The Valenti discussion has swung back around to blogs I read and thus has me mulling things over again. As usual, I find this to be an interesting discussion not because I give two shits one way or another about Valenti, but because it seems like a lot of different folks with a lot of different ideas about feminism are using this instance as a way to talk about our differences.
I find that exceedingly helpful.
And so I want to speak about Schwyzer’s post from my own position. I don’t have coherent thoughts because I’m sick, but here are my thoughts nonetheless.
1. Bfp outlines all kinds of good reasons why talking about feminism and the marketplace and the good Valenti is doing by focusing her work on reaching that marketplace are problematic. I just want to add to that. If we judge what Valenti is doing in order to reach a broader “market” in the terms of the marketplace, her book is a failure by that standard.
I don’t think you can have it both ways, though, to me, it looks like Schwyzer is trying. You can’t say “Well, whatever Valenti is doing is worth it, because she’s trying to reach a broader market than just her fellow feminists,” and turn around and try to argue that what she’s doing has value, even though the market hasn’t recognized it.
Ann Coulter’s latest book is considered, in the industry, to be a dismal failure. The last Bookscan numbers I saw for it were about 140,000 copies sold and it’s ranked, at this second, on Amazon at 745. I don’t know what Valenti’s Bookscan numbers are for sure, but I’m going to guess they’re less than 10,000, based on what imprint she’s on. Her ranking at Amazon, at this second, is 12,635.
Does this mean that Coulter’s ideas are more important or have more validity than Valenti’s? Not in any sane world.
But that’s what the market seems to think.
My point is apparent, I think, but let me articulate it: the market is not a meritocracy. The best ideas are not often given the most value. To argue that Valenti’s approach is necessary in order to reach her market, means accepting that her market has found little value in that approach, and thus Valenti’s book is a failure. I, myself, would rather not hold Valenti’s ideas to that standard. I believe it can take time and repetition for ideas to sink in and, if her book is a part of that, repeating ideas over and over again until they sink in, then we can judge it’s value on that.
2. I would like to take issue with this:
I said, quoting others before me, that I’d rather 97% of the world grasp 3% of feminism than have 3% of the world grasp 97%. That’s not a false dichotomy, that’s realism. 97% of the public will never read bell hooks or Helene Cixous. 97% of the public can, however, get the idea that women are of equal worth to men. 97% of the public can eventually accept the idea that biological sex is no barrier to any form of public or private achievement. 97% of the public can come to terms with the idea that “no means no” and “yes means yes”, and that we need to do everything we can as a culture to make certain that the “yes” is never coerced.
And, for a second, I’d like to focus on just the United States. We have had, in the United States, people making the argument than women are of equal worth to men since the inception of our country. I don’t believe that there’s a person living in this country for longer than a day who has not been exposed to the idea that women are of equal worth to men. Everyone here gets the idea.
And yet…
Just because people can articulate our basic positions doesn’t mean that they accept them or think they have value or are important enough to rearrange their lives.
It’s not enough to be heard.
3. I find the comparison between feminism and evangelical Christianity to be so gross as to make me want to vomit.
Let me be clear. You can be a feminist and be a Christian. There’s no reason those terms should be mutually exclusive.
But I don’t believe you can claim to be a thoughtful person who cares about women without being considerate of the minefield that is the relationship of the Church and women. Christianity has been responsible for some of the greatest advancements in social justice and it has played a crucial role in some of the most egregious injustices humanity commits against itself. And women have had an uneasy place in the Christian church for all of its history.
And, as someone who has been a participant/observer of Christianity, I can tell you that even now, right this very minute, in this very country, there are women who are being told that the violence perpetrated against them is part of God’s plan and that they are sinners beyond redemption if they leave their spouses. There are people who love each other dearly and who are committed to each other for life who can’t seek the secular benefits of that commitment because of the will of their fellow Christian countrymen. There are girls who hear constantly that they are responsible for the sin and temptation in the world. There are churches where women cannot participate in the central rituals of the church because they are women.
