David Sloan Wilson amuses me outrageously. He accuses me of not thinking scientifically in an astonishing glurge of pettifogging pedantry. You see, he’s peeved that I have said that the deleterious effects of patriarchal religion on women are obvious and that arguing that religion is beneficial to women is ridiculous, so he’s going to set me straight on how to think like a real scientist…that is, apparently, like someone who is divorced from pragmatism and reality.
Myers the ideologue thinks that he can demonstrate the harmful effects of religion on human welfare with a single word — WOMEN. Here’s how a scientist would set about studying women in relation to men. The first step would be to ask what evolutionary theory predicts about male-female relationships and how the predictions are borne out in nonhuman species. [I…what? The first thing a scientist should do is look up the theory that will tell him about the relations of men and women? I would have thought that the first thing we should do is measure the relative status of men and women.] That inquiry would show that sexual conflict is common in the animal world and that the kind of sexual equality that has become a virtue in contemporary western society evolves by genetic evolution only under special circumstances.[OK, I understand that comparative ethology can be useful…but it doesn’t answer the question of the actual status of men and women. That sexual conflict occurs does not mean we should not oppose it] Among the great apes, gibbons are monogamous, bonobos form female coalitions that resist domination by males, and males boss females around in all of the other species (and most other primate species). [I notice we still aren’t talking about humans] None of this variation can be explained by religion. [Yes. Because humans have religion and those other apes don’t. “Religion” is the variable in question, and we’re pondering how it affects human society; you can use data from other primates to show that religion isn’t the only factor that affects sexual relationships, but that’s not the question.]
The second step would be to see if variation in male-female relations within the human species can be explained by the same evolutionary dynamics that explain cross-species variation. [Nice of him to consider our species finally] For example, it is likely that in both cases, the ability of males to control resources needed by females will result in sexual inequality. This is one reason why agricultural societies are more patriarchal than hunter-gatherer societies — regardless of their religions. [That there are many factors that affect the relationship of the sexes in a species is not a point under contention. The question is whether religion does harm, or is a moderating factor to limit the damage caused by biological predispositions]
To measure the effect of a given religion on sexual inequality, that religion should be compared to the other cultural forms (religious and otherwise) that existed at the same time and place, such as early Christianity vs. Roman pagan society, early Islam vs. the many Arabic cultures of the region, or Christianity vs. scientific views about sexual equality in Britain during the Victorian era. I won’t try to second-guess the result of such an inquiry, but I do know this — it isn’t self-evident. [Or, rather than trying to calculate from theory the effects of a welter of complex phenomena, we could cut to the chase: are women oppressed by their society? Does religion act to oppose that oppression, or justify it?]
Myers and other new atheists seem to think that their action-oriented agenda doesn’t leave room for such scholarly footwork, but the reverse is true. Scholars who remain in the Ivory Tower can make mistakes without hurting anyone. [This was my very favorite part!] Those who leave the Ivory Tower to make a difference in the real world need to be extra careful, lest they hurt people on the basis of faulty theory and information. Humility is called for, which is the very opposite of ideological braggadocio.
I love that last bit. It’s an admission that David Sloan Wilson sneers at that dirty complicated real world; we’re supposed to sit in our ivory tower and calculate whether religion has a deleterious effect on women.
Rather than condescendingly telling us about evolutionary dynamics, I’d like Wilson to get specific.
How does depriving girls of an education benefit women?
How does raising girls with the expectation that their purpose in life is to bear children benefit women?
How does throwing acid in their faces when they demand independence from men benefit women?
How do honor killings benefit women?
How does stoning rape victims benefit women?
How does female genital mutilation benefit women?
How does letting women die rather than giving them an abortion benefit women?
I’m just asking about women here, but I could also say that the attitudes fostered by religion-based misogyny also do harm to the well-being of men — these are deep, wide-spread, endemic problems that poison whole cultures, including our own.
I would also not argue that these problems are solely caused by religion: atheists can be misogynists, too, and history and culture shape individuals in many ways. But these are cases where religion validates and reinforces the oppression of women; secularization and liberalization (more liberal religions are less damaging than conservative, dogmatic ones) reduces the harm done. The question is not whether religion is the only force that does harm, or even the force that does the most harm, but whether religion does more harm than good. I suggest that Wilson open his eyes to the tangible, measurable harm done to women in the name of god, rather than closing them to the real-world data that makes his theories superfluous.
You know, while he sits in his ivory tower trying to ponderously calculate whether women are being hurt, women are actually being hurt.
*facepalm*
I’m thinking (it is a little hard to parse the argument out of the fluff) that Wilson basically trying to argue that even in a world without religion, the same sorts of misogyny would still exist, and that therefore, we cannot blame the misogyny on the religions, but rather the other way around – that the misogyny is to blame for the religions, or at least the religions the way that they are.
Or something.
I await DSW’s response to that, if he’s got one that isn’t just waffle.
Religion is bad, & especially so for women, because religions, since the adoption of agriculture, are the products of patriarchal societies.
I was about to add some “But what about teh menz” snark, but I realised that the real thing will arrive soon enough*.
And other do the snark much funner than I.
* €10 that we’ll end up talking about circumcision again.
PZ, I met Sloan Wilson here in Wellington a bit over a year ago.
He did a presentation on how religion is the idea human behavior to test his group selection models on.
It was entirely full of anthropic bias and confirmation bias. Scarily so, and I called him on it directly.
It’s quite obvious to me that he considers access to religious organizations to be extremely important for continuing his work on forcing his group selection models down everyone’s throat.
this, of course, explains his current reaction.
it’s entirely political on his part. If he DIDN’T pull shit like this, he wouldn’t be able to enjoy access to various religious groups he is focusing his studies on.
Sloan Wilson has never considered intellectual dishonesty to be a hindrance to either espousing his theories, or indeed, in manipulating others into being his test subjects.
I lost pretty much any respect I ever had for the man after seeing that talk in Wellington. All the other academics in attendance left the building as if it were on fire as soon as the last word of his presentation left his mouth. Being the “asshole Yank”, I was the only one who stood up and bothered to call him on his bullshit.
seriously, the man actually USED AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION as evidence of group selection… because it was organized around sects…
*headdesk*
idea->ideal.
keyboard is breaking.
on religion and misogyny…
religion is NOT the cause of misogyny IMO…
…but it is an extreme enabler of it (especially the Abrahamic traditions). It organizes and institutionalizes patriarchy and authoritarianism. It needs to go for just that reason alone.
the modern abrahamic religions are analogous to making a bar a church, where they teach that alcoholism is good and right.
Men have it easy. Doesn’t matter if they all get butchered. Doesn’t matter if they had to push heavy plows. Doesn’t matter if they couldn’t claim unemployment relief, whereas single mothers could. Doesn’t matter if working in a cold building site or factory is less cushy than sitting in a warm room at a reception desk. Doesn’t matter that male housewives are written off as slackers, whereas “real” housewives aren’t and never have been. They’re men. They should stop whining and grow a pair.
I’ll take Naturalistic Fallacies for $1000, Alex.
They should stop whining and grow a pair.
you said it.
oh wait, you were trying to be sarcastic?
fail.
OK …
That was faster than I expected.
I really need to stop being such an optimist.
Well Cthulhu, this is totally stupid.
DS Wilson is male.
If you really want to know if religion oppresses women,…ask the women!!!
This isn’t a hard thought to come up with, most third graders could do it.
My friend used to quote an old saying. “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” Followed by, “If I/we ruled the world, we would know it by now.” If that aphorism was true, only men would be able to even get near a cradle.
And you could just read the so called magic books like the bible and look around. This isn’t hard either.
Naturalistic fallacy every-fucking-where.
Screw culture, it’s all “hard-coded”! Based on another naturalistic fallacious assumption, of course. Being “genetically hard-coded” (ew) does not excuse your douchecanoe behavior, as “nature” does not trump ethics.
And I guess no one has done such studies on the impact of religion on women’s rights and life… right?
Those who sit in Ivory Towers and do nothing while claiming to think, don’t need to be careful. They don’t need to do anything which is the whole idea.
They are simply irrelevant.
Looking at DSW’s response, it was obviously bereft of any real science, and chock full of religious accommodation by avoiding the issue, like any accommodationist does. Not surprising given Ichthyics description of his delusional thinking.
Oh, and is DSW was a real scientist, it would recognize that unevidenced OPINION on its part can and will be dismissed as fuckwittery, as I didn’t see one citation, unlike PZ, to back up anything it says…And that says all we need to know about its lack of integrity and honesty….
DSW is a real scientist as far as I can see. He’s just wrong about this.
Pfff that’s never happened before.
{Eyeroll}
{Claps hands}
New wrongness please! It’s what we live for.
Louis
If you want to revolutionise evolutionary theory, why spend so much time talking about humans? Start with bacteria. You can do experiments on umpteen generations of them—and you don’t even have to worry that your results will be biased because your sample only includes male psychology undergrads!
illithid,
OMG, what about the Menz. Fuck the fuck off. Noone is saying no men in history have ever had to face any sort of hardship, but on the whole, throughout history, including modern society, women face a vastly larger amount of crap on a day to day basis and if you can’t see that, I can’t even imagine what kind of blinders you’re wearing. Take your MRA nonsense elsewhere, douchebag.
From the original article:
Actually… I still haven’t heard any convincing argument for group selection that couldn’t be deconstructed into individual selection…
Crap, am I a fundamentalist too?
====
Speaking about group selection, I would like to know what definition of “religion” Wilson uses to defend his theory.. err.. hypothesis.
Chances are extremely high that he’s using abrahamic religions as a template for every religion ever created(!)
DSW isn’t making the naturalistic fallacy. He’s pointing out that females are oppressed in societies that have no religion. He isn’t saying it’s right because it’s natural.
His overall argument is that whether or not religion attempts to help or hinder the status of females, you’d need to look at the data to see whether it actually makes a difference. Seems like a valid point to me. While it seems obvious to me that it would, there are an awful lot of obviously true things that are actually false.
… pursuant to #18:
And, once you’ve spent a while realising just how much goes into modelling a bacterial biofilm, maybe you’ll be less eager to accept pat “explanations” for the evolution of traits in other species.
Sorry, I don’t see that, all I see is no evidence presented in an allegedly scientific argument. And his point is meaningless, if that is his point, as he avoids looking that the evidence.
illithick,
PZ addressed your butthurt here:
Now, care to explain how cis-men have it worse than others overall?
On second thought, nevermind. We don’t actually care to hear your explanation.
Now lets examine the praying mantis, where the female devours the male’s head during coitus…
Well. Define ““.
Preferably in ways that aren’t circular.
Or of course kin selection. As far as I can tell, Dawkins is evidently right on this one: genes all the way.
That is PZ’s argument. Read his 2nd-to-last paragraph again.
1. Quantify how religious a society is.
2. Quantify how repressed the women are.
3. Correlate.
Now we can at least demonstrate if the premise is true, though as PZ says, duh. Also I suggest studying societies that are human because religous bonobos are so uncooperative.
Well, I’ve seen some fairly okay arguments for the possibility of group selection occuring under certain conditions (mainly from Sober’s work). What I haven’t seen, however, is any evidence that group selection, or the specific hypothetical conditions required for it to occur, actually does occur in the real world.
Lawmom,
Oh I dunno. You wouldn’t BELIEVE the things they would do for a banana…TMI?
Wasn’t me…Ichthyic told me about it then ran away, miss. I’m a good boy, miss. I haven’t been interfering with the bonobos.
Louis
DSW is a real scientist as far as I can see.
meh, I’d take issue with that, given the man does does not accept the standard of trying to disprove your own hypotheses by experiment.
he’s spent decades doing nothing but scream about how his MODELS are entirely reasonable, and that they explain everything, on paper, DAMNIT!
when we show him actual data, from the field, testing group selection models, and how they don’t explain things as well as standard individual selection models do, he just doesn’t listen.
he’s fast approaching crank territory, IMO.
just because one keeps publishing the same nonsense, doesn’t make it science.
he gets way more credibility than he deserves, likely owing to support from elder iluminaries like EO Wilson, who himself deliberately misunderstands simple models like Hamilton’s kin selection.
I find this entire cabal to be more anti-science than science, and I say that even with the idea in mind that I have no objections to group selection models, and in fact encourage testing of them.
it’s just that none of them actually explain much of anything IN THE FIELD, and these people refuse to recognize this.
It seems David Sloan Wilson is in training for the Olympics – his event appears to be the hundred metre misogyny gish-gallop…
——————————————————————
illithid @ 8;
Do you hear that funny whistling sound? That is the point, siling clear over your head.
No one has clamed as much, though it is undeniab;le that women face hardships in society that men do not for no other reason than the accident of their gender. The facts of such things as education and wage inequality, restriction of access to abortion services (and thus the denaial of bodily autonomy), and institutionalised misogyny that leaves us with a society where only 6 percent of rape allegations result in convictions (a lower conviction rate than for almost any other crime of comparable seriousness) are undeniable.
To quote Tolkien, those who have not swords may still die upon them – women are in no way immune to the violence and bloodshed of war (the recent massacres in Syria being graphic cases in point), and women also experience a far higher level of domestic and sexual violence than men do in society.
History is replete with dirty, dangerous and back-breakingly heavy work that has been traditionally undertaken by women, including pushing plows. Women also do vast amounts of menial work, much of it unpaid, to keep society functioning in most households the world over.
Yes. Men face higher unemployment rate, higher rate of high school drop-outs, higher rate of homelessness, higher crime-rate, they have five years less life expectancy, they’re many times more likely to be murdered or victims of a violent crime, they work longer hours, they have much harder and more physically exacting jobs on average. They’re told to “grow a pair”. But women face “vastly a larger amount of crap” because some guy in an elevator asked Rebecca Watson to come back to his room for coffee.
