7 ms·

Wouldn't it be trivial to create a female privilege checklist? For example, while women may be asked to smile by random people (44), they are murdered by rando

by jcnnghm 15y ago

Wouldn't it be trivial to create a female privilege checklist? For example, while women may be asked to smile by random people (44), they are murdered by random people far less often than men, representing only 21% of victims. Or, while females spend more time grooming than men (27), they are much less likely to have their genitals mutilated as infants by mothers who do not like the way they look. There can be some things in society that do not appeal to women. There are certainly things that women find appealing that most men are not at all interested in. I always kind of thought that young geeks used comic books to escape their reality. This is just a guess, but could it be that some geeks are awkward around women because females weren't nice to them during their adolescence? Sex hormone levels peak at around age 17 for men, senior year of high school. Is it really that unexpected that men that get no positive female attention during their sexual prime don't embrace women exploring geek hobbies? Perhaps the focus of all these stupid gender articles should be on encouraging young women not to alienate a large subset of people. I would be willing to bet that if geeks were more accepted at an earlier age, many of the perceived gender issues would disappear.

zasz 15y ago
Eh, just because females have advantages in some domains doesn't mean that their overall advantages in life are outweighed by the overall male advantages in life. Stuff like the salary gap, stereotype threat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat), and being expected to give up your career to be the one to raise the kids affect most adult women for most of their lives. Murder is a pretty rare event, and men, as the traditionally more risk-taking sex, could be bringing quite a bit of it down on themselves. I'd take the increased chance of murder, personally.
- spindritf 15y ago
  > the salary gap Men don't earn more money for being men (not any more at least, if it was ever true): > according to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group. http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.html http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00....
  - wpietri 15y ago
    Amazing what happens when you read the whole article: you discover that a) this is a market research survey guy, and b) his theory is due to the fact that the women are better educated, and therefore better qualified. Which means that this is definitely not evidence that evidence that women get paid the same as men when all else is equal.
    - knucker3 15y ago
      It's not just this one guy though: http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20... http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=7763 http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_detai... http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E6DD1531F936A3575AC0A9639C8B63 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E6DD1531F... http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903454504576486690371838036.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190345450457648... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVvaQ0xxni8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVvaQ0xxni8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwogDPh-Sow http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwogDPh-Sow
      - wpietri 15y ago
        Thanks. That's helpful. However, that first link, the only one from a neutral source, suggests that sexism and male privilege are indeed still problems. They say that they couldn't account for 24-35% of the wage gap. And the portions they could account for were due to: * more women work part time * more women take time off to care for children and the elderly * women value 'family-friendly' workplaces more The first one isn't really an explanation; it says nothing about why that's the case. The second is at least partly due to societal policing of gender roles: talk to any couple where the guy stays home with the kid and you'll hear both partners complain about how they're treated. The man is unmanly; the woman, unwomanly. It's also self-reinforcing; the wage gap means that guys make more, so there's economic incentive for women to stay home. The third could be similar: ceteris paribus, it should be parents who value family-friendly workplaces more. So I think this study confirms that there is a salary gap, and that a good portion of the reason for it is exactly what Zasz says: women "being expected to give up your career to be the one to raise the kids". The study also suggests that what gap-closing has happened is due to changes in human capital. That is, women being more educated and more experienced in jobs typically held by men. That demonstrates to me that sexism was indeed a major problem in the past, that historical "women are just different" arguments are bunk, and that there's no particular reason to think that December 2011 is the month where we've solved the problems that come from millennia of oppression of women.
- makomk 15y ago