In fact, I would hazard to guess, from my own experience, that many women come to feminism not because of injustices out there in the secular world, but because of the heartbreaking injustice of being told, over and over again, that, no matter how much you love your God and feel a deep relationship to Him, you can’t serve him in the ways you feel moved to serve him because you don’t have the right body.
If you’ve never been through that, count yourself lucky, but for those of us who have, who can’t reconcile the love and acceptance we feel when one on one with the Divine with the rules others say the Divine has set up to exclude us, it’s soul-crushing.
It’s one of the main reasons I left Christianity (the most important reason being that I’m a polytheist, but we could have, I think, worked around that).
And so, to see someone so neatly and unproblematically compare Christianity to feminism, someone who is supposed to get both of those institutions?
It puts me off.
It makes me feel more and more like what I think of feminism and what the popular conception of feminism among some other feminists is are two very different things.
It’s making me really think a lot more hard about what I mean when I say that I’m a feminist. And I’m not sure yet that I can articulate what that means.
Filed under: Fun with Feminism
Well the more I read Schwyzer, the less I am convinced that he is one of those bad teachers, you know the kind, who does everything that should make him a good teacher, he honestly wants the students ot learn, and sincerely tries to get them involved in stuff to help them, but.
He’s also the kind of teacher that creates this idea of How You Need To Learn first, and then tries to cram you through it in that set manner, so he’ll try to engage in that way, and get annoyed when people who need a different teaching style to learn don’t learn from his, and tries to get you involved in the learning process He prefers, rather than the one that would actually would actually help you to learn.
And if the students fail, it’s not his fault. Why, they just didn’t want to learn, at all, they just didn’t have the drive, at all, and refuses to accept the idea that maybe, just maybe, he is the one who needs to mold his teaching to the students, rather than assuming that everyone must jump through his hoops, and be the one to change themselves and their inner-self, to recieve a service they have paid for.
I do not like Schwyzer these past few months, I do not see myself liking him in the future. A man who’s mind contains only one world, and that being the one he’s created for himself as well, is a man with a very small mind indeed.
I’d like you to possibly rethink your #1 point. One of the problems I have with FFF and the books coming out of the “populists” is that they are repetitive. Isn’t it possible that the books failure is that it’s all been heard before, that she is saying the same things that better writers have said before? One of the arguments I had with a defender of JV over other writers was that “everyone has a right to be heard” and JV deserves a book deal as much as the next person, and I said, go to Amazon.com right now and you will find 10,000 books just like FFF with a white heteronormative middle class viewpoint, why the hell do we need another? Her voice is the same as the last one like her and the one before and the one before that. Hell her next book is something like, “Men are studs women are sluts and other double standards” ….come on, are you or anyone going to tell me you haven’t heard that a million times before and probably all the double standards in the book are retreads of retreads that you have heard in conversation, in magazines, in other books a million tmes before.
No, Donna, wait. I think I’m just a step behind you. My point is that I think the point Schwyzer is making is that Valenti is not talking to other feminists (who are, in this case, the folks criticizing her), but that she’s talking to folks “out there” who aren’t “us” and who aren’t feminists. So, it seems to me that he’s saying that, if non-feminist are swayed by Valenti’s argument, that’s a good enough reason for her feminist critics to shut up.
My point is that, if we’re going to use market saturation as the standard by which Valenti’s book is judged, her book is a failure, because it hasn’t done a very good job of saturating the market.
But, I also believe that using market saturation as a means of judging the validity of a message is kind of bullshit, because important ideas don’t always get heard. Not saying that Valenti’s ideas are important, just that I reject, in general, the argument that the market is some objective means of judging what has value.
I would rather judge Valenti’s text on its own merits. In which case, I end up agreeing with you, that it does seem to be more of the same old message.
But if Schwyzer wants to use the market model to defend Valenti’s book without problematizing (god I hate that word) said market model, then he’s got a problem, because the market has not assigned much value to Valenti’s book. He can’t argue that the book has a broader market value than just to other feminists in the face of actual numbers.
