Sexism

The BBQ Pit
1

I’ll keep this short… for *my *standards. I could go on, and you all know it. (Edit: Well so much for that)

Recent events in the news/ relevant links:

http://news.yahoo.com/plus-sized-parking-spaces-chinese-women-drivers-032323682.html

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/23/world/asia/japan-sexism-heckling/index.html

I can’t be arsed to find more. You’ve all seen it. The attitude crosses borders, cultures, languages, and all across the globe. It all boils down to this:

Women can’t drive, women are for making babies, women shouldn’t be trusted with positions of authority, women are inferior to men for long list of supposedly legitimate reasons, essentially boiling down to “Do you even lift?”, and infamously, women can’t be trusted because they have periods.

I don’t know how it got into so many minds, but somewhere along the line, having a set of ovaries meant that essentially, you weren’t a fully developed human being. Not like the greatness that is men, apparently. These sexist opinions formed out of ignorance, I have to imagine, because we could just go down the list and tick them off one by one and identify which gender be causin’ the most problems.

  1. Let’s see… which gender can’t drive?

A quick google shows conflicting reports. There are reports and studies suggesting women can’t drive, and plenty of reports suggesting that men are worse. Specifically, men would end up causing more lethal accidents due to driving more recklessly or under the influence, whereas women would cause more minor accidents. So let’s let money decide. Young men tend to get penalized more on their auto insurance, and pay higher premiums, because we’re reckless as fuck.

Why are auto insurance rates higher for males? | AutoInsurance.org

There. Cited.

I’m pretty sure the insurance companies know more about traffic accidents than most of us do, because it’s how they stay profitable. If men were less of a risk than women, they’d charge less in premiums to attract more customers to their brand.
2) Women can’t be trusted to lead, can’t be entrusted with the fate of nations

But I thought that’s what women were better at? Taking care of those under their care? After all:

  1. Women are for making and raising children. Men obviously playing no role in this. It’s just the domain of women.

Which, *if *we assume that’s true, means they can’t do anything else because… reasons.

:confused:

So we trust women to look after a house, our kids, and the entire sum of a household’s collections of valuables; Trust women to provide wisdom, guidance, and leadership to our children. Essentially, we entrust them with the fate of our species, because our species relies on each successive generation to survive.

But when it comes to running nations, businesses, religions, they suddenly lose all of those qualities and become empty-headed dunces. They can’t be trusted to run a nation! They’ll get PMS and fire off some nukes and start world war III, it will be the end of humanity as we know it!

We certainly couldn’t trust some woman to think about the survivability of our people. Leave that up to the much more competent and level-headed men!

How’s that going, by the way? I trust that we’re deeply entrenched within a great Pax Testosterona, A historical period of peace and tranquility lasting tens of thousands and thousands of years since men overthrew their female overlords and started running things.

Certainly *men *would never do something as *silly *as declaring pointless wars and sending wave after wave of our children to suffer and die needlessly, to demonstrate the enormous size of their dicks. That, I think we can all agree, would be preposterous.

List of wars by death toll - Wikipedia

We can’t trust women in positions of political power. That’s why we’ve had kings and generalissimos and supreme leaders and fuhrers and chambers of Congress and nothing *ever *went terribly wrong then.

How about in positions of religious authority? We couldn’t have women as priests or bishops or cardinals or popes or imams, because we have to think of the children. Why doesn’t anyone ever think of the children? WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?!?!?

I can think of one group of people who think of the children. In fact, one might suggest, they spend an inordinate amount of time thinking of the children…

You need to have old men who aren’t allowed to have sex with women hanging around young prepubescent boys all the time. Nothing bad ever happened from those circumstances.

Speaking of which, how about those female sexual predators we’re always hearing about? Hmmm? Yes, gotta watch out for those women, for there certainly isn’t a much larger percentage of sexual predators among the males. Perish the idea.

Perpetrators of violent crime?

Serial killers?

Mass murderers?

Women all, I’m sure. At the very least, *most *of them had to be.

How about your non-violent white collar crime? Surely all those rich folks who embezzled billions or defrauded investors or rigged entire economies were members of the fairer sex? Most of them had to be.

Otherwise, I’m baffled by the reputation women have among persons who think gender defines someone’s trustworthiness in the business world.

Yes, yes, I’m seeing now all the reasons why we denigrate women so. It’s an entirely justified bias, for women have been holding us back as a species. It’s a wonder why we’ve tolerated their hormones and emotional outbursts and needless vagina-bleeding-induced massacres for this long.

I see now why the idea of women in positions of authority, or driving, or doing anything besides pumping out baby units is absurd. They’re clearly doing everything else wrong, and men have certainly proven themselves to be trustworthy, competent, rational, and reliable, in matters of state, religion, and business. History has shown time and time again that women are predatory and like to abuse minors, beat their spouses senseless, rape men, and cause genocides.

It’s such a perfectly justified position, I have to retract my earlier analysis. Rather than wonder why sexism is so widespread, one has to wonder why everyone doesn’t prefer that men keep running the show.

Yeah, I’m pitting sexism. It’s such a brave stand, bravo to me.

But if it’s so fucking obvious that it’s dumb, why is it so prevalent, you male assholes?

