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

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)

the retraction article is pretty excellent i think? i mean what people are going to say about it is still gonna be terrible but as far as case studies in how journalism goes wrong it seems like it really is something people can read and learn from.

idk im at the bit where the authors claim erdedy should have shared all the details of her investigation with phi kappa psi because she had no reason to believe they would not have acted in good faith and ... really?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/books/review/selfish-shallow-and-self-absorbed-sixteen-writers-on-the-decision-not-to-have-kids.html?smid=tw-share

" a morass of resentment, insecurity, longing and disappointment for those who don’t find the right man in time to mate (the terms “childless by circumstance” and “social infertility” have been coined to describe this group); an ungovernable tangle of anxiety, confusion and exhaustion for those who combat infertility issues with costly and invasive assisted reproductive technologies; and a pervasive fog of self-recrimination and angst for those who simply don’t know what they want. "

skim-reading this I initially mistook it for a description of those who do have kids; obv I am projecting a hell of a lot bc I read blogs about how parents find themselves feeling 'not cut out for this'

i got an email from statewide library org with this:

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y153/struggin/l1.jpg

immediately started writing a response to the guy who sent it, a reference librarian for the LDS church btw, pointing out that it was sexist ageist and disrespectful etc. then revised to say how it "could" be read the wrong way. now i feel like there's probably nothing worthwhile about pointing out possible negative interpretations in a dumb email instigated because i was offended by some typically tone-deaf thing sent from someone who works for the stupid church i hate so fn much. two hours gone. blechhhhhhhhhh. is it even objectionable in any way? i can't trust myself tbh.

it seems objectionable to me; my sister is a librarian... think I'll share with her.

thanks. this is what i'm considering sending in response but i'll have to sleep on it.

I’m looking forward to hearing more about this presentation. I just wanted to let you know that the promotional image in your email could be interpreted in an unfortunate way: the words could be read as a comment on the women in the photograph, not just the card catalog. I am sure that is not what you intended. I just wanted to pass this information along to you in the hope that you’ll consider it as you plan announcements in the future.

my thirtysomething librarian sister just wrote back "yeah, this is tone deaf" so there you go

Maybe if it were indicated that it's the librarians in the photo speaking, sharing the sentiment that they want/need better resources too? Could be like Married to the Sea speech bubbles or something.

agreed; the "we" doesn't read as the librarians, they read as "old resources"

yes. i asked a colleague and she also said it could have been intended that the pictured librarians are "tired of the same old resources". i think tone-deaf is the accurate read then.

i'm going to rewrite this imagining myself as a friend pointing out someone's innocent faux pas.