I agree, there is a double standard there. Who is giving him that power?
I love the ‘We evolved this way!’ line. For someone who accuses others of ignoring biology, you may want to look into some Sociology 101. Maybe Media Studies. Saying ‘Hey that guy is cute’ and leading the news with a story about a hot, white, missing waitress for the sixth night in a week are two different things.
Actual media items about a former PM and possible president? I’m shocked. Now find me some good, juicy quotes and debates about Fred Thompson’s body shape.
Mutations are bred out extremely quickly if they work against reproduction. Which, come to think of it, kinda works against what I was saying originally. Still, homosexuality isn’t directly geared toward finding mates, which is what you said the goal was: women trying to be more attractive to men. True for most, but not true for all, and even if there are evolutionary advantages for that minority, they are indirect and not the advantages that you claimed. Y’all glossed over all that.
Like I said, complicated. I’d be super interested in any cite you have handy for those advantages to mothers of gay children. Seems fascinating.
I think you’re right about this. I think that socially these women are pushed off to the side and ignored because they don’t fit the expectations of most of the people around them. They “disappear”.
But I don’t have any evidence for that. It’s simply my feeling, and feelings aren’t good enough for the Dope. Do you have data? Cecil did a column about wage differentials, and it’s possible that lower wages are mostly the result of women choosing kids instead of cash. If that’s so, what are we to do about it?
If it’s matter of pure biology that men prefer younger women, but women often prefer older men, then again, what are we to do? Legislation to mandate a more balanced silver fox ratio? Cultural conditioning in the schools?
I’m not disagreeing with your underlying principles. Women and men are equals, and I bet most all of us here would agree on that. What’s baffling to me is your priorities. As FinnAgain already noted, men are stimulated visually. Hell, half of Playgirl’s audience is gay men. I just can’t understand, when you’re mentioning the importance of feminism, why you list the problem of silver foxes, as if human biology itself is the enemy, and you neglect to mention that only 15% of the US Congress are women.
I agree that there’s still work to be done. But I don’t understand what point you’re trying to reach with your chosen examples.
I’ve looked over those links and I have to say, they are practically proof that feminism has done it’s job and that women are equal in every conceivable way.
I’m curious about a lot of those links because they don’t seem to have much to do with the topic at hand at all. Like, what was the point of showing me a naked lady pencil holder (with sounds!)? Yes, it is tasteless and I would never have such a thing in my house, but how is that proof of anything? Some people are jerks, that’s always been true and always will be true.
The boys with toy kitchens article is probably the closest, but I honestly can’t get too worked up about it. I would have hated a toy kitchen as a kid and I’m sure I’m not alone. Some boys just don’t want that as a toy, while some would. Although, I’ll tell ya, my sister had this pretty fancy set of fake flatware and I was mildly jealous, the little knives gleamed in a way I wish my toy swords did.
Not at all. Evolution IS the ‘100% powerful giver’ as you say…it IS the reality underlying every aspect of the human animal. Our culture rides on top of all of that. To use a computer analogy (I know Finn hates analogies), think of it (loosely) this way: Software is the culture that rides on top of the hardware. Sure, you can modify that software to do a lot…but in the end you are still forced and constrained by that underlying hardware.
As for homosexuality/asexuality…as with a lot of things there probably IS some kind of evolutionary reason for it (Finn gives one such possible reason). We aren’t the only species that exhibits this trait, which sort of points to a disconnect from our culture there as well.
Expression of sexuality is modified by the culture one is a part of. But EXPRESSING sexuality is part of that underlying hardware. Like I said…if one wears a burka or a bikini depends on the culture one is a part of…but some form of sexual expression is a part of being a human.
We ‘judge’ people based on a whole range of conscious and unconscious factors…including how we feel about them sexually. Again, this is hard wired into us. This doesn’t mean that everything we do is sexually oriented…but a lot more than you think actually IS, even if we don’t consciously recognize it that way.
Well, it isn’t our only metric…but it certainly is a huge factor in shaping who and what we are. I’m only saying that one needs to understand what drives us as human animals if one is to understand how and why we put on sexual displays. And that most ideological feminists don’t seem to get this very basic fact.
The women he can charm. Just like there is no actual double standard, and women who can charm men are powerful in exactly the same way. But as I pointed out, Murphy and her kind perpetuate the image that this is a double standard by haranguing women who use their personal sexuality in ways that Murphy et al. do not approve of. They paint women like that as victims and then whinge about how women like that aren’t seen as powerful.
