RIGHT FOR YOUR COUNTRY!
We know that? I certainly don’t know that. In fact if I had to guess based on my own personal experience and observation (take it for what it’s worth), I’d say the opposite is true; but I’m probably not in the best position to judge. However, I have heard many women say they’ve lost count of how many times they’ve been harassed on the street or at work (and Grace said the same thing – I’m not sure why you just ignored her statement and asked for “one person” who’s had that experience; presumably you’re not silly enough to be asking for specific names, so I’m not sure what more you’re looking for).
You can’t be serious with this – you honestly think the dozens (almost certainly an underestimate) of peer-reviewed studies documenting discrepancies in men’s and women’s pay don’t take into account occupation? Could you point to a single one?
Fair enough – there are some women who volunteer instead of working for pay because their husbands/partners make enough to support them both (and certainly some men who do the same, although probably fewer). Of course that’s not directly relevant to the question of the pay gap between men and women who do work for pay, as opposed to volunteering. And the rest of your comment has nothing to do with the issue of the pay gap between men and women doing the same job, which is well-documented (gijoe sports fan’s ignorance on the topic notwithstanding) – how would a comparison between a doctor and a part-time perfume counter worker be remotely helpful when it comes to the issue of equal pay for equal work?
More generally, do you honestly think the pay gap can be explained by many women not wanting to or not being able to deal with “the stress of having to perform for pay”? That seems to be the implication of your post, but maybe I’m misreading.
There’s greater societal pressure on women to take care of things in the home (and for men to prioritize their jobs over family). “Women take more time off than men” doesn’t disprove the role sexism plays, it just moves it to a different location. (In fact, here’s a cartoon on the topic by our fine blogmaster!)
As one example among many, this has been the official position of the National Organization for Women since 1980.
gijoe sports fan:
Sure.
That led me to this, if you’d like the direct shortcut.
Happy to help.
Are you asking me, or telling me? I’m not sure where you’re going with this, exactly. It kinda seems like you’re trying to tell me what my experience is, which is silly, because I haven’t said, and you don’t know.
So it would have been totally okay if one of those kids had walked up behind him and suddenly yelled at the top of his lungs, “BANG!”…?
The harm/no-harm distinction between sticks and stones, on the one hand, and “mere” words, on the other hand, is a false dichotomy. As Randall Munroe put it, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it.”
Yeah, gotta say I’m not a huge fan, either, unless I know they’re coming. Professional displays don’t get under my skin, but dipshits setting off bottle rockets in the neighborhood don’t fill me with a sense of ease, especially since there’s usually also beer around.
I don’t think this gets us anywhere, though. Telling someone not to be sensitive is like telling someone not to have any other emotional reaction. It’s like telling them not to have scar tissue. It’s like telling my veteran friend not to be so jumpy. Sure, it would be great if it were that easy, but it’s not. Saying that someone shouldn’t have a reaction doesn’t make the reaction go away, and it doesn’t change the history and the personal experience which made the reaction happen.
I did sign up for selective service.
They never asked me to go. Now they won’t take me. For starters, I’m too old, and there’s at least one other reason.
My wife tried to sign up for selective service when she turned 18. They turned her away. She supports and advocates for the “everyone signs up, everyone gets called as necessary” model, and so do I.
In the end, I found another way to serve my country.
Grace
You are awesome, Grace.
(I strongly disagree with the “everyone signs up, everyone gets called as necessary” model of selective service, because I strongly disagree generally with the idea of compulsory military service, but I still think you’re awesome.)
You are a liar on that issue, Grace. Because selective-service is ONLY applicable to men at present time and has been since the advent of the draft. So that defeats your claim right there. The reason I brought this up now is that while I was at the post office recently, I saw a sign next to the envelopes that said, “attention men, do what’s right!” and without even looking to see what it was about, I knew that it was going to be about selective service. And of course I looked down and there it was. You see, this country (men AND women) will guilt the hell out of young men to sign up for the draft (whether it’s in effect or not). And of course, as a woman, you will say that it doesn’t matter, you will never get called up, so don’t worry about it. But if you do say that, that just proves your ignorance. Because I am a veteran and I know some about it and my dad and grandfather both were veterans, hell I come from quite a military family. So I can definitely speak on this issue. Mandatory military conscription can happen at any time. Especially with the massive sequestration taking place and if ISIS gets bigger and if our uneasy truce with North Korea goes to hell and they attack our 4th ID (Infantry Division) stationed in South Korea. But of course, as a woman, you will NEVER have to worry about that. And I don’t want to hear about any imaginary privileges that you think that I have being a man (even a man of color, no less). I have EARNED every right that I have and hell I have kept every right that you have and if I were still in the military, I would proudly continue to do so, without ever needing recognition for it (namely because I HATE receiving recognition or gratitude for being in the military)….but again, no, the pay gape has proven to be a MYTH. If you want to make more money and you want to thrive in your career, social pressure will not dictate your professional choices. Hell I was always told to not even think about attending post secondary education because I admittedly am not school smart by any means (I have an IQ of something like 80 or something), but that hasn’t stopped me from attempting to pursue my kinesiology and nutrition degrees. There is no law in place that says that you have to have children. I for one HATE children, so I will never put myself in the position to have children, no matter how much my mom would disagree about that assertion whenever I talk to her. I just don’t see the point in vacating 25-50% of my annual income for 18 years, to support a child/children and the mother of the children. So instead of putting myself in that situation, I chose NOT to. Which is an EASY choice to make. You shouldn’t let society dictate what you do in your life. Hell I have always been pressured by my peers to consume alcohol and even on occasion to smoke marijuana. I have yet to smoke marijuana and can count on 1 hand how many days in my life I have even drank even 1 alcoholic beverage. Because I choose to be my own person and make my own choices….And also how can you compare a veteran suffering from PTSD (a condition that you can’t have complete empathy for, unless you too are a veteran suffering from PTSD) to perceived sexual harassment? And in this day and age of the lawsuit and crying rape, you can just make eye contact with a woman and be accused of sexual harassment. Another reason, many men are choosing to stay away from many women. Thankfully the few women I associate with are not lawsuit happy and don’t cry rape just to imprison someone, out of revenge.
