I think ENORMOUS progress has been made. I once saw an old ad for Southwest Airlines from the 1960s. It showed various applicants for “stewardess” and explained how they just weren’t quite good enough for Southwest, based on incredibly superficial details about their appearance or personality. It was outrageously demeaning to women. It would never have a chance of airing today.
I couldn’t find the ad, but I found this Braniff one that kinda shows what it was like back then:
Is anybody here disagreeing that they’re wrong? I’m not sure why you keep insisting on this point that, AFAICT, nobody is objecting to.
These two statements are in contradiction. To the extent that it matters whether you successfully communicate your belief in feminism, you’ve failed to communicate that. It’s very much of a piece with “I’m the least racist person you’ll ever meet, but…”
If you want people to believe that you’re feminist, you’ll find that active and frequent support of feminist positions communicates that idea far more effectively than prefacing constant criticisms of feminism with explicit claims that you’re feminist.
Of course, if you genuinely don’t care what I (or others) think about you, you may want to stop with those pointless declarations about yourself anyway.
Some people seem to be trying to minimize them or make petty excuses for them. If everyone agrees they are wrong, I’m glad for that.
No, what I meant is that I don’t care what you think because I speak for myself. You don’t get to tell me what I think. I know how I feel, and you must take it at face value. To say otherwise is to say I’m a liar.
As I explained, I am not here to prove anything to you. I say I’m a feminist. I don’t care if you believe it or not. I don’t have to do anything more than tell you. I’ve said nothing to indicate that I’m not. To criticize feminism - constructively - is not contradictory to believing in it. It’s SUPPORT for feminism. I believe in it strongly, strongly enough to call out those within the movement who aren’t living up to it by engaging in sexism.
I don’t care what you think about my declarations either. I’ll say whatever I want to say. I am not here to prove anything to you about myself or seek your approval. I am here to express opinions about issues. Please get back on topic. Thanks.
There are still negative examples like that, but in terms of the number of female doctors, dentists, lawyers, and executives I see in commercials, yes, there’s been considerable progress. Even when women are shown in a home setting they’re almost universally competent and capable. As I said before, I think that reflects their power in the marketplace; advertisers want to show women as the ones who are smart enough to buy the product they’re selling. Whether that means women are catered to or exploited would be an interesting debate to have.
It may just be that men and women have different hot buttons when it comes to how they’re portrayed. Women have complained, and rightly so, of being judged only on their looks, so when a commercial shows a woman who’s there only because of her looks it’s troublesome. Men are judged by what we can do, so when a commercial shows a man who can’t do the simplest of things, that bothers me. There are commercials that objectify men (see any Old Spice[sup]*[/sup] ad from the last few years), but those don’t particularly bother me. I don’t identify with the shirtless hunk on horseback in the commercial, it doesn’t connect to any image I have of myself.
Oddly, if there’s one product that I would expect to tailor their ads toward men, it would be Old Spice.
Good example of the role of self-parody and humor in ads. So many ads today are parodies of previous ads, self-deprecating jokes about the ad industry, that it’s hard to tell what’s serious and what’s a joke sometimes.
First and third, certainly. Of course, I wouldn’t maintain the relationship in the first case, but the problem there isn’t that her feelings are invalid.
Similarly, I would not continue associating with someone who was offended by my holding my partner’s hand, whether it was because of our genders or something else. If severing the association were not an option, I would probably continue holding hands with my partner, but it would be as a result of deciding I didn’t mind offending the person; again, not the same as calling their offendedness invalid.
I think we disagree on how complicated the issue actually is.
An example would be Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s remark about women on the Supreme Court. There have been over 1,700 person-years of male justices, and less than 80 person-years of female justices. If we commit to having exactly five women and four men forevermore, it will still be a majority male institution. Sure, in four or five centuries the difference will be negligible, but that’s a long time.
This is just shooting the messenger behavior. You don’t like that mansplaining is happening, so you attack those who point out that it’s happening.
Your exaggerations and weak-ass ad hominems aren’t helping your case.
Some people think, rightly in my estimation, that one of these is more common than the others, and deserves special consideration.
I guess you could if you really like making dumb arguments. But you know, if you really do think the term feminism is itself sexist, you should probably refrain from self-describing as a feminist.
Unfortunately for you, this contradiction is central to the point.
There are a lot of people who claim to support a trend toward equality, and believe that this claim is sufficient to excuse their spending all of their time attacking people who are actually working toward equality in that way.