And you might want to have a clue as to whether or not I have, already. The simple fact of the matter, however, is that not only have I studied both of them, but much more often than not both ‘disciplines’ are pseudoscience at best, and agenda driven politics at worst.
The very fact that you would put biology on the same level as “Media Studies” shows what angle you’re coming at this problem from.
And, when it’s made clear that you’re objecting to a fundamental part of human biology and whining about something that is as intrinsic to being human as being carbon based, you try to change the subject. You do realize that rather than answering why there was anything wrong with men being sexually attracted to women, and women being sexually attracted to men, you changed the subject? Why do you think someone would do such a thing?
Luckily you’re now shifting the goalposts, as I was specifically responding to your complaint that people (men, I assume) have a ‘kneejerk’ reaction and realize if a woman is attractive or not.
You sure do like changing the subject when your legs get cut out from under you.
So… you’re not going to admit you were completely bullshitting when you said that we had “news coverage devoted to good looking women only”. Right? There is no such thing as you alleged, but you will not admit you were making stuff up? Right?
Just so we’re on the same page here.
You mean like story after story after story as to how Huckabee lost weight? But no… only women have to be body-conscious, they’re victims, and those who make an effort to be attractive and get a positive reaction for their physical charms are double victims, right?
Awwww, that’s cute! You’re pretending that you have no idea what connection eating right and staying in shape has to do with a woman’s figure.
And you’re refusing to retract, let alone acknowledge your deliberately false description of my remarks. You’re attempting to again change the topic rather than accepting that I was talking about how the word “objectification” is meaningless and how there is nothing inherently wrong about appreciating a facet of someone’s being.
So I take it that you’ve reached the point in a debate where your position has been shown to be pretty much worthless, and you will refuse to retract your mistakes and will change the subject instead of addressing your mistakes?
Again, just so we’re clear here.
Honey, have I got a push up bra you should try out!
But seriously, folks.
It’s fantastic.
Anyway, I thought of myself as something of a feminist through high school. Through college, a lot of the messages that we get–the whole “victim culture”–really started to rub me the wrong way. The constant bombarding with messages about how we and everyone around us were potential rape or assault victims, all the terrible things that happen everywhere, patriarchy this and that. It just feels like some people are trying to find things to get offended about. I dunno–I guess these days I feel closer to Katie Roiphe or Camille Paglia than to feminists like Naomi Wolf bemoaning brazilian waxes and cosmetics and so forth. Is feminism dead? Some days I kind of wish it were…it’s getting a bit tiresome.
And I know, if I were alive a hundred years ago, I’d be so grateful for the right to protest against brazilian bikini waxes. Feminism these days just feels so aggressive and off putting.
Where to begin? I mean, aside from providing a complete history of feminism and defending its current place in the world. Upon reading the article in the OP, I sort of understand where the writer was coming from (even if I do not agree).
There is something to struggling for something, whether oting rights or money, then seeing your children take it for granted.
I don’t have the energy for point-by-point, and I wasn’t aware that I’d been whining or ‘changing the subject’ in posts that addressed several topics. The only ‘mistake’ I see is my sweeping declaration that the news doesn’t ever devote coverage to ugly women. I wasn’t even aware that I’d been coming from one particular position aside from ‘women are atill second class citizens in much of the world, legally and/or socially.’
I’ll concede defeat. Male politicians are taken to task for their looks as much as female politicians (even those who are unquestionably ugly, like Thatcher and Clinton), humans are both biologically primed for sexual attraction and this is perfectly balanced and played out in everyday life, as it should be, and eating right will change the shape of my tits (god forbid). Also, feminism is dead. I am a zombie.
Zoggie just because you’re a feminist doesn’t mean you have to be an activist. In can be depressing. But you don’t need to follow a particular theorist’s writings to be troubled by sex trafficking or domestic violence and see how it’s supported by certain laws and social attitudes. If anything, the femnists I know are the most outspoken about sexuality and getting off because they’re not grossed out by their own bodies or afraid to ask for what they like.
Not true. Certain mutations like Down’s Syndrome cannot be bred out of the population, ever.
I said that our genetic code was dedicated to perpetuating itself, and it is. To the extent that it goes against selection pressures, homosexuality is a mutation. To the extent that it goes along with selection pressures, it’s an adaptation that increases fertility of relatives (who have a very high degree of genetic similarity to any gay relative).