Do you need to be this disingenuous to make your point?
Must not be a very good point, then.
Wilson offers his conclusion that patriarchy is natural among other great apes, and therefore, by implication good, or transcendently right somehow. At the very least, he offers patriarchy as unavoidable. Patriarchal religions are just the almost perfect mirrors for all that inevitable rightness and goodness and naturalness. I get the impression that even if all the comparison studies he proposes indicated that most systems of dogma harm women, he would still defend religion.
There’s a fundamental dishonesty in the way he argues here. Anything will do as long as he can pretend to discredit PZ.
Ichthyic, #31,
Then take issue with it by all means! ;-)
I’m just not much of a fan of this No True Scientist accusation. He’s wrong about this, he’s been wrong, spectacularly, about other things, he’s not the first, won’t be the last. Linus Pauling didn’t stop being a scientist when he went cuckoo for vitamin C. He just became a scientist who was wrong about something, which to be fair, he’d been before.
Louis
Fixed that for you fuckwitted loser. Only misogynist liberturd losers miss the context like you do.
I’m just not much of a fan of this No True Scientist accusation.
hmm.
see, now I would classify Dawkins as a popularizer of science, not a scientist.
likewise, while Sloan Wilson et al publish regularly, their output is always in the form of model tweaks.
that’s math, not science.
when actual SCIENCE (by definition) is done by others, he ignores it.
*shrug*
I’ll stick with my call.
not everyone who publishes is a scientist, IMO.
hell, I wouldn’t consider myself a scientist any more, so much as a glorified consultant.
I just know science when I see it.
;)
Ichthyic,
Okay, I see your distinction. I may not agree entirely, and thus we should have a massive thread derailing flamewar, but I understand. ;-)
Soooo. Who goes first?
Louis
This is getting an ought from an is.
Chimpanzees have been known to steal someone else’s baby chimp and either kill it, or kill and eat it. They always seem a bit short on meat.
I guess according to Wilson, we should…aw forget it. I’m too old to take up infant cannibalism.
Don’t tell DS Wilson that. Besides eating human brains is a very bad idea. That is how Kuru get started and spread. Besides we already have enough problems with fundie xian Zombies.
FWIW, it seems pretty clear that PZ has just misunderstood the last paragraph. DSW isn’t arguing that it’s better to stay in the ivory tower (nor that he, DSW, is actually in his tower). He’s arguing that those of us who don’t stay there, like PZ, have to be extra-careful (and is implicitly accusing PZ of not being careful in the appropriate ways). If anything, he’s sneering at people who stay in the tower (as well as those who leave it and don’t take appropriate care).
None of that means he’s right, just that sentence means something almost the exact opposite of what PZ says.
You should add some turtles, at least according to Wilson.
That’s fair, my bad. Good old Elliott wrote some interesting points about it.
The reality check is my main beef with their hypothesis, please disregard my prior silliness… I guess I’m feeling a bit too cranky tonight.
Opps, accidental premature post (this never usually happens to me, honest…). Perhaps we should try again.
Now, where was I…
—————————————————————-
It seems David Sloan Wilson is in training for the Olympics – his event appears to be the hundred metre misogyny gish-gallop…
—————————————————————-
illithid @ 8;
Do you hear that funny whistling sound? That is the point, siling clear over your head.
No one has claimed as much, though it is undeniable that women face hardships in society that men do not for no other reason than the accident of their gender. The facts of such things as education and wage inequality, restriction of access to abortion services (and thus the denial of bodily autonomy), and institutionalised misogyny that leaves us with a society where only 6 percent of rape allegations result in convictions (a lower conviction rate than for almost any other crime of comparable seriousness) are undeniable.
To quote Tolkien, those who have not swords may still die upon them – women are in no way immune to the violence and bloodshed of war (the recent massacres in Syria being graphic cases in point), and women also experience a far higher level of domestic and sexual violence than men do in society.
History is replete with dirty, dangerous and back-breakingly heavy work that has been traditionally undertaken by women, including pushing plows. Women also do vast amounts of menial work, much of it unpaid, to keep society functioning in most households the world over.
What is a little needless child starvation against your petty sense of entitlement, hmmm?
Women have lesser earning potential than men even when doing the same job while working for the same organisation. Women live in a system that is rigged against them in all manner of ways both subtle and gross. Does this men that men never received harsh or unfair treatment from that system? Of course not, but in almost all cases the fact of being a woman exacerbates the level of inequality one faces, worsens the problems foisted upon one by the system.
What makes you think that women don’t work in factories and on building sites, or that men don’t work in offices?
Welcome to the real world; a place where patriarchy hurts men too. Both women and men who stay at home to look after the children are sometimes (and utterly unfairly) treated as if they are taking the easy route, this is not something limited only to men. But the very fact that the attitude is more widespread and more pronounced in relation to men is because of patriachally mandated gender roles – roles that paint womern as the stay-at-home, seen-but-not-heard partner and men as the bread winners and providers. This is not some expression of prejudice against men alone, this is the social straightjacket 0of inflexible gender role expectations that makes no allowances for personal circumstance or character.
(Emphasis added)
That is more of that toxic patriarchy right there – it infects our very lexicon. In this case, the ‘grow a pair’ saying explicitly identifies resiliance and determination with male genitalia, and thus asssociates these usually positively depicted attributes with maleness, and thereby implies that they are rarely found (or are even inappropriate) in women. At the same time, it emasculates those men who do not construct their concept of masculinity in a fashion that prioritises such traditional tropes of tough, taciturn maleness, and so plays into the clear undercurrent of homophobia within mainstream derpictions of heteronormative masculinity.
This isn’t men versus women. This isn’t some kind of quixotic ‘oppression olympics’. This is an example of the toxic patriachy that poisons every level of our society at work, and it is something that all of us should oppose.
Hey illithid, I absolutely adore what you’ve done with that hypothesis, especially the way you made it come out of your arse the way you did.
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 100 times – Religion is to misogyny as McDonald’s is to the hamburger. It didn’t invent it but it does a very good business in it.
illithid @ #8:
That’s 100% pure horseshit. I was born in the ’60s and even then women who were stay-at-home wives and mothers were thought of as “just housewives,” as if what they did wasn’t difficult or time-consuming enough to be considered “real” work.
DS Wilson is an idiot. I’m just going to say it.
There is a large variation in how various countries, cultures and subcultures treat women. Poor treatment is highly correlated with how poor, backward, and dysfunctional they are.
This is a lot more relevant than what Gorillas do in their spare time.
The correlation is high enough that the UN program for development relies strongly on empowering and humanizing women.
I’m talking about people at the deep end of society. People utterly without hope, who’ve fallen through the cracks in the system, and now their lives are destroyed, sometimes through no fault of their own. The best you can manage is to whinge about how middle class women are paid slightly less?
Judging by recent postings about harassment of women at atheist conferences and some of the sleazy email they get in response to complaints it seems religion does not have a monopoly on misogyny.
When one of the leading lights of atheism, Richard Dawkins is called to book on remarks he has made about one women in particular it suggests that the atheist fraternity, (it certainly isn’t a sorority) needs to do some serious housekeeping.
Perhaps Sloan Wilson is right. After all testing a hypothesis can also be done using an outgroup which does not share the character that the subject of the hypothesis possesses. We could conclude from this that all men are hard-wired to be misogynist bastards. It is only our cultural evolution that can overcome this. Whether it is the culture of religion or of atheism or both, time will tell.
Citation, not anecdote, needed. But then, you know that before you posted…
Category error fuckwit. And women are paid less with the same education and experience. What a fuckwitted loser if you don’t acknowledge the truth due your misogyny. Presuppositions are for godbots, not skeptics.
BEFORE we address the significantly higher unemployment rate, poverty rate, and all the rest of it, we MUST make sure these middle class dears have equal or greater pay grade than their non-maternal-leave-taking male co-workers. Even though women are far behind men in every competitive field with objective criteria, to the point where we have “Women’s Chess Championships”.
You can take your moldy strawman out of here.
All these straw men are causing my allergies to act up.
Evidence you are fuckwitted misogynist idjit.
@illithid
For your edification, a nice graph depicting the wage gap by industry. Looks like women in typically working class fields are doing just as crappy in terms of the wage gap as middle class women, with the odd exception of those in the construction industry.
If you’d like to talk about the “deep end of society” and being butchered, let us talk about female prostitutes, whose occupation is vastly more fatal than famously dangerous, typically male occupations like fishing and logging and is rather more common.
I have to say that going with the economic angle wasn’t the greatest trolling strategy. Should have stuck with the standard “BUT wimmenz have all teh SEX and won’t GIVE it to me!!!1!”, which has fewer associated statistics, but I suppose we deserve a bit of variety around here once in a while.
Are you being deliberately thick here?
Look, no one here is saying that men have it easy. No one here is saying that men don’t have problems. No one here is saying that we shouldn’t try to fix those problems.
Just because we are talking about problems facing women doesn’t mean that we are automatically dismissing problems facing men. We can support people working on the problems facing women and the problems facing men at the same time.
I’d like to see parental leave available for any parent, regardless of gender. But I don’t see how that’s relevant to the topic at hand.
And what do you mean when you say that “women are far behind men in every field with objective criteria”? I suppose it could be true if you define that narrowly enough (e.g., if you limit it to something like sports). But I doubt that this is what you mean.
It must be such a TERRIBLE, TERRIBLY handicapping thing to have a one-track mind, to be unable to multitask, to have to always, only, ever, solve ONE problem at a time, to be utterly unable to even think about another problem until the first problem is SOLVED(TM).
I mean, how do you even get to work in the morning? The need to plan your route AND *gasp* look out for pedestrians AT THE SAME TIME, must just completely cripple what little mental faculty you still possess, leaving you quivering in a corner shaking your fist at the universe at the utter unfairness of it all.
It must be nice to live in a world where one, single, rather poor, example (of a competitive field where for centuries women have been actively excluded and girls discouraged from entering), is considered adequate citational support for a claim to ‘every competitive field’.
And besides, in chess the computers kick EVERYONE’s ass these days, blind folded and underclocked.
Nerd
Thanks for that link! One of the arguments against the claim that women earn less than men that I have had to rebut (in personal discussions with friends) is that most studies compare occupations not jobs. That is a fair criticism, though by itself means little.
The link you give does both and I think the table that shows that there appears to be no correlation between the percent of women in a particular job category and the ratio of their pay to men in the same category gives the lie to that argument. What I mean is according to that table, some jobs have far less than 50% women in them and have the same pay disparity as those jobs with far greater than 50%. This means that pay disparity is systemic and not a function of job category.
Ammo. I like ammo.
illithid @ 48;
Do you honestly believe that this only happens to men, or happens to men at such a higher rate then women that it amounts to some kind of systemic misandrist discrimination?
That is one heck of a claim, and it requires a citation.
The fact of gender based income inequality exists across all social strata, your inability to accept it not withstanding.
Citations – you need them. And your misogyny with regard to maternity leave and is noted.
As for the supposedly ‘objective’ competetive inferiority of women with relation to men (another citation needed there, by the way), has it occurred to you that, with the system itself being riddled with the kind of gender essentialist claptrap you keep wheeeling out, the mode of assesment in such cases is lilkely to be anything but objective?
Consider the following variables:-
a) Who sets the tests?
b) When the tests are drafted, with which social groups are the creators principally concerned – for whom are the tests structured?
c) Who marks the tests?
d) Who performs comparison between the performance of men and women with regard to the results?
e) What is the liklihood that the answer to questions a, b, c and d is ‘men’?
To Dr Myers
I refer to the last comment by garydargan, and tend to agree with him. It appears that Mr Myers has, in his questions to Dr Wilson, lumped every person of a religious persuasion with some extreme newspaper articles and practices of a religious minority – practices which may not even be acceptable to the religious leaders of the society. For example, female circumcision and throwing acid on wives to disfigure them. Christians and Jewish people do not practice this; and many Muslims in countries beside the ones that practice it would also abhor such behaviours. Many persons of a religious persuasion are working to abolish such practices, but persons in Ivory Towers who are not on the ground would not know this.
We know that many religious followers would abhor deprivation of education to women. We also know many organisations that have been supported, or indeed founded by, religious groups, have been building schools, providing teachers, and financially supporting schemes which educate women. This has happened for well over 200 years. The USA has been one of the world’s highest performers in this area – a country which has the highest number of Christians per capita globally.
Let’s address two questions that Dr Myers raised:
“How does raising girls with the expectation that their purpose in life is to bear children benefit women?”-
Be careful what your conclusions are.We know that children are the future generation of any nation, and you are undermining the ability of women to choose whether or not they value highly the education and well being of their offspring. Women have indeed benefited in developed countries with over thirty years of work freedom. Those women in developing countries may not have the freedom as there are limited opportunities for them culturally. Again, religious organisations in the USA, and other developed countries, have worked in many African and South-East Asian countries to create co-operatives and interest free loans; and are seeing real changes in many communities of women in these countries.
Recent studies show that working mothers bring in higher income and access to better child care facilities than stay-at-home mothers. This is considered ‘positives.’ However, other research states that children in child care facilities for equivalent of over 30 hours per week tend to be more demanding, and tend to score lower on cognitive tests. You also need to consider the stress brought to a working mother, and on spousal relationships for full time employment. In fact, the evolution of employment in developed countries in the twenty-first century shows that part time employment in becoming more common than full-time employment.
A final consideration is the reason for employment. Single mothers often have to work out of necessity, and hence without a dual income cannot provide the advantages to their children that a dual income could offer. If her goal is to buy a house or own reliable transport – a given for dual income families – less is available for her children. Of course, step parents can lead to greater risk of a child being sexually abused. So if the single mother enters into serial relationships with spouses – in an effort to fill her own ‘loneliness’ or to ‘offer support for her child’, then this could backfire and not offer the emotional benefits that children need. Then, we also have the problem of ‘latchkey kids’, where children stay home and watch copious amounts of television and access internet without supervision; as a result of both parents working.
