is sexism more tolerated that racism?
Thecure
Posts: 814
why is it that we have no problem calling women sluts, bitches and tramps but the N word is look very down upon among what is considerdered polite society.
People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."
- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me."
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)
- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me."
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)
Post edited by Unknown User on
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who's "we"....?
cross the river to the eastside
good questions, i would say that many people in todays society use those words with reference to women. i am not saying all.
- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me."
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)
here is your amendment for black males, see the date
The Fifteenth Amendment (Amendment XV) of the United States Constitution provides that no government in the United States may prevent a male citizen from voting based on that citizen's race[1], color, or previous condition of servitude (i.e. slavery). It was ratified on February 3, 1870.
here is the amendment for women, see the date
The Nineteenth Amendment (Amendment XIX) to the United States Constitution prohibits each of the states and the federal government from denying any citizen the right to vote because of that citizen's sex.
- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me."
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)
In my experience these terms are used more by angry women towards other women.
Other than that, angry people use angry words when they are angry with other people for this or that.
Men are Assholes, or Bastards or Pigs what have you....
I think women use the term slut more. Men use Bitch quite a bit ususally with a woman they don't like.... for instance an ex girlfriend. Not sure that makes either sexist per say... just angry. Boys vs Girls is a classic rivalry eventually most of us grow up and realize we each have a lot to offer.
Anyone who arbitrarily throws those terms around usually is just a jerk and not worth listening too anyway.
Are there some closed minds and a lot of people living in the past? Sure.. definitely but uneducated or generally stupid people use words like this to describe people sometimes. You can't let it get you down.
I've asked plenty of girls who've said the statement... "she's a slut..." why? usually it has to do with a difference of morality or opinion...culture... like most arguments really.
Men have thier strengths on average as do women.... As far as actual racism, most people can have aversions to culture.... but if one thinks that skin pigmentation amounts to a hill of beans in the grand scheme of things... that person is an idiot same goes for people thinking women can't be good managers or wear pants or explain the word of God... etc. etc.
i think the date's missing but it was 1920.
women commonly were a part of abolitionist movements, but saw that they could only help so much because they couldn't vote on these issues. also, they saw a common theme between their position and the position of black men. this all led to things like the seneca falls convention and the first wave of feminism/suffrage movement.
cross the river to the eastside
So, yes, sexism is clearly more tolerated than racism.
naděje umírá poslední
"De nigger woman is de mule ah de world"
Zora Neal Hurston
naděje umírá poslední
lets try not to try this tread into a another joke which will get shut down. here is my questions to you all. if Hillary did a speech on gender like Obama did on racism what would people think?
- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me."
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)
What's so funny about that?
naděje umírá poslední
And please...enough with the "it is usually women referring to each other".
It is embarassing to live in a society where this is tolerated...even in a joking fashion. I will not tolerate that kind of talk or joking around my son and I would hope others feel the same way. I am not going to raise a sexist.
And thank you to the person that brought up the point about Hillary and the threads about her on here. Excellent point.
I have read more shit just on this board from men that think it is ok to refer to women as bitches or sluts or whores.
And I don't feel right when you're gone away
But is it sexist to call Hilary Clinton a bitch if you call Bill Clinton a bastard in the same sentence? I'm all about equal opportunity.
so ... are those words not appropriate to be used at ANY time or just in refering to women?
those words can now refer to the male gender as well
Good point.
naděje umírá poslední
The difference (at least to me) between using the n-word and words like "bitch", are that the n-word describes an entire race, while "bitch" describes certain women.
To me, the n-word doesn't describe an attitude or action, but a race, and using that word has a direct connection to slavery, discrimination, segregation, etc.
To me, bitch describes a specific woman's actions... If a women is outright obnoxious, mean or evil, I don't have anymore of a problem with using that world then calling a man a "dick" or an "asshole" who acts the same way.
I don't know... I just get more concerned when I see people acting racist or sexist than just using racist language, but what do I know... I'm not black or a woman...
was like a picture
of a sunny day
“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”
― Abraham Lincoln
i think you made a good point but i believe that using terms like bitch does also have a direct connection to slavery and discrimination and segregation. i tend to hear men call women bitches when their actions are not what men consider womenly. we tend to believe that slavery as in chains but in reality slavery can also mean not getting paid the same money for the same job, or saying things like i wonder how that women got that job and peopel saying soem thing liek "on their backs"
- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me."
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)
i understand what you are saying but does saying the N word make a person a racist or just anger.
- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me."
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)
and not to be turning this into an all PC thread, but i think in line with this is when people call things 'gay'.....that pisses me off no end, and no i am not homosexual. but i digress.......
Let's just breathe...