  On the other hand, stuff like the causes of the salary gap, stereotype threat, and being expected to give up contact with your kids to be the one raising money to bring them up affect most adult men for most of their lives. (There's support out there for heterosexual men giving up their careers to raise kids but only so long as this decision is made by the kids' mother based on what benefits her personally.) The wage gap is also curious because these days it results mostly from men and women doing different kinds of work, and campaigners demand totally different solutions for high-status jobs than they do for low-status ones. For stuff like tech industry startups there are lots of campaigns to include more women. On the other hand, if you take street-side trash collection (another job which is also largely male) instead there are campaigns for women to get the same pay for doing "equivalent" jobs like office cleaning. Now, trash collection of this kind is an awful lot more dangerous than cleaning offices and this is both why it's better paid and why there are few women doing it; for various reasons people get more upset about a woman dying in a horrific industrial accident than a man so employers have an incentive to discourage women, and there's not so much social pressure for them to get dangerous jobs. Equality would require making people care more about men dying or less about women, both of which benefit men rather than women, so feminists go for the unequal option of paying women for doing less than men instead. Edit: For example, if you play video games take a close look at the gender of the mooks that you kill en-masse. That's just one of the subtle messages saying that men are disposable in mass media.
  - kstenerud 15y ago
    Actually, men in crappy, dangerous jobs is an evolutionary trait. It's also why they're (traditionally) the ones to go to war and why everyone thinks women and children are to be protected above all else. If 90% of the males in a population die, it takes 1 generation to recover. If 90% of the females in a population die, it takes 5 generations to recover. Meanwhile, they are easy pickings for other competing populations.
    - makomk 15y ago
      Well, that's probably kind of true and it matters a lot if you're doing something like constructing a fictional matriarchal society. It's not exactly relevant in modern times though; we don't (or at least shouldn't) stop women from working because having other options might discourage them from having kids anymore, why should we allow other kinds of horrible gender-based discrimination in the name of population increase?
wazoox 15y ago
> they are murdered by random people far less often than men, representing only 21% of victims. Murder is an incredibly rare occurrence in most countries and social environments. On the other hand, women are a huge majority among rape victims, and this is not exceptional: 5 to 10% of all women are sexually abused at some point (depends upon the country, again). > Perhaps the focus of all these stupid gender articles should be on encouraging young women not to alienate a large subset of people. Perhaps the focus of people like you should be to think about your attitude, just like this article conveniently talked about? Your arrogance and close-mindedness are astounding. Oh, before you ask, I'm a white, straight male too.
- philwelch 15y ago
  > On the other hand, women are a huge majority among rape victims No one is even going to listen to a man complaining he has been raped, so I very highly doubt the validity of those numbers.
  - wazoox 15y ago
    Men are a significant minority of rape victims (5 to 10%). However more than 99% of perpetrators are males.
    - philwelch 15y ago
      And my contention is that rapes against men, and woman-on-man rape in particular, are incredibly underreported and hence your numbers are invalid.
      - wazoox 15y ago
        How do you know? What allows you to believe that?
- jcnnghm 15y ago
  Murder is an incredibly rare occurrence in most countries and social environments. On the other hand, women are a huge majority among rape victims, and this is not exceptional: 5 to 10% of all women are sexually abused at some point (depends upon the country, again). Rape makes up only 6% of violent crimes, and men are much more commonly the victim of violent crimes than women. In fact, excluding rape, as the severity of violent crimes increase, so does the probability that the victim is male. And couldn't I also say that, while rape is relatively rare, men are over twice as likely to be the victim of severe physical domestic violence (the ratio of murder to rape and rape to severe physical domestic violence is the same). Or that perpetration rates for physical violence as a whole are significantly higher for women than men. I personally think that these are all bogus arguments because they trivialize rape. At the same time, trivializing murder is no better than trivializing rape, unless you believe that men are expendable. Perhaps the focus of people like you should be to think about your attitude, just like this article conveniently talked about? Your arrogance and close-mindedness are astounding. Oh, before you ask, I'm a white, straight male too. Nice ad hominem.
rayiner 15y ago
> Wouldn't it be trivial to create a female privilege checklist? Sure. My girlfriend can randomly go up to random people and play with their babies, while my doing so is likely to get me arrested. A mother has the presumption of getting custody in a contentious divorce, etc. Nobody would take a sexual harassment complaint against a woman seriously. But you know what? In pure economic terms, I'd take male privilege over female privilege any day of the week. I can't remember the last time a woman was sexually harassing me but nobody at work would take me seriously. Negotiating salaries, gunning for promotions, making trade-offs between career and family--these are things with huge economic impact that affects everyone and women have a disadvantage in these areas because of perceptions.
- gregholmberg 15y ago
  Back when I had a boyish appearance (20s, early 30s), parents would smile when their kids tried to play with me. After the gray hair showed up, I could see them pull their kids away, no longer smiling. In pure economic terms, what price do we put on "forced to feel like a moral leper"?
  - jopt 15y ago
    And then there's the draft
rmc 15y ago
