I’m as delicate as a hot house flower, you mother fuckers. 
If I had cancer ( knock wood) and someone gave me a pink teddy bear and other pink whatnots, I’d cram them up their collective asses. Ok, that’s a bit harsh. I’d probably de-friend them on facebook. That isn’t support for the patient. That is telling ME YOU, my friend, are a fucking tool to be played by the Pink Ribbon Corporate Profit Brigade. It has NOTHING to do with THE DISEASE, but EVERYTHING to do with getting TOOLS like the Soccer Moms/Dads to buy the fucking Yoplait yogurt. Eat a yoplait and save the cap, send it it and Yoplait donates X amount of $ to Karmanos. It takes an ASSLOAD of caps to get to a modest donation amount, like $10.00.
Not to split hairs but mathematically speaking, it’s practically impossible that both sexes are exactly equal. However you define “fairer sex”, one group has to be more of that than the other. (but really, who gives a crap?)
You’re friend is an idiot. He did however almost articulate a point: Don’t you feel like you are in the minority when it comes towards your apathy of all things identified as feminine?
OK. Stuffed teddy bears are a little over the top for grown women, but those other things you mentioned aren’t.
Excuse me for showing my ignorance.
But they do do most of the hunting? Or am I wrong on that too?
Did not know that. Thanks.
That I did know. They need the protein that nectar doesn’t provide for their egg casings. However, my point was that female mosquitoes are not “frail and helpless” creatures. That whole paragraph was kind of a tongue-in-cheek, just in case it wasn’t apparent, but I am appreciating the zoology lesson.
OK. I’ll take your word about the first paragraph since you’re posting so confidently. But it’s going to take a cite to convince me that most if not all bird species have a larger female than males.
I admittedly confessed to him that I’ve been a gender weirdo my whole life. But that doesn’t mean my argument is wrong (i.e., that women aren’t naturally frail and helpless and thus require tender treatment). Yeah, a lot of women eat that stuff up, making it harder for the rest of us who hate it, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us are “strange”. I mean, we may be (I know I am :)), or they may just see how the meme has held women back in exploring and taking advantage of their world. I’m sure the wife of the coworker who likes to flirt with me by calling me “frail and delicate” was wooed that exact way, so I’m not denying that women across the board hate the idea. But I’ve seen that man’s wife. Perhaps forty years ago she was “frail and delicate”. But not any more :D.
I am under no delusion that both genders are biologically similar. Nor do I want them to be similar in all ways. I have no problem with the fact that girls tend to go for frilly things and skirts that swirl and bows and ribbons and pearls…even though I wasn’t that kind of girl (hey, that was a cool poem I just wrote!). I just have a problem with so-called liberal, open-minded people expecting all women to like those things, and if they aren’t into them, then they are in denial or something is wrong with them. (This “liberal” coworker has said things that bespeak of a subtle sexism/homophobia. Like, I once suggested that he carry his phone and keys and whatnot in a bag and he made a big to-do about how real men don’t carry around purses. And he makes negative comments about Rachel Maddow’s looks which he would never deign to do with Keith or John. So he’s definitely not as progressive as he likes others to believe.)
I just don’t think women are frail and helpless. I don’t even think we’re more frail and more helpless than men. I think we are physically weaker than men, yes, due to the size and strength differential. And our hormones make us less physically aggressive than men are, usually, so there’s that. But there’s a difference between between “weaker than” and “frail”. Women’s brains aren’t going to melt if they hear a curse word (and women who play that shit get on my nerves). A woman can learn how to fight just as skillfully as a man can, and even learn to take advantage of her smaller size in combat. Women are not naturally more sensitive to gore and guts (I mean, come on. Every month we witness a virtual crime scene in our pants, for pete’s sake). We like teddy bears just as much as men like action figures; which is to say, everyone likes youthful things now and then. It’s just that women are allowed to get away with it more openly than men are.
Do men with testicular cancer get care packages with GI Joes in them? If they do, then maybe I’m getting all worked up for nothing.
Females are hunters and males are fighters.
One of the funniest Youtube videos I’ve seen was of a bunch of lionesses being chased away from a kill by hyenas while My Boyfriend’s Back played in the background. The hyenas had them up in trees before the music switched to metal and the male exploded out of the grass and steamrolled the little bastards.
