Why Aren't We Shocked?

VictoryGin

soulsinging wrote:

then why did victorygin claim it was a pro-women tv show that demonstrated strong female friendships? which is it?

i think this is the key problem in the feminist movement... just like any woman, they dont know what the fuck they want but seriously, im truly confused. it's like they want it both ways. women shouldnt ever be shown in skimpy outfits becos it objectifies them, but they should wear them as much as they want cos it celebrates their sexuality. it's fine for a woman to look sexy as long as men dont notice how sexy they look? that doesnt make sense.

likewise, half of women see 'sex and the city' as an inspiring show about women being free with their sexuality and taking control of their own lives. the other half see it as perpetuating the "every girl is slutty deep down" male fantasy while still reinforcing that, in the end, women only need/want a decent man to be happy.

it's no wonder guys don't know how to behave and what is and is not acceptable... women don't know this yet either, not even for themselves.

jesus. It is not possible for every woman to think the same way. I'm shocked that some are still so surprised when that comes up--women think and feel differently from each other. Feminists do too, which is why there isn't one type of feminist. Of course women can know what they want, but we want different things! That's why gender roles and stereotypes are so ridiculous. It's insulting to think that people are so simple that they're all the same.

With all this talk about clothing, I'm surprised no one noticed that we don't talk about men this way--especially people who think oh we're so equal. Isn't it obvious that our society has issues with women when they're the ones who can't win. Apparently they are being judged no matter what they wear--if they're naked, in little clothing, in a lot of clothing, in loose clothing, in tight clothing, wearing constrictive pantyhose, padded or push-up bras, corsets, waist cinchers, etc. Maybe it's hard for some men to see that women are socialized to transform themselves into perfect objects? I think that's bs, though. All you need to do is look around.

soulsinging

VictoryGin wrote:

jesus. It is not possible for every woman to think the same way. I'm shocked that some are still so surprised when that comes up--women think and feel differently from each other. Feminists do too, which is why there isn't one type of feminist. Of course women can know what they want, but we want different things! That's why gender roles and stereotypes are so ridiculous. It's insulting to think that people are so simple that they're all the same.

With all this talk about clothing, I'm surprised no one noticed that we don't talk about men this way--especially people who think oh we're so equal. Isn't it obvious that our society has issues with women when they're the ones who can't win. Apparently they are being judged no matter what they wear--if they're naked, in little clothing, in a lot of clothing, in loose clothing, in tight clothing, wearing constrictive pantyhose, padded or push-up bras, corsets, waist cinchers, etc. Maybe it's hard for some men to see that women are socialized to transform themselves into perfect objects? I think that's bs, though. All you need to do is look around.

my point was not supposed to be that women need to be unified, it was more reactionary to the impression i get that women have a very narrow and specific expectation of how men should treat them. if women cannot get together on how to act, why/how are men supposed to? guy should tell women they're beautiful, but if he buys a magazine with pictures of scantily-clad women he's a misogynist.

ive actually had a friend tell me that she's guilty of this... if a hot guy checks her out she likes it and feels flattered. it an ugly guy does the same thing she thinks it's creepy and offensive. she said the only reason she can think to explain it is in the second case, it makes her feel like the ugly guy think she's in his league and that's insulting.

also, we talk about clothing becos it is well established that men are more visual. if women were attracted by a guy sporting some ballsack cleavage, we might have another debate on our hands. but that's not the case. objectification exists on both sides (look at rock band groupies... it goes both ways: the women objectify the rock stars and the rock stars objectify their groupies). women just use different standards and criteria when they do it and so it's harder to pin down. but ask any guy if he gets the same treatment from girls that they give to athletes or the guy in a band. the world's worst poet is still sexier to an average woman than the world's best engineer. likewise, some slutty sex goddess is going to get a guy's attention more easily. but neither of these are across the board interpretations.

i think my point is that i dont think media ads are the place to start. the battle needs to be separating the fantasy from reality. REALLY cracking down on things like rape or sexual abuse. show guys that "fine, you can thnk what you want, but this is how you ACT." once the actions are checked, i think the respect will fall into line. it's much easier to act your way into right thinking than to try to think your way into right acting.

hippiemom

Ahnimus wrote:

Misogyny (/mɪ.ˈsɑ.ʤə.ni/) is hatred or fear of, or strong prejudice against women. The word comes from the Greek words μίσος (misos, "hatred") + γυνη (gunê, "woman"). Compared with anti-woman sexism or misandry (hatred or fear of, or strong prejudice against men), misogyny is usually regarded as directed against women by some men, though women can also hold misogynistic views. In feminist theory, misogyny is recognized as a political ideology - similar to racism or anti-Semitism - that justifies and maintains the subordination of women by men.