That’s all I’m saying, that he’s pretending that Valenti’s book has some broad reach we’ve yet to see evidence of.
That’s not to discount anyone else’s problems with what he’s saying, obviously. I’m just saying that long before we get to what’s in the book, we can talk about whether the book is doing what its proponents claim it’s doing in terms of market saturation and thus whether using the market as a way to place value is really all that useful.
I’m just still a bit lost wrt the whole Christian + feminist = viva the market thing, I guess. I mean: what?
Maybe this is the result of my own saturation in the marketing of the church (after all, Jerry Falwell cancelled school for three days and charged $7 to each student account for a copy of Purpose Driven Life, all so we poor Liberty kids could swell the numbers of a conference on how to market the church), but I really read Schwyzer’s comparison between the Valenti debate and the Warren debates very differently than you did.
Clearly, a straight-up comparison between the church and women’s issues would be horrendous and moronic, given the entirely different goals of each movement and the virulent attacks from the church on feminism. I can understand a horror even for the thought of a side-by-side, on any grounds.
But I think he was using the two as analogous only in the sense of the debates that are occuring as to methods. And, based entirely on my own exposure to those debates as they occur within evangelical Christianity, I thought the analogy was pretty sound.
The passionate refusal to compromise on the part of the purists is certainly something I felt back when I believed (and still the thought of the metaphorical or otherwise cocksucking done by Falwell on every pastor with more than 20K members who darkened our chapel services makes me cringe, even now that the message means little to me). Though I’m less aware of the inner workings of feminism’s debates, the excerpted articles he cites seemed to share that distaste for the cheapening of the core beliefs, the same “at what price?” question about popularising which drives the debates. I think that, leaving aside questions of WHAT is believed by the adherents, the FACT of intense belief provides a safe analogy.
I don’t know about his conclusions. I think that you are right that the idea of the marketplace as “not the master’s” or even a safe/sane haven of ideas is naive at best. I don’t think the world is a better place or even a more Christian place now that Rick Warren topped the bestseller list and marketed some Purpose Driven greeting cards. I’m of the “I came not for peace but to bring a sword” mindset myself, about nearly everything I believe, but I don’t know if that’s a love for pure doctrine or just a hipster hatred for the smelly common person.
If Valenti’s book is a turkey, then of course the rationale for her dumbing-down is nonexistent, and we should save a few trees and quit printing the same old same old. Also, of course, it would kind of shred the comparison to the church’s methods, since apparently no matter how often the same old prosperity bullshit gets reissued (Osteen, etc) people still buy it. Of course, the debate over whether it’s even a proper goal to TRY to be mainstream would still continue.
I don’t know Schwyzer though. Maybe he’s a tool, and often tries to compare feminism to evangelical christianity on other fronts, and your response was more based on this being the last in a series of obnoxious and wrong comparisons.
Well–the real problem, as I’m seeing it, is that he’s just not listening. The analogy doesn’t hold up because wrt the criticisms bfp and Sylvia and BA and Magniloquence and others have been making–of the book, of his approach, of various related contretemps over the last…while–it’s got precisely nothing to do with “purism.” There is a qualitative difference here, not just a quantitative one, and here I’m not talking about the quality of the prose of FFF or what you will.
or, here, the most recent bfp post says it much more clearly than I ever could or should, as linked above:
http://brownfemipower.com/?p=2092
…Not listening, not hearing–I’m not sure which. But the thing of it is, from the perspective of the people whom he needs to be grokking what they’re saying in order for the dialogue to continue: it doesn’t matter. I’m sure that to -him- it does; it always does. “I am a good person. Really, I’m trying. Content? What content? I am a GOOD PERSON, I screwed up, please forgive me, I need absolution, tell me how to make it better, no not that way, tell me something I -want- to hear, I I I, but enough about me–well, no, back to me, actually…”
-weary shrug.-
…anyway, back to the bfp post, there’s now a comment there by ravenmn, which, I don’t know Warren really, but:
>>In terms of Christianity, I would put Warren and more traditional religions in the same category. Not because they share a philosophy about Jesus Christ, but because they share the ethic of building a huge apparatus called religion that benefits some while screwing others. Then they put up a pretty screen that prevents them from seeing the people they’ve screwed.