I am myself like you somehow
but that's exactly the problem. bitch, throughout history, has described a woman who doesn't follow traditional gender stereotypes. she is someone who can be aggressive, which women traditionally aren't supposed to be. bitch is a female dog, and when you call a woman a bitch, it is because she, like that dog, can sometimes bite back. this is a gendered term meant to disparage women. think about when a man is called a bitch these days---it is because he is being "womanly" in the way that he is submissive. the word "bitch" has definite gender attachments, it's offensive to women whether in the form of calling them out for being unlike their gender (being too aggressive) or applying that label to a man (which is an insult to him because he is acting like a woman).
cross the river to the eastside
zora's not a joke, for reals. black women certainly have the worst of all in terms of racism and sexism.
and yes, i would have felt differently about clinton's campaign. i felt she was afraid of alienating voters if she would have made a big issue out of it. i wish she did.
cross the river to the eastside
I might be losing my sense of humor, i though that person was trying to be funny and ruin what i consider an important topic. you see i think that Hillary didn't make it an issue because people would say that she was just trying to win votes. look what happen when she started to cry on TV, people all over where saying that she was just doing that to win the womens vote. it made me sick.
- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me."
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)
i guess in that way, hillary was in a no-win situation. she didn't start that dialogue, which upset me. but if she did, others may call her pandering, or too aggressive, or something else.
i obviously don't know what was going on with her, but to me, it seemed like when she cried, that was an actual honest moment we had from her. she was just f'ing tired. tired of so many things i'd bet. i don't think we got to see too many honest moments from her because of all her advisors and whatnot. maybe if she did what she wanted in the campaign, we would have heard a good speech about gender.
cross the river to the eastside
I have always had high respect for women that many people I know don't share. Most of my close friends do, but outside of that I know plenty of guys who aren't like that. In fact many girls even find it odd these days. They don't expect respect from guys, they expect the mild kind of abuse which they receive from men threatened by the changing role of women in society who have to regain dominance. These kinds of guys make me angry. These guys kinda view women as puppets almost who are meant to please them. It pervades the way they talk about women, how they treat women, and how they expect women to act.
However, I think it's also important for women to be sensitive to the fact that it's a guy's nature to hold a position of authority (not in a negative or abusive kind of way, in a very respectful and loving way). I don't really know how to describe it, and I don't want this to come off the wrong way, but I also know many girls who are a little too headstrong and independent at times. This can really intimidate a guy and make him uncomfortable and, therefore, cause him to react to regain dominance, so to speak.
Please, no one get offended by what I'm saying. These are just my personal observations. In no way do I mean to accuse or criticize either guys or girls. I'm just trying to address the issue and explain it the way I've come to understand it.
-Reagan
However, it IS bias. I can't tell you how many people I've encountered who know almost NOTHING about Bush except what they've been told to believe by the media.
Believe me, I'm not a Bush fan either, but I am willing to acknowledge that there has been tons of bias against him in the media. Not just on the news but on sitcoms, talk shows, game shows, etc. I also think a lot of that is what has caused so much ill feeling about Bush. It's not about the issues, it's about what attitude is accepted by society. There's a lot of negative labeling and association in society as far as people who support Bush. It's no longer an acceptable position.
-Reagan
what do you mean it's a guy's nature to hold a position of authority? are you saying men are the biologically dominant gender and women shouldn't try to hold a position of authority because it can intimidate a guy and make him uncomfortable?
this is some fun reading (and it brings race into it too, yay!):
'Women's Liberation' Aims to Free Men, Too
The Washington Post
Sunday, June 7, 1970
By Gloria Steinem
THIS IS THE YEAR of Women's Liberation. Or at least, it's the year the press has discovered a movement that has been strong for several years now, and reported it as a small, privileged, rather lunatic event instead of the major revolution in consciousness�in everyone's consciousness, male or female�that I believe it truly is.
It is a movement that some call "feminist" but should more accurately be called humanist; a movement that is an integral part of rescuing this country from its old, expensive patterns of elitism, racism and violence.
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn. We are filled with the popular wisdom of several centuries just past, and we are terrified to give it up. Patriotism means obedience, age means wisdom, woman means submission, black means inferior: these are preconceptions imbedded so deeply in our thinking that we honestly may not know that they are there.
Unfortunately, authorities who write textbooks are sometimes subject to the same popular wisdom as the rest of us. They gather their proof around it, and end by becoming the theoreticians of the status quo. Using the most respectable of scholarly methods, for instance, English scientists proved definitively that the English were descended from the angels while the Irish were descended from the apes.
It was beautifully done, complete with comparative skull measurements, and it was a rationale for the English domination of the Irish for more than 100 years. I try to remember that when I'm reading Arthur Jensen's current and very impressive work on the limitations of black intelligence, or when I'm reading Lionel Tiger on the inability of women to act in groups.