Isn’t it strange that people are attracted to relatively “easy” battles to fight? I mean, if there’s a relatively common cancer with a high mortality rate, you’d think there would be an upwelling of support to fight it.
Perhaps the high number of breast cancer survivors speaks to the success of the awareness programs and hypermaniac fund-raising. I wonder what would happen if we shifted just a portion of that attention to something else. Would we then see increased survivorship amongst other cancer groups?
I’m with you Monstro. I haven’t had enough caffeine yet to put thoughts together coherently, so this is what’s skimming around my brain after reading the thread: (and I’m female btw)
-Women don’t HAVE to be the fairer-frailer sex, but people like to be told how to be, and that’s the line we’re fed: Men give protection (or are rapist scum), women must accept that.
-Women like to be coddled and taken care of, but so do many men. It may not be in the form of pink gift shit and minor social courtesies, but men get coddled by having their meals shopped for and cooked, their houses cleaned, their kids raised, the boring minutiae of life seen to. Not all men, obviously, but many.
-Personally I detest pink (though I do have a fondness for stuffed animals, probably because I like real animals better than I like most people) and the whole pink=women’s issues makes me nuts.
- I am married, and my husband earns 99% of our income while I do everything else. And I do mean everything. We have no kids, but a lot of animals on 13 acres that I care for. All the maintenance, all the feeding, bills, household chores, repairs, etc. I travel alone a fair bit, with no qualms at all. If he disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow I would miss him like hell, but I could continue on with my life without much effort or retraining on my part.
-Physically I’m pretty strong for a women. I have horses, I do all the heavy lifting of feed and hay, and have the physical stamina to ride a lot and handle large animals. It doesn’t always require sheer strength, but it does require you to be tuned in to what’s going on around you, to have good reflexes, and to know your own limits.
-I confess that while I’m not a girly girl, I don’t know what I’d want if I had to have chemo and lost all my hair, got run down and sick-looking. I don’t even own makeup, but the hair thing would take some getting used to - at almost 49 yrs old mine is still thick and nearly long enough to sit on.
-There are plenty of women out there who have no use for frills, no use for being treated as a child or an invalid. Physically I will never be able to beat up a man, but I might put up more of a fight than would be supposed and there are other ways of staying safe.
Monstro, your work friend is a narrow minded fool.
I feel as though your point could have been best made and this misunderstanding resolved with the careful and forceful application of a throatpunch.
Wow. The only people I know who talk like that are certain types of patriarchal fundamentalists. (Who also expect women to bear unlimited numbers of children, regardless of health, raise and educate the children, and keep perfect homes–by themselves. The toll that takes on health is dire.)
I thought ‘fairer sex’ meant prettier. And I wouldn’t have a problem with my daughter walking to the convenience store when she’s 14. She’s 10 now and bikes around the neighborhood alone. The store is across some serious traffic so she doesn’t go there alone yet.
I too dislike the breast cancer = marketing toys and pink thing. A friend of ours recently went through treatment for stage II breast cancer and we made her a purple quilt, since that’s her thing. It came out pretty wild actually, but very cool.
Mostly I’m pulling your leg. But it seems to me that if you’re going to do what John Norman repeatedly did in the Gor books and argue about gender roles based on sexual dimorphism, it behooves you not to fail biology worse than Norman does.
I think your last sentence means the opposite of what you intended. Regardless, that’s not how it works; you made a claim, I have forcefully cast doubt on it, it’s up to you to produce a cite. Mind you, I think you’d be on firmer ground examining mammals, preferably placental mammals, primates for choice and great apes above all. You may find some species of segmented worm where the female is a thousand times the size of the male, but that would have little bearing on humans, really.
And I feel you’d expect to escape the negative consequences of your actions on the grounds that you are female.
I’m impressed that you maintained the will to continue the conversation with him after this point. I would have stopped talking to him right then, since he’s clearly a fucking idiot. In fact, I haven’t even read beyond this line in your OP yet. 
That tells me all I need to know about what kind of a person he is.
Blahblahpitytheoppressedmenblahblahborednow.