“How does letting women die rather than giving them an abortion benefit women?”
Research shows that this is a minority in developed nations. According to the Centre for Disease Control in the USA, only 1% of 820,000 abortions in 2005 occurred as a result of rape or incest; and only 3% of total abortions due to mother’s health. This leaves a staggering 96% of abortions conducted due to the choice of mother in considering a child to be inconvenient for their present circumstances. For those who see a foetus within a mother’s womb as a human being due to the development of their heart beat and brain, this is staggering. But the argument shows that less than 4% of any person chooses an abortion for health risks, or due to sexual abuse.
In developing nations, abortions are either unsafe or not wanted by the mother anyway.
And what does this have to do with your imaginary deity and mythical fictional babble, both of which approve of abortion??? What a loser. Can’t put up, can’t shut up, you can only lie and bullshit…
@antigodless #61
I can hardly see your comment, as the fog of ignorance that rolled in with it is as thick as pea soup. In short, religion is a major support beam for a patriarchal culture that harms both women AND men by reinforcing rigid gender roles. Congratulations – your entire comment was rife with examples of that.
I’d like to ask you something, antigodless.
The World Health Organization conducted a comprehensive study of abortion rates in nations around the world. [ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/world/12abortion.html ]
Their findings were extremely consistent, allowing me to simplify greatly here without sacrificing accuracy:
In nations where abortion is illegal, the rate of abortions performed was equal to the rate in nations where abortion is legal. In other words, no matter whether abortion is legal or illegal, the same number of fetuses get killed. Procuring abortions is so important to women who need them, that the possibility of jail time is no impediment. And that makes sense, because the rational person weighing her options can see that the possibility of imprisonment (or death; see next paragraph) is preferable to the certainty of unwanted childbirth and childrearing.
That was the first finding. Illegality does not reduce the number of fetuses being killed.
However, in nations where abortion is illegal, more women die during and after the procedure. That also makes sense. Of course back-alley abortions are going to be more dangerous than abortions in a hospital or clinic with well-trained staff under minimal pressure.
Summary: outlawing abortion does not reduce the number of fetuses being killed, but it does increase the number of women being killed.
Conclusion: the anti-choice stance is objectively anti-women.
Why are you willing to kill women, antigodless?
@antigodless
Skipping blithely over the rest of the massive fail that was that post, how on Earth did you come to this conclusion? If anything, one would think that women in areas where reliable birth control–or basic necessities like food and clean water in some cases–are rare would be more likely to want an abortion. And why are abortions unsafe? Often because they are illegal due to religious dumbassery. See El Salvador for an illustrative example of the effect of religion on women’s health in the “developing” world.
And do you really want to not only hold up the USian education system as one to emulate, but attribute that to religion? I’m just going to blink dumbly at the screen for a bit while I take that in.
antigodless @#61
1. Unless one of “those who see a fetus […] as a human being” is the mother of the fetus, your opinion doesn’t matter, because you’re not the one carrying the parasite.
2. Furthermore, the vast majority of abortions performed for reasons other than direct, known risk to the mother’s life (i.e., those that people like you qualify as “due to the choice of mother in considering a child to be inconvenient”*) occur before the development of heart beat and/or brain, and when it does occur later in pregnancy, is usually because individuals (often using religious reasoning) have places so many blocks towards access to abortion that women are unable to access abortion services in a timely fashion.
—
* And of course, such a proposal ignores the fact that pregnancies are inherently risky, and therefore forcing women to stay pregnant places them at heightened risk for injury or death, no matter how healthy they may be.
Not really “mother” until after the birth.
I always love how people like Antigodless stress how dangerous abortion can be, but completely neglect the dangers of the alternative. It’s as if they think that pregnancy doesn’t ever harm the mother’s health and giving birth is completely risk-free.
I also like how Antigodless has managed to reduce a woman’s bodily autonomy to a matter of convenience.
Antigodless, here’s a friendly word of advice: if you want to show us that religion does not help perpetuate misogyny, then shut up. Seriously. Your last comment was just an illustration of how religious thought can ultimately harm women.
jeez with the derailage.
So what is true? a) Myers and other new atheists do not seem to think that their action-oriented agenda doesn’t leave room for such scholarly footwork? Or b) M.a.o.n.a. seem to think that their action -oriented agenda leaves room for ssf? Or c) despite whatever M.a.o.n.a. seem to think, their action-oriented agenda actually does lrfssf? And what do any of them mean?
Say what? I agree with somebody above that this is a misreading. He is casting himself as the dealer-with-the-real-world, who has to be careful, and PZ as the ivory-tower guy with nothing to lose from being outrageous.
(DSW taught 1/3 of the first course in Evolutionary Biology ever offered at Michigan State University, and I was one of the maybe 30 students in it. This would have been Winter 1983, maybe?)
antidelusionless has obviously never spent any time with Hasidim, fundamentalists or Mormons if he things Judeo-Christians in the US&A aren’t patriarchal and misogynist.
What? Then that last paragraph is very badly written. He says the new atheists are action-oriented, and then that those who leave the ivory tower have to be very careful…which sounds like he’s talking about the new atheists again. Are the new atheists action-oriented people who don’t do scholarly footwork, in DSW’s world, or are they ivory tower types? It’s ambiguous, but I chose the interpretation that has less internal contradiction.
By my reading, y’all are both wrong :) New atheists are action-oriented, and supposedly don’t do scholarly footwork but should do so. But DSW wasn’t saying that people SHOULD stay in the Ivory Tower, just that people who do non-Ivory-Tower stuff should value footwork even more than people who are in the Ivory Tower.
…And now I’m confused.
This isn’t right.
Roughly half of all zygotes ended up spontaneously aborted.
This is 50 to 100 times the number that get aborted by human intervention.
If one assumes god is in charge and everything happens for a reason (a standard fundie xian claim), then the vast majority of abortions are god caused.
The number of human caused abortions is around 1% not 96%.
Says it all, really. Ivory tower or no, a menz is a menz.
DSW is an angry troll.
Wilson’s criticism seems to be quite uncharitable and nitpicky. The first few paragraphs ‘pick’ on the title of a post as if your argument is simply “open your eyes.” Obviously it is not that simple…and you can provide evidence to show, as you did in the post, that women are harmed by religious practices.
Life is like a pitbull:
Pfffft, c’mon, you know those…creatures weren’t real women. They weren’t busy being on their knees all submissive under a man’s thumb, who was under god’s thumb, and they were baby killers! Why, everyone knows a good
uteruswoman keeps her mouth shut, prays all day, and breeds, breeds, breeds. Along with proper sammich makin’, submittin’ to her manz and raisin’ all those little warriors for god. Oh yeah.This is a lie. Xianity is a fairy tale and all they can do is lie a lot about it.
One of the commonest reasons women get abortions is because they already have kids. And they calculate that one more will negatively impact the children they already have.
The consideration here is not the “convenience of the mother” but the present and future well being of the children.
BTW kook, fundie xians such as yourself score lower on IQ tests and have lower education levels. If you really cared about mothers and children, the best thing to do would be to shrink xianity down small enough and then drown it in a bathtub. We don’t need any more ignorant, lying morons like antigodless.
Which is happening slowly. US xianity is dying as 1-2 million people leave the religion every year.
The religious kook just flat out lied.
3/4 of all abortions are because, “women cite concern for or responsibility to other individuals”.
Odd factoid. The abortion rate among fundie xians is higher than the general population. Bunch of hypocrites.
It’s not just middle class women, you misogynist asshole: It’s all women, across the board, who are paid less, even when they have the same experience, education, training, and are working in the same job.
David Sloan Wilson is clearly not an idiot. Which makes it curious that he seems intent on convincing everyone that he is one.
The problem with the last paragraph is that the first sentence doesn’t have any obvious connection with the rest. Methinks that Wilson accidentally a whole sentence somewhere in there. Perhaps he ought visit a proctologist and have that checked out.
PZ –
Yes, that’s right (both statements).
The former. The ideal, though, is action-oriented people (i.e. non-ivory-tower types) who DO the necessary footwork.
So the new atheists leave the ivory tower because they engage with the real world (which seems a fairly accurate description of the debates and polemics and so forth), but they’re intellectually lazy and so don’t live up to the higher standard by which we must judge people who do leave the tower.
I think you actually agree with this para, except for the bit about the new atheists not being up to scratch.
At any rate, despite the fact that it’s not the world’s best-written paragraph, it seems pretty clear (to me) that he’s criticizing BOTH those who stay in the ivory tower and those who leave it and don’t do their homework. Which, in and of itself, is a perfectly valid claim. The only question is whether the new atheists fit into either of those groups. (Presumably DSW thinks that he fits into the third category of folks who both leave the ivory tower and do the required work.)
Either way, though, I agree that it’s a pretty annoying piece of writing. But I think your irritation blinded you to the content, here.
I went to Binghamton and I knew DSW personally, although not that closely. I challenged him on this once after he wrote the whole “atheism is a stealth religion” piece on the huffington post, even as a lowly undergrad. It always seemed to me that he would have liked the “new atheists” to just shut up because we are too mean, that we should be holding hands and singing kumbaya with the theocrats.
The only question is whether the new atheists fit into either of those groups.
that would depend on the person, not the “new atheists” as a group, which, for one, ISN’T EVEN A GROUP.
fuck me, but I weary of people who claim that we need to do “homework”, but conclude that strident atheism is a “new” thing.
Sloan Wilson simply has his head up his ass. There is no better way to describe it.
thus we should have a massive thread derailing flamewar
grabs garlic and holy water…
BACK, BEAST!
DSW seems to be one of those “It may work that way in the real world, but how does it work in theory?” type of intellectuals. Isn’t this a variation of the Courtesan’s Reply?
“It may work that way in the real world, but how does it work in theory?”
yup, I see this a lot with modellers. total disconnect from whether or not their models have real-world applicability, as they get lost in the possibilities the equations spit out.
I don’t have anything against modellers; like philosophy, modelling all possibilities gives us interesting new directions to try out in the field.
but…
when a modeller comes up with a valid and logical model… that HAS no real world applicability, and has been SHOWN so, and then STILL insists that the fact the model works on paper must mean it still has explanatory power…
they’ve lost the plot.
Sloan Wilson has lost the plot.
if anyone is interested in tracking the debates regarding the group selection models published by Sloan Wilson et al over the last few years, Jerry Coyne has covered them nicely over at “Why Evolution is True”.
just do a search on “group selection” or “kin selection” or even just the name “Wilson”
you’ll see the relevant posts pop
Teehee, cybercmdr, I think you mean Courtier’s Reply.
Teehee, cybercmdr, I think you mean Courtier’s Reply.
yeah, I actually tried to work it like he wrote it, but I can’t picture the response from DSW as being comparable to a whore in any way.
oh wait….
anyone know if DSW has applied for a Templeton Grant?
>:)
Oh my.
Anathema writes: “I also like how Antigodless has managed to reduce a woman’s bodily autonomy to a matter of convenience.”
Remark: Anathema, how about you kill your boss when he makes you work a little hard? How about you eliminate your elderly mother because she can’t walk anymore and you have to take time off work to take care of her? How about if you break your right arm – the one you work with- and it is ‘inconvenient’ for you. Do you ask a doctor to chop it off because it is causing you pain and a little inconvenience so you can have choice? The reality is – body autonomy is not total. You cannot control your heart beat. You cannot tell your body to stop bleeding in an accident. The body has many autonomous functions that you CANNOT control. Why should you expect a life you created inside you should be stopped, and it’s future eliminated because you don’t feel like it????
We hear a lot about how the Abrahamic religions are the really bad ones. Worse than everything else.
I’m sorry to say, you’re wrong here, guys.
Buddhism considers women to be “bags of filth”. The Buddha taught that only men, the ones with penises, could be enlightened. Nuns were only permitted later. And sexual exploitation of Buddhist nuns by monks is widespread.
Hinduism? Yeah, there are some goddesses. But try to find a Brahmin priestess. Then look at what “Hindu values” do to women. They include female infanticide, burning widows alive, caste-enforced prostitution and traditional culture which treats women like crap. In fact, suttee was only suppressed by Christian Europeans, not Hindu Indians.
I could go on for hours with examples from all over the world, but you get the idea. It’s been pretty much a man’s world for the last few thousand years. Cultural institutions including religious ones are part of this. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are no more culpable and in many cases less so than other traditions.
The presence of a fetus doesn’t trump a woman’s choice of how she’s going to conduct her life in the near future. If she’s not willing to become a mother or raise another child, then the only humane, civilized course of action is to end the pregnancy.
The DSW argument against smoking causing cancer:
1. Animals get cancer and they don’t smoke.
2. Some humans get cancer without smoking.
3. Some humans smoke without getting cancer.
4. There are many known carcinogens that are not smoking.
Therefore smoking doesn’t cause cancer.
Anuran commented:
“Judaism, Christianity and Islam are no more culpable and in many cases less so than other traditions.”
Thank you for your analysis. I appreciated hearing your comment. It was enlightening. All the best.
hey prothoughtless – Nothing Anuran said could be construed as supporting your cause or pet religion. It was only a lesser indictment of it, and if you take that as a consolation prize then you’re a twit. But that was already known.
antigodless @ 93;
False equivalency. If your boss makes you work unreasonable hours or requires you to do things outside your contract you possess legal recourse (in some societies at least) or you have the option to leave your job – if you had your way, women would have no such choices in relation to pregnancy. Once they fell pregnanat, they would be relegated to the status of living incubators. As for the elderly grandmother scenario – there is such a thing as social care (again, in some societies). Also, the grandmother would be an individual capable of life independent of the carers own body which cannot be said ofa foetus that is, to all intents and purposes, a parasite until it is born.