they are much less likely to have their genitals mutilated as infants by fathers who do not like the way they look. Female genital mutilation happens as well in some countries. And the majority of cases it's much worse than the male equivalent. FGM often results in all or part of the clitoris being removed. That would be like all or part of the glans of a penis being removed. (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_genital_mutilation#Classification_and_health_consequences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_genital_mutilation#Class...) (As an aside, I think male genital mutilation happens more in the USA. Men in Europe of christian ethnicity don't usually get this done. Tis an odd the cultural practices)
- jcnnghm 15y ago
  And the majority of cases it's much worse than the male equivalent. FGM often results in all or part of the clitoris being removed. As a circumcised male, I generally believe that FGM is much worse than the male equivalent, even though it is much more rare in developed countries. At the same time, I wonder if the facts that most circumcised men have no basis for comparison, and that the procedure is so common, colors that bias. The foreskin has over 20,000 nerve endings whereas the clitoris only has about 8,000. Men that have undergone foreskin restorations sometimes report vastly improved sexual sensitivity and much more intense orgasms. As I said, I believe the female variant is much worse, but it does cause me to pause and consider that this may be caused by female privilege. I cannot help but wonder if my belief that there would be outrage if roles were reversed is valid.
  - wpietri 15y ago
    Could you help me better understand the theory that circumcision results from female privilege? Female genital mutilation is pretty explicitly about controlling female sexuality in a way that makes women more obedient male property. Circumcision, though, seems to be a religious thing from a very patriarchal culture. The modern justification for which is hygiene and/or health, and sometimes it's definitely medically necessary. So I'm not seeing how circumcision is evidence of a gender power differential.
    - 15y ago
wpietri 15y ago
Wouldn't it be trivial to create a female privilege checklist? Sure. And if you do that in the spirit of saying, "gosh, these are also nice problems to fix one day", that's great. But mostly people bring that argument up in the sense of "Gosh, your life is not 100% shitty, so I'm going to go back to pretending everything is fair now." This argument is so common that it appears on the "Derailing for Dummies" guide: http://derailingfordummies.com/#butbut http://derailingfordummies.com/#butbut (Note that they include as an example your false equivalence between circumcision and female genital mutilation.) Also, that there are reasons somebody might be a sexist jerk does not excuse them being sexist jerks. Suppose there's a correlation between sex hormone levels, lack of female attention, and rape. Do we say, "Gosh, that's not unexpected" and tell women to be more accommodating? Honestly, your attempt at victim-blaming here is kinda repulsive. There's no particular reason to believe that the sort of sexism described by the article is experienced by the people who failed to be nice enough to (by which you mean: have sex with) the guys who are being jerks. And if they were the same people, then I'm still not seeing any justification: your theory appears to be that guys are somehow entitled to sexual attention just for being guys. Which, hello, is exactly the sort of sexism driven by male privilege the article's author is calling out.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  I must say that that trivialization of male genital mutilation is particularly sickening. The author very clearly has no actual knowledge on the subject.
- jcnnghm 15y ago
  This argument is so common that it appears on the "Derailing for Dummies" guide: http://derailingfordummies.com/#butbut http://derailingfordummies.com/#butbut (Note that they include as an example your false equivalence between circumcision and female genital mutilation.) This is really incredible, "Because the removal of a tiny flap of skin is entirely comparable to the crippling mutilation many young girls are subjected to.." Seriously? Why is the removal of a "tiny flap of skin" from a vulva a crippling mutilation, whereas the removal of the foreskin, which has over 2.5 times the number of nerve endings, no big deal? And also, it's not a false equivalency since I did not bring up FGM since it is irrelevant to a discussion that is not centered around third world issues, whereas male genital mutilation is, seeing as how over 50% of males born in the US are still altered. Or are you actually suggesting that any discussion of male genital mutilation is irrelevant because males are not important, or at least not as important as females? Or perhaps that female genital mutilation is so much more important that it is unthinkable to address male genital mutilation at all so long as it is happening to a female somewhere on earth? And I actually fully believe that the female variant is worse (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3364906 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3364906), but this language is incredibly inflammatory.
philwelch 15y ago
> Wouldn't it be trivial to create a female privilege checklist? Yes: http://www.the-niceguy.com/articles/Checklist.html http://www.the-niceguy.com/articles/Checklist.html http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2008/06/08/female-privilege/ http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2008/06/08/female-privil... http://mensresistance.wordpress.com/female-privilege-checklist/ http://mensresistance.wordpress.com/female-privilege-checkli... (Note: I don't necessarily agree with or endorse everything on every one of these lists, but the point is very much made.)
- wallflower 15y ago
  Wow, read these lists. It appears that I really never think about gender bias.