Contrast the religious apparatus builders with Christians who build communities and live the life that Jesus modeled. Christians who, every day, make a difference in the lives of those less fortunate. Christians who donate time and energy in changing the world for the better, inspired by the message of Jesus.>>
*****
to which I thought: yeah. that.
I mean, and I’m not an expert on this side of it by any means, but it seems to me that if you’re trying to appeal to a broad-based liberal-to-moderate, mainstream approach to “change” which yes means activism, wrt Christianity, I was thinking: then wouldn’t you start by citing o I don’t know, Sojourners/Jim Wallis? Mel White? I mean, I have issues with some of their stuff, but there’s no question that they walk their talk. And yes, they both wrote books, popular ones as these things go I believe; possibly more than one apiece. But, that’s not -all- they do, see.
>>(after all, Jerry Falwell cancelled school for three days and charged $7 to each student account for a copy of Purpose Driven Life, all so we poor Liberty kids could swell the numbers of a conference on how to market the church),>>
o i see! Lovely.
Georgia, I want to respond to something you said.
The passionate refusal to compromise on the part of the purists is certainly something I felt … the excerpted articles he cites seemed to share that distaste for the cheapening of the core beliefs, the same “at what price?” question about popularising which drives the debates. I think that, leaving aside questions of WHAT is believed by the adherents, the FACT of intense belief provides a safe analogy.
It was, in large part, me that he excerpted. And he did so in a biased and non-representative way, inventing the ‘purist’ label to serve his own purposes, which had NOTHING to do with advancing coalition, or with the larger (and complex) issues my post was about.
As I said in a comment there, I actually teach all the workshops he was saying the ‘popularizers’ (another invention) will be so benefited by at WAM. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t: the first step to publishing something of value is writing something of value.
So, it’s nowhere near as neat and polarized as he made it – and while I don’t expect at all, at this point, that Hugo has any interest in accuracy, listening, or learning (re: anyone not Hugo), I do hope others won’t accept his unbelievably dishonest and self-serving ‘framing’ as fact.
(Because it is this kind of divisive ‘framing’ of false premises and stereotypes about feminisms, women of color, the motives for criticism of the call for submissions, etc., that deflects attention not only from the legitimate criticisms, but from forward movement and real change.)
(Which is, I believe, the agenda, whether conscious or not.)
(And now I will stop serial commenting instead of gathering my thoughts before I say something.)
Hey, no need to apologize for serial comments here. If you have good thoughts, keep them coming.
The thing I just keep coming back to, over and over again is this. If we believe that feminism is world-changing, we have to try to give ourselves over to that change. We don’t have to be perfect at it, but we have to practice what we preach.
Because, to draw a more appropriate (I think) analogy to Christianity, the people we’re trying to reach are watching us. That’s our outreach. It’s not in writing books or giving lectures; it’s in living our lives as if we believe what we say.
Argh. I’m aggravated that I’m trying to get at something important and I’ve been reduced to sounding like some terrible motivational speaker.
But it’s like I said above–it’s not enough just to be heard. This discussion has gone round and round the blogosphere because lots of people are hearing what other people are saying.
We’ve got to give ourselves over to change, and like Theriomorph points out, a lot of this seems to be designed deliberately to keep change from happening.
Well, alas–I suppose it serves me right for dragging all my own experiences in evangelicalism around and assuming they are germane to every movement. Schwyzer does seem to be kind of a tool from everything said here, and I sort of blush to have defended his analogy if it was based in uncontextualized block quoting. Oops!