Also, why is it that more than 60% of all collegiate students are women, and that number is increasing? Wouldn’t sexism have a play in that discrepancy? Or is it just men underperforming and women showing that they are the superior gender in the classroom? Oh, never mind, I already know what your answer as a feminist will be….Why should women get paid the same as men for less work? If you work a 36 hour week and a man at the same job works 43 hours, shouldn’t he get paid 7 hours more? Women also call off work more frequently as being “sick”, yet they should get paid the same as someone who doesn’t? Also, let me give an example of a woman not doing everything within the job but yet getting paid the same. When I was in the army (and we all know that one of the main jobs of every soldier is to load and unload gear/supplies/equipment from an LMTV/HMMVVVV/Storage area, etc. But yet the men would be doing all of the loading and unloading and I never once saw a woman so much as touching a ruck sack as they stood around and watched us men laboring, loading and unloading an entire battalion’s worth of gear (over 250 soldiers’ TA-50/gear). But yet those female soldiers still got paid the same as their male counterparts. And also women in the military are more easily promoted to NCO’s. This has been proven, since their fitness test standards are significantly lower and the promotion board weighs fitness test scores VERY heavily, when deciding who is getting pinned at the next promotion…But yet women are the ones “fighting for equality”. And don’t even get me started on the fact that in cases of alimony, women are the beneficiaries of it 92% of the time and feminists completely ignored alimony stories until a few women started having to pay their husbands alimony…But yet, women are the ones “fighting for equality”.
gijoe sports fan:
Nope. It is a fact that I signed up.
If you couldn’t see how that could be true, then you had several paths open to you. Among them, you could have asked, “Grace, since you’re a woman, how is it possible that you signed up for selective service, and why would it matter anyway, since if you showed up, they’d just turn you away and you wouldn’t have to serve?” Then I could have answered that question, which I would have been inclined to do.
Instead, you called me a liar, and now I have to control my irritation. Good morning to you, too.
Should you choose to embrace enough humility to encompass the possibility that you might be wrong on the biographical details of a person you don’t know, you could back up ask that question now. Or, you could do a little reading on this site, and the answer might occur to you.
Oh, yes, it’s coercive, and it’s worse than that. There’s an issue of class privilege, too: you can’t get access to student financial aid without showing proof that you signed up. Rich kids can therefore dodge the draft that much more easily. Which (intersectionality!) has a disproportionate impact on racial and ethnic minorities.
There you go again. I have never said that. Partly, because for me it wasn’t true; I was available to be called up (and enough of a starry-eyed idealist to go, too). Partly, because if someone expresses a concern or a hurt, and I don’t make an effort to walk a mile in his moccasins before opening my mouth, I’d be acting like an asshole. I do act like an asshole sometimes, but I work hard not to, and I can spot that particular method of acting like an asshole a mile away. I’ve noticed that others find it more challenging.
I notice that you had no trouble predicting confidently that I would say it (or that I had said it). Rather than categorizing people and then confidently acting on the belief that you know them, why don’t you try actually getting to know them and letting them surprise you with what they do? It’s a lot more interesting. And sometimes the surprises are pleasant ones.
I haven’t earned any of the rights I have; rights aren’t earned, they’re recognized, and I wasn’t around when most of the rights I enjoy were recognized, so other people fought and died to get them recognized, and I benefit from their efforts through no virtue of my own. I do appreciate your service in protecting our rights. (I know that you just said you hate appreciation for your service, but since you threw your service in my face, I feel it’s appropriate for me to pick it up and dust it off.) I have, in fact, helped to preserve our rights, too. But you don’t know anything about that, because you’ve assumed things about me, rather than asking.
As Lee1 pointed out, above there’s plenty of evidence, in the form of peer-reviewed studies, that the pay gap exists. There is plenty of argument over it which ignores those studies. Would you care to point us to any evidence which we can read and review which supports your assertion?
Perish the thought.
Because both are brought about by trauma. Classically, PTSD trauma is from a single event or related string of events, but we’re also finding that it can be produced by chronic stressors.
Consider a really simple case: people who have been raped (men, women, and other people). People who have been raped have certainly experienced trauma. Sexual harassment would certainly be very likely to bring back memories of that trauma. Likewise, veterans who have been shot or watched comrades die have experienced trauma. Loud noises or other things are very likely to bring back memories of that trauma.
If the association causes dysfunction, then it might be PTSD.
You haven’t asked, but I’ll answer the question you should have asked: to the extent that I have PTSD, it comes from other sources than military service. But, here’s the thing: even while I can’t understand through direct experience exactly what service-related PTSD is like (though it’s universal; it certainly it varies from person to person), I can make an effort to relate it to aspects of my own experience, and that leads me to sympathize with veterans who have service-related PTSD.
Lots of people can do the same with women. Lots of people can do the same with men. Lots of people can do the same with other people. So it’s puzzling to encounter people who refuse to.
No, you really don’t. You need to engage in a dialogue and actually listen, here. You’re using what other people say as a diatribe trigger, and that’s not achieving anything other than making you look mulish. If it goes on, I’m going to do what many others here have done, and stop responding because I have other things to do with my time.
gijoe sports fan, please: fewer assumptions about other people, more responding to what people actually say, more paragraph breaks. Your posts will be more persuasive, and we could have an actual discussion. Win/win all around.
Grace
The STUDIES are usually pretty clear, though the REPORTING is not.
Still, even most studies do not go into real details that matter. And the more that people tend to dig into the minutia, the less that they tend to find a pay differential. IIRC, one of the most detailed studies found that the discrepancy approached zero.