Agan, false equivalency – the arm is an actual part of one’s body whereas a foetus is a parasite that consumes biological resources to the detriment of the mother’s body (see osteoporosis and its relationship to pregnancy). A better anology would be the arm becoming infected after an accident that occured during a recreational activity, and a pro-lifer like you denying the woman antibiotics because the bacilli causing the infection are alive, and she only became infected because of a choice she made, and thus she is morally responsible for the infection and has no right to kill all those bacteria…
How is that even remotely relevant? The existence of autonomic bodily functions is no excuse for forcing a woman to undergo an unwanted pregancny when there is a better alternative.
Why should a woman’s right to choose and bodily aytonomy be denied to her, or even her life be imperiled, in the name of a foetus that, at the stage we are talking about, is not conscious ands is in no way comparable to the mother in terms of posessing its own hopes, dreams and personality? Why should your pseudo-moralistic, misogynist, prating piety be given greater weight than the lives of women?
You claim you are so concerned about human life – so why are you so blase about denying avortion rights to women when history has demonstrated that doing so will inevitable result in large numbers of preventable deaths from both complications in pregnancy and backstreet abortions? Why are you OK with killing women?
Says the person who is advocating the procreative slavery of women…
Gah, so many spelling errors in my last post!
Typos will have her due…
I’m not sure whether it’s your extreme stupidity or your gross dishonesty that is responsible for this crap. The differences are that:
1) Neither the boss nor the mother have anything whatsoever to do with bodily autonomy. Evidently you don’t understand the term.
2) Both the boss and the mother are people. The fetus is only a potential person. The fact that the heart beats and the brain shows some activity (the level of oxygen perfusion of the brain, incidentally, is below that compatible with consciousness) is irrelevant – an ant has a beating heart and a functioning brain, which doesn’t make it a person. The fact that you have to resort to such emotive drivel shows that you know just how poor your case is.
You make much of the samll proportion of abortions that are the result of rape of incest. Tell me, antigodless, what about those women who are pregnant as a result of being raped? Do you say they must be forced to go through with the pregnancy?
It’s also hilarious that a moron who wants to throw out the whole of science because it contradicts his favourite fairy story should be bleating about the advantages of education.
But do carry on, antigodless. You’re making PZ’s case for him with every post.
How about we kill you for terminal presuppositions. Like your imaginary deity existing, your babble being inerrant. Your babble doesn’t disapprove of abortion. No babies are killed. You lie and bullshit, liar and bullshitter.
It’s not fully human. It’s a fetus. IF YOU HAVE TO PLAY WORD GAMES YOU HAVE NO ARGUMENT. You just lie and bullshit.
Now show us your authority to make the decision to have an abortion for anybody else. And a presupposition is that everybody has complete bodily autonomy, including women. A recent signed letter from your imaginary deity is required fuckwit. Put up or shut the fuck up…That is what people of honesty and integrity do. And it leaves you out.
Sweet fuckin deep-fried bejeebus on a stick.
I gotta sobstory for you, dickwad.
“Hello mom! I am so happy to be alive. Just a few days ago I started growing inside of you. We will spend so much time together, I am really looking forward to it! You don’t know about me yet, but you will!
Hello again, mom! As of now, I am the size of a pea. Soon you will find out about me, I am so excited! Will you tell your beloved ones as soon as you find out? Will we visit the doc together? There is so much to do as soon as you find out about me!
Hello mom! Today you noticed something was different from before. I am the size of a kidney bean now and growing fast! I got my own blood vessels already, I am so proud! I made them just for you! I know you helped me do it, though. You are there for me, I can feel it. I love you, mom!
Hello mom! Today we went to the doc together and he told you about me!! I know this must come as a huge surprise! I can feel you are in turmoil, but that’s ok. We will go through this together. We will have a blast!
Hello mom! Today you went to the hospital. I don’t know why. Is it because of me? I am worried. I still love you and try my best to grow and become big and strong!
Hello mom. I don’t know why you did this to me. Today they ripped me out of your body and killed me. I am lying in a trash bin at the hospital. Cold, alone, dead. They took my life, my potential, our time together away from us. Why didn’t you want me? I wanted you.
And I will come back.
Love, your malignant breast tumor.”
ZOMG CHEMO KILLS!!!
keenacat, that was awesome.
@ Gregory Greenwood #43:
This so much.
@ sambarge #45:
There’s not enough internets to present you with. ^__^
*reads keenacat’s story, fights nausea, tears, then stands up and freakin’ applauds*
Whew, that was some writing.
Thank you.
It was about time somebody ripped that darn anti-choice-sob story off and perused it to save breast cancer!!!
I’ll be here all week.
@keenacat:
Ugh, as a pro-letting-women-die-because-they’re-sluts sob story, that’s just abhorrent. It’s totally appeal to emotion bullshit. It makes me cry, but that’s its intent.
Keenacat, beautiful job of showing why just saying “life” is fuckwittery. And the antichoice crowd is defitely afraid to call everything by the right names. It’s like they know they don’t have a rational argument, as AGL proves with every inane and presuppostitional post.
katherine:
Yup, it is. It has been around seemingly since the beginning of the intertoobs. Assholes still use it daily. It has always struck me how this could’ve been written from a tumors pov, and behold! It works.
@keenacat:
Kekeke, now I’m reminded of a funny IKEA ad about a cow creamer that got broken. It had the same appeal to emotion BS. The VGCats comic did a funnier version related to the old GBA.
That appeal to emotion works in so many ways, it’s better when it’s for funny reasons.
You know you’re grasping at straws if you have to resort to prostitution (an occupation only available to one sex for the most part) as an example of sexism. And in any case, I’m sure it’s not more dangerous than a tonne of working class male occupations, like Fire-fighter and Rifleman.
The point remains that significantly higher unemployment rate, poverty rate, crime rate, drop-out rate, significantly later average age of financial independence (because girls can acquire an apartment of their own just by choosing to have sex), etc., are vastly more severe problems in society than slightly less pay.
hmmm, let me guess, Sloan-Wilson also thinks he can tell the number of teeth in a horse’s mouth with never looking at a horse?
The gender pay gap chart is sobering, as my Daughter is on her way into the information industry, where a high discrepancy between male and female pay is noted.
It looks like the nature of the hiring process has something to do with the salary women receive. In education and many other jobs, there are set pay grades, and the jobs are advertised at those grades. However, in the information and financial sectors, employers have a lot more leeway in determining and negotiating salaries, and in preventing workers from comparing their pay to that of coworkers. I conclude we need to train women to be better salary negotiators and stop companies from making salaries secret.
I finally buy myself an irony meter, after reading so much about them and here it gets blown to pieces right after the first use.
*tries frantically to find the receipt and guarantee*
keenacat @ 103;
Horrifying and brilliant in equal measure. It is interesting how easily the blather of the anti-choice brigade can be adapted from ‘pro-life’ into ‘pro-tumour’, especially when they so dishonestly abuse the idea of ‘human life’ in a bid to make their non-existent case come across as less feeble.
Well no, it’s really not. The studies that have been done which take into account things like experience, education, hours of work, are difficult to perform and typically focus on a narrow segment of middle class occupations. That’s why I emphasize middle class pay.
If there is a slight gap in pay, there’s a large gap in education, unemployment, crime, and many other things. One of them will be perceived as a “crisis” until women are ahead. The others, nobody seems to care apart from a bunch of “douchebag MRAs”.
I’ve seen this assertion repeated, but you need to link to the evidence. Otherwise *POOF* your assertion is bullshit.
A slight reduction in pay is an inconvenience. Being unemployed, or gaining a criminal record, or finding yourself living on the streets, can be life-destroying. It’s not hard to understand that the so-called “MRA” concerns are far more urgent than the feminist concerns. Always with the exception, of course, of non-Western feminist concerns. But that was what “Dear Muslima” was about.
And how much does that have to do with making bad decisions, like to rob that store, join a gang or use alcohol/drugs, rather than getting an education? You still sound incoherent on that point until this is properly adressed and cited.
@illithid:
Here’s a dollar, buy a clue.
We’re not fighting solely against the marginalization of women in society – which happens, you cannot deny it. We’re fighting against a toxic patriarchy that causes a large number of problems for men and women alike. The trope of “men have it just as bad” is a typical Male Supremacist maneuver away from the subject at large – toxic masculinity and patriarchal societal roles.
You mention stress and unemployment and stuff like parental leave – these are all solved with simply realizing the toxic nature of masculinity. When men are seen by society as having to be the breadwinners and not able to show their emotions because only whiny girls cry or go to the hospital, you have an issue. Of course men get lots of problems related to stress – and that’s because men largely eschew doctors because they want to “man up” and be seen as macho – because that’s what society expects of them.
If society deems men and women to be equals, separating gender from societal roles, then it won’t be much an issue for men to be seen as equally capable parents to women, as not having to worry about showing a masculine macho front.
That would be tedious, and you know how to use Google. The last figure I mention is the only one which is not common knowledge. Here’s a link to the Guardian. One in three young men (between 20 and 34) are living with their parents, compared with one in six women in the same age group.
That’s Tpyos. Get it right lest she brings a shower of Coke down on your keyboard.
Yup. I used that. One day, I was sitting in my parents’ house and was like, “Hey, wouldn’t it be awesome to have my own place?”.
So I was thinking “Hey, I am totally going to have sex”, at which point an apartment popped into existence that I didn’t have to pay for with my lower wage. I didn’t even need a man as everyone sane knows women OWN teh sex0rz, so I just went at my stash tucked away in my closet. And as soon as I needed a gold-plated toilet seat I let menz pay for my sex0rz and all was well. I also got to lol at all the menz who can’t get fucked for monies, because everyone knows there are no male sex workers anywhere, ever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_prostitution
On mortality on other occupations: Are you too incompetent to peruse google?
Lookit this, sweetheart cuppycake:
http://orangejuiceblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/cfoi_rates_2006.pdf
It sez firefighters have a CMR of 16.6 per 100,000.
And then lookit this again, provided upthread already: http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/159/8/778.full
Now remember what it said:
(Bolding mine)
So, icidentally, a prostitutes prospect of being outright murdered due to her occupation is over 13 times higher as a firefighter dying on the job at all.
You might’ve wanted to stay with fishing (147,2 per 100,000), but prostitutes are still about 1,5 times more likely to die if we look at murder alone, and over 3 times as likely to die at all.
You lying fuckwad, stuff a decaying porcupine up your rear. But don’t forget to pull your head out first.
Right, because calling them whining douchebags MRAs, and telling them to stop crying and grow a pair, will really tear down this edifice.
O.O
I didn’t even notice that one.
Geeze, blockquote fail.
First passage courtesy of dunce, rest mine.
Newspaper instead of the academic literature, and limited to Britian? You think that is evidence? It isn’t. The numbers are irrelevant as to the why. Why aren’t the guys finding jobs and getting out on their own? Did they make bad decisions, like not getting a proper education, think only sports matter, and getting high/drunk is the expected behavior. In which case it is a self-inflicted problem for which I have no sympathy.
Versus women getting an education, getting higher paying jobs based on that education, and then being treated shabbily by systemic discrimation once they have that job. Your priorities are seriously messed up.
So what about soldiers? You conveniently didn’t mention soldiers. Are you really sure you want to tie yourself to the position that prostition is The Most dangerous occupation in The World?
In any case, there’s an easy remedy to this risk of prostitution. Don’t do it. I hardly think having the option to enter a risky trade is a good example of patriarchal culture.
No, not lying, just mistaken about one thing. A distinction made by everyone who doesn’t frequent this slimepit.
katherine:
Hah, that’s a sweet ad and an even sweeter comic, thank you! I will use this in the future for telling people to shove their appeal to emotion somewhere dark and musky.
There you go. “Grow a pair”. Way to break down that patriarchy. Actually, the main reason cited is that young women find it easier to move in with partners, and free housing is provided to single mothers.
Death rate of US troops in Iraq (2003-2006): 3.92 per 1000
Which is less than 459 per 100,000.
You know, I missed the part where it was illegal for women to be soldiers. Huh.
(And don’t give me that “front lines” bullshit, either– there is no such thing any more. Women are fighting right alongside men.)
@ illithid:
Darling, no one here is telling you to, as you put it (with unfortunate use of gendered language), “grow a pair”. Nope. But several people have told you to stop thinking in a black-and-white, us-vs-them, way and actually think about the issue at hand.
Hint: it’s not that women have “too many rights” or men are the “real” victims. It’s about a widespread trend for societies to have a gender imbalance that hurts not only the half of humanity who are female, but has additional repercussion on the health of children, the way boys and girls are educated, and on how relationships between men and women play out in the household, at work, on the internet… It’s about the “social straitjacket of inflexible gender role expectations” (thanks, GG!) that forces men and women into pigeon-holes and then blames them for failing to conform.
Oh, yes, if you have trouble with terms like “patriarchy” or “privilege” or even “feminism”, try this site. Start with the intro and faqs, and think about it:
http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/
ZOMG ONLY SOLIDERS EVER DIE IN ARMED CONFLICTS AND THEY ARE ALL MENZ
Really,shithead? You went there?
Look at this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21390560
Female soldiers are MORE likely to die than their male counterparts.
Female civilians in war zones experience a higher maternal mortality and often suffer from rapes besides the “usual” effects of war (hunger, illnesses, collateral killings).
Also, mortality rates. I have a surprise for you. For Iraqui Freedom as an example for modern warfare, soldiers are LESS likely to die than USAnian average population.
http://repository.upenn.edu/psc_working_papers/1/
This is also true for canadian soldiers.