I honestly don’t know what “feminism” is. Also, I don’t know what this means:
“I don’t believe that there’s a person living in this country for longer than a day who has not been exposed to the idea that women are of equal worth to men. ”
Define “worth.” So women have the same worth as men in the bench press? Given the usual metric, obviously not. Do women have the same worth as men in bearing children? I’d claim no. When you add up all the things that people do, does the “worth” of men and women come out the same? Is there any point in discussing the “worth” of one gender w.r.t. the other?
I’m taller than my labmate, does that make me “worth” more, less, the same? How can such a thing be measured? Worth what, and to whom? Argh!
Ben, don’t even try that shit. It’s beneath you and faux-idiocy looks good on no one.
Aunt B., I’m not trying anything. I honestly don’t know how feminists define “worth”. Does “worth” in this instance not refer to any concrete thing? Is it a political thing? Is it how much women are “worth” to society? Is it that your average woman is “worth” the exact same, um, “amount” as the average man at the average human task? Or is the “worth” of the sexes something more nuanced and obscure? What is it exactly?
After reading this post I realized that I’ve heard this sort of thing said nearly my whole life, but I’ve never heard it defined. What is it exactly?
You know, I read my school paper at UW the other day and it looked at how women were progressing. Turns out women make up more than half of the undergraduate student body and more than half the employees. Should I feel inferior as a man now that “we” aren’t cutting the mustard? Are women holding me back? The paper seemed to think that this was progress, which I find interesting. On the other hand, women only make up 9 out of 112 department heads, so I guess that means that women are being unfairly discriminated against.
Ben,
What feminists mean by worth probably differs from feminist to feminist. But basically, what I mean when I use the term is that I want women to be given the same weight as men. I want my value to society to be based on what I want to do and what I’m able to do, not what I’m supposed to do.
As for your observations of UW, I would say three things–1. I would think, in a fair world, women would occupy most positions roughly equivalent to their proportion of the population, so, yeah, we should, if everything, systemically, is going well, take up a little more than half of the room in the world (obviously, this won’t always be true. We will continue to be 100% of the birth givers; You will continue to be 100% of the prostate cancer havers and there are other jobs, with certain physical requirements that may lean more heavily towards men or women). So, 2., yes, there’s still something wrong that only 9 out of 112 department heads are women. I mean, if half of the workforce is women, but those women are all administrative assistants, housekeepers, and cafeteria workers, what kind of recognizable power do they have? And 3., as folks have been saying for ages, if women are making up far more than half of your student body, there may indeed be a problem with young men–not that you’re inherently stupider than us–but that boys might be having problems we need to recognize and address.
I’ve said before that y’all need a movement like feminism, because the system is really not set up so that men have it so great and women have it so shitty. It’s set up to keep the people with power in power and keep the rest of us fighting over scraps that feel good but don’t mean much.
“1. I would think, in a fair world, women would occupy most positions roughly equivalent to their proportion of the population, so, yeah, we should, if everything, systemically, is going well, take up a little more than half of the room in the world”
Last time I checked, not as many women wanted to be computer scientists as men. What can you do about that? Should as many women want to be computer scientists as men?
Is it possible that more men than women want to be department heads? However it falls, shouldn’t the percent men/women department heads fall along the same percent as want to be so, and not along the lines of simple population?
“3., as folks have been saying for ages, if women are making up far more than half of your student body, there may indeed be a problem with young men–not that you’re inherently stupider than us–but that boys might be having problems we need to recognize and address.”
Is there a problem with young men, or a problem with the status quo of the culture at higher education facilities?
It’s all about power, eh? Or is it how you feel about the power? Suppose you were president of the United States? But then since more men were department heads than women, you’d feel less powerful? Why? Because you define yourself by your gender and not your individuality?
Also note that more men are groundskeepers at UW than women. Is that because men prefer to be out in the cold and in the muck, or because women prefer not to be?
ROFL@ben. What a tool. I’ve been coughing with helpless laughter since “Last time I checked, not as many women wanted to be computer scientists as men. What can you do about that? Should as many women want to be computer scientists as men?”