I'm not a feminist theorist, nor to my knowledge is anyone else on this board, so I'll leave them to their own discussions amongst themselves and stick with the standard definition of misogyny that you quoted.

It escapes me how anyone could look at our culture today and not see a good bit of self-hatred among women. They starve themselves. They rip out their body hair by the roots. They wear painful shoes that will deform the foot over time. They stuff themselves into push-up bras and tummy-flattening undergarments that are the furthest thing from comfortable. I recently saw an article that said it's not uncommon for women to spend 20% of their income on beauty treatments and supplies. If women genuinely liked themselves, would they need to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on diet aids and cosmetics and hair dye and fake fingernails and plastic surgery and anti-wrinkle cream and on and on and on? Is that the behavior of a person who thinks she's great just the way she is, who thinks women are naturally wonderful? Or is that the behavior of a person who all her life has been pummelled with the message that it's going to take a lot of work and a lot of money to make her acceptable?

So no, men were not singled out in the article. Prejudice against women is everywhere.

Ahnimus wrote:

We're not talking about the Klu Klux Klan here. We are talking about one crazed individual. This isn't a sign of "strong prejudice against women". Even if it were, it was isolated and the dude is fucking dead now.

We are NOT talking about one crazed individual. We are talking about the reasons that several murders of groups of females don't arouse the same type of alarm that they would if they involved almost any other group.

surferdude

hippiemom wrote:

We are NOT talking about one crazed individual. We are talking about the reasons that several murders of groups of females don't arouse the same type of alarm that they would if they involved almost any other group.

Much like we don't talk about why more men are murdered every year than women, or why women are better represented in universities. There is an uneasy truce in the "battle of the sexes". One where we don't look at reality if we fear what it will tell us. One where we are happier with status quo than true equality and admitting that part of equality is admitting there are fundamental differences between the sexes and always will be.

VictoryGin

surferdude wrote:

Much like we don't talk about why more men are murdered every year than women, or why women are better represented in universities. There is an uneasy truce in the "battle of the sexes". One where we don't look at reality if we fear what it will tell us. One where we are happier with status quo than true equality and admitting that part of equality is admitting there are fundamental differences between the sexes and always will be.

Is that last sentence really supposed to connect to the others? It seems like you're saying men are inherently more violent because they have that problem of killing each other.

I'm also not sure where you're going about women being better represented in universities. You mean there are more students? So women are inherently smarter? And what really is 'better represented'? Are you taking into account that women are the majority (population-wise)? The ratio of applicants, the quality of applicants, what?

I think there are some differences between genders, but they're mostly due to socialization.

surferdude

VictoryGin wrote:

Is that last sentence really supposed to connect to the others? It seems like you're saying men are inherently more violent because they have that problem of killing each other.

I'm also not sure where you're going about women being better represented in universities. You mean there are more students? So women are inherently smarter? And what really is 'better represented'? Are you taking into account that women are the majority (population-wise)? The ratio of applicants, the quality of applicants, what?

I think there are some differences between genders, but they're mostly due to socialization.

I wasn't going anywhere specifically with the last sentence. I am trying to, and rather poorly, is to point out that if we are going to do investigate the why's of the recent brutal killings and why they seem to be aimed at women then we should also be looking at the why's behind women being better represented in universities than men even when taking into account the difference in populations. I'd be comfortable if the why of that was because schools are currently set up and teach in a manner that the average woman finds easier to excel in than the average man. I'd be comfortable with that finding because the next logical step is to find ways to make it more equitable.

I'm not afraid of the findings because I willingly accept the notion that there are lots of inequitities on both sides. Things cant get better unless we accept that there are shortcomings.

It wouldn't surprise me if there are aptitude differences between the sexes and races. It seems pretty logoical if there are physical differences that there would be mental differences as well. Some aptitudes would naturally be more valued than others, but I wouldn't mistake the value placed on an aptitude to be equal with saying someon eis smarter than another.

Sorry for rambling. Hope it makes sense.

hippiemom

surferdude wrote:

I wasn't going anywhere specifically with the last sentence. I am trying to, and rather poorly, is to point out that if we are going to do investigate the why's of the recent brutal killings and why they seem to be aimed at women then we should also be looking at the why's behind women being better represented in universities than men even when taking into account the difference in populations. I'd be comfortable if the why of that was because schools are currently set up and teach in a manner that the average woman finds easier to excel in than the average man. I'd be comfortable with that finding because the next logical step is to find ways to make it more equitable.