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-584-x/82-584-x2011001-eng.htm
I said no such thing. But it certainly is one of the most deadly.
Quite thick for someone who’s said the following:
Maybe you’re not lying, but you sure as fuck make sure to stay as clueless as humanly possible.
That’s them pregnancy hormones messin’ up yer lady brainz.
@illithid:
Have I been engaging you in those terms? No. And yet that’s the only thing you draw out of my argument?
Seriously, whining about how men have it so bad is not a way to attack the problem at its head. You’re talking about attacking a symptom to fix the disease. Women and men have legitimate problems resulting from a societal patriarchy – gender roles being thrust into us from even before birth (boys need blue things with sports and science, girls need pink things with bunnies and bows.)
If you want to have a legitimate conversation about this, then I suggest you have a legitimate conversation – which includes listening to people and providing evidence for your assertions.
Oh look – after telling Christina that he didn’t like her picture, illithid slid over here to do some more baiting. Dude, you hate women. We get it. You don’t have to keep trying to convince us.
keenacat, #103:
Brav-O.
My hat is tipped in your direction.
Men are five times more likely to be murdered than women. The most dangerous occupation appears to be drug-dealing. I typed in “CMR prostitutes” and one of the first matches I got was this crique.
@Ichthyic/Cipher (90/91)
Damn. Normally my humor phasers are set on pun. I guess they go off even when I don’t intend to use them. ;-)
Please google ‘pacemaker’.
Please google ‘bandage’.
You really aren’t very smart, are you?
Gee, fuckwit misunderstands the difference between being responsible for your actions, and mollycoddling. It expects menz to be mollycoddled. I expect all adults to take responsibility for their actions. And if their actions are bad for them, get help and/or change their behavior. But boyz must be mollycoddled and not expected to take that responsibility, and have a tear shed for them, poor things…
How to become an adult? Get the best education you can, with an eye toward supporting yourself. Avoid drugs and alcohol in anything more than moderation. Sports aren’t life. Stop listening to bad peer pressure. Volunteer to expand your horizons and contacts. And guess who acts more adult, men or women? I don’t feel sorry for permanent adolescents of either sex.
Keenacat,
Damn it! I zi>knew there was something making my fluffy pink lady brainz short out even faster than normal!
I’m even less of a person now. Wheee!
Oh yeah, leave it to a bunch of MRAs to scrutinize empirical work.
That will totally convince everyone.
You are also moving the goalpost. After not getting anywhere with your “prostitutes are not actually at that much risk compared to menz in manly occupations”, now you’ve moved on to total murder rates – those, however, are irrelevant to the ongoing discussion.
Your goal, you won’t reach it. That is, convince us with some or other randomly gathered data, that the menz are at such a disadvantage, all while weaseling around the fact that most of mens issues ALSO stem from patriarchy, which people have been explaning to you since pretty much the beginning.
Y’know, illithid’s got a point.
Men have it worse than women.
I think we should protest this to all of the female Presidents the US has had, such as…
…I meant female VP’s, like…
Ok, well, politics isn’t all that important. Actual power comes with money, and we all know that the majority of CEO’s are female and…
…I meant that the highest paid employees are all female and…
…I meant that the majority of corporate board members are female and…
(glances at religious leaders, pretends not to see… ahems about military leaders… tiptoes carefully past sports stars)
Alright, maybe both politics and money are stupid and dumb for not being what I want them to be, so I really mean educated professionals! Women hold a clear majority as scientists…
…I meant as doctors…
…I meant a teachers!
Yeah! There we go! Teachers!
Unless, of course, you count higher education.
Um, or top administrators…
But, fuck yeah, teachers are more important than anything else I mentioned! And that’s why women have it better! Because they control the real power! Right?
*bad poker face*
More needs to be done to protect and support prostitutes. Just as more needs to be done to protect and support prison inmates who don’t want to be repeatedly raped. Or young African-American men, who face a higher homicide rate than prostitutes. Again, the analysis is more nuanced than “Here is a case of a group of women getting the shaft in some particular fashion; therefore society is patriarchal, men are privileged, and anyone who disagrees is a lying MRA douchebag”.
We’ve been calling you out on your particular bullshit spewed in this particular thread, but we can easily move on to other issues. Do you want to talk about rape, now that you mention it? Do you want to talk about catcalling and street harassment? Or about the bullshit pregnant women and nursing mothers endure? Maternal mortality? Or about fucking womens health care in many a country, newly including ‘murca?
Politics, big business? Wanna go over the glass ceiling again? The misogyny experienced by determined women who want to break “traditional gender boundaries”? Do you want to talk about homosexuality and how the patriarchy has been making life miserable for homosexuals and still does?
Or, as you prefer talking about the menz, we could always talk about the countless ways men are being hurt by the patriarchy, daily.
Do you want us to explain intersectionality to you, since that piece you linked got itself worked up about black males? Want a broad overview over privilege as it applies to a whole fucking host of things like mental and physical health, social standing, race, gender, education, sexuality, class?
Yes?
Now, being the google whiz you are, it should be easy for you to first get the basics on these issues straight and then come back and we’ll help you move along on the hard way to open your eyes to privilege and how it applies to everyone.
@illithid:
Strawmanning galore.
Also, your point about African-American men being more prone to violence has little to do with men’s issues and a whole lot more to do with the fact that society makes it a whole lot harder for African-American people to drag themselves out of poverty. Poverty is a key factor in whether or not one is more likely to commit a crime (violent or not.)
Society is patriarchal. It is been designed throughout history that men are in charge and women are not. It was that way in the United States until the 1920s when women got allowed the right to vote (by men in government.)
Keenacat, in a lightly facetious way, described the problem clearly. Women are far less likely than men to be in places of power. The people in power in this country are trying their damndest to make life more difficult for women – whether it’s denying equal pay for equal work or limiting access to medical decisions.
I mean for fuck’s sake, one of our states (I think Arizona, but I could be wrong) passed a law allowing doctors to withhold medical information from women if it could result in that woman choosing to have an abortion. Ectopic and other kinds of pregnancies – which require an abortion to fix – can KILL a woman if not properly taken care of.
Apparently someone doesn’t know what “systematic” means. Or “oppression” for that matter.
*sigh* I am so sick of fighting this battle.
illithid:
Nice straw-man. Did you get that at a Scarecrow Outlet Store?
How about address the real, original point, that religious groups preach patriarchy, and do so without any kind of resistance either from their congregations, or from very many outside groups?
Society is patriarchal. The fact you spend so much time and effort denying it doesn’t negate that fact that religion is a caustic force that helps perpetuate that patriarchy, and that patriarchy still exists.
Do you deny that many religions preach patriarchy? Are you denying the effects of that preaching on the congregation? Are you denying those congregations are part of society? Are you denying the effects of those congregations on public policy?
You don’t have to be an MRA douchebag to disagree. You just have to be blind to your own privilege, or willing to ignore the effects of religion on society.
No. Men aren’t privileged. This has already been established. They have higher unemployment rate, live with their parents at a higher rate, and have to work harder, more physically demanding and more technically skilled jobs on average. This isn’t a sign of privilege. It’s only a tiny percentage of men who get the opportunity to become “patriarchs”. Whether there are more male CEOs means nothing for the vast majority of men, and is hardly a “privilege”.
@illithid:
Do you know what we mean by “privilege?”
@keenacat, in general
Please take these – my last two internets. You deserve them.
@illithid #153
Saying “No. Men aren’t privileged. This has already been established” in an online comment, even with correct grammar, punctuation and spelling, doesn’t magically make it true. There are all kinds of privilege, not just male privilege. Having privilege doesn’t mean that your life is all rainbows and unicorns and showers of donuts. It doesn’t mean that because the majority of the very powerful and financially rewarding positions in society are held by men that EVERY man gets an equal piece of that pie. It means that the eaters of that pie are more likely to be men than women.
Jeebus christ man.
Get a google and peruse it to learn about the definition of privilege, just as I suggested.
Or wait, let me help you:
http://www.google.de/search?q=male+privilege&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:de:official&client=firefox-a
There, was that so hard? Now you can clickie linkies.
Don’t you realize how truly awful a statement like that is? For all you know, I could be homeless and posting from an Internet cafe. I could be long-term unemployed. I could be a high-school dropout. I could be posting from jail and being repeatedly raped. Labelling all these people as “privileged” shows a remarkable lack of sensitivity to some of the most urgent problems that society faces. Not Rebecca Watson being propositioned in an elevator. That’s nothing. Millions of people living in misery is something. You’re not only deflecting time and attention away from the more pressing concerns; you’re actually a confederate in enhancing and sustaining this cycle of despair that a growing percentage of men face. They’re a whole chunk of the population that you’re writing off as losers. Individuals who can’t succeed despite their privilege. This is one of the most toxic memes you can propagate, because it makes them feel even worse about themselves, increases their chances of staying unemployed, of turning to crime and ending up in jail.
The bang tells you it’s working!
@illithid:
It’s easy for a guy to fall into that trap, to reason away why guys aren’t really that bad. Why, they’re suffering unjustly out there, can’t you see? It’s easy to do this because you belong to the group you’re defending, just like the white southerners defended slavery as being the “natural order of thing.” You wouldn’t hear a slave echoing that point of view.
It’s easy to think this way, until you have daughters. Daughters who are capable, independent, and intelligent. Daughters who have to deal with the spectrum of male egos, from decent to asshole. You get to see just how bad it is out there for them, and it is enough to make you despair about the future. Because the assholes are increasing in numbers, insulated from reality by the media that projects distorted versions of what “men” are supposed to be like, and by internet forums that feed and reinforce this worldview. You don’t get the picture because it hasn’t touched you, personally. Until it does, you will live in your bubble, unperturbed by the reactions people have to your errors in social logic.
@illithid:
There are more than one type of privilege.
Men are privileged over women.
Rich people are privileged over poor people.
Able-bodied people are privileged over disabled people.
Straight people are privileged over gay men and lesbian women.
Cisgendered people are privileged over transgendered people.
We’re not arguing that a middle-class thirty-something white woman is less privileged than an older black man living in abject poverty. Of course she is! Anyone who isn’t blind would be able to see that. However a middle-class white thirty-something woman is less privileged than a middle-class thirty-something white man.
We are aware of the other problems in society – racism, homophobia, transphobia – and these are all bad, but we can fix other problems. Focusing on one issue doesn’t mean we can’t focus on others at the same time.
But a patriarchal system hurts everyone – women more than men, but men still suffer greatly as well. It hurts everyone from the rich corporate CEO to the homeless man. Regardless of class, status, or anything else – patriarchal societies are indiscriminate about who they make suffer.
illithid:
Point to a single fucking comment that is denying this. One. Single. Comment.
What, women aren’t also in those straits? Seriously?
Also, nice way to try and distract from the actual discussion. Just because there are Very Serious Problems in the world doesn’t mean it’s effective for everyone to always work on just those problems, and ignore other problems. Patriarchy is part of the problem. Male privilege is part of the problem. Yes, it even contributes to some of those Very Serious Problems.
You know how you take care of Very Serious Problems? Work on the fairly small and manageable problems that make up those Very Serious Problems.
And nice that you avoided my actual questions:
me:
illithid is illithid.
Oh, and meme? I do not think that word means what you think it means.
But here’s one concession for you: I disagree with part of post #129 from Nerd:
It’s vital to acknowledge the role of choice. Without choice we **can’t** fix problems, without an appreciation for choices and how they’re made we **don’t know how** to fix problems. So, yes, choice. A big deal.
But those choices are made in a context. And what fixes the problems is not de jure oppression of women to limit the competition. What fixes it is, as others have said, ending Freuding sexism.
The MRA bit about measuring whom sexism hurts worse is largely a distraction.
When MRAs then use their analysis to prove the answer is MOAR SEXISM, RAWWRRz!!!!11!1!!!111 they aren’t a distraction: they are the heart of the frickin’ problem.
How do you know that some of us aren’t in those positions for the precise reason of not being in a privileged group? Unlike men, women get the opportunity to be homeless (kicked out after an accidental pregnancy by parents), unemployed (e.g. fired for making a sexual harassment complaint), or repeatedly raped (e.g. that’s what wives are for) simply because we are women. Whatever shit men go through, they aren’t going through it simply because they are men and they aren’t susceptible to the additional shit experiences women face for being women. That’s privilege.
Nowhere near as serious as the problems I mentioned, simply because their incidence is tiny by comparison. There might be a few cases a year of repeated rape outside of prisons, or of employees getting fired for making a complaint of sexual harrassment. Single mothers get substantial welfare payments, which seems to vitiate your point about getting kicked out of the house for getting pregnent.
Labelling all men as privileged automatically implies that the most of the people at the bottom of society, disproportionately men, are losers. I don’t find this to be illuminating…and it sure as shit isn’t going to help them.
Which has nothing to do with your fuckwitted argument. We have shown statistically, men as a group has privilege compared to women. You have ignored those statistics and put up strawmen about how guys make bad choices and it hurts them. So fucking what? That doesn’t change the fact, that as a group, men, and white men especially, have privilege compared to those not of the same group. You failed to prove your case, instead just proved your bias against those not men by trying to refute the truth.
All men are privileged. Some less privileged than others, but it doesn’t change the statistical case that patriarchy, that is male privilege, exists and is a problem for society. Individuals are bullshit when talking about groups, a category error, showing your lack of cogency.
So apparently you need a politically correct buzzword before you can be set into action. If it falls under the rubric of racism, homophobia, or transphobia, you’ll join the fight. The other people at the bottom are over-privileged white trash and their problems are self-inflicted.
Ok, then, what would convince you that privilege exists?
If women were paid, on average, less than men?
If women were vastly underrepresented in every position of higher government, higher education, and the professional world?