Ben, why aren’t you doing something about it? You and those like you are the source of the low numbers of women in computer science. The way to end the disparity is for men make it their business to teach other men how not to behave like utter losers. If you want to know what “behave like utter loser” means, check out any comment thread on Slashdot where a woman has stated a clear opinion.
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Last time I checked, not as many women wanted to be computer scientists as men. What can you do about that? Should as many women want to be computer scientists as men?
Heh. There are at least two women who comment here regularly who have personal stories about being driven away from computer science and math as careers by male hostility. CS is a field with a huge sex imbalance largely because men have worked very hard (and very openly) to keep it that way.
So, I’m gonna suggest that what you can do is act in ways that welcome women into your life and work — maybe even go so far as to encourage women to join you.
“…check out any comment thread on Slashdot where a woman has stated a clear opinion.”
Sorry, don’t read slashdot.
“So, I’m gonna suggest that what you can do is act in ways that welcome women into your life and work — maybe even go so far as to encourage women to join you.”
I do. My advisor is a woman. In fact she is the first female professor in our department and she’s only two weeks older than me, her first grad student. She also has two Masters degrees, and a PhD from Harvard.
The women I’ve known in engineering and computer science have by and large been anywhere from above average to vastly superior compared to their average male counterpart. There just aren’t very many of them. More women I know than men simply don’t seem to care about CS and engineering. We’ve had many undergrads in our lab over the years, four of which were women. Two of the women were by far the best we had, one was so-so, and one was not so good. The male undergrads we had work for us were about the same, but there were more of them.
I still don’t understand feminism. Much as women don’t like that, and I don’t know why they do, it is true. Women, including my wife, are a bit of an enigma to me. A wonderful enigma, but I often come across like a plank of wood to them for some reason.
The women I’ve known in engineering and computer science have by and large been anywhere from above average to vastly superior compared to their average male counterpart. There just aren’t very many of them.
It’s like the first black ballplayers in the major leagues: they had to be superstars just to get in.
“It’s like the first black ballplayers in the major leagues: they had to be superstars just to get in.”
Well, I exagerated. I’ve known women in engineering who were half-asses, just like the men.
“Sorry, don’t read slashdot.”
So you’re functionally illiterate? I told you where you could find an example of the sort of behavior women in computer science have to face, and your response is “I don’t read that”? This would be more of that coming across as a plank you were talking about, except planks are a lot more useful.
You just did a beautiful job of demonstrating how you are a major part of the problem.
Being antagonistic to Ben, a fellow who seems open to instruction and perspective, does little to advance the cause. Perhaps we could step back from the podium and commune rather than lecture on this occasion.
Ben, I am a chemical engineer, and was one of 13 women graduating with my degree. There were 4 men. Two of my classmates admitted they would have switched to another science or liberal art degree had there not been such a strong community of women. So I believe the phenomena you describe in CS is like looking at the dinosaur and wondering why it can’t just become human already.
I agree the concepts of feminism are confusing to the inexperienced (me included), but I’m trying. Thank you for doing the same.
Also, as an aside wrt the sciences lacking in women, there is strong evidence that success in technical fields is often-times linked to forms of autism, a condition afflicting a much higher percentage of males than females. I have worked with at 3 men diagnosed later in life with mild autism (all found out after their sons were diagnosed with the condition). So perhaps this is not an example of a career with an inherently level playing field.
Mignon, here’s the thing–as open as Ben seems to others’ perspectives, he’s still strolling around here like he’s the man and we’re a bunch of little ladies who need to not only provide evidence for him, but provide it in a way he’s willing to accept, all while running around demonstrating that he’s not stupid.
Imagine it this way. Say that feminists are crossing guards on a busy street and it’s our jobs to try to get as many people from one side of the street (Dumbassville) to the other side of the street (Semi-enlightened-town) in as timely a manner as possible, because Dumbassville tends to be a dangerous and toxic place for all manner of folks to live (and, in fact, many feminists would rather everyone leave both towns for other, better places, but will settle for at least getting as many people out of Dumbassville as safely as possible).
