A Crash Course in Feminism Mk. II (or, why everyone should be a feminist)

[eldargal]

What do you mean "penises on all the things as well"? Do you see vaginas on everything? If so, see a Doctor.



Your statement here is divorced from reality, this can be shown by simple observation!

Sex clearly does sell and it isn't about objectified women, if sex didn't sell why would advertisers use it? Why would adverts such as the following have been made if what you say is true?

[.

As with most of your posts inthis topic you've illustrated you completely fail to understand the basic facts. If sex sold penises would be on things because mens bare chests are not sexualised, only their penises which are rarely if ever used to sell products.

A handful of isolated examples does not invalidate the fact that the vast majority of advertising rests on sexualised women and hilariously two of your examples are over 16 years old. As YorkN says we are talking at an industry wide level, the amount of advertising using sexualised men to sell product is virtually non-existent at that level. That you can find a couple of examples does not divorce my statement from reality, it just illustrates you have no clue what you are talking about.

One ad from 1985 proves I'm flat out wrong? No as I said it proves you have no ****ing clue what you are talking about.

Men and women can be sexualised, yes. That is never in doubt. The issue is that women are sexualised more often, more frequently and to a far greater degree than men. You should try ****ing understanding what is being discussed before launching into riduculously and poorly argued 'rebuttals'.

I mean this is so ****ing tedious. We're talking about systemic cultural problems and you're saying 'nuh uh, once in 1985 and again in 1998 it didn't happen! Your argument is invalid!'. If you can't get your **** together and come up with some more thoughtful and intelligent contributions just don't bother.

[Gotthammer]

However, I'd argue the issue is an individual one and not a societal one.

Well you could, but you'd be wrong.

Why is the Levi ad one of the most successful TV adverts ever made? Because you're flat out wrong, that's why!

Four ads in 30 years vs decades of research and studies showing the opposite... sexism is over people!

Also, the University of Buffalo study quoted immediately above your post argues that images of women AND men have become more sexualised in the case of Rolling Stone covers! You really should try and observe the world and not just the dogma you subscribe to.

Yes but it also says:

In the 2000s, 17 percent of men were sexualized (an increase of 55 percent from the 1960s), and 83 percent of women were sexualized (an increase of 89 percent).

Among those images that were sexualized, 2 percent of men and 61 percent of women were hypersexualized.

“In the 2000s,” Hatton says, “there were 10 times more hypersexualized images of women than men, and 11 times more non-sexualized images of men than of women.”

So maybe you should actually read the results and see that, yes, men have been sexualised more, but women are sexualised almost exclusively and to a far greater extent. So the norm is for women to be highly sexualised.

[eldargal]

What was that about arguments being divorced from reality again? Lol.

[Mr Mystery]

Also - the men in the ads linked? Kind of prompting having a tight bod as a way for us blokes to get laid easily because women are all shallow and stuff and start fizzing in their knickers at the merest hint of a six pack....

And the flipside to that? If I could be arsed to eat right, and hit the gym I, and any man, could realistically achieve that sculpted look. Nothing to do with how big your diddler is. All about superifical muscle definition (did you know, that a six pack is a sign of quite abdominal muscles? It's working one out of three layers of muscle. This is why proper Strong Men appear to have beer bellies. They don't. It's muscle).

Women? Airbrushed, push up bras, high heels to define those legs better, bum enhancing knickyknockyknoos, make up, perfect hair, hundreds of pounds wazzed up the wall on quack face creams, because don't you dare for a second look any older than....shall we say 18? We would say 16, but that's probably a bit too Jimmy, so we'll say 18, but really mean 15...sorry, no, 16. And if you're actually 16, sorry, 18? Well you better make yourself look less like the still physically developing lass, because we want to letch at you without feeling a wee bit Rolf yeah?

[eldargal]

Yup that is another issue too, men are almost never photoshopped. The bar for being what the media describes as an attractive male is set much lower. Muscle definition, a tan, nice hair. Now if you're overweight that might not be much comfort but when you're a woman the bar is literally impossible to reach because it all involves digital trickery. The growing sexualisation of men is a problem and it is causing men and boys to get eating disorders for the first time in recent decades but it is still a minuscule problem compared to what women are faced with. Hopefully combatting the sexualisation of women will help nip it in the bud too, in the way feminists fighting for things usually ends up benefiting men as well in the long run.

[Mr Mystery]

A wider range of men are also considered sexually attractive.

Best example? Seriously best one I've got in my hat right now?