by jcnnghm 15y ago

zasz 15y ago

Eh, just because females have advantages in some domains doesn't mean that their overall advantages in life are outweighed by the overall male advantages in life. Stuff like the salary gap, stereotype threat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat), and being expected to give up your career to be the one to raise the kids affect most adult women for most of their lives. Murder is a pretty rare event, and men, as the traditionally more risk-taking sex, could be bringing quite a bit of it down on themselves. I'd take the increased chance of murder, personally.

spindritf 15y ago
> the salary gap Men don't earn more money for being men (not any more at least, if it was ever true): > according to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group. http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.html http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00....
- wpietri 15y ago
  Amazing what happens when you read the whole article: you discover that a) this is a market research survey guy, and b) his theory is due to the fact that the women are better educated, and therefore better qualified. Which means that this is definitely not evidence that evidence that women get paid the same as men when all else is equal.
  - knucker3 15y ago
    It's not just this one guy though: http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20... http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=7763 http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_detai... http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E6DD1531F936A3575AC0A9639C8B63 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E6DD1531F... http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903454504576486690371838036.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190345450457648... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVvaQ0xxni8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVvaQ0xxni8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwogDPh-Sow http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwogDPh-Sow
    - wpietri 15y ago
      Thanks. That's helpful. However, that first link, the only one from a neutral source, suggests that sexism and male privilege are indeed still problems. They say that they couldn't account for 24-35% of the wage gap. And the portions they could account for were due to: * more women work part time * more women take time off to care for children and the elderly * women value 'family-friendly' workplaces more The first one isn't really an explanation; it says nothing about why that's the case. The second is at least partly due to societal policing of gender roles: talk to any couple where the guy stays home with the kid and you'll hear both partners complain about how they're treated. The man is unmanly; the woman, unwomanly. It's also self-reinforcing; the wage gap means that guys make more, so there's economic incentive for women to stay home. The third could be similar: ceteris paribus, it should be parents who value family-friendly workplaces more. So I think this study confirms that there is a salary gap, and that a good portion of the reason for it is exactly what Zasz says: women "being expected to give up your career to be the one to raise the kids". The study also suggests that what gap-closing has happened is due to changes in human capital. That is, women being more educated and more experienced in jobs typically held by men. That demonstrates to me that sexism was indeed a major problem in the past, that historical "women are just different" arguments are bunk, and that there's no particular reason to think that December 2011 is the month where we've solved the problems that come from millennia of oppression of women.
makomk 15y ago
On the other hand, stuff like the causes of the salary gap, stereotype threat, and being expected to give up contact with your kids to be the one raising money to bring them up affect most adult men for most of their lives. (There's support out there for heterosexual men giving up their careers to raise kids but only so long as this decision is made by the kids' mother based on what benefits her personally.) The wage gap is also curious because these days it results mostly from men and women doing different kinds of work, and campaigners demand totally different solutions for high-status jobs than they do for low-status ones. For stuff like tech industry startups there are lots of campaigns to include more women. On the other hand, if you take street-side trash collection (another job which is also largely male) instead there are campaigns for women to get the same pay for doing "equivalent" jobs like office cleaning. Now, trash collection of this kind is an awful lot more dangerous than cleaning offices and this is both why it's better paid and why there are few women doing it; for various reasons people get more upset about a woman dying in a horrific industrial accident than a man so employers have an incentive to discourage women, and there's not so much social pressure for them to get dangerous jobs. Equality would require making people care more about men dying or less about women, both of which benefit men rather than women, so feminists go for the unequal option of paying women for doing less than men instead. Edit: For example, if you play video games take a close look at the gender of the mooks that you kill en-masse. That's just one of the subtle messages saying that men are disposable in mass media.
- kstenerud 15y ago
  Actually, men in crappy, dangerous jobs is an evolutionary trait. It's also why they're (traditionally) the ones to go to war and why everyone thinks women and children are to be protected above all else. If 90% of the males in a population die, it takes 1 generation to recover. If 90% of the females in a population die, it takes 5 generations to recover. Meanwhile, they are easy pickings for other competing populations.
  - makomk 15y ago
    Well, that's probably kind of true and it matters a lot if you're doing something like constructing a fictional matriarchal society. It's not exactly relevant in modern times though; we don't (or at least shouldn't) stop women from working because having other options might discourage them from having kids anymore, why should we allow other kinds of horrible gender-based discrimination in the name of population increase?