IOW, if you look at “women versus men” you end up with a large discrepancy. If you compare “female MDs versus male MDs” you end up with another, smaller, number. “Surgeons versus male surgeons” might be smaller still. And so on down the line, until you get to “cardiothorcacic surgeons from comparable medical schools who have never taken any time off and who work equivalent hours/week” and then, it seems, you find much less (if any) discrepancy.
THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT THERE ISN’T A DIFFERENTIAL. But it DOES call into question what, precisely, is the SOURCE of the differential. If it turns out that identically-qualified identically-trained, identically-experienced women are being paid less due to their sex that is obviously a problem. If it turns out that women are assigned as pediatricians and men as brain surgeons, that may be a different problem with a different solution, which requires a different analysis. And if it turns out that women are choosing to be pediatricians then that is yet another issue, including the obvious question of whether or not to define it as a “problem” at all.
To Lee1:
First, we’ve mostly managed until to have a civil discussion here, and now you and gijoe are trying to spin it out of control into yet another web page burning with rage and indignation. Please try to be polite. Please try to imagine that people who disagree with you might have reasons beyond stupidity or malice.
I checked the college’s tuition just now, and you are right–the tuition is much less than that. I was only repeating my recollection what she told me. She is excruciatingly honest, but often careless about precision.
The male:female ratio of 30:1 is my estimate. I was at her graduation ceremony and saw the entire graduating class. There were a few men in a sea of women. She said there were no men in any of the classes she was taking at that time. Nationally, the ration of women to men in psychology programs is 9:1, so 30:1 is not that far out of line.
WRT every single one she asked having her tuition paid by a husband or boyfriend, that is what she told me. I don’t know how many she asked.
Because they can.
Someone who has an enormous debt to pay off must find a job that pays enough to pay off that debt. Someone who doesn’t, can and often will take a job they like better. Or they will take the same job, but not negotiate aggressively for a higher salary. You have to do some pretty impressive mental gymnastics to avoid understanding this.
I could try to go into the evidence and literature supporting my statement. Or I could point out that this is the almost-universal expectation of every American on the dating scene outside of major urban centers. But I don’t sense enough good faith or openness from you for this to be worth my time.
Bad Horse says:
I could try to go into the evidence and literature supporting my statement.
Or I could point out that this is the almost-universal expectation of every American on the dating scene outside of major urban centers.But since that would expose the problems with my assertion, I won’t. Instead, I’ll make a lot of generic and wholly unsupported claims and demand that you accept them, even though I won’t do the same for any of your assertions.But
I don’t sense enough good faith or openness from you for this to be worth my time.admittedly I am concerned that I might not be able to keep up that facade for long, so I’m going to blame my refusal on you.There, fixed that for ya.
Bad Horse:
I’m astonished you found this claim plausible.
American women and men are equally likely to owe money for student loans, and women are more likely to be worried about their ability to pay off student loans. (See this UI report – pdf link.) And the average amount of student loans owed by women and men is about the same, according to this AAUW report (pdf link).
However, women, because of the pay gap, tend to have to spend a higher portion of their income paying back student loans than men do. (The same is true for Blacks and Latinas compared to whites).
So if the women at her college really are all getting a free ride from boyfriends, then her college is wildly unrepresentative. (Furthermore, to make the averages work out, presumably there is some other college at which an approximately equal number of men are all getting free rides. :-p )
According to this APA article, “Women earning doctoral degrees in psychology outnumber men three to one.”
P.S. Bad Horse, every single time I respond to you or just read one of your comments, I get that song stuck in my head. :-p
gin-and-whiskey, if you aren’t able to admit that men ask women out more than women ask men out, you aren’t ready for this discussion. If you think something would “expose problems with my assertion”, you should explain it.
When you’re ready to argue your point of view with reason instead of insults, let me know.
Even if it were true that it’s an “almost-universal expectation” in much of America (which it’s not), that doesn’t make it a “basic fact of biology.” As it happens there are factors beyond inherent biological characteristics that affect human behavior and societal norms. In fact, you yourself distinguished between patterns in major urban centers vs. elsewhere. If you recognize those differences, it should take you less than ten seconds of critical thought to realize there are other factors at play besides some “basic fact of biology” (unless you’re under the impression that city folk are genetically distinct from country folk).
I saw the graduation ceremony, and there were very few men. The 30:1 estimate I made may be a faulty and biased recollection. I recalled a 90% female figure for psychology enrollment from some graphic I’d seen recently, but can’t find it now, and may have gotten it wrong. It may have been this one: Psychology: Where are all the men, which gives the figure for the UK as just under 80%, not 90%. 80% would be a 4:1 ratio, which I admit is a big difference. 75% would be a 3:1 ratio, and is the ratio the NSF gives for graduate studies in psychology in the US. I apologize for not checking before spouting.
The ratio, however, doesn’t matter WRT this argument, since I merely mentioned it in passing and didn’t use it as a point in my argument. My point was that all the women she asked had their tuition paid for by a man. I realize this is atypical; my reasoning was that this particular college might have a concentration of such cases because people who had to pay for their own education would be unlikely to go there. She said she didn’t ask any men because there were no men in any of her classes.
Ampersand, you wrote,
That linked report says,
Its cited sources are
The 2001 study could not have data from 2009. The 2009 study produced only one report, “First Look”, which doesn’t break down debt statistics by male and female. The only other data I found available is a CD-ROM full of transcripts of the study’s interviews, so it’s hard to see how they could arrive at this figure. Also, the survey questions don’t provide any option for a person to answer if someone else (other than parents) took out a loan for them, and I didn’t see any data on who paid for the non-loan portion. It isn’t obvious why the size of the loans would tell us anything about how much of tuition was paid by someone else. If someone offers a person $10,000/yr of financial support, they can go to a more expensive college and take out the same size loan that they would have without it.