Sean Connery, Patrick Stewart. One is 83, the other 74. Both are still very much considered male sex symbols. Virile, capable, desirable. And that's from all parties. To quote Austin Powers International Man of Mystery, which I'm fairly sure was quoting something else 'Men want to be them, women want to be with them'.

No pressure on them to have their face stretched and stapled every few years. Oh no. Mature men are sexy (and they are, let's not lie about it!). But women? Sadly women come with a sell by date, which is pretty much 39 years after they're born, unless they have a really good surgeon for the odd sneaky nip/tuck.

Take Kylie and Dannii Minogue. Both good looking lasses in their day. But now, the surgery is seriously taking it's toll. Kylie is rapidly approaching the 'permanently startled' phase of cosmetic surgery. Dannii's face is currently completely immobile. And why? Because women aren't allowed to age, particularly when they've been lauded primarily for being fairly good looking (seriously, neither of them can really sing all that well, and their acting is atrocious)

Look at the utter drivel pumped into your living room of an evening. This creams 'targets the 10 signs of youthful skin'. It 'clears up IMPERFECTIONS. YOU ARE IMPERFECT. MAKE YOURSELF PERFECT' The wording. Imperfection. Flaws. Those are carefully chosen to cause guilt. Mitchell and Web cracked it with this ad.



It's not a flaw in your skin. It's your skin. That's the way your DNA has it. Some people have nominally good skin (I'm lucky enough to be in that camp for the most part), other have nominally bad skin. But those with the nominally bad skin? Made to feel guilty not only for having it, but for not doing enough about it. It's pathetic. Nobody seems to have clocked that ultimately, we all feel pretty terrible about something in our lives.

[eldargal]

Yup, you have numerous entire industries based around making women feel terrible and none do that to men, then you get idiotic little ****s saying things like 'well women are just too sensitive'. then when you explain about male privilege and institutional and cultural sexism they have a ****ing meltdown at the idea that maybe they have it easier than other people.


Thor approves new Thor so your argument is invalid:



[URL="http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/05/_yesallwomen_in_the_wake_of_elliot_rodger_why_it_s _so_hard_for_men_to_recognize.html"]Why It’s So Hard for Men to See Misogyny[/URL]

The night after the murders, I was at a backyard party in New York, talking with a female friend, when a drunk man stepped right between us. “I was thinking the exact same thing,” he said. As we had been discussing pay discrepancies between male and female journalists, we informed him that this was unlikely. But we politely endured him as he dominated our conversation, insisted on hugging me, and talked too long about his obsession with my friend’s hair. I escaped inside, and my friend followed a few minutes later. The guy had asked for her phone number, and she had declined, informing him that she was married and, by the way, her husband was at the party. “Why did I say that? I wouldn’t have been interested in him even if I weren’t married,” she told me. “Being married was, like, the sixth most pressing reason you weren’t into him,” I said. We agreed that she had said this because aggressive men are more likely to defer to another man’s domain than to accept a woman’s autonomous rejection of him.

A week before the murders, I experienced a similar dynamic when I went for a jog in Palm Springs, California. It was early on a weekend morning, and the streets that had been full of pedestrians the night before were now quiet. When I paused outside a convenience store to stretch, a man sitting at a bus stop across the street from me began yelling obscene comments about my body. When my boyfriend came out of the convenience store, he shut up.

These are forms of male aggression that only women see. But even when men are afforded a front seat to harassment, they don’t always have the correct vantage point for recognizing the subtlety of its operation. Four years before the murders, I was sitting in a bar in Washington, D.C. with a male friend. Another young woman was alone at the bar when an older man scooted next to her. He was aggressive, wasted, and sitting too close, but she smiled curtly at his ramblings and laughed softly at his jokes as she patiently downed her drink. “Why is she humoring him?” my friend asked me. “You would never do that.” I was too embarrassed to say: “Because he looks scary” and “I do it all the time.”

Women who have experienced this can recognize that placating these men is a rational choice, a form of self-defense to protect against setting off an aggressor. But to male bystanders, it often looks like a warm welcome, and that helps to shift blame in the public eye from the harasser and onto his target, who’s failed to respond with the type of masculine bravado that men more easily recognize. Two weeks before the murders, Louis C.K.—who has always recognized pervasive male violence against women in his stand-up—spelled out how this works in an episode of Louie, where he recalls watching a man and a woman walking together on a date. “He goes to kiss her, and she does an amazing thing that women somehow learn how to do—she hugged him very warmly. Men think this is affection, but what this is is a boxing maneuver.” Women “are better at rejecting us than we are,” C.K. said. “They have the skills to reject men in the way that we can then not kill them.”