I'm not afraid of the findings because I willingly accept the notion that there are lots of inequitities on both sides. Things cant get better unless we accept that there are shortcomings.

It wouldn't surprise me if there are aptitude differences between the sexes and races. It seems pretty logoical if there are physical differences that there would be mental differences as well. Some aptitudes would naturally be more valued than others, but I wouldn't mistake the value placed on an aptitude to be equal with saying someon eis smarter than another.

Sorry for rambling. Hope it makes sense.

There HAS been discussion of that issue. The NYT alone has published at least a half-dozen articles recently on the "boy crisis." I've posted a couple of them here. People are studying it, suggestions are being made and talked about. Change is slow, of course, because widespread change almost always is, but it's been getting attention.

surferdude

hippiemom wrote:

There HAS been discussion of that issue. The NYT alone has published at least a half-dozen articles recently on the "boy crisis." I've posted a couple of them here. People are studying it, suggestions are being made and talked about. Change is slow, of course, because widespread change almost always is, but it's been getting attention.

Attention at the acedemic level, but not part of public discourse. I'm sure the same is happening with the latest shootings. But since it is happening at the acedemic level we don't hear about it.

There is no societal approval in beating your wife or killing her. Happily those days are gone. We understand that it is the abuser who is wrong 100% of the time.

I think most people accept that the people doing the recent shootings have deep seated problems and their actions are not a real reflection of society. In fact they go against the grain of the very change society is undergoing to a more equal and equitable world.

VictoryGin

hippiemom wrote:

There HAS been discussion of that issue. The NYT alone has published at least a half-dozen articles recently on the "boy crisis." I've posted a couple of them here. People are studying it, suggestions are being made and talked about. Change is slow, of course, because widespread change almost always is, but it's been getting attention.

This is great:

The Boy Crisis—Fact or Myth?

by Rosalind C. Barnett & Caryl Rivers — October 02, 2006

In this commentary, the authors argue that the media has overplayed the questionable idea of a Boy Crisis in education.

It's been on the cover of Newsweek, featured in People magazine and examined by a PBS documentary. It's also the central issue in a suit filed by a high school student in Massachusetts saying that schools discriminate against boys. The idea of a “Boy crisis”—with American boys in academic free fall—has become a favorite theme of the media.

Boys, these reports lament, are falling behind in academic achievement, graduating from high school at lower rates than girls, occupying fewer seats in college classrooms, displaying poorer verbal skills.

This time, experts are calling for a complete overhaul of American education based on gender, saying that boys are wired differently from girls, learn in different ways and may just need their own schools. Boys, they say, are at a disadvantage in the many classrooms headed by female teachers, who are supposedly hostile to their sex. A Massachusetts student states flatly that his school is biased against males.

But the alarming statistics on which the notion of a crisis is based are rarely broken out by race or class. When they are, the whole picture changes. It becomes clear that if there is a crisis, it's among inner-city and rural boys. White suburban boys, overall, are not in crisis. On average, they are not dropping out of school, avoiding college or lacking in verbal skills. Although we have been hearing that boys are virtually disappearing from college classrooms, in Ivy League colleges, men still outnumber women.

In June 2006, the Washington-based think tank Education Sector reported that, over the past three decades, boys' test scores are mostly up, more boys are going to college and more are getting bachelor's degrees (Mead, 2006).

The report, titled, “The Truth About Boys and Girls,” labeled the “boy crisis“ as greatly overstated. "The real story is not bad news about boys doing worse," the report says, "It's good news about girls doing better.” Focusing on gender differences, the report cautions, could sidetrack efforts to put more resources into inner-city and rural schools, where both boys and girls desperately need better schools (Mead, 2006, p.3). A new breakdown by gender of the graduation rates of U.S. high schools, from a study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, tells a disturbing story. While it is true that among whites, girls are more likely to graduate than boys, the gap is relatively small, only five percent. Among Asians, the gap is even smaller, some three percent. The gap between the sexes for Blacks is 11 percent and for Hispanics, nine percent. While 59 percent of Black females got their high-school diplomas, the same was true for only 48 percent of Black males. Among Hispanics, 58 percent of females graduated, compared to 49 percent of males (Greene & Forster, 2003).