What I’m saying is that data doesn’t answer the question of whether men pay for women’s college more or less than women pay for men’s college. I have seen or heard about cases of both; my impression is that the former is much more common. The annual SallieMae surveys on how students pay for college doesn’t have any response available to cover “husband”. The closest is “relatives & friends”, who accounted for a very small 4% last time, but this survey is of undergraduates, who don’t usually have spouses or committed relationships.
My overall point is that it’s easier and more common for women to accept traditional roles of being supported or mostly supported by men, and this reduces the relative importance to those women of salary versus other considerations. So keeping traditional roles available to women screws up statistics about gaps in pay. You could probably see this in a plot, if studies plotted all their datapoints instead of summarizing them with a linear regression or an average.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303532704579483752909957472
Here is just a quick link that greatly explains my stance (but in the words of the Wall Street Journal, of course). Interestingly most of the sites that claim and believe this myth, never take into account the different occupations chosen (men often choose science and math based careers vs. women often choosing education, language, or art based careers), the number of hours worked (men generally work more hours on average and often work more overtime hours), maternity leave vs. paternity leave (men rarely if ever get paternity leave, while women almost always are granted maternity leave), salary negotiations (men are usually more aggressive negotiators vs. women often being more passive negotiators).
Also I never did respond to you asserting that sexism is more prevalent now than racism or other discriminations (what a load of bunk). My great uncle (a man of color), who helped start the NAACP, and my dad (another man of color), would both strongly disagree with you on that assertion.
And no, actually men are the only ones to be called upon to sign up for selective service. You see, you don’t just voluntarily sign up for selective service, you are chosen as a man to do it. Of course, if you ENLIST voluntarily, you don’t have to worry about signing up for it. You may have tried to enlist, but you didn’t attempt to sign up for selective service, those are 2 different things. And don’t get me wrong, selective service is a positive thing, which is why EVERYONE (men AND women) should have to sign up for it. You should gather some of your female friends together and petition the government to look in including women in the selective service pool. And no you cannot sympathize or empathize with veterans who have ptsd. It is COMPLETELY different from any perceived trauma that you may have experienced. Hell I get a little jumpy sometimes when I hear something that even sounds similar to a 155 round being shot downrange. Because I saw and experienced something that less than 1% of the U.S. population will EVER see or experience. Hell I am almost desensitized to anything that I see in Chicago (my current city) because of it.
And you shouldn’t just assume that if a woman screams rape or harassment, that anything even remotely close to rape or harassment has occurred. The law and history have proven that often times, they are LIEING (oh wow what a concept). Just look up Brian Banks. A man accused of rape (by a woman who didn’t want her boyfriend to know that she had cheated on him). So she accused him of rape. He went to prison for 5 years, losing out on his USC scholarship. He was a standout 5-star linebacker at his California high school and had received a verbal commitment from USC. This took all of that away and only while he was in prison, did the woman admit to lieing about it. She even received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Long Beach State University for punitive damages (she paid back some of it). And he received NOTHING of compensation from her or the judicial system. The judge claimed that, “the school was the victim”, NOT Brian Banks! But of course, you may go on believing that the law isn’t on your side.
I stand corrected. Let me wash my nose and mentally prepare for the discussion now, so I will be “ready” to your standards.
Ok.
The thing that’s wrong with your assertion–well, ONE of the things that’s wrong with your assertion–is that it isn’t “an assertion.” It’s conflicting.
1) basic fact of biology: Men display and women choose.
2) almost-universal expectation of every American on the dating scene outside of major urban centers.
3) men ask women out more than women ask men out
Do *you* think those are saying the same thing?
When you argue in a matter which deserves something other than mockery, I’ll start.
No, seriously. You can find plenty of my posts in this thread in that category. And since I actually do things like read studies (and posts,) they’re probably what you’re looking for. But since you apparently can’t be bothered to read them, I can’t be bothered to retype them. If you respond to them, though, I’m game.
Besides, people who yammer on about “basic facts of biology” without any apparent understanding of biology(*1) ; who use terms like “almost-universal” when they mean “greater than 50% (*2);” and who refuse to offer evidence for their ever-changing BS(*3); deserve what they get.
Want to talk facts? Sure! Let’s start with that “evidence and literature supporting my statement” which you mentioned. You made a claim; you said you had support; let’s see the support. It might help if you restated what it was you were talking about, though, since it sure seems to have changed in a very few posts.
*1: I majored in psych with a concentration in neuropsych, as it happens, and have also taken post-graduate courses in neurodevelopment. I’m quite able to talk intelligently on this subject. Which biological differences, precisely, are you referring to?
*2: Of course, now I am a lawyer and not a scientist, so I’m even more into the whole “words have a meaning and you don’t get to redefine them” thing. Not my fault if you can’t get them straight.
*3: The %age of people who claim to have great proof, and who subsequently turn out to be lying or just plan wrong, is very high. People who have proof of their point can usually be recognized by the fact that they start with “my point is true because ____.” People who are lying, or who suspect that their “proof” is so much BS, have a tendency to refuse to produce it. Guess which group you’re in right now?
That may be a quicker link than you realize – only the first sentence or so can be read by people who aren’t WSJ subscribers.
But it does tell you the title of the post. Google for that, and click on the link that goes to the very same WSJ page you couldn’t read before. Abracadabra, you can now read it.
Grace, why are you intentionally trying to cause confusion here?
gijoe sports fan:
Show me where I asserted that, please. Link or quote.
I signed up for selective service.
(I’m reining in a whole bunch of other replies which want to burst out. Reining them in HARD.)
I know what selective service is. I signed up for selective service.
Here, I’ll make this super easy: cut-and-paste the following line:
Grace, how were you, a woman, able to sign up for selective service?