A bit on genetics on homosexuality. From the genes’ point of view, the only thing that matters is making more genes. Humans are, to a very real extent, generally hardwired to perpetuate the genes of the species. The point is not that there aren’t exceptions (there are) but that to treat normal, healthy human sexual function, like men looking at a newscaster and saying “she’s cute”, as if it’s something to be remedied by ideology is absurd. It’s moralizing at the chimps.
Because to many feminist schools of thought, human biology is the enemy.
Being physically desired and having sex are some of the quickest ways to light up the pleasure centers of the brain? Women are victims and being objectified. Men are visually stimulated and will respond favorably to an attractive woman? Down with the patriarchy! Women enjoy having male companionship and so they do things like get breast implants? They’ve been brainwashed! Women often select partners who are good for helping raise children while men often select partners who are good at bearing children? The sexes aren’t totally equal in alike in all things, it’s due to wicked men and traitorous women!
No, it certainly isn’t. But there are certain bits of our evolutionary hardware that do make us who we are in general. Evolution, for instance, has given us sexual dimorphism and a fierce reproductive drive. How cultures and individuals express that is another matter entirely. Just like biology has given us a need in ingest and burn calories, but national dishes vary region to region. (Yep xt analogies are always suspect, and should be taken with a grain of salt, but this is a pretty good analogy as far as analogies go.) No matter what we do, if we want to survive as individuals, we will always need to eat food. No matter what we do, if we want the species to continue, we will need a way to find and attract mates.
The objection Murphy seemed to have was with women enjoying being desired and sexually attractive. Enjoyment which is coded into our very nervous systems. Opposition to which is a bit absurd, from where I sit.
Women who wax in order to have better oral sex are traitors to feminism. Women who actually enjoy being clean shaven are liars and traitors to feminism. I think.
Riiiiiight. You mischaracterize something I say, I point out what I actually said, and you talk about how to make your tits better. You claim that the news “only” focuses on attractive women. I point out how the news also focuses on women who aren’t attractive, but that women who are powerful are a natural focus for the news. You then ask about whether or not they talk about Thompson’s physique. How, oh how could you have realized you were changing the subject and avoiding the issue?
“Perfect balance” is found only in ideological dogma. Men and women have evolved a certain way, and complaining that, for instance, men generally primarily want sex with an attractive partner while women generally want a stable partner is laughable. You can complain all you want that reality isn’t fair, but reality always trumps ideology.
I’ll note here, again, that you refuse to go back to your original statement and retract your false claims about my position. You are continuing to try to change the subject.
Nor have you shown any reason, at all, why it is fine to admire an intelligent person’s intellect, an athlete’s ability to ride a bike, but not a woman (or a man’s) physique.
Your only objection, that women don’t have to ‘cultivate’ a good figure is patently absurd. Even if it was true, which it isn’t, it still wouldn’t have a damn thing to do with admiring traits in a person not being “objectification”. Thinking “wow, he’s got beautiful eyes” or “neat, she’s got a lovely accent” is only wrong when it violates someone’s dogmatic ideological purity.
I am not trying to prevent people from saying or thinking ‘Hey, she’s cute’ – I am more concerned with ‘Sorry, you’re not cute enough for the job’ or ‘Who cares what he looks like? He’s smart and well-spoken.’
Again, the problem isn’t so much with admiring or complimenting someone on their physique-- it’s prioritizing looks (whether through genetics, dieting, cosmetic surgery) over skills, accomplishments, etc. in women.
The sad part is that there is an interesting discussion to be had about the actual article – about whether Sex and the City and Spice Girl-brand feminism have benefits, how sex work can sometimes be empowering, how far internalized beauty standards extend into lesbian relationships – but I’m going to assume they won’t be occurring here.
Sex and feminism can be seen as an odd pair, if only because the minority of feminists who consider men ‘the enemy’ (let’s ignore the men who see women as the enemy) see sex as ‘fraternizing with the enemy.’ At the same time, you’re right, biology can be the enemy when women are told to go out and get laid then find they’re not cumming every time. At the same time, you seem to exist in a world where sex is sex – it has never been used against women and there are no social implications for women who deviate (e.g. by ‘acting like a man’ and having an ‘abnormally’ high sex drive).
There are tons of debates about these subjects (waxing, make-up, high heels), online, in magazines, in academic journals, especially between people from different offshoots or ‘waves’ of feminism. If you think you’ve got a solid position, I’m sure they’d all like to hear about it.
