This links to a news story about a study that found that fathers of illegitimate children were 42 times more likely to marry the mother if the child was a boy than if it was a girl.
I find this disturbing beyond words.
That really is messed up.
Listening to the golfers griping about Anneke whatsername playing in one of THEIR tournaments has convinced me that we have made zero progress since Billy Jean King and Bobby Riggs.
Sheesh.
I’m grieved. Not suprised, but grieved. When grief and outrage stop, hope dies. Then again, I’m an “old feminist” who’s getting very tired indeed. That isn’t an age designation but rather a philosophical one, based on the radical notion that fairness and survival shouldn’t depend on the chromosomes one is born with. When half of humanity is discounted and degraded on the basis of gender EVERYBODY loses.
This is nothing new, far from it, here or worldwide. Read and weep
or this
Killing at birth, discarding or denying after birth, it’s all senseless waste. And less I be misconstrued, this is not a male conspiracy. It could not happen without the consent of women, of mothers. No one is blameless on this one.
But unfairly or not, it’s I hold excellent fathers in such high esteem. I had one. He was the most uncomplicated, naturally masculine man imaginable. His two children were girls. My sister was “all-girl”, I was a tomboy. He loved us equally and without reservation. He taught us that we were fine, just the way we were, even when we were incomprehensible squirrels. He didn’t know “girl” but he knew his, and damned if he didn’t give us his best. We were bright, wonderful and deserving of the best. I’m quite sure we mystified him as often as not (what kid doesn’t?) but he was always THERE and solidly behind us, through divorce and everything.
There isn’t a moment when I forget how insanely fortunate I was, by a fluke of man, character, circumstance. But it shouldn’t require a fluke.
Veb
I was unable to access the journal, Demography, that the study appeared in. The website allows access only to IP addresses associated with “participating institutions”. Someone logging on from a college campus might be able to get in.
http://www.jstor.org/journals/00703370.html
I’m assuming that the study was done in the U.S. There were 600 participants. Is that enough to give a reasonable degree of validity to the results?
Can there possibly be this degree of gender favoritism in our culture, or certain segments of our culture? The men I know dote on their daughters.
I think one should be very cautious about ‘studies’ where social politics are involved. A sufficiently biased ‘researcher’ can find data to ‘prove’ anything he or she wants.
I don’t get it either… I just adore my little girl so much, I couldn’t have asked for a better child. Sophie is all I ever wanted in a child, without me knowing that I wanted it.
I’ll be on campus Monday, and I’ll try to remember to check. That URL looks familiar, like something we use on campus - is there anything particular you’d like to know beyond the country of the study?
I am horrified by the statistics, but I do think that lianif is on target in noting the small number of participants.
Using the math, The number of fathers of daughters who married the mother would be between 14 and 15. And that would be with 588 to 630 people participating in the study, depending on which figure you went with. It doesn’t add up for me and it doesn’t seem like a very good sampling.
Feel free to correct me on my math!
Surely you can’t be basing accusations that our society is riddled with gender bias on this one statistic!
Boys are over four times as likely to be paddled in school than girls (a marginally larger disparity than that between blacks and whites). Also, boys make up 70% of victims of assault under the age of twelve, are five times as like to suffer “non-sexual genital assault” between the ages of 10 and 16, boys make up 72% of juvenile homicides in the US, boys are almost four times as likely to be driven to suicide at some point, especially “gay male teens and native youth”, and so on.
If there was all of this anti-female bias you seem to be envisioning there wouldn’t be laws like this.
And the OP was wrong in saying:
That’s 42 per cent.
If you really believe that (which, based on your one sided appraisal of this situation I’m going to guess you don’t), you’re not a feminist. Feminism is a biogroup supremacy movement, much like the KKK. The name alone tells you it’s about women, not equality. Feminism is not only part of the problem of gender based hatred, feminism is all of the problem of gender based hatred. It has always been so, from when the suffragettes published paranoid rantings about men using VD as a biological weapon against women and held placards saying “Votes for women, chastity for men”, down through history to Laura Bush on the radio announcing that the war in Afghanistan is a feminist crusade for women’s rights.
We must get past these hate movements, leave behind bigotry and stop hating people for how they were born.
That’s nothing to do with social bias, it’s an economic decision.
Abortion is used in the west to select sex in children and I remember reading of a survey in the Times last year reporting that a large majority would prefer female children. A large majority of US infanticides involve male children as victims. Some feminists even advocate eliminating the majority of the male population just for being male, such as Sally Miller Gearhart, that’s cultural bias.
If you really believe that (which, based on your one sided appraisal of this situation I’m going to guess you don’t), you’re not a feminist. Feminism is a biogroup supremacy movement, much like the KKK. The name alone tells you it’s about women, not equality. Feminism is not only part of the problem of gender based hatred, feminism is all of the problem of gender based hatred. It has always been so, from when the suffragettes published paranoid rantings about men using VD as a biological weapon against women and held placards saying “Votes for women, chastity for men”, down through history to Laura Bush on the radio announcing that the war in Afghanistan is a feminist crusade for women’s rights.
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Most of this shit is just plain goofy. You’re confusing a few extremists with an entire group. I’m a guy and I call myself a feminist (and no one has ever complained to me about it, either). What most feminists want is equal rights for women, period. Equal pay for equal work, right to choose, that kind of thing. I’ve never seen anybody actually argue that women should have MORE or greater rights than men. I sometimes think Eve Ensler comes close, but I think she can be a dimwit. Then again, she’s done some good work, too.
Am I seeing an upswing in people ranting about stuff they have no clue about, or is it me?
I’ve never seen a real feminist ‘hate’ a man for how he was born, and I doubt you really have either. You’ll find morons ranting about almost any damn thing, but none of the things you mention are things most feminists support or fight for.
Cavalier, The original link said:
Your cite, which says 42% seems more likely to be correct. Maybe Lsura will be able to verify the number.
I saw the “42 times” in the local newspaper as well as online. It did seem unbelievable, which was why I was trying to find the study online.
Hmmmm. For those of you who think we haven’t come a long way…I am constantly in the company of women who are smarter, and more capable than those women I encountered as a young man. This is not to say that those women in my youth were incapbable, but today more women are able to express more of their potential,
All one needs to do is open one’s eyes to see the real world.