I can’t? I can’t feel sympathy for someone? I’ve never had a migraine, so I can’t say to someone having a migraine, “That has to be awful. What can I do to help?” You’re so sure that I could not possibly have any experience remotely similar to what EVERY veteran has gone through? I work with veterans who have accepted my sympathy, knowing that my experience was not theirs, and vice versa. You’re assuming a lot about my life experience and it’s starting to piss me off.
I also don’t appreciate the deprecation of “perceived trauma” I “may have experienced”. I’m not going to play Oppression Olympics with a veteran; I don’t think it does either of us any good. But I’m also not going to let you say that because I’m not a veteran I can’t understand what it is to go through a traumatic experience. I think that’s unfair to the many non-veterans who have been shot, or stabbed, or beaten unconscious, or had a building collapse on them, or whatever. Those traumas are real, too. It’s a violent, crappy world, and military combat is not the only way to suffer in it.
You’ve made it abundantly clear, here, that you don’t know word one about my life experience.
That sounds like it sucks. You have my sympathy.
That does not even begin to approximate what I said.
I have investigated many police reports which turned out to be false, including some sexual assaults. When there was evidence, I’ve then charged the false reporter. I’m not going to make assumptions about your first-hand experience with people lying to the police, but I, personally, have a wealth of experience in that area.
Grace
Then you should know that those false allegations make it even harder for the REAL rape victims to see their perpetrators held accountable for their actions and convicted. And rape often times has no evidence. Yes they may have had sex, but who is to say whether it was completely consensual or not? Perhaps it was and then out of regret, the woman went to the police and claimed rape….and military medical instances and ptsd patients are NOT comparable to anything in the civilian sector. Which drives me nuts that president Obama tried to get rid of VA and present everyone with that terrible obamacare. Civilians have COMPLETELY different ailments than do veterans and current military personnel. That is why, you cannot begin to empathize or really even do much sympathizing with a veteran. And no you cannot sign up for selective service. It is only open for men to sign up for. You see, this country believes women to be indispensable, due to their ability to bear children and for men to be very dispensable, as 1 man can impregnate a plethora of women over their lifetime. Where as a woman has a somewhat small ovulation window with which they can typically be impregnated. That is one of, if not the main reason that men are the ONLY ones obligated to sign up for selective service and women are not asked to nor allowed to sign up for it. I come from a LONG line of military veterans, so on this subject matter, I am the subject matter expert. This is why you should petition the government to mandate women to ALSO sign up for selective service. Everyone, truthfully should, since this is just as much your country as it is ours. And you want equal rights, don’t you? Well with equal rights come equal responsibilities. And that’s the thing. Most of us men have no problem adhering to and taking on those added responsibilities, but if women truly want to be seen as equal and not just equal when it appeases them, they must also take on those same added responsibilities…..But yes either you or another poster mentioned that when I said that racism and other forms of discrimination are more prevalent in this society, you or someone else said that the opposite was likely true. Well I said that my great uncle (one of the people responsible for the founding of the Evanston, IL chapter of the NAACP and also instrumental in forming an NAACP element at UCLA (yes the University of California-Los Angeles!) and my father (another man of color), whom both have dealt with racial discrimination throughout their lives and still do on occasion, would STRONGLY disagree with you on that assertion.
Please stop making false assertions about PTSD.
PTSD is not something only soldiers get. For instance, it is more common in alumni of the foster care system (over 21%) than amongst active combat veterans (2-17%). Rape survivors, both adults and children, also commonly experience PTSD (of course, these categories all cross over with each other: a great number of foster care kids and a sizable number of soldiers are also rape survivors). Anyone who is exposed to violence (whether committing it or at the receiving end) is at high risk for PTSD, and it can even crop up under conditions that we would not normally consider “violence.”
The idea that PTSD is something that only happens to soldiers is harmful to everyone with PTSD, including soldiers themselves.
I have PTSD. I have not now a soldier, nor have ever been.
gijoe sports fan:
You are wrong. Some women are required to sign up for selective service. Let me be explicit about what you are missing using the source that Grace Annam provided which you didn’t read or didn’t understand:
gijoe sports fan,
I don’t get it – you seem quite willing to accept the claims of people of color regarding the amount of discrimination they suffer; why are you so unwilling to accept the claims of women regarding the amount of discrimination they suffer? Not that there has to be some sort of competition between women and people of color for who has it worse, but you seem a lot more open to accepting the personal experiences of one group than the other.
Also,
That may make you the expert on what it’s like to be in the military (certainly compared to me – I can’t speak for others here); but it obviously doesn’t make you an expert on the reasons why our government and society treat women and men differently with regard to military service. I won’t pretend to be an expert on that either, but I think it’s a little more complicated than their “small ovulation window” being the main reason why most women don’t have to sign up for SS.
Wow. Amongst the veritable avalanche of atrocious, this really sticks out for some reason.
The official reason why women are excluded from the draft had been that the purpose of the draft is to get combat troops, and women were excluded from combat positions. Since that changed last year, it’s likely that the exemption from the draft will be reconsidered soon.
