This is why I’m angry
Posted in FanGirl, Feminism, Life, Sci Fi, Television on 04/04/2008 08:21 pm by KatiePlease, everyone go read this, Andrea’s done a fabulous job of explaining why we still need feminism: Think we’ve achieved equality? Think again.
Also, look at this post (also by Andrea, but on a different blog), about what sexism is. Pay specific attention to “unintentional sexism”: FAQ: What is sexism?
I have lots of comments/ideas for this, but I’m brain-overwhelmed today, so I’ll try to post ideas later. In the meantime, I’d be very curious to see how everyone else interprets this stuff.
ALSO: Battlestar Galactica returns tonight! W00t!!!! *cough* Back to your regularly scheduled feminist rant.
April 5th, 2008 at 1:12 am
It comes off as complaining to me with no real attempts at solutions. And most of these are social realities, not institutional or legal ones.
The fact we’ve never had a female president, for instance, in a representative democracy where everybody has one vote, should raise some flags. I don’t believe it is because of a lack of female authority on the matter — after all, women outnumber men, and therefore have more votes — but lack of good candidates.
There are a few reasons why girls tend to stick with girl things and guys with guy things. Mainly, it’s just more comfortable, perhaps. But you don’t tend to find a lot of female software engineers, economists, scientists, or politicians; all things which I’m very interested in, but unfortunately find I can’t communicate with basically any women about.
Sure, the guys are a big part of the problem. Many girls get chased away from internet communities that are very male-dominated. Either the bottom 5% of people troll them, or they fawn over them, and it’s enough pressure to make them give up.
The best thing women can do for equality in these fields is to be capable in them and keep a thick skin. Trust me, men suffer a lot of criticism in these arenas as well.
April 5th, 2008 at 1:24 am
Oh yeah — my CEO knows the creator of Battlestar Galactica. In fact, the application I work on has been renamed “Cylon”.
April 5th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Found you from a return link from Feminism101. Wanted to respond to Joel.
“… most of these are social realities, not institutional or legal ones.”
So what if it’s social, not political or legal? I don’t totally agree with your assertion, but even if we did decide the problems were mostly social, does that make them less real?
“The fact we’ve never had a female president, for instance, in a representative democracy where everybody has one vote, should raise some flags. I don’t believe it is because of a lack of female authority on the matter — after all, women outnumber men, and therefore have more votes — but lack of good candidates.”
You honestly believe that no woman in the past 200+ years has been qualified to be president of the US? Do you really, truly think that? If so, there’s no point in continuing to read my rebuttal, as you are hopeless. If not, consider the fact that women are also affected by our sexist society and end up internalizing those messages that women are inferior to men. That one is part of why many women won’t vote for a woman president. For another thing, consider South Africa, where the whites, at 10% of the population, horrifically oppressed the black majority for years. Numbers alone do not determine whether a group will be oppressed.
“There are a few reasons why girls tend to stick with girl things and guys with guy things. Mainly, it’s just more comfortable, perhaps…Sure, the guys are a big part of the problem.”
Why is it “more comfortable” for people to stay within society’s assigned gender roles? It’s not like a woman experiences physical pain if she starts studying physics- its society that disapproves, and from about grade school on discourages women’s interest in science. So why can’t we open people’s eyes to the problem and try to do something about it? You seem to say that although some sexist men make it hard for women to break out of gender roles, you don’t really care.
“Trust me, men suffer a lot of criticism in these arenas as well.”
But women get the same criticism based on their work as men do, PLUS gender-based discrimination. We’re not just whining about the same thing men experience. Why should we have to grow a thick skin, rather than sexist people stop flinging their sexist drivel at us?
Your whole comment seems to say that women should just get over it, because either it’s too big a problem to fix, or it’s too unimportant. Well, we women, who have to experience it all the time, disagree.
April 5th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
You are twisting my words, which is not a respectable tactic.
I said that politicians — our ultimate authority — are granted their power by a vote from the masses, most of which are women. So if you want to find someone to blame for the lack of good female candidates, you can look to everyone, including the women.
I haven’t had a chance to be sexist against female applicants to my software engineering positions, because there haven’t been any. In my school, there were about 4% of students in Computer Science that were female.
I don’t see many women standing up to change that. And trust me, it wasn’t for lack of trying by the school itself, which saw it as a massive problem. And believe it or not, many men in these fields, such as myself, find the lack of women in their profession unfortunate.
You can go ahead and try to paint me as someone who is sexist, but all you’re doing is attacking someone sympathetic to the cause of equality who is trying to explain that not everything is in the control of men as so many feminists seem to believe, but is instead regularly chosen by women as the course they prefer.
April 16th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Joel, how is directly quoting you twisting your words? Plese provide a specific example of how I twisted your words, as I don’t think I did.
In your posts I see an enormous ignorance of the way oppression works, as it appears that you believe that women are individually and as a group responsible for not creating and voting for female presidential candidates, or applying to go to your school’s CS department. I don’t know your school, so I don’t know what efforts they made to get young girls interested in CS, to create a welcoming and woman-friendly CS dept, and to actively recruit women. If they did all that, great! If not, they cannot just whine “no women apply! Women don’t want to do CS!” without acknowledging the larger social context.
Women who run for president or try to enter male-dominated fields experience enormous amounts of anti-woman backlash. Do you agree or disagree with that?