wazoox 15y ago

> they are murdered by random people far less often than men, representing only 21% of victims. Murder is an incredibly rare occurrence in most countries and social environments. On the other hand, women are a huge majority among rape victims, and this is not exceptional: 5 to 10% of all women are sexually abused at some point (depends upon the country, again). > Perhaps the focus of all these stupid gender articles should be on encouraging young women not to alienate a large subset of people. Perhaps the focus of people like you should be to think about your attitude, just like this article conveniently talked about? Your arrogance and close-mindedness are astounding. Oh, before you ask, I'm a white, straight male too.

philwelch 15y ago
> On the other hand, women are a huge majority among rape victims No one is even going to listen to a man complaining he has been raped, so I very highly doubt the validity of those numbers.
- wazoox 15y ago
  Men are a significant minority of rape victims (5 to 10%). However more than 99% of perpetrators are males.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    And my contention is that rapes against men, and woman-on-man rape in particular, are incredibly underreported and hence your numbers are invalid.
    - wazoox 15y ago
      How do you know? What allows you to believe that?
jcnnghm 15y ago
Murder is an incredibly rare occurrence in most countries and social environments. On the other hand, women are a huge majority among rape victims, and this is not exceptional: 5 to 10% of all women are sexually abused at some point (depends upon the country, again). Rape makes up only 6% of violent crimes, and men are much more commonly the victim of violent crimes than women. In fact, excluding rape, as the severity of violent crimes increase, so does the probability that the victim is male. And couldn't I also say that, while rape is relatively rare, men are over twice as likely to be the victim of severe physical domestic violence (the ratio of murder to rape and rape to severe physical domestic violence is the same). Or that perpetration rates for physical violence as a whole are significantly higher for women than men. I personally think that these are all bogus arguments because they trivialize rape. At the same time, trivializing murder is no better than trivializing rape, unless you believe that men are expendable. Perhaps the focus of people like you should be to think about your attitude, just like this article conveniently talked about? Your arrogance and close-mindedness are astounding. Oh, before you ask, I'm a white, straight male too. Nice ad hominem.

rayiner 15y ago

> Wouldn't it be trivial to create a female privilege checklist? Sure. My girlfriend can randomly go up to random people and play with their babies, while my doing so is likely to get me arrested. A mother has the presumption of getting custody in a contentious divorce, etc. Nobody would take a sexual harassment complaint against a woman seriously. But you know what? In pure economic terms, I'd take male privilege over female privilege any day of the week. I can't remember the last time a woman was sexually harassing me but nobody at work would take me seriously. Negotiating salaries, gunning for promotions, making trade-offs between career and family--these are things with huge economic impact that affects everyone and women have a disadvantage in these areas because of perceptions.

gregholmberg 15y ago
Back when I had a boyish appearance (20s, early 30s), parents would smile when their kids tried to play with me. After the gray hair showed up, I could see them pull their kids away, no longer smiling. In pure economic terms, what price do we put on "forced to feel like a moral leper"?
- jopt 15y ago
  And then there's the draft

rmc 15y ago

they are much less likely to have their genitals mutilated as infants by fathers who do not like the way they look. Female genital mutilation happens as well in some countries. And the majority of cases it's much worse than the male equivalent. FGM often results in all or part of the clitoris being removed. That would be like all or part of the glans of a penis being removed. (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_genital_mutilation#Classification_and_health_consequences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_genital_mutilation#Class...) (As an aside, I think male genital mutilation happens more in the USA. Men in Europe of christian ethnicity don't usually get this done. Tis an odd the cultural practices)