Actually it isn’t just to get combat troops. Most military occupation specialties (MOS) are NON-combat. Most are combat support. Those are the positions that women in the military (even in present day with women being able to take on combat moss’s if they so choose to) are occupying. And the selective service requirements that COMPLETELY EXCLUDE WOMEN (NO women are ever required or have ever signed up for selective service) will never be reconsidered, unless women take action and demand for it to be reconsidered and changed. Truthfully everyone should have to sign up for it. It is an American thing to do, much like Americans often say that everyone should vote. Well how can you so proudly place a vote, when you haven’t done what many Americans died doing and that is representing our country?….And I am more willing to accept stories of discrimination from people of color, because they have truly been discriminated against. They have suffered throughout history and many have been tortured or killed just because of the color of their skin. Hell I had an argument over the phone, recently with my mom about the NFL team the Washington Redskins. She said that it was stupid that there is controversy over whether they should change the name or not and that she never thought of the term “redskins” as a racist term. And I said, it doesn’t matter what you think, because you don’t get a vote. It is completely up to Native Americans, because they are the ones who have historically suffered over their entire lives. Many have been killed and had their skin sold (hence where the term, “redskin” comes from). So let them and ONLY them vote on whether to keep the NFL team name or get rid of it….You see, women can’t relate to that just because they are women. You haven’t suffered or been killed in massive amounts, just for being women. My dad has historically been discriminated against, being a black man and one of only about 40 or 50 black men in his current city (we were even featured in the newspaper for it). Where as my mom, who is white, cannot quite understand it on that level, but she should be able to understand some, being Irish as Irish Americans were also discriminated against when they came to this country (another group discriminated against but NOT because of gender). You see, women haven’t suffered or been killed or tortured or sold as slaves just for being women. They were African American or Native American or other ethnicities, who just happened to be women (many others were men, so again, no sexual discrimination). In fact, you could argue that the men of color were treated much more harshly than the women of color, as they would often be castrated as a punishment, vs. just being hit as a punishment. I don’t know about you, but I would rather keep all of my organs and just be struck repeatedly….Women have no right just based on being women, to compare their perceived plight to that of the massive suffering of ethnic groups that have been discriminated against.
And actually PTSD is ONLY for military veterans. You cannot compare your traumatic experiences to that of what many military veterans have experienced.
No, it’s not. Requisite link
In case you don’t want to follow the link, here’s a quote: “Posttraumatic stress disorder[note 1] (PTSD) may develop after a person is exposed to one or more traumatic events, such as sexual assault, warfare, serious injury, or threats of imminent death.”
The reference is to the definition of PTSD in the DSM V.
I will trust the DSM, which literally defines the conditions, over the assertions of a pseudonymous guy on a blog comment thread with an axe to grind. I’m sorry that you have had traumatizing experiences. I have too. I would like that to unite us, not divide us. You have my sympathy and, if you’d refrain from being dismissive of rape and child abuse and accident survivors, you’d also have my support and love.
yrs–
–Ben
P.S. I, and most feminists, believe that if a draft is necessary then it should draft from all genders. Anything less is unjust. This is not a new or uncommon belief. Feminists were, historically, at the forefront of the draft abolishment movement, and of course also pushed the ERA, which would have constitutionally required that the draft not discriminate on the basis of gender.
https://www.sss.gov/wmbkgr.htm
“The Supreme Court based its decision largely on DoD’s policy that excluded women from combat. The Court reasoned that since the purpose of registration was to create a pool of potential inductees for combat, males and females could be treated differently.”
You can’t defeat assertions with mere facts, guys. You can only be victorious by countering with assertions of your own. You get bonus points if you can make your assertions in comments of more than 2000 words with no paragraph breaks and ALLCAPS. Bolded and italicised.
No, thank you, I go based off of logic and science. Feminists are the most illogical of species. And each and everyone of them has an “axe to grind” with men and they disguise it by blaming an imaginary subculture known as “patriarchy”….Actually that link doesn’t say that the main reason (or even a reason at all) for excluding women from mandatory military conscription was due to them not being in combat MOS’. Nice try though. And also feminists are against women being made to do anything. Women certainly are against them being included in selective service obligations as that would put them in a role of responsibility only given to men at present time. Feminists don’t want that. And feminists were NOT on the front line trying to reverse that decision…..and I don’t go with subjective definitions, I go with OBJECTIVE ones. You see, feminism is defined something like “equal opportunity for all” or some other b.s., but yet does things that are not at all equal and fights for women (and the special treatment of women) while ignoring men. For that and many other reasons, men have a much higher suicide rate and a higher high school dropout rate and comprise the much lower (less than 40%) of the collegiate student body…..And there isn’t anybody on here that can go toe to toe with me on military issues to include selective service, because once again, I am the subject matter expert on that issue. I also am the expert on here on discrimination, being from a biracial family. My great uncle and grandma often remind me of the struggles for equality that they faced, growing up in the great depression and even to present day. My dad also is very knowledgeable and experienced on both of these subjects. So yeah, I know a thing or 2 about REAL discrimination.
1. The transgender draft requirement is an intentionally distracting red herring from the main issue. I like Israel’s model where everyone must serve.
2. PTSD is a broad term like wet can refer to my dog or the Pacific Ocean. I agree with Joe that war is a special breed of mind fucked that many people do not have a clear prospective on how the acts committed inform your viewpoint.
3. Joe the ‘racism is bad because my family suffered from it don’t try to compare it to anything’ angle is a little hypocritical but I codify the pain and suffering of soldiers and people who have endured genocides as a heavy burden myself.
I know you don’t have any kids but imagine if you had a daughter. Most would do almost anything in the world to protect her. A lot of men might believe their advances toward her are just playful but from a parent’s perspective you could empathize with the stress she felt at unwelcome attention. It’s all fair in love and war but if your tactics aren’t successful you have to suffer the consequences of your actions.
4. Bad Horse – Alpha Male? Why so complicated. You don’t have to be an aggressor or even remotely assertive these days 25% of people meet online. The art of conversation makes beta or alpha immaterial. If I were full of youthful exuberance I’d be practicing my way to Carnegie Hall as we speak.
FANTASTIC!!! Sentences two and three being a direct contradiction of sentence one is a fine thing all on its own. But sentences two and three are also a long way of saying, “Women! They are all exactly the same. Unlike real people – men.”
(I’ll point out for the benefit of the commenter who thinks he is logical and scientific that the claims made in sentences two and three are neither logical nor scientific. I’ll leave it to him to ASSERT that sentences two and three are, in fact, logical and scientific, thus digging himself further into the not worth taking seriously pit)
And you are for forcing women to do what, exactly? But thanks for letting me know I’m doing feminism wrong in my insistence that women meet all of their civic and societal responsibilities.