It wasn't easy for the English to give up their mythic superiority. Indeed, there are quite a few Irish who doubt that they have done it yet. Clearing our minds and government policies of outdated myths is proving to be at least as difficult, but it is also inevitable. Whether It's woman's secondary role in society or the paternalistic role of the United States in the world, the old assumptions just don't work any more.
Part of living this revolution is having the scales fall from our eyes. Every day we see small obvious truths that we had missed before. Our histories, for instance have generally been written for and about white men. Inhabited countries were "discovered" when the first white male set foot there, and most of us learned more about any one European country than we did about Africa and Asia combined.
I confess that, before some consciousness-changing of my own, I would have thought that the women's history courses springing up around the country belonged in the same cultural ghetto as home economics. The truth is that we need Women's studies almost as much as we need Black Studies, and for exactly the same reason: too many of us have completed a "good" education believing that everything from political power to scientific discovery was the province of white males.
We believed. for instance, that the vote had been "given" to women in some whimsical, benevolent fashion. We never learned about the long desperation of the women's struggle, or about the strength and wisdom of the women who led it. We knew a great deal more about the outdated, male supremacist theories of Sigmund Freud than we did about societies where women had equal responsibility, or even ruled.
"Anonymous," Virginia Woolf once said sadly, "was a woman."
A Black Parallel
I DON'T MEAN to equate our problems of identity with those that flowed from slavery. But, as Gunnar Myrdal pointed out in his classic study "An American Dilemma," "In drawing a parallel between the position of, and feeling toward, women and Negroes, we are uncovering a fundamental basis of our culture."
Blacks and women suffer from the same myths of childlike natures; smaller brains; inability to govern themselves, much less white men; limited job skills; identity as sex objects,and so on. Ever since slaves arrived on these shores and were given the legal status of wives � that is, chattel� our legal reforms have followed on each other's heels �with women, I might add, still lagging considerably behind.
President Nixon's Commission on women concluded that the Supreme Court sanctions discrimination against women � discrimination that it long ago ruled unconstitutional in the case of blacks�but the commission report mains mysteriously unreleased by the White House. An equal rights amendment now up again before the Senate has been delayed by a male-chauvinist Congress for 47 years. Neither blacks nor women have role-models In history: models of individuals who have been honored in authority outside the home.
As Margaret Mead has noted, the only women allowed to be dominant and respectable at the same time are widows. You have to do what society wants you to do, have a husband who dies, and then have power thrust upon you through no fault of your own. The whole thing seems very hard on the men.
Before we go on to other reasons why Women's Liberation Is Men's Liberation, too �and why this incarnation of the women's movement is inseparable from the larger revolution � perhaps we should clear the air of a few more myths � the myth that women are biologically inferior, for instance. In fact, an equally good case could be made for the reverse.
Women live longer then men. That's when the groups being studied are always being cited as proof that we work them to death, but the truth is that women live longer than men even when the groups being studied are monks and nuns. We survived Nazi concentration camps better, are protected against heart attacks by our female hormones, are less subject to many diseases, withstand surgery better and are so much more durable at every stage of life that nature conceives 20 to 50 per cent more males just to keep the balance going.
The Auto Safety Committee of the American Medical Association has come to the conclusion that women are better drivers because they're less emotional than men. I never thought I would hear myself quoting the AMA, but that one was too good to resist.
I don't want to prove the superiority of one sex to another: that would only be repeating a male mistake. The truth is that we're just not sure how many of our differences are biological and how many are societal. What we do know is that the differences between the two sexes, like the differences between races, are much less great than the differences to be found within each group.
Chains of Mink
A SECOND MYTH is that women are already being treated equally in this society. We ourselves have been guilty of perpetuating this myth, especially at upper economic levels where women have grown fond of being lavishly maintained as ornaments and children. The chains may be made of mink and wall-to-wall carpeting, but they are still chains.
The truth is that a woman with a college degree working full time makes less than a black man with a high school degree working full time. And black women make least of all. In many parts of the country � New York City, for instance�a woman has no legally guaranteed right to rent an apartment, buy a house, get accommodations in a hotel or be served in a public restaurant. She can be refused simply because of her sex.
In some states, women get longer Jail sentences for the same crime. Women on welfare must routinely answer humiliating personal questions; male welfare recipients do not. A woman is the last to be hired, the first to be fired. Equal pay for equal work is the exception. Equal chance for advancement, especially at upper levels or at any level with authority over men, is rare enough to be displayed in a museum.