The students most at risk of dropping out attend public high schools in the largest urban centers. Each of the nation’s ten largest public school districts fails to graduate more than 60 percent of students--New York, Los Angeles Chicago, Greater Miami and Houston among others. Within this dismal picture, girls are doing only slightly better overall than boys, as we noted.

But our national concern about all boys seems pervasive, no matter what the statistics say. We fret because there are more girls filling college classrooms and they seem to be studying harder than the guys. Pundits worry whether boys are serious enough, whether they will falter in a new globalized world, and whether they are spending too much time playing video games and not enough on serious pursuits.

Truth be told, anxiety over men and boys is as American as apple pie. We’re been worrying for a long time. In the mid-19th century--which we tend to view as some golden age of patriarchy--the closing of the frontier was bemoaned as signaling the end of manhood. "By mid-century," writes sociologist Michael Kimmel (1987) of SUNY Stonybrook, "masculinity was increasingly threatened by the twin forces of industrialization and the spread of political democracy” (p.138). With the end of the frontier, critics worried, went the ideal of the free, unfettered American man, able to push west, to cut down trees and plow the prairies, and then just pull up stakes and move again. Urbanization was changing the landscape and altering men's relations to their work. Before the Civil War, 88 percent of American males were small farmers or independent artisans or small businessmen. But by 1910, less than one-third of all men were self-employed.

Americans worried that manhood was vanishing as men became mere cogs in machines, no longer having control over their labor; that city life was making men weak and cities represented "civilization, confinement and female efforts to domesticate the world," as one critic put it (Kimmel, 1987, p.145). And no less a sage than novelist Henry James muttered in The Bostonians: "The whole generation is womanized. The masculine tone is passing out of the world. It’s a feminine, nervous, hysterical, chattering canting age..." (James in Kimmel, 1987, p.146).

Cities and culture were equated with femininity to the point that intellectual achievement was seen to be unmasculine, prompting Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge to counsel boys to "avoid books, and in fact avoid all artificial learning, for the forefathers put America on the right path by learning completely from natural experience" (Beveridge in Kimmel, 1987, p.147). The Boy scouts were founded in 1910 in large degree because of a worry about the "feminization" of young boys who spent their days in the female world of school.

It was against this backdrop that Teddy Roosevelt's hyper-masculinity strode onto the world stage. It wasn't secure manhood that the Rough Rider represented, but the anxiety of the time about what men and boys were, or ought to be. World War I represented another crisis for the male image; Americans were shocked when nearly half the recruits were physically or mentally disqualified for military service. "In these and other ways, writes psychologist Joseph Pleck (1987), a leading authority on men's lives, "American men in the nineteenth and early 20th centuries were having trouble meeting male demands" (p.22).

The result was a cult of anti-modernism in which men looked to the past for male warrior role models—to medieval knights and to the Oriental warrior cult. Just as today's boys and men flock to video games and action movies for the comfort of certainty in an uncertain time, our ancestors looked backwards to a time when men were men.

In the Nineteen Fifties, Father Knew Best and women were safe at home raising the kids. Still, men and boys weren’t secure. Harry Brod (1987), the editor of The Making of Masculinities, writes, “the nostalgic male eye that looks longingly back to the 1950s, ostensibly the last time when men were men and everyone knew what that meant, forgets that this was a period of pervasive fear among the white middle class that men were being emasculated and turned into robotized organization men in indistinguishable grey flannel suits" (p. 46). William Whyte's best-seller The Organization Man presented men as powerless automatons doing the bidding of their corporate bosses. Social critics like Philip Wylie (1942)—who coined the term "Momism"—wrote that too much mothering was making American men soft and unmasculine. It was alleged, in fact, that an overdose of mothering was what caused American servicemen to crack under brainwashing in Korea.

The underlying message of the recurrent “boy crisis” has often been women. In the past, we asked whether female teachers, or later “moms,” were turning boys weak and wimpy. Today, some people ask whether feminist teachers are declaring war on boys, favoring girls while putting down boys, making them read books about “girl” stuff, and telling them to sit still and shut up.

Out of this crucible, a peculiar image of the "typical" boy has emerged today in many media reports: He's unable to focus, can't sit still, hates to read, acts up in class, loves sports and video games, gets in trouble a lot. Indeed, such boys exist—it has long been established that boys suffer more from attention deficit disorder than girls do—and they need all the help they can get. But research shows this is not the typical boy. Boys, in fact, are as different from one another as they are from girls.