If women’s bodily autonomy was a political issue being largely decided by those selfsame overrepresented men in government?
Or do you mean something totally different than making less money and having less political power?
Let’s take a look at what you said:
Is that among those actively seeking work?
I’m asking because it’s quite easy for someone caring for children to be unable to seek work. Does your statistic take this into account?
Translation: have been thrown out of the house less.
Working a more technically skilled job is bad? Wha?
Also – you did notice that men are paid more for their work, right? Even when the jobs are the same… you did notice that bit, I presume. That’s not privilege, because, well, um, you see, um… well, it just isn’t, that’s why!
On what planet?
They “over privileged white trash” do have more privilege than equally situated black or hispanic families. That’s the facts, whether you want to acknowledge them or not. And their problems are real, and often self inflicted, but not always.
I know privilege, I have a large measure of it. Being white, male, old, in reasonable health, and working, I have tons compared to the “white trash”.
I’m with chigau on this: bwuh?
Is there much point in debating someone this deluded about the real world?
As commonly understood, this is an assertion of dogma, not a statement of fact, Nerd of Redhead. In the U.S., men are privileged along some dimensions, and women are privileged along others. Unlike white privilege and heterosexual privilege, gender privilege is not uni-directional.
It is certainly true that being prone to violence has a lot to do with living in poverty, Katherine Lorraine. But it is categorically false that it has “little to do with men’s issues.” Among 18-24 year olds, for example, African American men are nine times more likely to be murdered than African American women. White men are about five times more likely to be murdered than white women in that age (as I believe someone tried to point out earlier), and in fact white men are slightly more likely to be murdered than African American women in that cohort.
Anri @168, you bring the double standard out for everyone to see and prove once and for all that I’m not going after a strawman. Well done!
Men have significantly higher unemployment rate? Oh, it must just be because they’re lazy.
Women have slightly lower pay? Crisis!
Yes. What I was objecting to was a poster who basicially said, “Oh, we recognize there’s other problems — there’s racism, there’s homophobia, there’s transphobia”. Which seems to assume that white men could never fall through the cracks in the system.
And how do you know the incidence is tiny. I know that you’re talking to at least a few women here who’ve been raped more than once, including myself, and the Pharyngula commentariat is a damn small sample size. And remember: women get raped repeatedly when they’re imprisoned too. Women become unemployed for the same reasons men do. Plus, the just-because-they’re-women reasons. It’s like a bonus! Yay!
One is not a mother until one gives birth. Gravidas are only eligible for your ostensible substantial welfare payments (via TANF in the US) during their last trimester. But I suppose it’s easier for you just to make assumptions rather than looking shit up.
And again, you’ve simply assumed that what you’d like to imagine is true is true. When you look at the “bottom of society”, it’s women who are disproportionately affected. 30% of woman-led households are in poverty, twice the rate as male-led households(in the US in 2010 [see table 4]). The gap between the median income of a single man and a single woman is 10,000. I’ll let you guess which way that runs. (Between a single parent man and a single parent woman it’s 18 thousand.) So there’s your only-affecting-the-middle-class wage gap.
Maybe you’d like to attempt a different definition of “bottom of society” to make men end up there?
All of Ichthyic’s posts above are quite relevant. I’m not sure you can call it conflation when you meld certain aspects of repugnant male or patriarchal behavior with patriarchal aspects of religions (especially the Abrahamic versions). I think the root cause is the same. Males behaving badly. In many cases religion is used as the excuse and/or justification when it may be ingrained societal or cultural behavior or norms.
As much as I agree that making religion vanish would be positive, it still will not eliminate bad behavior in society. Some of those in power will continue to oppress, exploit and degrade the less powerful or advantaged.
are women oppressed by their society? Does religion act to oppose that oppression, or justify it?
That’s the entire point right there. No one is saying that there aren’t cultural pressures that aren’t religious but that religion is all too often used to encode and legitimize biases of the group or individuals. God always seems to want just what the zealot wants.
You’re back at the fuckwittery that individual men falling through the cracks negates privilege. It doesn’t. And many of those men fall through due to their own problems, and not handling them properly. Statistically, men are privileged compared to women. It shows up in promotion and pay differentials, for example. Or customer service responding to a male, but not a female voice.
Women and children, along with minorities, are clustered in poverty compared to males, healthy white males in particular. You ignore that, but then your misogyny has blinders.
You are avoiding the acknowledgement that patriarchal male privilege exists. It just makes you look less than smart.
The comment you quote-mined said: “Rich people are privileged over poor people.”
I’m assuming you’re responding to this:
See those little curly things at the ends of the sentences? That means I was asking a question. I was asking that question because unemployment statistics are often – but not always – drawn from those seeking work (however that is defined by the surveying body), as opposed to those actually out of work. This can lead to a skew in the data, and I was trying to determine if such existed.
But, apparently, you presumed I was making a judgment rather than asking for clarification of a potentially important point, once again demonstrating that you’re not the sharpest tool in the woodshed.
So, let’s try again:
Do your employment statistics include only those actively seeking work?
Except in those dimensions where women are privileged compared to men, Nerd of Redhead. Like when it comes to being murdered. Or being killed on the job. Not to mention a variety of less-easy-to-compare-statistically aspects of life where women are able to be more emotionally authentic due to being free of having to participate in a violent male dominance hierarchy.
Anri:
And how recent are those statistics?
Male/female unemployment was at parity earlier this year. As employment has risen, more jobs go to men than to women (women are getting about 40% of the new jobs). Also, are those national averages, which include teens, or adult averages?
@ballgame
So what you’re saying is that men are privileged in comparison with women, except in that men kill and maim each other (and women!) more often than women kill and maim each other (and men)? Now I know that this opinion is not shared by the majority of the commentariat here, but I really don’t give a shit. I have an extremely difficult time shedding tears over men’s violent tendencies, which harm both themselves and women. Call me selfish, but when the topic is how men are raping and oppressing me (not killed, yet, thank Athe) I have little interest in changing the subject–as invariably happens–to how men are killing and oppressing each other.
illithid
bullshit
bullshit
bullshit.
You know how I know this is all fucking bullshit?
Because I am currently an unemployed homeless single mother who has been repeated raped in the past. You don’t know jack shit about the reality of welfare. You believe the fucking myth about welfare queens you jack ass. That tells me enough about you and the alternate reality you chose to believe in.
A few cases my ass. Come live in my world, down here. You will meet plenty of women who have been through all this shit.
Privledge doesn’t mean what you think it means. We are not calling men who face these issues losers. We fight to help all homeless, unemployed, victims of sexual harrassment/assult etc. The reason why this shit happens to women is because they are women. Knowing the reason why is important to fighting to end this shit.
They fall throught the cracks. There is a net to catch most of them at least. We still want to help them. There’s just a huge fucking difference. There are craters specifically for women, the poor, minorities, transgenders, etc to fall into and never get out of. And they get shit on trying to get help to get out. Totally fucking different.
From Privilege, Power, and Difference by Allan G. Johnson. Typos are mine.
—————————————————————
Getting On The Hook
One way to acknowledge the problem of privilege and oppression and get off the hook at the same time is to make use of an illusion we looked at earlier — that bad things happen in social life simply because of bad people. Since I can make a good case that I’m not a bad person, then the trouble couldn’t have anything to do with me.
“Racism still exists,” I can say, “and it’s a shame there are still bigots around like the Klan and skinheads and neo-Nazis.” Or, “Unfortunately, some men still haven’t gotten used to women in the workplace.” Or, “People who haven’t worked through their homophobia make life difficult for gays and lesbians.”
“And,” I can hasten to add, if only to myself, “I don’t belong to the Klan, I don’t see color, I like women, and I have no ‘problem’ with gays and lesbians as far as I know, and I never park in those handicapped spaces.”
Having set myself up as a good person with good intentions, I can feel disapproval or even compassion for all those bad, flawed, or sick people who supposedly make trouble happen all by themselves in spite of people like me. And I can sympathize with people who suffer as a result. But the issue of just where I am in all of this drops out of sight. Apparently I’m on the outside looking in as a concerned observer. I might even have moments when I count myself as a victim, since I feel bad whenever I think about it.
But the truth is that my silence, my inaction, and especially my passive acceptance of the everyday privilege that goes along with group membership are all it takes to make me a part of the problem.
It’s a point that’s easy to miss, because we want people to see and judge us as individuals, not as members of a social category. But when we insist on that, we’re being naive if not somewhat false, for the fact is that we do want people to treat us as members of social categories whenever it works to our advantage. When I go into a store, for example, I want to be waited on right away and treated with respect even though the clerks don’t know a thing about me as an individual. I want them to accept my check or credit card and not treat me with suspicion and distrust. But all they know about me is the categories they think I belong to — a customer of a certain race, age, gender, disability status, and class — and all the things they think they know about people who belong to those categories. I want that to be enough. I don’t want to have to prove over and over again that I’m someone who deserves to be trusted and taken seriously. I want them to assume all that, and the only way they can do that is to perceive me as belonging to the “right” social categories.
This is simply how social life works. By itself, it’s not a problem. What many people resist seeing, however, is that on the other side of the same social process are all the people who get put into the “wrong” categories and ignored or followed around or treated with suspicion and disrespect regardless of who they are as individuals.
I can’t have it both ways. If I’m going to welcome the way social categories work to my advantage, I also have to consider that when those same categories are used against others through no fault of their own, it then becomes my business because through that process I am being privileged at their expense.
In 1990, ABC News aired as a segment of Prime Time a documentary called True Colors that powerfully illustrates this dynamic. It focused on two men who were quite similar in every observable characteristic except race: one was black and one was white. The crew used hidden cameras and microphones to record what happened in various situations — applying for a job, accidentally locking oneself out of the car, trying to rent an apartment, shopping for shoes, buying a car, and so on. Over and over again the two men were treated differently. In one instance, for example, the white man wandered into a shoe store in a shopping mall. He was barely across the threshold when the white clerk approached him with a smile and an outstretched hand. He looked at some shoes and then went on his way. Minutes later his black partner entered the store and from the outset was utterly ignored by the clerk, who stood only a few feet away. Nothing the black man did seemed to make a difference. He picked up and looked at shoes, he walked up and down the display aisles, he gazed thoughtfully at a particular style. After what seemed an eternity, he left.
When I show True Colors in my race class and at diversity training sessions, I ask whites if they identify with anyone in the video. Invariably they say no, because they don’t see themselves in the black man’s predicament or in the racist behavior of the whites. Somehow, the white partner who is on the receiving end of preferential treatment is invisible to them, and if I don’t mention him, he rarely comes up. In other words, they don’t say, “Yes, I see myself in the white guy receiving the benefits of white privilege.”
The effect of this obliviousness is for them to become invisible as white people in everyday situations and unaware of how privilege happens to them, especially in relation to other whites. They don’t see themselves as being involved in situations in which privilege comes into play. They don’t see, for example, that simply being white puts them in a particular relationship with someone like the shoe store clerk (whom they readily identify as racist) or that this relationship affects the way customers of color are treated and the way they are treated as whites.
The invisibility of whiteness illustrates how privilege can blind those who receive it to what’s going on. As Ruth Frankenberg writes about a white woman she interviewed, “Beth was much more sharply of racial oppression shaping Black experience than of race privilege shaping her own life. Thus, Beth could be alert to the realities of economic discrimination against Black communities while still conceptualizing her own life as racially neutral — nonracialized, nonpolitical.”
A common form of blindness to privilege is that women and people of color are often described as being treated unequally, but men and whites are not. This, however, is logically impossible. Unequal simply means “not equal,” which describes both those who receive less than their fair share and those who receive more. But there can’t be a short end of the stick without a long end, because it’s the longness of the long end that makes the short end short. To pretend otherwise makes privilege and those who receive it invisible.
So long as we participate in a society that transforms difference into privilege, there is no neutral ground on which to stand. If I’m in a meeting in which men pay more attention to what I and other men say than they do to women, for example, I’m on the receiving end of privilege. My mere acceptance of that privilege — whether conscious or not — is all that other men need from me to perpetuate it. Other men need my compliance for male privilege to work, even if my compliance is unconscious and passive. I know this because as soon as I resist that path by speaking out and merely calling attention to it, I can feel the defensive response rise up to meet me. In this sense, I don’t have to be consciously hostile toward women in order to play an integral role in maintaining male privilege as a pattern in this society.
In the same way, for white privilege to work, whites need the compliance of other whites. If I look around my workplace and see no people of color, my silence on this issue sends the message to other whites that there is no issue. The shoe clerk’s racist behavior depends on his being able to assume that other whites don’t see a problem with preferential treatment for whites. That’s what makes this path of racial preference a path of least resistance. And every white person either supports or challenges that assumption in choosing which path to follow. It is in the nature of social life that people continually look to one another to confirm or deny what they experience as reality. Given that, other people will interpret my going along with them down this path as my acceptance of that path unless I do something to make them think otherwise. Whether we know it or not, when someone discriminates by treating me better simply because I’m white, we walk down a path of white privilege together.
There is no such thing as doing nothing. There is no such thing as being neutral or uninvolved. At every moment, social life involves all of us.
It’s not unusual for whites to comment on how sick and tired they are of hearing about race. “It’s always in your face,” they say. I ask how often is “always” and what does “it” consist of? They become a bit vague. “Oh, it’s in the news,” they say, “all the time.”
“Every day?” I ask.
“Well, it seems like it,” they say.
“Every hour, every minute?”
“No, of course not,” they say, and I can tell they’re starting to get a little irritated with me. I realize they aren’t trying to report an objective reality in the world. They’re describing the feeling of being annoyed by something, put upon. When you’re annoyed by something, it can seem as though it’s everywhere, as if there’s no escaping it. When it comes to the problem of privilege and oppression, privileged groups don’t want to hear about it at all because it disturbs the luxury of obliviousness that comes with privilege. This means you don’t have to bring it up often for them to feel put upon. “Always” turns out to be somewhere between never and every minute. In reality, “all the time” comes down to “enough to make me look at what I don’t want to look at, enough to make me uncomfortable.” And usually that doesn’t take much.