Now, back in 1792 (when Wollestoncraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women), maybe folks could argue that they hadn’t ever heard of Semi-enlightened-town, maybe they could piss and moan about never having to have had to cross the street before and complain about not being sure how to do it or about not being sure they trust the crossing guards.
But it’s been three centuries now.
We’ve left maps. We’ve put up flyers. We stand on the other side of the road shouting words of encouragment to come and join us. We point out, repeatedly, the ways that the forces in Dumbassville seem to collude to make Dumbassville seem like a tolerable place where nothing’s that wrong, even though anyone who takes even one step back from it can see there are deep problems.
Folks can look across the street and see how things are going in Semi-enlightened-town. They can watch the crossing guards and listen to what they say about the safest and easiest ways to cross the street.
Hell, a lot of people figure out how to get across the street on their own.
Three centuries. And we still get guys coming up to the corner demanding the crossing guards take time out of clearing the way for people who get what’s going on to explain yet again why Dumbassville sucks and what about this and what about that and on and on.
There’s not a question or a point that Ben’s bringing up that hasn’t been asked or made and then addressed a million times.
That’s why people perceive it as hostile–like he’s saying that his time and energy are so much more important than ours that it’s our duty to take time out of our lives to explain to him stuff he is more than capable of learning on his own if he just shuts up and listens.
To use another metaphor, he’s repeatedly demanding a forest; we’re repeatedly showing him a bunch of trees.
How much more can you ask a person to do?
I already feel like I asked too much of my readers to share their stories of bullshit if he wasn’t going to think about what it does to grow up in a world where that kind of stuff happens all the time.
I’m no Queen of Feminism, no great guru.
All I can do is tell you what’s happened to me and the conclusions I draw from it.
And I can tell you that feminism, for me, at its most basic, saved my life.
I couldn’t have gone on living thinking that I deserved to be treated the way I was being treated just because of an accident of birth.
And I speak out about feminism because I want other women to know that what they see around them is wrong and is systemic and can be successfully fought.
So, at the end of the day, I don’t give a shit if Ben gets it or not. It’d be nice if he does, but my time is almost always going to be better spent explaining feminism to women.
He just used the “Your failure to wear a burkha ripped my penis out of my clothes and forced it to rape you” argument; he has no credibility of “wanting to learn”.
Oh god.
Does anyone know the folks over at the Feminism 101 blog, because between Ben’s stuff and the woman-hating crap being spouted on the Campfield thread, there are plenty of examples here of how that crap works, if they want to use them.
I’m sorry. I should go put my foot down with Ben, but I’m still reeling from Ned Williams and can only recover by going to bed.
“So perhaps this is not an example of a career with an inherently level playing field.”
That’s one of the weirdest logical contradictions I’ve ever seen. “Let’s postulate about the ability to do science while using the opposite of scientific method.” The only experiment that can answer whether men have scientific abilities equal to those of women — studying large populations in which men and women have equal opportunities in the sciences — has never been tried.
Sweet dreams B. :)
Actually, I’m willing to be persuaded that there are genetic factors at work in mens’ greater attraction to math and engineering. There are so many things we don’t know yet about how mind and body are connected (and about what’s on the Y-chromosome) that I’ll keep an open mind about sex selection for certain career areas. BUT. But, but, but. But when there are so very many social factors that are so obviously and openly at work in the question, ignoring them seems to be kind of foolish. Let’s look at sex-linked traits, sure. But while we’re at it, let’s pay even more attention to the fact that a guy shows up here wondering why women don’t go into those areas when he is so very welcoming and supportive of them, and in almost the same breath tells us that it’s women’s fault that he stares at our tits all the time, because as a guy he’s just hardwired that way, and hot gay male sex is teh hott but lezzie sex isn’t (no, that’s not logical, but I guess he missed that class). That’s the welcome and encouragement he practices, and yet he dares to claim that he doesn’t need to do any self-improvement and that this all somehow proves that there is a level playing field. I have to say that that is probably an even larger factor in discouraging women from entering his field than anything genetic.