Never mind the elephant in the room that is feminism calling for women’s inclusion in selective service obligations. That’s only been going on for the last four decades or so and only in response to logical, sciency commenter’s pointing out their failing for that more recently than four decades ago. Time travel, it’s not just for killing Hitler anymore!
Let me fix that for you:
Much better. Now I can begin to take your wild assertions with the gravity that they deserve.
Oh, my. This also needs some fixing.
See? Now you seem ever so much more logical and scientific. Formatting your comments in this matter really shows everybody your expertise and exactly how seriously you need to be taken.
Remember, unsupported assertions fail without ALLCAPS, bold and italics. I’m sure my small editing role will really help your message achieve the accolades it deserves.
I’m not sure why you think that – it’s certainly related to the main issue (at least as I understand what the issues we’re talking about are), and I don’t think anyone was trying to be intentionally distracting. The fact that gijoe sports fan still seems to be confused about it is not from a lack of information being made available to him.
I can certainly see how having PTSD as a result of combat service is different from having PTSD as a result of, say, sexual assault or ongoing pervasive harassment, but I find it hard to understand how or why we would go about ranking them in terms of how serious they are as general categories of PTSD. And of course joe’s claim that “PTSD is ONLY for military veterans” is patently absurd – he’s certainly entitled to his own super-special definition of PTSD, but it bears no resemblance to reality (not suggesting you’re agreeing with him on that).
Of course those things are heavy burdens – I don’t think anyone here disagrees with that (although I’m not sure why genocide came into the picture, unless that’s part of an earlier discussion I missed). Racism can also be a heavy burden, and I accept joe’s claim that he and his family members have experienced it and suffered from it. It just so happens that sexism can also be a heavy burden, which certainly has resulted in torture or death for some suffering from it, and I find it baffling that joe is unwilling to acknowledge that.
BTW, gijoe sports fan, you don’t magically become “the subject matter expert” on something just by declaring yourself to be so. You clearly know very little about the history of women and selective service, and you also clearly know very little about gender-based discrimination. It would be useful if you quit pretending otherwise.
Gijoe Sports Fan, thanks for your participation on “Alas.” However, I’m afraid that – in the words of our comment policy – your contribution “is bringing us further away from the conversation we want to have.” For that reason, I am now asking you to refrain from posting any further comments on “Alas.” Best of luck to you.
Hmmm. I seem to have become another grim reaper variant. Once you see me mocking your comments, you’re not long for this blog. It’s a nice change from work where I can actually see people running to hide when I approach.
So…this is you?
(Any day I get to Google “chibi reaper” is a good day.)
Bad Horse (he’s bad! The Evil League of–ahem, sorry), I agree that the differences found between men and women found in those studies are far more likely to be socialized differences, not biological–that’s why I mentioned the WEIRD thing at the end, in fact. I certainly didn’t mean to convey otherwise with my phrasing. On this blog, I assume I’m talking to a crowd that wouldn’t assume gender differences are biological as a first guess; I’d probably be more careful in a more hostile environment.
I also wanted to ask:
What do you think this would show? I can’t come up with anything that would be obviously distinct from sexist discrimination in pay, so I must not be thinking of whatever plots you’re thinking of.
I was thinking that the points would fall into two clusters, or along 2 regression lines, of women who did or did not choose to let men support them. But that supposes it’s an all-or-nothing choice. That might not be the case.
Lee1, sorry for asserting the TG draft comment was part of an inside joke.
I’m not ranking PTSD. I do not care to remember much about war and south east Asia. Ingroups are funny, being motivated by fear and acting amoral out of necessity can be hard for some vets to reconcile after the trauma. I commend those who do not wallow in it.
The genocides of the transatlantic slave trade ( 8 million+ in transit) and Colonial Indian wars (80% – 90% native population died from introduction of disease) were what I was referring to since Joe mentioned both blacks and Native Americans. Listing all your martyrs, the begrudged wrongfully killed, to compare grievances only fuels division and reinforces xenophobia.
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Even if I sleep with a lot of women, there is no chance that I will be seriously labeled a “slut,” nor is there any male counterpart to “slut-bashing.”
The male equivalent of a slut is a Pick Up Artist
Men who have self branded or are labeled by society as a PUA have been ostracized from conventional “mainstream” occupations, had sizable charitable donations refused by planned parenthood, been banned from college campuses and been labeled as a hate group by the SPLC. Beyond these obvious indictments of promiscuous behavior, men’s group such as PUAhate, Elliot Rogers (the mass shooter from the University California Santa Barbara) was a member, have forums dedicated to the inequality of women being attracted to “alpha” males and feminists have written articles and at least one dicertation based on a PUA courses book published by one of the communities original members named Mystery.
In 2007, Bill Clinton dressed as Mystery, one of the most prominent pick up artists, on Saturday night live and told John Edwards (character) to quit trying to seduce his wife the future sec. of state and 2016 presidential candidate.
Far from the view of an isolated minority of people in the dating pool this term has been adopted by the hipster, feminist and liberal young adult communities in the northwestern United States.
A 2011 online survey of 19,000+ college students found half lost respect for people who have sex with “lots of people.” And only 12% of students judged women more harshly based on the amount of sex they had.
http://runsonmagic.com/2014/02/men-slut-shamed/
http://tuckermax.me/the-exhausting-process-of-trying-to-give-money-to-planned-parenthood/
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/even-guys-get-shamed-for-too-much-casual-sex/
http://m.psychologytoday.com/blog/strictly-casual/201403/is-our-sexual-double-standard-going-away
http://the3bromigos.com/2013/12/03/pua-shaming/
http://jezebel.com/5903883/why-guys-really-hate-being-called-creepy
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Creep_shaming
I see you’ve even got an article there by Dr. Hugo Schwyzer.