Quite true. OTOH, I wonder if feminism itself has an entirely new meaning and Murphy has just missed the boat. In other words, maybe it’s not feminism that’s dying, it’s just Murphy’s view in particular.
But it sometimes irritates me, too, to see women ignore the contributions of feminism to their lives. On the gripping hand, maybe it’s a positive thing. I know that sounds odd, but bear with me through this dark and stormy analogy.
When a black person steps onto a bus and takes a seat at the front, does s/he stop and thank Rosa Parks? Every time? I can’t say for sure, but I doubt it. Should s/he do that? Well, sure, it’s important to remember how things used to be and appreciate how far our culture has come. But paying attention to it every day in every case just adds a burden to our (society as a whole) minds–isn’t it a truer sign of progress that a black person can take a seat at the front of a bus without having to think about how novel his/her freedom is? Doesn’t that show, better than anything else, how far we’ve come?
Back to feminism: when a woman makes choices without regard to the countless women who have suffered to give them those choices, it’s a bit of a tragedy on an individual level, but on a societal level it looks to me like a sign that feminism is working, and that we’ve made a hell of a lot of progress. YMMV.
I see where I was misreading you then. Thank you for the infos.
You’ve made a bit curious, though, about your apparent disdain for sociology. Maybe it’s off topic, but you just dissed an entire discipline without batting an eye. I don’t really see how you could resist entertaining more direct explanations for, say, Augusta National’s decision not to have any women as members. I know nothing about sociology, but that seems more of a thing that they’d be able to answer. Maybe not the specific mindset of those particular owners, but tendencies among people. Maybe they could chart it with a nice normal distribution. I dunno. But you fire a salvo before even entertaining the evidence (which, granted, was never offered, just referred to), and that seems a bit unDope to me. So what gives? Psychologists are better equipped to answer or what?
But that has nothing to do with what you actually said, which was to bemoan “knee jerk comments about the physical attractiveness of any and every woman in the media”.
You keep shifting the goalposts.
Blanket prohibitions based on ideology almost always fail. If you’re looking for someone to bed down with for the night, what’s wrong with only looking at physical attractiveness? There are certainly circumstances where it is perfectly fair and right to use standards of physical attractiveness to judge men and women alike.
Nope. Actually, as I pointed out several times, one of the factions who ensure most certainly that there will be negative social implications for women who are confident and aggressive in their sexuality are women like Murphy who brand them traitors to feminism.
Nor did Murphy’s argument have a damn thing to do with whether or not Joe Sickpack would look down on a woman who got more tail than he did. She simply said that women, for instance, who posted raunch photos were traitors to feminism.
Invite them to this thread?
Oh, definite disdain for most college level sociology (sociology 101, as was suggested). I have great respect for cultural anthropology, for example; it is often objective, thoroughly researched and scientific. Often, sociology is agenda driven and picks facts to support a particular conclusion rather than vice versa. Looking at the prevalence of Marxist Sociology on college campuses, for example, is enough to turn me off to many so called sociological “findings” unless they adhere to a rigorous methodology. And they often do not.
I went through the whole slew of “multicultural” and “women’s studies” requirements when I was at college. I also got a masters that focused heavily on proper research methodology and how to interpret data. And much (if not most) sociology simply adheres to the dogmas present in parts of the Academy.
For example here is a sample collegiate overview. Note, for instance, under Marxist Sociology: “Gender role inequalities reflect exploitation of dominant (male) segments of society over secondary (female) segments of society.”
That’s it. If you’re a Marxist Sociologist, and you find that men and women have different gender roles, why, by gum, it’s The Patriarchy dominating women. If women who choose to have children and have to take time off for that are not as successful in the business world as men who work 70 hours a week, then obviously, they’re being exploited by the dominant class.
No, not all sociology is bad. But much of it is simple pseudoscience. Especially when we’re talking about sociology courses taught at liberal arts universities.
Well, yes… they could ‘answer’ it, but depending on who you speak to you’d get a totally different answer, and they’d use the same exact data to prove any varying conclusion (which, for me at least, dispels the idea that sociology is based on reaching an objective answer). Sociology, as I see it, has much more in common with Literary Criticism than Cultural Anthropology.