Aren’t men usually more often the victim of violent crimes (mugging, assaults, etc.), though? And aren’t most women more likely to be raped by someone they know than by a stranger? As a woman, I don’t really feel all that unsafe walking around late at night (then again, I live in Manhattan, where statistically there isn’t a lot of crime and it’s always pretty much well lit).
Good point, well made, you’ve run rings round me logically.
In other words, you DO think it’s OK for a woman to assault or kill a man. After all, he’s an Evil Male Oppressor and no doubt deserves it.
Yes, and yes.
Dammit, a tv tropes link! I’m going to get sucked in when I should be doing something more productive, aren’t I?
I do think that the whole “oh noes the mens” is one of the weakest arguments used out there. They seem to really love it at Jezebel and act as though it’s quite witty when it seems like a convenient way to dismiss an argument without looking at it. And it actually does disturb me when I see things like the tvtrope link–women acting violent or irrational or obsessive, and we’re supposed to think it’s cute or that she’s only acting that way because of that mean man making her! Whereas, when you imagine a man doing it, it suddenly becomes emotionally or physically abusive. It’s always made me think that (some) people don’t take women very seriously…
No, I think that I was clearly joking and Malacandra’s schtick is boring.
A lot of people don’t, I’ve started to notice. I’ve never considered myself an ardent feminist, kill-all-the-men type, but I guess as I’ve gotten older, annoying things become more noticeable. Or perhaps I can now see how things can be perceived in multiple ways, and both ways can be equally annoying.
A few years ago, one episode flew right over my head but now I can see the wrongness of it. I was working in a lab down in Miami, and one of the field techs decided she wanted to go to grad school and study in a different lab, one where everyone went scuba diving in the Florida Bay to study sea grasses. She went to the boss to let him know and she came back infuriated. Apparently he had told her, in that sunny-yet-patronizing way of his, that it seemed to him that her boyfriend (who worked in the lab where she wanted to go) had convinced her of this idea and that she hadn’t really thought it through. It also seemed that she was attracted to the romantic idea of diving rather than doing science. This woman was no flighty dumb-bunny. She was one of the toughest, smartest field techs in the lab. There is no way the boss would have said any of this to one of the male graduate students or technicians. I absolutely know it. He may express disapproval with their plans, but he wouldn’t have essentially told them that they were brainless idiots easily persuaded by their girlfriends. About a year ago I thought back on the whole thing and combined it with my experiences with this guy and realized, despite his very progressive political background, that he too was a sexist wildebeast.
I know people will point to certain commercials as examples of anti-male bias. And many of them clearly are (like the whole “dumb male” trope). There’s this one in particular that airs on CNN promoting the Spitzer and Parker Show. At the end, Parker says she has a Spitzer mute button (or something like that). Now you could say the reverse would never happen because it would be perceived as sexist. But isn’t this in itself a sexist position? Why should women get their panties in a bunch because a particular male wants one of them to shut up? Are we that “frail”? Also, why should people perceive women to be so sensitive that they would be wary of doing a reverse commercial? I wish Spitzer had said that line just so that we could see what would happen. (I know I might be overthinking it just a tad much. No need to tell me that).
(By the way, I’m also curious if there exists in a parallel universe a well-known promiscuous, scandalized female politician hosting a serious TV show on a serious network. Because I can’t fathom that happening.)
The word “girl” has come up on the board before. And women are just as guilty as men calling grown adult women “girls”. Why do we do this? Is it a throwback to olden times when women were overtly considered child-like and immature human beings? Is it because women are vain about their age and like being referred to as “girl” rather than “woman”? Or is it that “woman” just sounds too formal and “lady” too old-fashioned? I don’t know, and can’t complain too much because I’m guilty of doing it too. So maybe I’m overthinking this as well.
So yeah, the OP is a culmination of a lot of observations. The “frail” thing last week and the conversation with my coworker just clinched it. I don’t think women in the US are treated a fraction as horribly as they used to be, and we definitely have it easier than women in many other places. But present in our language and our interactions are still vestiges of a more overt sexist history.
I guess “that’s just how it is”.
[Dogbert, waving paw]Bah[/Dwp]
No, you weren’t “clearly joking” because the sentiment you expressed is done so with complete seriousness all the time.