He’s certainly looked up to and respected for everyone by being a male slut. Or Lothario.
Speaking as a male slut, I think you’re wrong here. It seems like the primary objection to PUAs is not the sex they do or don’t have, but the manipulation they engage in, and the objectification of women.
I’ve seen literally no article or blog column opposing PUAs on the grounds that they have a bunch of sex. It’s entirely possible that they’re out there, but I doubt it.
—Myca
PUA’s are shunned for their dishonesty, misogyny and advocacy of rape. Nobody shuns them because they have sex with lots of people.
And, Schwyzer… If you think he’s disliked because he’s a slut, well, you’ve missed the entire uproar over his non-slut past and present.
Regarding Schwyzer: There most certainly was a backlash against that idiot because of his bragging about “banging” numerous students. Among other things, on his desk in his office.
And the backlash didn’t even involve his being married at the time. Scumball is scumball.
Backlash over bagging his students has everything to do with unethical exploitation of power differential and zero to do with having lots of sex. Except in the sense of exploiting an advantageous power differential unethically with the goal of bagging his students.
Had Schwyzer bagged consenting adults who were not his students nobody (excepting anti-sex folks) would give a shit.
People who are part of the PUA community and use a formulaic approach to meeting women that is documented on the internet are the origin of the term. The term is used as a general description of a male who only wants sex and not a significant relationship. I believe there is evidence the cultural barometer of men or women sleeping around and the acceptance of men doing so has dramatically shifted against promiscuity. The pejorative use of the term is usually ‘pick up’ as in “he picks up women” or “quit trying to pick up my friend”.
The PUA subculture showcases some dark, creepy and extremely misogamist views toward women that make them a focal point that brought the male equivalent of a slut into the lexicon. I think the economic parity of the hipster/drop out of workforce demographic is a big factor but as we see Lebron James put on skinny jeans and faux glasses it’s clearly influenced most demographics. The current ideal image for a man is more Portlandia than Alpha male. Men who try to pick up on women risk being alienated for trying to fight the tide.
I’ve never heard the term PUA used for just any guy who sleeps with a lot of women. I’ve only heard it used to describe guys who use those specific (incredibly creepy and gross) methods to try to sleep with a lot of women.
If that’s what you’re going to use as the definition of PUA, I don’t think that we can have any kind of meaningful dialogue. I mean, my position is that you’re definition is incorrect so where could we possibly go from here?
Hill Guthrie:
Ruchama:
PUA culture is a lightning rod for criticism for ideological reasons, though that criticism may be disguised as moral indignation. Whether their methods are “creepy and gross” depends on your position on a lot of issues in gender relations. A prototypical PUA like Mystery, David DeAngelo, or Style would say that they are just being honest with women about what they want and about what women want, and providing women with what they want, and that it’s the average Joe on the street who tries to hide his intentions or put on a false front that’s creepy. But their version of “what women want” is full of evolutionary psychology and gender stereotypes. It is a fully-developed and (supposedly) street-validated justification of gender stereotypes in dating as things forced upon men by women.
I realize it’s piling on, but I have never heard the term used this way.
—Myca
1. The term pick up is most commonly used as in he picks up women or don’t try to pick up my friends. The full PUA title or acronym are not as common offline. To to further split hairs there’s not one set of methods rather there are thousands of tactics to simulate the social interactions of more physically and or fiscally successful (dominant) men. I define the PUA as someone who uses scripted jokes and dialogue to approach women. These individuals often have limited social skills and a degree of contempt for women and what they envision as a prototypical alpha male. The phrase ‘picking up’ is used to shamed. The term slutty is too.
2. Neil Strauss wrote a book, the Game, which reads as a coming of age story for a ragamuffin group of misfits looking to find themselves and love under the tutelage of their magician leader Mystery. The highlight of the book for Neil was sleeping with Cortney Love.
The how to manual coined by “Mystery” and much of the underbelly of his followers tactical manuals on seducing women are not as commercially charming.
Personally, I don’t enjoy the type of men who prescribe to the basic premise of this community. Life can be much simpler if you believe there are no shortcuts. The price is always paid and the process must be followed. Define what it is you want in life. Enjoy the process of getting there as a working meditation.
If this is the conversation you want, fine.
PUA is not used as a term to shame men who sleep with a lot of different women. You are the only person I’ve ever encountered who claims otherwise.
You’d think that your view might garner at least a single mention over at Wikipedia if it was a common one. But no such thing is found.
From that entry:
The meaning of slut is a very different thing than that of pick up artist (PUA).
From that entry:
How is it that you are unaware of this?
Do you have anything other than personal opinion to back up your claim?
I read the Wikipedia. The most interesting conversation is about the changing views of sexual promiscuity by far. I’ll concede that but there is obviously a direct parallel between the subset of the male population who attempts to be promiscuous and equally loose group of women are regarded with contempt and disdain. To regard a PUAs as a special group of males whose sexual pursuits and reputation are viewed separately from the majority of the male population and view those labeled sluts a congruently behaving subset from the general female population differently is not logical.
Let’s put it this way
Group A is 10% of AA. Group A sleeps around and is disliked for it. Group A is female.
Group B is 9% of BB. Group B uses tactics to sleep around and is disliked for it. Group B is male.
If Group B was not promiscuous and simply focused it’s a tactics on meeting someone for a significant relationship do you think people would hold the same opinion of them? I believe the promiscuity is the prominent point people dislike about both the sluts and pick up artists.
Yes. Without question, the distaste elicited by PUA’s is due to their tactics.
There are plenty of guys who aren’t PUAs who have sex with a lot of women, and the reaction to them is not the same as the reaction to PUAs.
And there are plenty of guys with similar attitudes towards women as PUAs but who are not promiscuous (certain other types of MRAs) who *do* get the same reaction as PUAs.