2

You don’t seem to be pitting sexism but misogyny, with sexist examples that denigrate men - aka. male assholes. Not that I care. Men in general are stupid filthy pigs. So are women – and they can’t drive worth shit, but they take fewer chances and drive slower so have less bad accidents. Which won’t help them parking. They also have women-only spaces in Germany. They’re also larger. But the main purpose is not prevention of scraped cars, but that they are closer to the exits so the women have less distance to cover in dark and scary empty parking lots.

Tags: #YesAllMen #YesAllChicks #GermanNaziSwine

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tl;dr version

4

From the parking article:

Women belong in the kitchen. Except restaurant kitchens, which are dominated by men. Women aren’t even good at their stereotypes.

5

Friend, I live in Beijing, China. Care to guess how many folks here I’ve seen who can drive? And gender has naught to do with it.

6

Sexism is prevalent because of the observation that women cannot do for themselves, but need to have the opportunity for equality be protected artificially. For example, they couldn’t possibly become equal members of society without laws protecting that equality. They couldn’t possibly compete with men without laws protecting their opportunity to compete.

The catch-22 of those sorts of laws is that they create a weaker class by definition.

Males may be significantly stupider than females and less capable in many areas, but a quick look around the rest of our mammalian brethren :wink: suggests that for the majority of species, nature has wired males to get their way.

Sexism is prevalent because males are the dominant sex for the human species, and despite their incompetence, the naturally superior gender for getting their way. This in turn drives a perception of overall superiority.

7

So. Sexism is bad. Noted. I breathlessly await your instructions on how I should feel about Nazis, pollution, and high cholesterol.

8

Men get out & about more, so have more chances for achievement or failure.

And since this is the pit: So Askthepizzaguy, you’re taking a Women’s Studies course? :wink:

9

Sexist stereotypes persist for the same reason all stereotypes persist:

  1. There’s a tiny grain of truth in many of them. Women can be petty and catty, for instance. Every office has their clowder of catty bitches. But their proportion of the population is the same as the jerkface contingent of any other groups. It’s just that their personalities are so strong, their cackles so loud, that they create the perception that they are Every Woman.

The other day one such a woman remarked that I’m not a real woman because I only own six pairs of shoes (versus her 300 pairs). She’s got it in her mind that she is the normal one, and guess what? Dumb-ass guys who don’t know any better might decide she IS representative of womankind. Advertising would have you believe the same thing. All it takes is for someone to know one woman who fits the stereotype for them to think it’s an accurate depiction of reality.

  1. People are lazy and don’t like having to stretch their imaginations outside of stereotypes. It’s impossible to believe that women could be good programmers, for instance, if you have never seen a woman do anything but worry about cooking, cleaning, and buying shoes. Your eyeballs may have seen women do more than these things, but if you don’t recognize something for what it is, it’s just like you didn’t see it. Unfortunately, women are invisible to lots of folks unless they are stereotypical. For instance, almost every day for the past several months a coworker of mine (a woman) has bopped into my office to discuss a project we’re working on together. People(guys) will see the two of us talking and say stuff like, “Do we need to keep you girls separated?” Or they’ll see her standing in my office and use this as an invitation to flirt with us in the doorway. Like the two of us are trading blueberry muffin recipes or talking about our nails at a slumber party. But if we were two guys, I doubt people would treat us this way. They would assume we were busy talking shop and leave us alone.
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If these are the least progressive things that happen in China and Japan this year, I think they’ll be OK.

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(1) The whole “woman driver” thing is about as dead a trope as can be. I haven’t seen it seriously used since the '60s.

(2) I have recently seen a lot of references to “testosterone poisoning” as an explanation for some male behaviors. Who is accusing whom of hormonal instability?

12

I was about to post a refutation of this, but then I remembered that I’m just a stupid male (and one who doesn’t always get his way; thus a loser as well as stupid). And anyway, this peach I bought looks like a girl’s butt so I have to go masturbate to it and then stomp it instead.

13

Dude, not only is trading in misogyny for misandry intellectually shallow, but I can assure you that you can wear that “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt of yours every day for a month, and its not going to make girls like you more. They’ll probably think you’re creepy.

14

Goddamn, dude. FUCKING PROOF AND EDIT YOUR POSTS. You might have a great point but your argument gets lost in the morass. If it was an occasional thing, no big deal - but short and concise posts are the exception to the rule.

I tend to ramble and accidentally repeat things. So I skim and edit after I’m done typing. I’m not expecting the minimalism of Hemmingway or hours editing your posts; it’s a casual message board. But posts that ramble forever and make me scroll. And scroll. And scroll. And scroll. And scroll on my phone aren’t part of a conversation - they’re a monologue.

15

Are you having fun in your time travelling holiday to 1953?

16

I know! Women drivers, sheesh! And what about those frozen TV dinners, huh?

17

Sometimes I feel like I live in a different reality than some people. This “trope” is healthier than ever not just in America, or Asia, but probably most developing countries. Just search “women driver” in youtube, you’ll find dozens of videos with millions of hits consisting of nothing but bad women drivers and comments filled with people observing how bad women are at driving and how they should just stay home or let their boyfriends drive.

18

Yup. It’s pretty goddamn common.

19

One hardly notices women drivers on the actual roads, but I do wish that they would quit shopping for a better parking spot. Just pick one and walk, dammit.

20

Lies!
And never trust anything that bleeds for 5 days and doesn’t die!