Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

very smart take on affirmative consent law imo:
http://dsadevil.blogspot.com/2014/10/necrophiliacs-anonymous.html

I lol'd:

http://thewomansplainer.com/

i caught about 10 min of the dr phil show yesterday and steve harvey was on explaining to women what they were doing wrong (it looked like the whole show was about women and what they're doing wrong) and why they were still single. this one woman said that she thinks (and has been told) that men are intimidated by her success, and steve harvey responded in such a way that i honestly couldn't believe what i was hearing.

he said the following, not in exact words but not far off:
* NOTHING you could possibly do would be intimidating to a real man
* without us, you can't make babies
* without us, you can't have families
* without us, you can't move a refrigerator

wtf

oh he also said "and if you can move a refrigerator by yourself, you're going to have a REAL hard time finding a man"
what a cretin

phew i have never wished for a man for any of those purposes

hey you know how this man moves a refrigerator

he pays someone else to do it

xp neither have i! that aside, it made me angry and curious about what other total horseshit people say on daytime tv. what a cesspool!

damn if i could only find a girl could move her own fridge

i expect the woman to move all the refrigerators on a first date

I have never moved, nor had the need to move, a refrigerator

I mean seriously terrible example, that's like one thing you virtually never move. You get it delivered, that's it til the day it dies! Most places you move into already have one! You are in television guy, think of a better example!

He's crazy, I move the fridge every time I sweep the floor. They SCOOTCH, you know. No one is picking them up with one hand like a super hero--not even MEN.

he is disgusting
no families without men? tell that to bazumpteen thousand single moms, asshole. he sucks.

He's terrible.

hope he gets crushed while trying to move a fridge

It's Impossible to Prevent Someone From Eyefucking You

We asked 10 women in eight countries to record every instance of street harassment -- every catcall, every ass-ogle, every creepy look -- for an entire week. The results? A strong argument for just becoming a shut-in.

http://www.rookiemag.com/2014/10/ugly-as-i-want-to-be

http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/im-rich-youre-hot

that article is basically an ad for the sugar daddy site?

Most of us will never be rich enough or beautiful enough to qualify, so this is just another media story using our fantasies as the bait on their hook.

http://photos2.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/8/1/f/8/600_404433272.jpeg

At happy hour, Boston’s coworkers pump him for details: How is going out with a sugar baby different from hiring an escort? He answers that he hires escorts, too, but that sugar babies are more like real dates. He doesn’t care if his peers judge him—he is transparent (Bruce Boston is his real name), awash in women, and, frankly, effervescent about it. Sugaring, he says, has changed his life. - See more at: http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/im-rich-youre-hot#sthash.YwXUpvjs.dpuf

https://medium.com/matter/the-uber-of-gentleman-companions-4416b25f6491

the uber of creepazoids

http://youtu.be/M2KPeMcYsuc

What's with all of the smug / scary "atheist" / libertarians attacking or misrepresenting feminists? The woman in the video is not impersonable at all! She makes a fair point.

I don't understand sexist atheists at all.

What's wrong with being a sexy atheist?

Hypothesis: atheist libertarians are just your basic, simple-minded libertarians, who see feminism as a special interest group that distorts the free market by demanding equal pay for equal work and promotes other types of government meddling with their efforts to turn society into the war of all against all.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/12/09/gender_bias_in_student_evaluations_professors_of_online_courses_who_present.html?wpsrc=sh_all_tab_tw_top

One of the problems with simply assuming that sexism drives the tendency of students to giving higher ratings to men than women is that students are evaluating professors as a whole, making it hard to separate the impact of gender from other factors, like teaching style and coursework. But North Carolina researcher Lillian MacNell, along with co-authors Dr. Adam Driscoll and Dr. Andrea Hunt, found a way to blind students to the actual gender of instructors by focusing on online course studies. The researchers took two online course instructors, one male and one female, and gave them two classes to teach. Each professor presented as his or her own gender to one class and the opposite to the other.

The results were astonishing. Students gave professors they thought were male much higher evaluations across the board than they did professors they thought were female, regardless of what gender the professors actually were. When they told students they were men, both the male and female professors got a bump in ratings. When they told the students they were women, they took a hit in ratings. Because everything else was the same about them, this difference has to be the result of gender bias.