The OP’s question is, does a feminist’s broad-brush attack on men hurt the cause of feminism? Well, maybe, in a very small way it does. But the harm that these broad-brush attacks cause to feminism is vanishingly small compared to the harm caused by those who tear down activists under the guise of trying to help.
There are some passages from Letter from a Birmingham Jail that speak to this issue:
Emphasis added.
So, sure, feminists occasionally acting like assholes to men? Yep, assholes come in every flavor, apologies for the mixed metaphor. But self-professed advocates of a cause of engage in the sort of behavior MLK decries above, behavior so similar to that you engage in in the OP and elsewhere? A lot more damaging.
Nothing there is sexist per se except for its catchiness lends itself to overuse and abuse. Now here’s a blunt instrument that lets a women effectively shut down a man’s side of a conversation to the approving nods of her compatriots, regardless of whether he was being condescending or in earnest. (And if you think people are that discerning in deciding whether to exploit an argumentative advantage, think again).
I just find it funny that the same folks who invented and complain about ‘tone policing’ are the same bunch who don’t bat an eye at shutting down a conversation with ‘mansplaining’. Apparently there’s no problem in women policing a man’s tone, and there appears to be a bit of sexism there.
Would you apply that same standard to the thread on “American Exceptionalism” that’s been going on in Great Debates? As you might guess, a lot of posts have been somewhat critical, pointing out areas in which the U.S. compares unfavorably to other countries. In post #99 Stringbean said
Several posters took issue with that, saying that to be critical of something does not mean that you hate it. I don’t think anyone suggested that you need some number or percentage of pro-America posts before you’re allowed to say that it is not all that it could be.
Yes, that’s the crux of my objection to the current usage. It’s used incorrectly in situations where it doesn’t apply to shutdown dialog.
Ok, sure. I’m not sure there exist people who both invented ‘tone policing’ and shut down conversations with ‘mansplaining’, nor do I see the humor in these hypothetical people, but thanks for finally sharing what you were going on about.
:dubious: Comparing a poster’s entire posting history concerning a particular topic on the whole SDMB with posts in one individual thread isn’t really “applying the same standard”.
If there’s a poster who always in their whole posting career over several years spoke of the US only to blame and criticize it, it would be reasonable to infer that that person didn’t actually support the US.
Even then, though, not to support something is not necessarily equivalent to hating it. So your analogy is pretty much full of holes all over.
I haven’t read that thread. I also see nothing shameful about folks not supporting the predominant culture or government of the society in which they live, if they have sufficient reason for withholding such support; I doubt you have a problem with that, either. So no, I don’t feel qualified to answer your question in any way, nor am I interested in reading that thread.
If, however, hypothetically speaking, someone is constantly saying what a great patriot they are and how much they love United States government policy, and all they do is pick nits with that policy, I’d suggest that the beam in their own eye requires attention.
Yeah, from what I’ve read of online commentary, it all starts to sound a lot like, “Those people [insert whoever ‘those people’ are in this context] had better be quiet and be nicer to me so I can go back to ignoring them, or I’ll stop throwing them the occasional crumb. It’s not like anything they say is relevant anyway; [sexism/racism/homophobia/whatever] doesn’t exist anymore, and even if it did, it has nothing to do with me, so I don’t want to hear it.”
There’s a lot that’s REALLY easy to dismiss, even these days.
I hope I’m misunderstanding you. Are you claiming there needs to be some sort of equality over time? That’s pure bullshit. Guilt/wrongs are not temporal properties. If your grandfather wronged my grandfather, the answer is never that I get to wrong you now. The proper answer is for the wronging to cease. In the case of unequal representation of the past, the answer is for equality to be applied now and in the future.
Sure it is. That’s what returning stolen Nazi art is all about. If your grandfather took my grandfather’s artwork without compensation, and it’s still in your family, the answer is that I get to take the same artwork from you without compensation.
It’s a perfectly reasonable approach to righting past wrongs, and should be applied more broadly.
That said, obviously that’s not what **Hershele ** is suggesting. Obvious to me, at any rate.
This again. Calling that phenomenon out for what it is is not the same thing as “shutting down a conversation” unless you think a conversation is where a man gets to tell everybody what’s what.
“Let me tell you what this book is all about.”
“I wrote it. You do not have authority over the subject, and I do.”
That’s not shutting down the conversation. That’s correcting the parameters of the conversation.