Nonetheless, some are advocating boys-only classrooms in which boys would be taught in boot-camp fashion. In a recent Newsweek cover story, Houston neurologist Bruce Perry described today's co-ed classes as a "biologically disrespectful model of education" (Perry in Tyre, p.2006). In the New Republic, Richard Whitmire (2006) wrote of a "verbally drenched curriculum" that is "leaving boys in the dust" (p.2). New York Times columnist David Brooks (2006) suggested that boys ought to be given books about combat, to hold their interest. (Forget Julius Caesar, give them GI Joe?)

There's actually not much evidence that most boys lack verbal skills. In 2005, University of Wisconsin psychologist Janet Hyde (2005) synthesized data from 165 studies on verbal ability and gender. They revealed a female superiority so slight as to be meaningless. And psychologist Diane Halpern (2000) of Claremont McKenna College looked at many studies of verbal and math abilities and found that, overall, the gender differences were remarkably small. In fact, according to the Education Sector report, reading achievement by 9-year-old boys increased 15 points on a 500-point scale between 1971 and 2004, and girls that age increased seven points, remaining five points ahead of boys. Reading achievement for 13-year-olds improved four points for boys and three points for girls, with girls 10 points ahead. Among 17-year-olds, there was almost no change in reading achievement, with girls up one point, boys down one point and girls 14 points ahead (Mead, 2006).

VictoryGin

Many of us remember a time when boys had to read Shakespeare, Hardy, Longfellow and other classics as early as 8th grade, when boys were the majority of valedictorians, dominated the debate teams, and edited the school newspapers. Have boys’ brains changed over the years? No. Maybe one thing that’s changed is our expectations. If we don’t believe that boys have good verbal skills, they’ll believe it too.

All this research casts doubt on the idea, championed by author Michael Gurian and others, that boys' and girls' brains are so different that they must be taught in very different ways (Gurian & Henley, 2001). Although there are indeed some structural differences in the brains of men and women, we don't know what they mean. Perhaps very little. In the 19th century, scientists thought that the greater size of the male brain meant that men were a lot smarter. We now know how off the mark that was.

The Massachusetts student who has brought the discrimination suit against his high school wants boys to be given credit for sports and to be excused from the school's community service requirement. But might that not send the message to boys that they are inherently too dumb to get academic credit and too insensitive to be concerned about community issues?

Many, perhaps most, boys would be bored to tears in the kind of classroom that is now being described as "boy-friendly"—a classroom that would de-emphasize reading and verbal skills and would rely on rote learning and discipline—because it is really a remedial program in disguise. That may be needed for boys who have real problems in learning, but most boys, especially those in affluent suburban schools, don't have such problems. One group of studies found that although poor and working-class boys lag behind girls in reading when they get to middle school, boys in the wealthiest schools do not fall behind, either in middle school or in high school. University of Michigan education professor Valerie Lee reports that gender differences in academic performance are "small to moderate" (Lee et al., 1993).

Still, as Newsweek reported, educators "are reviving an old idea: separate the girls from the boys" (Tyre, 2006). We may see a rush to single-sex classrooms that won't really be good educational policy. California tried such classrooms in the 1990s under Gov. Pete Wilson, but they did not succeed in boosting academic achievement. The schools also presented very traditional gender scripts. A Ford Foundation report noted that boys tended to be taught in a regimented and traditional fashion that failed to guarantee academic achievement. In fact, Ford noted, the academic success of both girls and boys is influenced more by small classes, strong curricula and qualified teachers than by single-sex settings (Datnow, Hubbard & Woody, 2001).

Other studies also question whether sex-segregated schools are a magic bullet for improving kids’ academic performance and if there might be other downsides to segregated education. Michigan’s Lee found sexism in all single-sex schools, but it was the most severe in the all-boys’ schools. She suggests that without daily interactions between the sexes to contradict the messages being sent by the media, boys have little chance to learn non-sexist behavior. Boys could well be at a disadvantage in the modern world if they have trouble learning and working with girls (Lee et al., 1993).

However, a subtext of the boy crisis stories seems to be a fear of girls’ success. Too often, the fact that girls are succeeding academically touches a well of psychic fear in some people. A 2003 Business Week cover asking whether boys were becoming the “Second Sex” featured a huge, smiling girl looming over a tiny, puzzled-looking boy (Conlin, 2003). In some quarters, there is a peculiar fear that girls' success equals boys' failure. This is one of the main themes of the popular book by Christina Hoff Sommers (2000), The War Against Boys. Lacking much data, she managed to spin a Jeremiad about evil feminist teachers harming boys from a few anecdotes.

