What is Sexism?

About This Message Board
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Just in case anyone was still waiting for some cites that use sexism to mean the institutionalised subordination of women:

Code, Lorraine. What Can She Know: Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Cornell University Press, 1991.

Page 64: a brief discussion on the dictionary definition vs other definitions.

Kassin, Saul M., Steven Fein, and Hazel Rose Markus. Social Psychology. Cengage Learning, 2010.

Page 147 “Sexism […] institutional or cultural practices that promote the domination of one gender over another.”

McCann, Carole Carole Ruth. Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives. Routledge, 2003.

Page 41: “Her oppression endured by the forces of racism and imperialism is similar to that endured by our men. Oppression by sexism, however, is hers alone. (By sexism we mean oppression based on sex, just as racism is oppression based on race. Sexism includes both social structures and attitudes of male superiority that are rooted in those structures.)”

Ruthven, K. K. Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Page 2: “The oppressive effects of patriarchal domination manifest themselves as ‘sexism’.”

Worell, Judith. Encyclopedia of Women and Gender: Sex Similarities and Differences and the Impact of Society on Gender. L-Z. Volume Two. Elsevier, 2001.

Page 873 defines sexism.

Here is a PFD of Marilyn Frye on the definition of sexism. All about cultural and economic structures and dividing the world into dominants and subordinates.

There is:
Benatar, David. The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys. John Wiley & Sons, 2012.
The author comes up with a new concept, “second sexism”, as a descriptor for gender discrimination against men. He indicates that this is necessary because the definition of sexism is institutionalised gender discrimination that oppressed women.

This is really just a very quick look through google books, searching for the term “defining sexism”. I just wouldn’t want this thread to end with anyone thinking that ladyfoxfyre’s claim is unsupported.

Anyway, which definition the mods use doesn’t matter. They are enforcing the “don’t be a jerk”-rule. That means that they look at whether someone is being a jerk. The difference with before being that there is more recognition of the fact that many women don’t find being a jerk funny just because it is being a jerk to women.

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It tasted like marzipan.

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How are males, as a gender, victims of institutionalized sexism?

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And, how could you ban institutionalized sexism from the message board?

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Depends, I would have thought, on the institution in question.

See my example of the alleged treatment of boys in public schools.

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These are all very interesting (and indeed, much the same arguments show up in numerous blogs and the like).

What it does not demonstrate is the claim that there is a social-scientific definition of “sexism”, the “sociological definition” as someone above put it, which differs frim the “colloquial” definition, so as to be a recognized term with some sort of claim to objective scientific merit.

No-one contests that people are allowed to assign whatever meanings they want to such words, and that some feminist theorists have assigned this particular meaning to that one. What is contested, is that this particular meaning has some kind of weight of scientific consensus behind it.

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Thank you. Czarcasm will just come back to say that he’s not interested in those definitions because they aren’t the “common” definition of sexism as he understands them to be and he steadfastly refuses to believe that there is a more expansive definition which is correct. But I was asked to source my claim for my definition as sexism being specifically an institution against women, and I have done so, multiple times, along with the help of gracer. Since I was accused of trying to “redefine” sexism, I’m glad for the acknowledgment that this isn’t a redefinition of sexism at all. Including men would be a redefinition.

I would also like to point out that the frequency with which Czarcasm has jumped on other posters for getting off on “tangents” rather than answering the question about their opinion on the matter is ironic, since I have asked him multiple questions on the matter about HIS opinion which he has thus far refused to answer. A sampling of those questions:

He hasn’t provided his own opinion on the matter besides “I think that sexist posts have become a problem on this board and should be dealt with by the moderators as they reported. Sexism against female posters especially is an ongoing problem that should be focused on.” and that was after Giraffe effectively badgered him into doing so.

On top of that, has still not responded to my first scholarly article which specifically defines sexism as “Sexism is indeed a prejudice, but in this article we argue that it is, and probably always has been, a special case of prejudice marked by a deep ambivalence, rather than a uniform antipathy, toward women.” even though that excerpt is in the abstract I quoted, he couldn’t address it until he got home. Which was seemingly never. So my assessment is that you’ve bounced around, between wanting to talk “specifically about this board” and then “now let’s talk about sexism in general” and back to “but my OP ASKED about this board” and then “but we’re not talking about this board, we’re talking about sexism in general!” so you can try and get a conflicting definition. This is not a “reasoned discussion” as you claimed earlier, when you’re only really participating to ask questions rather than provide input or suggestions or, you know, discussion.