As for our much-touted economic power, we make up only 5 per cent of the Americans receiving $10,000 a year or more, and that includes all the famous rich widows. We are 51 per cent of all stockholders, a dubious honor these days, but we hold only 18 per cent of the stock�and that is generally controlled by men.
In fact, the myth of economic matriarchy in this country is less testimony to our power than to resentment of the little power we do have.
You may wonder why we have submitted to such humiliations all these years; why, indeed, women will sometimes deny that they are second-class citizens at all. The answer lies in the psychology of second-classness. Like all such groups, we come to accept what society says about us. We believe that we can make it in the world only by "Uncle Tom-ing," by a real or pretended subservience to white males.
Even when we come to understand that we, as individuals, are not secondclass, we still accept society's assessment of our group � a phenomenon psychologists refer to as internalized aggression. From this stems the desire to be the only woman in an office, an academic department or any other part of the man's world. From this also stems women who put down their sisters�and my own profession of journalism has some of them.
Inhumanity to Man
I DON'T WANT to give the impression, though, that we want to join society exactly as it is. I don't think most women want to pick up briefcases and march off to meaningless, depersonalized jobs. Nor do we want to be drafted�and women certainly should be drafted; even the readers of Seventeen magazine were recently polled as being overwhelmingly in favor of women in national service� to serve in a war like the one in Indochina.
We want to liberate men from those inhuman roles as well. We want to share the work and responsibility, and to have men share equal responsibility for the children. Probably the ultimate myth is that children must have fulltime mothers, and that liberated women make bad ones. The truth is that most American children seem to be suffering from too much mother and too little father.
Women now spend more time with their homes and families than in any other past or present society we know about. To get beck to the sanity of the agrarian or joint family system, we need free universal day care. With that aid, as in Scandinavian countries, and with laws that permit women equal work and equal pay, man will be relieved of his role as sole breadwinner and stranger to his own children.
No more alimony. Fewer boring wives. Fewer childlike wives. No more so-called "Jewish mothers," who are simply normally ambitious human beings with all their ambitiousness confined to the house. No more wives who fall apart with the first wrinkle because they've been taught that their total identity depends on their outsides No more responsibility for another adult human being who has never been told she is responsible for her own life, and who sooner or later says some version of, "If I hadn't married you, I could have been a star." Women's Liberation really is Men's Liberation, too.
The family system that will emerge is a great subject of anxiety. Probably there will be a variety of choices. Colleague marriages, such as young people have now, with both partners going to law-school or the Peace Corps together, is one alternative. At least they share more than the kitchen and the bedroom. Communes; marriages that are valid for the child-rearing years only�there are many possibilities.
The point is that Women's Liberation is not destroying the American family. It is trying to build a human compassionate alternative out of its ruins.
Simply Incorruptible
ONE FINAL myth that women are more moral than men. We are not more moral; we are only uncorrupted by power. But until the old generation of male chauvinists is out of office women in positions of power can increase our chances of peace a great deal.
I personally would rather have had Margaret Mead as President during the past six years of Vietnam than either Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. At least she wouldn't have had her masculinity to prove. Much of the trouble this country is in has to do with the masculine mystique: The idea that manhood somehow depends on the subjugation of other people. It's a bipartisan problem.
The challenge to all of us is to live a revolution, not to die for one. There has been too much killing, and the weapons are now far too terrible. This revolution has to change consciousness, to upset the injustice of our current hierarchy by refusing to honor it. And it must be a life that enforces a new social justice
Because the truth is that none of us can be liberated if other groups are not. Women's Liberation is a bridge between black and white women, but also between the construction workers and the suburbanites, between Mr. Nixon's Silent Majority and the young people it fears. Indeed, there's much more injustice and rage among working-class women than among the much publicized white radicals.
Women are sisters; they have many of the same problems, and they can communicate with each other. "You only get radicalized," as black activists always told us, "on your own thing." Then we make the connection to other injustices in society. The women's movement is an important revolutionary bridge, and we are building It.
Gloria Steinem is a free-lance writer and a contributing editor of New York Magazine. The accompanying article is excerpted from a commencement address at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Miss Steinem says that it "was prepared with great misgivings about its reception, and about the purpose of speaking at Vassar."
cross the river to the eastside
Yes, I am saying that because I believe it's true. Not that women shouldn't have jobs or positions of power, but that, from a relationship point of view, men are the protectors and women are the nurturers. So, therefore, I disagree with much of what Ms. Steinem has to say.
-Reagan
Agreed ... Its a tad shocking, actually. Women are about 51% of the population? Blacks in the U.S., around 10%? Why does sexism linger more strongly??? Its rather odd.
Talk about sexism and racism WOW. LOL
My wife AND my black friend would probably slap me for that one hahahaha
Sweep the Leg Johnny.