A similar dynamic operates with most forms of privilege. The middle and upper classes say they’re sick and tired of hearing about welfare and poverty. Nondisabled people are sick and tired of hearing about disability issues. And it takes almost no criticism at all for members of dominant groups to feel “bashed,” as if it’s “open season on us.” In fact, just saying something like “male privilege” or “patriarchy” can start eyes rolling and evoke that exasperated sense of “Here we go again.”
In fact, however, there is almost always utter silence in this society on the subject of male privilege. In a system that privileges maleness, the default is never to do anything that might make men feel challenged or uncomfortable as men. In the same way, because whiteness is privileged over color, the norm is to never call attention to whiteness itself in ways that make white people uncomfortable. It’s expected, of course, to routinely draw attention to male and white and nondisabled and heterosexual people, since our society is centered on and identified with those groups. But that differs from drawing attention to “male,” “heterosexual,” “nondisabled,” or “white” as social categories that are problematic.
Another reason for the “sick and tired” complaint is that life is hard for everyone. “Don’t bring us your troubles,” privileged groups say to the rest, “we’ve got troubles of our own.” Many white men, for example, especially those who lack class privilege, spend a lot of time worrying about losing their jobs. So, why should they have to listen to women or people of color talk about problems with work, especially when the talk suggests that white men should be doing something more than they already are? When Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, says that it’s “utterly exhausting being black in America,” many white people barely miss a beat in responding that they’re tired, too.
And of course, they are. They’re exhausted from the pace of life that a competitive capitalist society imposes on everyone, and it’s hard to hear about privilege and oppression. But it’s one thing to have to hear about such problems and another to have to live them every day. The quick white defensiveness runs right past the fact that whatever it is that exhausts white people, it isn’t the fact of being white. It may be exhausting to be a parent or a worker or a spouse or a student who works all day and studies all night, but it’s not exhausting to be a white person or, for that matter, a heterosexual or a man.
By comparison, people in subordinate groups have to do all the things that also exhaust members of dominant groups, from raising families to earning a living to getting older. But on top of that, they must also struggle with the accumulation of fine grinding grit that oppression loads onto people’s lives simply because they’re in the “wrong” social category.
“I’m sick and tired” is a defense that allows privileged groups to claim the protected status of victims. It reminds me of those times when people injure you in some way, and when you confront them about it, they get angry at you because you’ve made them feel guilty about what they did. “Look how bad you’ve made me feel,” they say, as if you’re supposed to apologize for bringing your injury to their attention. Children often use this defense because they’re so self-centered that the idea of taking responsibility for what they’ve done doesn’t occur to them. When confronted with their misbehavior they may sulk and glower and act hurt and put upon, as if someone has just laid a heavy and undeserved weight on their shoulders.
Privilege similarly encourages people to be self-centered and unaccountable to others. It encourages whites and men and other advantaged groups to behave as less than adults. It makes avoiding responsibility for what they do and don’t do a path of least resistance. And yet, at the same time, these are the groups in charge of social institutions. People in those groups are the ones who occupy positions of responsible adult authority. It’s a combination guaranteed to keep privilege and oppression going unless the cycle of denial and defense is broken. The challenge for dominant groups is to see how privilege keeps them from growing up, how it diminishes everyone — including them — and blocks their potential to be part of the solution.
If being on the hook for privilege and oppression means being perpetually vulnerable to guilt and blame, then we shouldn’t be surprised that people do whatever they can to get off it. But according to my dictionary, on the hook also means being “committed,” “obliged,” and “involved.”
In this sense, being on the hook is one of those things that distinguish adults from children — adults are and children aren’t. When I’m on the hook, I feel called on to use my power and authority as an adult to take responsibility, to act, to make things happen. Being “involved” makes me part of something larger, and I can’t stand alone as an isolated individual. Being “obliged” means more than just being burdened, because it also connects me to people and makes me aware of how I affect them. And being “committed” to something focuses my potential to make a difference and bonds me to those who feel the same way.
Off the hook, I’m like a piece of wood floating with the current. On the hook, I have forward motion and a rudder to steer by. Off the hook, I live in isolation and denial, as if I can choose whether to be involved in the life of our society and the consequences it produces. But involvement is something that comes with being alive in the world as a human being. On the hook is where I can live fully in the world as it really is.
Trying to live off the hook puts members of privileged groups inside a tight little circle that cuts them off from much of what it means to be alive. They have to work to distance themselves from most of humanity, because they can’t get close to other people without touching the trouble that surrounds privilege and oppression. Men living off the hook distance and insulate themselves from women, whites from people of color, heterosexuals from lesbians and gay men, the nondisabled from those with disabilities, the middle and upper classes from the working and lower classes. And the more diverse and interconnected the world becomes, the harder it is to sustain the illusion and denial day ater day,the more it takes to maintain the distance and deny the connection. The result of illusion and denial is to become like the person who loses the ability to feel pain and risks bleeding to death from a thousand tiny cuts that go unnoticed, untreated, and unhealed.
Sooner or later, dominant groups must embrace this hook they’re on, not as some terrible affliction or occasion for guilt and shame but as a challenge and an opportunity.
Nepenthe, you appear to be operating under the delusion that ‘men are Borg,’ and that if a person-with-a-penis kills another person-with-a-penis, this glandular similarity somehow makes the crime self-inflicted. Or something.
I really hope you’re right about the majority of the commentariat disagreeing with you, Nepenthe! The word you’re looking for is “bigoted,” not “selfish,” BTW.
So this moron thinks there’s something to the moon landing conspiracies?
Do tell…..
The reality is the reality. Extra benefits are paid to single mothers, usually on a per child basis up to a certain limit per household. If you interact with ordinary people outside an echo chamber like this, you’ll know that stories about “welfare moms”, as they’re called in the States, with flat screen televisions and XBox 360s for all their children, are the primary reason why the public are not more open-handed with benefits. I know this because I have debated welfare, from a pro-welfare position, on political forums with largely American participants.
At one end of the spectrum, there are single mothers who struggle to make ends meet. At the other end, there are single mothers whose partners are living with them, but are still claiming benefits that they’re not legally entitled to. So it’s a mixed barrel. I see no implications of sexism in any of this — especially in places where abortion is legal. If you want an example of sexism, concentrate on the anti-abortion movement, and we will be fully in agreement.
Bah. The framework I’m operating under is the one that you appear to be operating under: men have been socialized to be violent and engage in, to quote you, a “violent male dominance hierarchy”. Not a glandular problem. (The penis is not a gland, btw. You may want to review your endocrinology.)
I just don’t give a shit. I care about the male dominance hierarchy insofar as it affects women, but I expect men to put their own house in order before demanding that feminists clean it up for them. It’s not the job of feminists* to make sure that men aren’t harming each other; much like it’s not the job of atheists to reform religion.
*Caveat: many feminisms do focus on men’s issues. I think this is a derail stemming from misogyny: clearly women can’t focus on their issues without also caring for men. That’s what women are for! And plus, anything dealing with real people is more important than mere women’s issues.
Because children are free and raise themselves. Fascinating. Does your species reproduce like turtles, by burying eggs and leaving? That would certainly explain your distaste for benefits to children.
Dumbfuck. Welfare goes off of the family number and income. So a single mother and single father get the same amount of money. Provided they both have the same amount of children, and the same income(or lack of one). Have you ever dealt with welfare? There a grids for the amount of income and the number of family members. It’s not a huge amount. A family of 4 is fucking lucky to get 300/month even in the best of states with no income.
Now if the single father is working the same job wit the same qualifications but gets paid more than the single mother then the father would get less due to the pay difference. Now why is there a pay difference between men and women…Oh. right.
@illithid:
Alright, I gave you the benefit of the doubt and the three comment rule, but every one of my comments has been met with either some kind of fallacy or quote-mining or something of that sort.
Gloves are off.
Fuck you, you are a misogynist male supremacist. You’re pretending to be all about everything, but if it doesn’t affect men you don’t care about it. I am sick and tired of this topic, I am sick and tired of hearing how people should worry about men while society is systematically breaking down its protections for women at every level in government from local to federal.
Enough! I’ve had fucking enough.
You were the one to bring up welfare being sexist against men you moron! Oh no the poor menz are so disadvantaged due to welfare queens getting so much money and single fathers not getting anything.
Also, again proof you know jack shit about welfare. This “mixed barrel” isn’t as mixed as you think it is, there a very few cases of fraud for welfare. Honestly, you get so little to survive, the only way to survive is to have shit on the side. So if someone needs the help even with living with a partner to support their child(ren) that’s fine by me.
See, illithid worked at WallyMart one summer and you shoulda seen what those welfare queens were buying with their foodstamps!
Oh noez! I had the audacity to buy cake for my daughter’s birthday on foodstamps*. Stupid me! I should know by now that us poor folks aren’t allowed to have anything that isn’t completely necessary to survive.
—————
I was actually cussed out by a woman behind me in the check out line because I bought a box cake mix and candles for the little one’s recent 5th birthday. Not the first time this kind of shit has happened. It’s happened several times over such things as juice, Good Bread(tm) and popsicles. And yes it was in Wal-Mart.
lurker
Just because someone is impoverished doesn’t mean they should lead impoverished lives as a punishment! It’s like, if people can’t get their Schadenfreude fix, or if the illusion is broken that the poor are not in fact miserable, it’s an assault on them personally (since they’re “taxpayers” I guess.) Never mind that they’re probably barely above the poverty line themselves…
How did you find the self-restraint?
Just because someone is impoverished doesn’t mean they should lead impoverished lives as a punishment!
No, no, no. Aren’t you familiar with the Prosperity Gospel? The only reason poor people are poor is that they either have not accepted the xombie as their personal saviour or have accepted the xombie as their personal saviour in the wrong way. If they believed in the xombie, they would be wallowing in kittens, unicorn farts and rainbows!
This bullshit angers me no end. I went off on a volunteer today, while we were eating lunch, when he complained about a family he knows, who he knows get welfare and get food from the church food kitchen at which he also volunteers, who use a cell phone. How dare they have such luxuries.
I pointed out that many poor, and lower middle class, families have such screwed up credit ratings that there is no way they could get a home phone. I also pointed out that cell phones are cheaper than home phones (I pay $30 a month for mine). And I also pointed out that, given the forced mobility of many poor families, a cell phone makes sense. And, just to add even more, I explained that it is also virtually impossible to get a job if you cannot leave a phone number.
He was unimpressed. As far as he is concerned, if people recieving public assistance have a colour TV, a cell phone, or a car, their assistance should be slashed. Because they are all scamming the system.
I also explained just what a tiny problem ‘scamming the system’ is, relative to all the public assistance programmes just in our country and pointed out that the private assistance programmes are far easier to scam and are far less efficient in getting the money to the people who need it.
He still thinks that 90% of those on welfare are scamming the system, that a national sales tax on everything (with an elimination of the income tax) would solve all problems, that all government-run programmes waste most of the money, and that poor people should look like they are poor so they will be shamed into getting a job.
He spent his life as a high school civics and history teacher. In a public school. Represented by a strong union. So now he has the money, in his retirement, to look down on everyone who didn’t bootstrap themselves into a masters degree in education.
Asshole.
The reality is the reality.
translation:
“I will now project what I found up my ass as reality.”
what a fucking wanker.
@anuran 94:
I’m sorry to say, you’re wrong here, guys.
no. not wrong, as your post essentially agreed that the abrahamic religions ARE misogynistic and paternalistic.
instead, you should simply say the ruling is not broad enough, which IS a fair cop.
most of us know more about the Abrahamic religions than the Eastern ones, so we tend to speak about what we know.
thanks for broadening the perspective to add impetus to the natural idea that ALL organized religion serves a political purpose, and tends to organize itself in ways that best manipulate authoritarian personalities.
another addendum…
for those that want to label “authoritarianism” as “bad behavior”…
IMO, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that authoritarianism has a significant genetic component to it. It’s typically not a “choice” so much as a just a variant personality structure that occurs in about 15-20% of any given population over time on average.
IOW, you aren’t going to really “get rid of it”, like one might be able to do with any particular organized religion. Instead, authoritarian personalities will always simply be looking for things that help them maintain group structure and cohesiveness. These CAN be good things. It’s simply the messages they have been given by trusted authorities that has feedback into the general populace in a negative fashion.
change the message, and you have an extreme force for promoting “good” behavior instead of racism, sexism, etc.
so, the rest of us who don’t have authoritarian leanings really need to work harder on controlling the message sent to those who do.
right now, that message is controlled, stereotypically, by message machines like Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh in the US.
Imagine instead if they were controlled by say… Rachel Maddow?
It will take a couple of generations to change the message, and get the authoritarians to accept the new message, but anything that can be done, can be done differently.
the neocons have been controlling the message for purely political purposes since the “Southern Strategy” of Nixon.
no reason that message can’t be changed. It just takes will, effort, and of course, a lot of money.
that last is likely a big hurdle, given that big money tends NOT to want to change the message that’s out there.
again, I suggest reading Altemeyer’s summary of his 30 years of sociological work in the field:
The Authoritarians
“Katherine Lorraine, Chaton de la Mort:
May 31st, 2012 at 12:40 pm
@illithid:
Alright, I gave you the benefit of the doubt and the three comment rule, but every one of my comments has been met with either some kind of fallacy or quote-mining or something of that sort. ”
I value your fire, girl. There are many situations where women are undermined, threatened, paid less, discriminated against, and stood over simply because men see themselves as physically stronger, or maybe a deeper voice, perhaps?