Listen, Czarcasm, if you want a definition of sexism then you’ve gotten it. Over and over from multiple sources not limited to just me. Sexism is sexism, an institutional subjugation of one gender below another perpetuated by a power disparity between the two. In the case of every western culture currently in existence, that power dynamic favors men at the expense of women. It does not favor women at the expense of men, which is why men can not be victims of sexism as there is not an institution that holds them as the second gender. They can be victims of gender discrimination, and indeed they have gender norms and expectations which come as an indirect result of the classification of women as second.

Actually it seems obvious now that you made a mistake in your OP, since we had all been discussing misogyny in every single other thread. Not sexism. I’m sure your misunderstanding of the definition of the word contributed to its inaccurate usage in this case. That’s why you can’t reconcile the word and its definition within the parameters of “how this message board should be moderated”, because you’ve been using a different word that is inappropriate given the context of your question. “How should this message board be moderated with respect to misogyny” is the question we’ve been answering in the other ATMB thread this entire time. Or even, “How should this message board be moderated with regards to gender discrimination” if you’d like to claim that men are on the receiving end of gendered insults. Going back to my racism analogy for a moment, it would be weird to say “How do we moderate racism”, but “How do we moderate racists / racist behavior / racist speech” makes sense.

So that being said, I can’t imagine there are any further questions you need to ask in order to accurately flesh out my opinion on the matter, before, of course, stating your answers to any of the multiple questions that have been posed at you, ignored, which are still flapping in the breeze.

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The idea that there is a difference between the two definitions was put forth by Czarcasm. He challenged me to find evidence that my definition was legitimate, since all he could find was internet cites (wikipedia being one of them) that sexism was just “discrimination based on gender”.

This is an odd statement. You seem to be implying that all the research we have brought forth defining the term is not acceptable because they are “feminist theorists” (an unsubstantiated claim), or that this definition “lacks scientific consensus”. Multiple articles, written by university professors. Published in scholarly journals. And you really want to claim that these are just off the cuff definitions with no consensus. In fact, all we have been able to find is the definition of sexism as it relates to its negative impact on women, I would say that’s a damn consensus.

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I am sorry if you are incapable of understanding that I was asking a different question than the one being asked “in every single other thread”, but I asked the question I wanted to ask. No, it was not the same question being asked in the other threads-it was a different question. No, this is not the same conversation as the ones in all the other threads-it’s a different conversation. Because the question and conversation are different, it is possible that conclusions reached may be different.

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I’m the one “incapable” of understanding things now?

Here was your OP:

“This thread” is entitled “Misogyny on board”. Not “sexism” on board. The posters were discussion people expressing misogynistic statements aimed at other posters and how we wanted it moderated under “don’t be a jerk”. You, for the purpose of clarifying that moderation guideline, came here to open a thread on “banning sexism from this board”. Which isn’t what anybody asked.

So yeah, sure, you wanted to ask a different question because it’s a different thread and it’s so different and different…but then you related it back specifically to questions in the other thread which were using a different term entirely. So, now that you’ve been provided with multiple layers of the definition of sexism, are you still going to claim that it doesn’t matter because the common definition as you know it isn’t gender specific? Because if that’s the case, I fail to see the point of the thread in the first place.

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At the time I wrote that OP, some posters in that thread started talking about Sexism also, which is why I clearly wrote"some posters are now saying…".
edited to add: If I wanted to talk about misogyny, I would have just posted in that thread. This is an offshoot thread about an offshoot subject that came up in a thread about another subject.

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Ah. Of course. Perhaps you’d now care to answer the second half of my post. Or any of the prior, still unanswered questions.

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I have no dopt that different people use the word to mean different things.

You are mixing up two different notions here.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with people giving a word a specialized meaning, for political, philosophical, or rhetorical purposes.

The difficulty arises when they insist that this word has that meaning by weight of scientific consensus - adding a layer of “scientism” to a perfectly-acceptable choice.

Not at all - in fact, if you actually read the cites, what you will see is something quite different.

Take this one (it’s the only one in gracer’s post with a link to it):

In this essay (which appears to be from a text as it is followed with questions for discussion), Marilyn Frye starts with the “colloquial” definition of sexism, finds it personally inadequate, and derives a new definition based on her own personal experience - stating, in effect, that all sex-marking and sex-announcing in our society divide us into “dominators” and “subordinates”, and that sexism is the systems and acts which sustain this.