jcnnghm 15y ago
And the majority of cases it's much worse than the male equivalent. FGM often results in all or part of the clitoris being removed. As a circumcised male, I generally believe that FGM is much worse than the male equivalent, even though it is much more rare in developed countries. At the same time, I wonder if the facts that most circumcised men have no basis for comparison, and that the procedure is so common, colors that bias. The foreskin has over 20,000 nerve endings whereas the clitoris only has about 8,000. Men that have undergone foreskin restorations sometimes report vastly improved sexual sensitivity and much more intense orgasms. As I said, I believe the female variant is much worse, but it does cause me to pause and consider that this may be caused by female privilege. I cannot help but wonder if my belief that there would be outrage if roles were reversed is valid.
- wpietri 15y ago
  Could you help me better understand the theory that circumcision results from female privilege? Female genital mutilation is pretty explicitly about controlling female sexuality in a way that makes women more obedient male property. Circumcision, though, seems to be a religious thing from a very patriarchal culture. The modern justification for which is hygiene and/or health, and sometimes it's definitely medically necessary. So I'm not seeing how circumcision is evidence of a gender power differential.
  - 15y ago

wpietri 15y ago

Wouldn't it be trivial to create a female privilege checklist? Sure. And if you do that in the spirit of saying, "gosh, these are also nice problems to fix one day", that's great. But mostly people bring that argument up in the sense of "Gosh, your life is not 100% shitty, so I'm going to go back to pretending everything is fair now." This argument is so common that it appears on the "Derailing for Dummies" guide: http://derailingfordummies.com/#butbut http://derailingfordummies.com/#butbut (Note that they include as an example your false equivalence between circumcision and female genital mutilation.) Also, that there are reasons somebody might be a sexist jerk does not excuse them being sexist jerks. Suppose there's a correlation between sex hormone levels, lack of female attention, and rape. Do we say, "Gosh, that's not unexpected" and tell women to be more accommodating? Honestly, your attempt at victim-blaming here is kinda repulsive. There's no particular reason to believe that the sort of sexism described by the article is experienced by the people who failed to be nice enough to (by which you mean: have sex with) the guys who are being jerks. And if they were the same people, then I'm still not seeing any justification: your theory appears to be that guys are somehow entitled to sexual attention just for being guys. Which, hello, is exactly the sort of sexism driven by male privilege the article's author is calling out.

burgerbrain 15y ago
I must say that that trivialization of male genital mutilation is particularly sickening. The author very clearly has no actual knowledge on the subject.
jcnnghm 15y ago
This argument is so common that it appears on the "Derailing for Dummies" guide: http://derailingfordummies.com/#butbut http://derailingfordummies.com/#butbut (Note that they include as an example your false equivalence between circumcision and female genital mutilation.) This is really incredible, "Because the removal of a tiny flap of skin is entirely comparable to the crippling mutilation many young girls are subjected to.." Seriously? Why is the removal of a "tiny flap of skin" from a vulva a crippling mutilation, whereas the removal of the foreskin, which has over 2.5 times the number of nerve endings, no big deal? And also, it's not a false equivalency since I did not bring up FGM since it is irrelevant to a discussion that is not centered around third world issues, whereas male genital mutilation is, seeing as how over 50% of males born in the US are still altered. Or are you actually suggesting that any discussion of male genital mutilation is irrelevant because males are not important, or at least not as important as females? Or perhaps that female genital mutilation is so much more important that it is unthinkable to address male genital mutilation at all so long as it is happening to a female somewhere on earth? And I actually fully believe that the female variant is worse (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3364906 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3364906), but this language is incredibly inflammatory.

philwelch 15y ago

> Wouldn't it be trivial to create a female privilege checklist? Yes: http://www.the-niceguy.com/articles/Checklist.html http://www.the-niceguy.com/articles/Checklist.html http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2008/06/08/female-privilege/ http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2008/06/08/female-privil... http://mensresistance.wordpress.com/female-privilege-checklist/ http://mensresistance.wordpress.com/female-privilege-checkli... (Note: I don't necessarily agree with or endorse everything on every one of these lists, but the point is very much made.)

wallflower 15y ago
Wow, read these lists. It appears that I really never think about gender bias.