But where is the evidence of women taking over the world beyond school? Females earn considerably less than males and are under-represented in high-level jobs. As Jacqueline King, a director at the American Council on Education, told the Seattle Times, "Do I think it's doomsday for the male gender? No. I look around the world, and it seems to me that men are still in charge" (King in Barnett & Rivers, 2006).

he Education Sector report charges that the whole idea of a boy crisis has been used by conservative authors who accuse "misguided feminists" (Mead, 2006, p.17) of lavishing resources on female students at the expense of males and by liberals who say schools are "forcing all children into a teacher-led pedagogical box that is particularly ill-suited to boys' interests and learning styles” (Mead, 2006, p.14).

There is, says the report, a “free market for theories about why boys are underperforming girls in school, with parents, educators, media, and the public choosing to give credence to the explanations that are the best marketed and that most appeal to their pre-existing preferences” (Mead, 2006, p.17).

Obsessing about a boy crisis or thinking that American teachers are waging a war on boys won't help kids. What will help is recognizing that students are individuals, with many different skills and abilities, and there is no one-size-fits all-solution for boys or girls.

And we must also understand that there is indeed a huge crisis among poor inner city and rural students, who are slipping further and further behind, a fact that has dire portents for our entire society.

References

Barnett, R.C. & Rivers, C. (2006, March 15). 'Boy crisis' in education is nothing but hype. Women’s eNews. Retrieved October 2, 2006 from, http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2671

Brod, H. (1987).The case for men’s studies. In H. Brod (Ed.), The making of masculinities: The new men’s studies. Boston: Allen & Unwin.

Brooks, D. (2006, June 11). The gender gap at school. The New York Times.

Conlin, M. (2003, May 23). The new gender gap. BuinessWeek Online. Retrieved on September 25, 2006, from http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_21/b3834001_mz001.htm

Datnow, A., Hubbard, L., & Woody, E. (2001, May 21). Is single gender schooling viable in the public sector? Lessons from California’s pilot program. Ford Foundation. Retrieved October 2, 2006, from http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/depts/tps/adatnow/final.pdf#search=%22from%20www.oise.utoronto.ca%2Fdepts%2Ftps%2Fadatnow%2Ffinal.pdf%22

Gurian, M. & Henley, P. (2001). Boys and girls learn differently: A guide for teachers and parents. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Greene, J.P. & Forster, G. (2003, September). Education working paper: Public high school graduation and college readiness rates in the United States. Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Retrieved September 27, 2006, from http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ewp_03.htm

Halpern, D. (2000). Sex differences in cognitive abilities. Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.

Hyde, J.S. (2005). The gender similarities hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60(6), 581-592.

Kimmel, M.l. (1987). The contemporary crisis of masculinity. In H. Brod (Ed.), The making of masculinities: The new men’s studies. Boston: Allen & Unwin.

Lee, V. et al. (1993). The culture of sexual harassment in secondary schools. American Education Research Journal, 33, 385-418.

Mead, S. (2006, June). The truth about boys and girls. Education Sector. Retrieved September 25, 2006, from http://www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm?doc_id=378705#pdf

Pleck, J. (1987). The theory of male sex role identity. In H. Brod (Ed.), The making of masculinities: The new men’s studies. Boston: Allen & Unwin.

Sommers, C.H. (2000). The war against boys: How misguided feminism is harming our young men. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Tyre, P. (2006, January 30). The trouble with boys. Newsweek. Retrieved September 25, 2006, from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965522/site/newsweek/

Whitmire, R. (2006, January 18). Boys and books: Boy trouble. The New Republic. Retrieved September 20, 2006, from http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060123&s=whitmire012306&c=2

Wylie, P. (1942). Generation of vipers. New York: Farrar and Rinehart.

hippiemom

surferdude wrote:

Attention at the acedemic level, but not part of public discourse. I'm sure the same is happening with the latest shootings. But since it is happening at the acedemic level we don't hear about it.

There is no societal approval in beating your wife or killing her. Happily those days are gone. We understand that it is the abuser who is wrong 100% of the time.

I think most people accept that the people doing the recent shootings have deep seated problems and their actions are not a real reflection of society. In fact they go against the grain of the very change society is undergoing to a more equal and equitable world.