This is her definition, which she perceives to be true. It is also, I say, a highly idiosyncratic one, and few would agree on it as a generality.

For example, the discussion text asks something like “do you agree that all sex-marking has to do with dominance and subordination”? I rather suspect that few would. It certainly is not some sort of scientifically accepted “fact” that anything done to differentiate the sexes is, by definition, “sexist”.

That does not make her opinion invalid - it just makes it, well, her opinion.

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I thought I had answered your previous questions, but give me whatever ones you think I haven’t answered and I’ll give it another shot.
BTW-“Ah. Of course”? Was that an acknowledgement of the misunderstanding, or just a snide dismissal?

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It was a dismissal because I believe you’re backpedaling.

Also the multiple questions from my previous post which have gone unanswered by you, the ones that are actually on topic.
FYI: I don’t really expect that you will go back and answer the questions related to this thread. I think you’re enjoying trying to continuously redefine the conversation and tell other people to answer the question more than participating in the discussion.

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The OP was pretty damn clear what I was referring to in that other thread, and I posted exactly what I wanted to post because I clearly wanted to talk about sexism, not misogyny. The only way you could possible mistake one subject for the other is if you think that they are basically the same thing. You’ve provided links, quite a few of which do not say what you claim they say in my opinion, and others have posted links that say something different. I have shown that there is a very common dicionary definition that differs from your own, and I have posted a quote from a prestigious dictionary of sociology that gives a different definition than yours. To claim that there is some common sociological definition of sexism that agrees with your own is rather disingenuous in my personal opinion, and the rather open antagonism you’ve shown since the beginning of this thread is rather tiresome.

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True. But what it shows is that throughout academia (and she is an influential feminist and academic, not just a randomer with an opinion) sexism is used in a way that differs from the more colloquial definition in two particular ways:

  1. what it refers to is institutionalised, not just random incidents
  2. by virtue of 1 it can only apply to women

So she has a very particular take on the meaning of sexism, but it still adheres to those two points and in that way differs from the broader colloquial usage.

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Yes, you posted a question about sexism. We are talking about sexism. But you don’t like the definition of sexism as far as it’s used by people who research and write about sexism. You haven’t addressed any of gracer’s citations either, which also back up what I have said. So no, there was no purpose to the thread then. I didn’t make up the definition, I just read it in a bunch of academic papers and understood that to be the definition. And then provided those citations to you, which you dismissed because “they’re in journals about women so of course they’re going to say that”. Really? Is that how you operate in GD because that line of thinking is abysmal.

PS, I like how my scholarly citations are questionable because they’re written in journals about women, but your citation is “prestigious”. I don’t think your “prestigious” definition conflicts with mine, actually, since it says, “Sexism is typically defined as the subordination of one sex, usually female, based on the assumed superiority of the other sex ( Kendall 2005)”

Fun story! Your citation actually says this when you read ahead:

“Gender bias is behavior that shows favoritism toward one gender over another. Most often, gender bias is the act of favoring men and/or boys over women and/or girls. However, this is not always the case. In order to define gender bias completely, we first must make a distinction between the terms gender and sex. When we use the term gender , we mean socially constructed expectations and roles for women and men, for girls and boys. Specifically, girls and women are expected to demonstrate feminine behavior, and boys and men are expected to act masculine. By sex , we mean biological differences assigned to females and males in order to distinguish between the two. The biological characteristics assigned to females and males often consist of primary or secondary sex characteristics. **The term gender bias is often (wrongly) used interchangeably with the term sexism. Sexism is typically defined as the subordination of one sex, usually female, based on the assumed superiority of the other sex ( Kendall 2005 ) or an ideology that defines females as different from and inferior to males ( Andersen & Taylor 2005 ). Sex is the basis for the prejudice and presumed inferiority implicit in the term sexism. ** The term gender bias is more inclusive than the term sexism, as it includes both prejudice (attitudes) and discrimination (behavior) in its definition.”

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9781405124331_yr2012_chunk_g978140512433113_ss1-11

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Do you believe that “usually” has the same definition as “always”?
I don’t.

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And the other half of the sentence which you conveniently clipped out?

“…or an ideology that defines females as different from and inferior to males (Andersen & Taylor 2005)”
Of course it doesn’t say always, because a different gender might be the one “subordinated”. But given that it is usually women, and in this country it is women, and in Africa and South America and Asia it is women, and most of the history of Europe it has been women, I’m sure the definition leaves open the possibility that it could, at some later date, be “not women”. But I am enjoying you arguing against your own citation now.