Psychologists, yes… maybe in the case of Augusta, investigative journalists. To be quite frank. Maybe the men who run it simply enjoy having a place where it’s a “guys only” club, and it has nothing to do with a Marxist interpretation. Maybe a few of them are sexist bigots who tink women are beneath them, but they have no intention of dominating them, they just want them to leave them alone. Maybe some are just traditionalists who believe that since that’s the way it was done, that’s the way it should stay, even though they believe that women are totally equal to men.
The problem, there is with treating individual actors in a story as vague representatives of genders and power structures. I can’t count the number of time, during my college days for example, that I’d have a teacher talking about how evil white males of European descent were, and how they were keeping women down. Never mind that I was sitting in the class and wasn’t doing a damn thing that " The Patriarchy" was accused of.
The problem, in this thread, wasn’t with an analysis of the facts, it was with the suggestion that since I rely on biology to look at what we can reasonably expect to change in humans and what we can’t, that I should take Sociology 101 and find out what’s “really” going on. As if being preached at by a Marxist Sociologist, a Feminist Sociologist, a Structuralist or a Post-Structuralist Sociologist and a Postmodern Sociologist, all with varying dogmas that they insist are the only right way to view social interactions, would serve any purpose.
It really is often like Lit Crit Bullshit, the same ‘text’ is used, and various modes of dogmatic interpretation change it depending on who the person looking is. It’s an interesting exercise, but attempting to say that Sociology 101 holds all the answers on this topic is a bit like saying that Literary Theory 101 is the single, solitary definitive course of study on Joyce.
The problem with feminists is that they’re still sitting around in their womynz studies classes whining and waiting for someone to give them power.
You don’t like it that there are more females in low-paid social work than engineering? Guess what? You are not solving the problem by majoring in womynz studies.
Some of us were too busy studying engineering so we could make the big bucks rather than preparing for a life in lower status jobs.
Did you miss the eight years of the Clinton Presidency, where the media had some kind of unhealthy focus on his nose? Size, shape, color, and potential for explosion at any point? I think you have selection bias.
And some girls would like swords and cap guns and Tonka trucks, which is what I played with my entire childhood.
The fact is, this works both ways. An attractive man is going to get a high-paying job in corporate sales before an ugly one will, because it’s human nature to like being around attractive people.
Now if you want to talk engineers, well, I work with 36 of them. Three of the other 36 are female, and we are all relatively plain looking and range from extremely girly to fairly butch. In sales, we have five employees in our office. Four of them are female. All of them fit the standard definition of ‘attractive’, including the guy. Because looks matter in sales.
Minor quibble, but wouldn’t it be accurate to say that seducing someone is, to some extent, an act of power? Not one, at all, that is made powerful by “The Patriarchy”, but an act of getting what you want from another person by force of will?
Perhaps I’m misreading your objection, but would it be accurate to say that you’re objecting more to how it reads as if it’s a complaint that some external force is “giving” a man power rather than his actions and the responses he gets being part of a certain dynamic that means he can deliberately effect the course of his life?
This, however, simply deserves to be quoted because it is absolutely spot on. Getting a degree in Victim’s Studies and then complaining that you don’t have a shot at earning real cash or influencing society is absurd.
All the women I know who are professionals in their chosen careers, scoff at the idea that they need to be “empowered”. They believe that working hard and doing their job well is their own source of power.
Complaining that there aren’t more female CEO’s when many of the people doing that complaining aren’t on an MBA track but instead in “Womenz’ Studies” programs is one of the most risible trends to come out of academia.
What I’m saying is that men didn’t sit around singing kumbaya and waiting for someone to give them power. They reached out and took what they wanted. They did not ask for empowerment from someonme else, the empowered themselves.
I have lived my life by the principle that I have exactly as much power as I choose to, and this is by and large true. Why do I get awards at work and get raises and promotions? It’s not because I look pretty, and it’s not because I sit around waiting for someone to notice what a good job I do. It’s because I tell the boss ‘I want this. I deserve this for xyz reasons, and if you give this to me I will make you look good to your boss.’
Don’t wait for power to be handed to you. Take it.
And here I see that you already understand what I meant when I said ‘Nobody’ gave men the power.
This may be an aside to the discussion, and he’s hardly an investigative journalist, but at the time of the Augusta flap, Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated did a terrific column on another gender-restricted golf club–this one for women only. You can read the column at this link.
Still, homosexuality isn’t directly geared toward finding mates, which is what you said the goal was: women trying to be more attractive to men. True for most, but not true for all, and even if there are evolutionary advantages for that minority, they are indirect and not the advantages that you claimed. Y’all glossed over all that.