[Mr Mystery]

It also leads to men accusing women of being flighty.

Well, so would you be if your entire life you'd been told, subtley and not so subtley, that you're not good enough in any realm.

[eldargal]

This is brilliant on several levels:


[URL="http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/07/23/glass_ceiling_study_women_and_people_of_color_are_ penalized_for_valuing.html"]Study finds that women, people of colour are penalised[/URL] for hiring other women and people of colour. White men are not.

By examining both gender and race in the study, this analysis smartly sidesteps the common excuse for why women’s careers stall at the middle of the ladder (because they devote themselves to their children) to show that deep down, the people who run these companies appear to believe that women and people of color should only succeed to a certain level, and rationalize that belief by coding their discrimination in corporate metrics: Most women just lack the temperament for management, and most people of color just lack the skill to perform. The few who manage to escape that assessment do so by slyly reinforcing the company’s ingrained sexism and racism: As they snag their own promotions, they are content to act as the exceptions that prove the rule. Women and people of color who demonstrated a low level of diversity-valuing behavior didn’t see their performance scores take a dip.

Meanwhile, white male managers who promote women and people of color aren’t penalized for valuing diversity. Perhaps that’s because, when a white man recruits a diverse group of people to work beneath him, he’s improving the company’s optics without disrupting the composition of its upper rungs. But when a woman or person of color does it, she’s threatening the system. As the authors put it: “Minority and women leaders' engagement in diversity-valuing behavior may be viewed as selfishly advancing the social standing of their own low-status demographic groups.”

This is why “token” female and minority managers are particularly valuable to their companies—they allow executives to point to their commitment to promoting women and people of color (or rather, a woman and a person of color) without actually fostering widespread diversity in the ranks. Women and people of color who succeed in being seen as warm or competent (by disavowing a commitment to diversity) are then coded by their companies as what the researchers call “social outsiders” from their gender and race. Most of the bosses included in the study were white men (no duh), but female and minority bosses surveyed rated their diversity-minded colleagues similarly—perhaps because reinforcing the status quo is a requirement for cracking the glass ceiling.

This study ultimately reinforces what we already know: that the glass ceiling is not really a barrier that can be broken by the hard work of determined individual women and people of color. It’s a limit imposed from above. And it’s time for the bosses to break their glass floor.

[YorkNecromancer]

The thing is that not the entire industry makes the things you describe, that's a big generalisation. There are tonnes of outliers that try something new and different, and are more rewarding for it.

Your own choice of words demonstrates the problem: you yourself call them outliers.

You openly admit that stories which include characters other than straight, white, male characters are outliers. As a result, mentioning them is pointless, because I'm not talking about one or two films, and I'm not making a generalisation: I'm taklking about the industry which produces all those works, which by nature, is not going to be a single point of information. Quoting specific outliers is completely irrelevant in any discussion of an industry-wide problem. You know who makes films with interesting, complex, difficult female characters? Lars Von Trier. You know how many people watch his films? Not as many as watch the work of Michael Bay. You want to talk about Morgan Freeman. I want to talk about all actors, their agents, the producers and scriptwriters. Do you see the difference in scale? You're trying to reduce a discussion about a culture to a discussion of individuals, which is derailing and unhelpful.

To put it another way, just because Black Widow's been in some Marvel films doesn't mean that superhero films have anything even approaching equality, and it certainly doesn't mean all summer action films have equality.

One or two or even ten outliers that have solid, successful, non-straight white cis male characters aren't part of mainstream discourse, and that is in essence, the problem. While they remain outliers, that means that those non-straight white cis male characters are still marginalised. If you can't see that it's a problem, I suggest that's because it's not a problem for you personally: we don't tend to notice/acknowledge problems that do not affect us personally as much as those that do. That doesn't mean there are no problems.

It means our perceptions are flawed, and thus part of the problem.

You will ALWAYS be able to quote outliers, because there are ALWAYS outliers. Yes, Morgan Freeman can play a role for any character, blah blah Lara Croft blah blah Clarice Starling blah blah...

Just because it is possible to quote a handful of examples that do not fit the pattern does not mean there is no pattern. I put it to you that what it means is that you wish to diminish the importance of the pattern because the pattern is heavily weighed in your favour, and thus you are less inclined to see it, not through malice or any actual deliberate intent, but because we simply don't notice when things naturally go our way: we just assume that's how things are.

But they aren't. They're unfair, and that is A Bad Thing.

So, stop quoting one-off example as a way of diminishing/discounting an overall industry pattern. Outliers, by their nature, are not indicative of an overall pattern.