The NYT is not an academic publication, and if they're writing about it, so are other papers. And if you're not hearing it talked about, I guess that means the moms don't invite you to lunch. Take my word for it, the moms are talking about it.

my2hands

hippiemom wrote:

By BOB HERBERT
Published: October 16, 2006
The New York Times

“Who needs a brain when you have these?” -- message on an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt for young women

In the recent shootings at an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania and a large public high school in Colorado, the killers went out of their way to separate the girls from the boys, and then deliberately attacked only the girls.

Ten girls were shot and five killed at the Amish school. One girl was killed and a number of others were molested in the Colorado attack.

In the widespread coverage that followed these crimes, very little was made of the fact that only girls were targeted. Imagine if a gunman had gone into a school, separated the kids up on the basis of race or religion, and then shot only the black kids. Or only the white kids. Or only the Jews.

There would have been thunderous outrage. The country would have first recoiled in horror, and then mobilized in an effort to eradicate that kind of murderous bigotry. There would have been calls for action and reflection. And the attack would have been seen for what it really was: a hate crime.

None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected. Stories about the rape, murder and mutilation of women and girls are staples of the news, as familiar to us as weather forecasts. The startling aspect of the Pennsylvania attack was that this terrible thing happened at a school in Amish country, not that it happened to girls.

The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability to shock. Guys at sporting events and other public venues have shown no qualms about raising an insistent chant to nearby women to show their breasts. An ad for a major long-distance telephone carrier shows three apparently naked women holding a billing statement from a competitor. The text asks, “When was the last time you got screwed?”

An ad for Clinique moisturizing lotion shows a woman’s face with the lotion spattered across it to simulate the climactic shot of a porn video.

We have a problem. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed on women every day, and there is no escaping the fact that in the most sensational stories, large segments of the population are titillated by that violence. We’ve been watching the sexualized image of the murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey for 10 years. JonBenet is dead. Her mother is dead. And we’re still watching the video of this poor child prancing in lipstick and high heels.

What have we learned since then? That there’s big money to be made from thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In a misogynistic culture, it’s never too early to drill into the minds of girls that what really matters is their appearance and their ability to please men sexually.

A girl or woman is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so in the U.S. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count. We’re all implicated in this carnage because the relentless violence against women and girls is linked at its core to the wider society’s casual willingness to dehumanize women and girls, to see them first and foremost as sexual vessels — objects — and never, ever as the equals of men.

“Once you dehumanize somebody, everything is possible,” said Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of the women’s advocacy group Equality Now.

That was never clearer than in some of the extreme forms of pornography that have spread like nuclear waste across mainstream America. Forget the embarrassed, inhibited raincoat crowd of the old days. Now Mr. Solid Citizen can come home, log on to this $7 billion mega-industry and get his kicks watching real women being beaten and sexually assaulted on Web sites with names like “Ravished Bride” and “Rough Sex — Where Whores Get Owned.”

Then, of course, there’s gangsta rap, and the video games where the players themselves get to maul and molest women, the rise of pimp culture (the Academy Award-winning song this year was “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”), and on and on.

You’re deluded if you think this is all about fun and games. It’s all part of a devastating continuum of misogyny that at its farthest extreme touches down in places like the one-room Amish schoolhouse in normally quiet Nickel Mines, Pa.

i definitely understand the point of the article

but i think there could be a flip side...and that is that we are also conditioned through mostly the media and pop culture (movies, music, ect) to believ that men are generally dumb, aggresive, and sexist... so it doesnt come as a suprise when a man targets women or girls? i guess hwta i am saying is that we have been conditioned to look at women as objects and victims, we have also been conditioned to view men as objectifiers and vitctimizers

just my2cents

soulsinging

VictoryGin wrote:

Is that last sentence really supposed to connect to the others? It seems like you're saying men are inherently more violent because they have that problem of killing each other.

I'm also not sure where you're going about women being better represented in universities. You mean there are more students? So women are inherently smarter? And what really is 'better represented'? Are you taking into account that women are the majority (population-wise)? The ratio of applicants, the quality of applicants, what?

I think there are some differences between genders, but they're mostly due to socialization.