“The difference in the promptness rating is a good example for discussion,” MacNell explains in the press release for the study. "Classwork was graded and returned to students at the same time by both instructors. But the instructor students thought was male was given a 4.35 rating out of 5. The instructor students thought was female got a 3.55 rating.” Considering that professors were rated on a five-point scale, losing an entire point on the "promptness" question just because students think you're female is a major hit.

This particular study is small, so we shouldn't get carried away about its results. But it certainly suggests an important avenue for future research. Students penalized the perceived female professor in all 12 categories, including in qualities that women are usually assumed to excel at, such as being caring and respectful. This comports with other studies that show that while female professors are judged somewhat less harshly if they conform more to female stereotypes, men still get bonus points for showing up male.

Hmm. Yes.

I recently readthis interesting article on American teaching, which touches on its genderedness among other things. at center is the following conception of the teacher:

Indeed, the biggest insult to the intelligence of American teachers is the idea that their intelligence doesn’t matter. “The teaching of A, B, C, and the multiplication table has no quality of sacredness in it,” Horace Mann said in 1839. Instead of focusing on students’ mental skills, Mann urged, teachers should promote “good-will towards men” and “reverence to God.” Teachers need to be good, more than they need to be smart; their job is to nurture souls, not minds. So Garret Keizer’s first supervisor worried that he might have too many grades of A on his college transcript to succeed as a high school teacher, and Elizabeth Green concludes her otherwise skeptical book with the much-heard platitude that teachers need to “love” their students.

I wonder if American perceptions of woman faculty at American universities is shaped in reaction to American students' experiences with primary & secondary ed teachers who model that conception: shaped by a sense that there must be some reason there are a lot of men teaching at the university level but not at the primary & secondary levels, and that whatever that reason is, it entails that women university teachers are worse than men. if so, then as with many problems with American university learning, the source of the problem is in American attitudes toward primary & secondary ed.

Also American attitudes toward gender and gender roles.

good, that's one of the roots of American attitudes toward (esp) primary ed

http://www.onthemedia.org/story/44-prostitute-laundry/

10 min podcast about two women who write via tinyletter

Charlotte Shane is pretty cool in general.

http://savedbythe-bellhooks.tumblr.com

so that's what a podcast sounds like

i'd put this in the right-wingery thread, but nobody reads it

http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/bookman/article/a-cause-lost-and-forgotten/

conservative writer considers the forgotten female anti-suffragists (while rerehearsing a bunch of their arguments, and airing out some dirty suffragette laundry [like the one who became a fascist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norah_Elam seriously the 20th cent was so fucked up]). she's right about one thing: i'd never heard of any of these people.

really tho it's an explicit warning to the anti-gay-marriage crowd (see the closing). it's a weird phenomenon now to hear your NOM types speak in full knowledge they are destined for oblivion.

That essay was gross.

However, you will never be able to see these women clearly if you insist, anachronistically, on seeing suffrage as a fundamental human right. ... No one was having their humanity denied—not £7 householders in 1866, not women in 1914. If you do not understand that, you will never understand women like Mary Ward.

A loss I can live with.

And wow it only gets more gross from there.

amen

We so rarely hear from those who really choose to be childless, and there are few essays from women who don’t regret having had an abortion, who wouldn’t have been “ready” at a later age, who had the money for IVF and childcare but who chose not to go there. The mainstream conversation is colored by if-arguments, eerily reminiscent of the 1950s, when women without children were pitied (and, possibly, pitied themselves). If I had found the right partner… If I had had enough money… If my childhood hadn’t been so bad… Whatever the reasons, they all suggest that something went wrong.

I don’t have any if-arguments (which doesn’t mean that things don’t go wrong in my life). I simply never wanted to have children. Not when I was 20, not when I was 30 and not today.

I didn't read the whole thing but this part sums up my feelings so well that i just wanted to put it somewhere http://blog.longreads.com/2015/04/02/the-answer-is-never/

yep.

good piece!

i should really read more simone de beauvoir. what a writer.

she is my very favorite of the old school anarchists, especially search her pieces in the Mother Earth anthology called "Anarchy!"

https://libcom.org/history/anarchy-anthology-emma-goldmans-mother-earth

argh so sorry I thought you meant Voltairine De Cleyre

I also need to read more SDB

i am looking at facebook's live feed of people sharing the report on the rolling stone's retracted campus rape story, and it's incredibly disheartening

the report itself, the article, the things people say about it ("why does no one talk about the war on men on our nation's campuses" oh god)