Care to back up that gay sex claim with some research, cowboy?
I’m still staggered by anyone suggesting men might “be better” at STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) while using the OPPOSITE of scientific method as the basis for their notion.
If you have to trash science to uphold your theory about science, you’re just making crap up.
Look children, it’s very simple. “Men have X, X seems to help in STEM, men may have an advantage in STEM” is making crap up, nothing more.
To have even a valid statement of wild speculation, you need, “Men have X, X seems to help in STEM, but then women have Y, Z, P, and Q, and Y, Z, P, and Q seem to help in STEM. We have no way to compare which has greater weight due to the sexism in the system at this time, but wouldn’t it be great if we could find out?”
My perspective comes from working (in engineering) and living (in big and small cities in the supposedly-progressive Pacific Northwest) around men that don’t give a rat’s ass if there even is a Semi-enlightened Town. Why would a guy, getting along, making money with a nice family living in Dumbassville, care? So my point is, and perhaps here is not the place for it, somebody who is finally seeing (or at least questioning) why there even exists a Semi-enlightened Town is not the bad guy. I guess this makes me an apologist. I’m just not willing to jump on a guy that at least reads feminist theory websites.
I like your analogy – it’s an excellent visual. However, I would hazard that the thinking and behavioral patterns of the majority of men actually become hard-wired and much more difficult to change than stepping off a curb and crossing a street. Unfortunately, I think a certain amount of hand-holding is necessary. (I acknowledge that’s not your role, nor is that the goal of your work on this site. I think your responses to Ben have been fair and reasonable.) I just don’t think standing behind Ben and poking with him a sharp stick in the direction of Semi-enlightened Town is effectual if, in fact, he first has to go find the handicapped crosswalk and fix his broken wheelchair.
And finally, Helen, you’re right. That sentence, as you quoted, was not a good point. The point is that more men are autistic than women (4:1 for autism, as high as 9:1 for highly-functioning autism), and highly-functioning autistic people have a propensity for abilities in hard sciences. Current rates of autism in children can be as high as 1 in 150 (as measured in the British-equivalent of Silicon Valley). The level of the playing field is irrelevant, but many of those (not the majority, of courrse) choosing and succeeding in careers in hard science may themselves be neurologically inable to encourage their peers, male or female, because of a genetic abnormality.
“but many of those (not the majority, of courrse) choosing and succeeding in careers in hard science may themselves be neurologically inable to encourage their peers, male or female, because of a genetic abnormality.”
Uh, no, that still doesn’t work. If you aren’t up to non-bigoted behavior on the job, you are incompetent for the job. And you’re selling autistic people pretty severely short with that notion — they do learn social skills, and in fact they often turn their autism to advantage in doing so; if you aren’t tuned in to certain societal pressures you don’t have to deconstruct those societal pressures in the rest of your process of creating your social behavior.
Oh, and also, the tenents and (to you and your readers) obvious ideals of feminism have been around for three solid centuries, but not in my world. I went to an excellent university, and it was discussed there, but only in my 10-member progressive club. Not on my soccer team, not with my roommates, not with my engineering classmates. Not only was it not discussed, it was not in practice.
Then I went on to work in a progressive engineering field for 10 years – no feminists there, except perhaps one woman who was openly mocked in meetings when she left the room. And no real feminists in the 3 college towns I’ve lived in since I graduated 15 years ago.
This is all to say, the leaflets, pamphlets and flyers have been passed out, but only to small groups of people that either threw them in the gutter or read them and became enlightened.
I’m 36 years old, and I’ve met one man in my life that called himself a feminist and really was. Obviously the leaflet/pamphlet/flyer method is not working outside the halls of the Womens Studies departments.
(Aside: Your description of worth was very good. My brother-in-law likes to argue about how we’re not biologically, thus inherently, equal, which is not the correct way to frame the argument. I had yet to come up with a good counter.)