*edit* alread covered. carry on people

my2hands

soulsinging wrote:

there are more women in college, they get better grades, and they graduate in greater numbers. they outperform men in every area at every level of academia.

the major contributing factor for this is more men go into manual labor professions that do not require a college education... almost the entire construction industry is male, just as most hands on type of professsions such as auto mechanic, caprentry, plumbing, etc...

surferdude

That article is so full of mysandry it's disgusting. Every time boys fall behind girls in testing it is discounted, "the gap is ONLY 5%", "the difference is ONLY 5 points". Or it tries to insult the ways boys learn in general as "Many, perhaps most, boys would be bored to tears in the kind of classroom that is now being described as "boy-friendly"—a classroom that would de-emphasize reading and verbal skills and would rely on rote learning and discipline—because it is really a remedial program in disguise." Gee, there's no bias and contempt for boys shown there.

decides2dream

surferdude wrote:

Much like we don't talk about why more men are murdered every year than women, or why women are better represented in universities. There is an uneasy truce in the "battle of the sexes". One where we don't look at reality if we fear what it will tell us. One where we are happier with status quo than true equality and admitting that part of equality is admitting there are fundamental differences between the sexes and always will be.

all of that may be quite true...but yea, i think it is a pressing issue to see the *whys* of one group being targeted for murder. there are many layers reasons, etc...for all these *whys* for any of the questions, but i believe the article is pointing out that maybe, just maybe....a bit more study into the *why* of this disturbing, life-ending issue is sorely needed.

sure, ALL these issues are important, worthy of study and discussion....but this one article is simply focusing on this one particular issue. i for one believe it important enough that sure, it can and does warrant a degree of our undivided attention at least for a moment to contemplate, work towards understanding/change..without bringing in all the other issues out there. so yes, i can appreciate all these other things that exist, but i can also pause and just consider....why are women/girls being targeted?

Ahnimus

hippiemom wrote:

I'm not a feminist theorist, nor to my knowledge is anyone else on this board, so I'll leave them to their own discussions amongst themselves and stick with the standard definition of misogyny that you quoted.

It escapes me how anyone could look at our culture today and not see a good bit of self-hatred among women. They starve themselves. They rip out their body hair by the roots. They wear painful shoes that will deform the foot over time. They stuff themselves into push-up bras and tummy-flattening undergarments that are the furthest thing from comfortable. I recently saw an article that said it's not uncommon for women to spend 20% of their income on beauty treatments and supplies. If women genuinely liked themselves, would they need to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on diet aids and cosmetics and hair dye and fake fingernails and plastic surgery and anti-wrinkle cream and on and on and on? Is that the behavior of a person who thinks she's great just the way she is, who thinks women are naturally wonderful? Or is that the behavior of a person who all her life has been pummelled with the message that it's going to take a lot of work and a lot of money to make her acceptable?

So no, men were not singled out in the article. Prejudice against women is everywhere.


We are NOT talking about one crazed individual. We are talking about the reasons that several murders of groups of females don't arouse the same type of alarm that they would if they involved almost any other group.

Yea, almost none. If they were boys no one would even raise an eyebrow, unless they were black.

Women don't do all that stuff because they have to. I know plenty of women that don't do that stuff and get a long just fine. Women do it because of their own insecurities. My ex would spend 3 or more hours getting ready just to go to work. I kept telling her she was beautiful without it, but my opinion didn't mean shit because she was a psycho bitch..

It's not mens' fault you get caught up in the marketing of sex, and feel you need to do yourselve's up.

Anyway, this thread is really starting to offend me.

hippiemom

surferdude wrote:

That article is so full of mysandry it's disgusting. Every time boys fall behind girls in testing it is discounted, "the gap is ONLY 5%", "the difference is ONLY 5 points". Or it tries to insult the ways boys learn in general as "Many, perhaps most, boys would be bored to tears in the kind of classroom that is now being described as "boy-friendly"—a classroom that would de-emphasize reading and verbal skills and would rely on rote learning and discipline—because it is really a remedial program in disguise." Gee, there's no bias and contempt for boys shown there.

Saying that most boys would be bored in a remedial class is insulting to boys? I think it shows respect for boys' intelligence. The boys I know have fine verbal skills and would indeed be bored to tears by rote learning.

surferdude

hippiemom wrote:

Saying that most boys would be bored in a remedial class is insulting to boys? I think it shows respect for boys' intelligence. The boys I know have fine verbal skills and would indeed be bored to tears by rote learning.

Sorry but the two female authors view a "boy-friendly" class to be equivalent to a remedial class. If that doesn't show a complete and utter disrespect and general contempt for boys and their intelligence I'm not sure what does.

PJPOWER

I just started reading this forum, so let me know if someone has brought up this point about that particular shooting incident..........They were Amish and purposely made it a point not to start a big stir about it! They even publicly stated that they forgive the man who did it and want to move on. I don't think that the aftermath has anything to do with the fact that they were women, but moreso everything else surrounding the incident. It would almost be a crime against their families and their culture to start a lot of media crap out of something that they want to put behind them.