I value your passion to speak in a quite patriarchal society. We are not living in a perfect world – many people are jostling for limited resources; and often the evolutionary phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ means those less noisy, perceived as less significant, or perceived as ‘different’ or ‘dependent’ or ‘vulnerable’ miss out on a chance to be heard.
Keep persevering, sister. Power to ya.
many people are jostling for limited resources; and often the evolutionary phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ means those less noisy, perceived as less significant, or perceived as ‘different’ or ‘dependent’ or ‘vulnerable’ miss out on a chance to be heard.
seriously, STFU, you sanctimonious twit. you don’t get to redefine what evolution means, or what it applies to.
1 vote for tossing this guy’s ass into TZT to test for zombiedom.
Second the motion.
I am so fucking tired of hearing that I, as a white, cis-gendered, able-bodied male, am somehow not the top of the fucking pyramid. Let’s see, my local MP is a white guy; my hometown, Kitchener, is the proud bearer of the stupid fucking MP who wants to reopen the abortion debate for the province and country; my PM is a white guy; his cabinet is largely white men; the list goes fucking on. Ever play a video game where you get to create your own character? Ever notice how the default is a white dude? The richest people in the world: largely white men. Biggest movie stars: white men. Biggest music stars: white men. News anchors tend to be… attractive white men. Women’s health policy is largely debated by and decided on by: white men.
Do you notice a pattern yet, you shit-brained fuckhat? I’m not even scratching the surface.
Here’s the thing about privilege: you’re not a bad person for *having* privilege. It’s not to say that you will have an easy life. It’s not to say that you will even have a good life. But for fuck’s sake, the *instant* you start pretending it doesn’t exist, you become a complete fucking douchebag, and if you’re in any way intellectually honest you will do everything in your power to ensure that the people around you don’t get fucked, or oppressed, or beaten the fuck down because you’re King Fucking White Guy And Your Perspective Is All That Matters. Jesus tapdancing Christ, wake the fuck up.
Bah, I’ve read this whole thread and everything Illithid has to say is just another tedious MRA talking point.
Fuck off already, will you? You’ve been belching and farting about welfare queens and special benefits and poor menzes for this whole entire thread.
Not a single post you’ve made contains anything to convince me you actually give a fuck about other people. You sound like a liberturd. You’re stinkin’ up the joint.
Thirded.
Fortunately, truth and justice aren’t determined by what makes you sick and tired. Maybe spend a few years breaking down the protections for women at every level in government, and women will be on exactly the same platform as men, who receive absolutely no protection anywhere. Far higher unemployment rate, far higher average age of independent living conditions, significantly worse performance in education, and many other disadvantages, and yet the standard response is to attribute these things to the superiority of women. Even though the diametrically opposite mentality is adopted with respect to women’s slightly lower pay. All the insults in the world won’t change facts like this.
And whether you like it or not, “welfare queens” do exist. I’m not against welfare in any sense, but you’re fighting a losing battle if you want to deny the existence of a minority exploiting welfare loopholes. I’m from the UK and can give an endless list of examples from my personal life. But I don’t want to personalise this, so I won’t go down that route. I’ll restrict myself to pointing out that what makes single mothers unique with regard to welfare is that they can so easily find partners and receive gifts (which might include flat screen televisions and XBox 360s) to top up their payments for rent, food, and other basic necessities. This can make them better off than many working people at the low end of the income spectrum. Not controversial, and pretty much understood by everyone.
In post #129 above, Nerd of Redhead insinuated that poverty among men is self-inflicted, and blamed men in poverty for “bad decisions”. Personally, I think claiming that people “deserve” to suffer, whatever decisions they’ve made in their past, is a disgusting life philosophy, and I’ll have no truck with it. Without backing away from that, I’ll make the argument that IF you are going to play that game (and I won’t join you), then why not blame single mothers for not getting abortions? The double standard is plain to see. Men who did things wrong in hindsight “deserve” their suffering for the rest of their lives, and their problems are self-inflicted. Women get off the hook, whatever life choices they’ve made.
Having just worked on the publishing end of two sociology books for my sins, I can confirm that the one thing a well-trained sociologist will never do is criticise anyone in a minority group. Neoliberals, climate change ‘deniers’, capitalists and the US military are fair game, but any suggestion that, say, Pakistani or Syrian men might be at fault for mutilating their wives or shooting down large numbers of their fellow-citizens is to indulge in career suicide.
Now, when you find a way to blame Muslim female oppression on the Western military-industrial complex, then you can expect enthusiastic support from the leftist departments of Sociology and Anthropology.
Having just worked on the publishing end of two sociology books for my sins
you wrote them, or published them?
Neoliberals
NeoCons don’t count?
neoliberal = more international, broader category that can include american neocons
In post #129 above, Nerd of Redhead insinuated that poverty among men is self-inflicted, and blamed men in poverty for “bad decisions”.
strange, that doesn’t sound like NoR at all.
*looks*
nope, that’s because it isn’t even a poor strawman of what he said.
haven’t people shown you to be intellectually dishonest enough for one day?
maybe come back and see if we’ve forgotten what a complete and utter fuckwit you are tomorrow?
neoliberal = more international, broader category that can include american neocons
say wut?
Neoliberal is the term many Europeans use when discussing what Americans call libertarians. Except that neoliberal is actually a wider term which includes libertarian-influenced people such as American neocons.
Well, you unsubtle creature from the fucking Pharyngula slimepit, I was not aware that women and ethnic minorities had no representation as news anchors or in the music industry. I didn’t know that the biggest market for video games isn’t white males. I wasn’t aware that affirmative action doesn’t exist. But I believe I already gave my stock response to this line of argument, which is that the very top of the rung is of NO RELEVANCE WHATSOEVER to the majority of working men, or indeed white men. They have no chance of becoming movie stars or CEOs. They have much higher chance of becoming unemployed or of dropping out of high-school. Which are two of the many, many problems that men have worse than women.
White men privileged compared with black men? Sure, the evdience suggests this. Men privileged compared with women? I don’t any such evidence, and the statistics I’ve alluded to about education, unemployment, poverty, crime, and living conditions, provides good evidence of the contrary.
No evidence? What about the gender gap when it comes to wage? What about the gender gap when it comes to political representation?
As for the small gap when it comes to wages, which was always attributable to a difference in things such as competitive drive and skill (recall that men are on average far better than women in chess and Starcraft 2 — there’s no reason to expect it would be different in paid work), women in the 20s in my country already earn more than men in their 20s. The difference for all ages is only small, and in any case it seems women are pulling ahead. You’ll forgive me for not being all that impressed by this particular Inequality of the Gaps.
And if you try to verify said stories, you find they are lies made up by the rethuglican propaganda machine. What a lying weasel, you can’t check and cite your sources.
No they don’t, until you provide a citation weasel. Unevidenced claims like the above are *POOF*, dismissed as lies and bullshit without citations. Go to Google Scholar and do your homework, or shut the fuck up…
Why should I give a flying fuck what a lying and bullshitting weasel like you thinks? I don’t listen to misogyist fuckwits. Or don’t think in your case.
Some men do make bad decisions. They join gangs, do crime, drugs, etc, and pay for their decisisions. All their voluntary decisions. Some men do have mental illness preventing normal life and do need help, but they often prefer to live homeless rather than in the system. Fuck off, and keep your fuckwitted unevidenced opinions to yourself.
Nope, always comes down to privilege, until you provide citations to show otherwise. This is a scientific blog, not a bullshit blog.
Always?!? Taller men earn more on average that shorter men, are we to attribute that to drive and skill too? Good looking people earn more on average than ugly people, are we to attribute that to drive and skill too?
With all we know about the psychology of perception and how it comes to assessing the worth of others, I don’t know how you can make such a claim. The reality, no matter how much we like to think otherwise, is that our psychology and our cultural perceptions play a large role in determining how we assess and treat others. It’s established empirical fact.
You’ll be forgiven when you put the effort into looking at the how of the question (it has been studied in many ways) instead of giving a superficial dismissal of it.
Always?!?
Here’s the evidence for women in their 20s now earning 3.6% more. There’s a link to the Office of National Statistics. I’m linking to the Guardian just to show that even a far-left, consistently pro-feminist paper, where Naomi Wolf is a regular contributor, is admitting that women are pulling ahead in pay.
No, you’ll attribute that to superfical, frivolous factors taking priority over meaningful aptitude and technical skills. Which favours women, as it happens. See “communication skills”. Which doesn’t mean ability to get a point across.
So by this, you’re saying that women in their 30s and older just didn’t have the skill or competitive drive that women in their 20s do now? Or are you conceding that what you said before was ad hoc bullshit?
“There’s no gender gap for UK women in their 20s” doesn’t actually show that there’s no gender gap. On the contrary, even the article you cite showed at that there was ~10% gap overall.
Nope, not evidence from the US. Local market where you evidently fuckwit your inane OPINIONS from. But, what you don’t acknowledge, is to get that differential, more women are graduating college than men, so it isn’t apples to apples, oranges to oranges. Men hurt themselves by not getting an education. Now check back in 15 years…Context, you have nothing.
Uncited OPINION *POOF* dismissed as fuckwitted OPINION.
Yes, in the case where these factors favour particular men over other men it’s superficial, but when it favours men over women, it’s competitive drive and skill? You’re pulling answers out of your arse!
illithid, I check:
I click on the link’s link, I read its title, I read its opening remarks:
Gender pay gap falls below 10 per cent in 2011
“The gender pay gap has fallen below 10 per cent for the first time, according to data published today by the Office for National Statistics. Standing at 10.1 per cent in April 2010, the gap between men’s and women’s median full-time hourly earnings excluding overtime was down to 9.1 per cent in April 2011.”
Your point is that there’s a non-uniform distribution in pay disparity, with some exceptions to the overall divergence within certain subsets of the data?
(Nice point, if so, except you’ve now admitted there is such a pay gap)
So, it’s remarkable to you and should therefore be remarkable to us that this purportedly consistently biased mainstream medium publication must needs admit the utter power of this truth.
Interesting.
Yep, typical arrogant and ignorant liberturd/neocon drivel.
Maybe it’s because they’re better educated. But whatever the reason, it seems clear that women ar nowe pulling ahead in pay and the problem is being fixed.
The opposite is true with respect to all those gaps which favour women. The gap between women and men in education, for example, is ever widening.
The figure of 3.6% more earnings is true averaged over all jobs, remember. Even though men have harder, more physically exacting, and above all, more technically skilled jobs on average, women in their twenties are earning more. The culture of “soft skills” (which is essentially a euphemism for “no skills”) works to women’s advantage.
Uncited claim that it continutes *POOF* dismissed as fuckwittery, which is all you offer.
Citation, not your OPINION needed to show apples to apples, and oranges to oranges, so *POOF* OPINION dismissed as fuckwittery.
There’s no reason to assume that men are prettier or more charming than women. There’s no reason to assume they have stronger “communication skills” and other “soft skills”. The consensus is quite the opposite.
illithid:
And, via your own linked, there is a pay gap between sexes.
(Did you really imagine a pay gap means every single sex comparison results in the woman receiving less pay?)
Man, illithid, you have seriously swallowed every bit of toxic masculinity.
List of bullshit you believe:
Welfare queen exists.
soft skills = no skills = women’s advantage,
hard skills= hard work, physical & technical skills = men’s work.
Women get ahead due to being prettier and charming so the young women are fine. Fuck all those ugly & old bitchez.
Men get ahead due to skills, ambition and shit, yet you dismiss studies showing taller men are better off then short men.
You complain about housewives getting credit while househusbands do not, yet you perpetuate the same shit that leads people to that very conclusion.
And that’s all recently!
I applaud those still dealing with this fuckwit. I can’t anymore. It’s like everything wrong with patriarchy packed into one little asshole. I just can’t deal with being shit on from him anymore.
illithid rebuts (but does not refute) Kel thus:
Kel didn’t assume that, at all.
@J_A_L:
I’m still biologically a man, and I can’t take his toxic masculinity. I only, by proxy, feel for biological women, but he’s gone even beyond levels I can take without needing a shower.
Fuckwitted unevidenced OPINION, *POOF* dismissed as the fuckwittery and bigotry it is…
Ichthyic @208 asking of JonJermey @207
He indexed them, by the look of things. So you have to take him seriously when he offers his special insights.
One last point. This idea that sitting in a warm room and being charming deserves as much or greater pay as working on a cold construction site has poisoned the economy to an even greater extent than banking. The most important professions will be taken over by countries like Japan and China, which actually appreciate the value of honest toil. At the moment the economies of United States and Britain manage to survive by dining on their own excrement. There’s only so long you can last in an economy where honest workers are an underclass, and everybody else is either a con-artist or a pretty bird that’s pleasing to have around, but doesn’t really do much.
[meta]
illithid:
Since all your previous have been shot down, I think purported point is more like it.
Why, so it does.
It’s your idea, after all; one based on a total misrepresentation (which cannot be ruled out to be misapprehension) of others’ contentions.
Toiling is what you do, and where has it got you?
Don’t judge others (even States) by your own predilections.
Were I you, I too would be as sorry for being a wretch.
(Hard to have sympathy for you, but)
It’s really weird to read people answering me with what they imagine me to be saying. Is there something in my use of language that makes me so easily misread?
It’s like Illithid thinks that only men are construction workers and only women are administrative assistants…
@illithid:
You know, Mind Flayers are supposed to be really freakin’ smart. Are you sure you haven’t had your brain eaten by one?
Since you never had a point due to lack of solid and conclusive evidence, this, like all your fuckwittery, is a lie. Welecome to reality, where everything you say without citations is considered lies and bullshit…and it is.
Why is it that shitheads like illithid think their hard work is the only “honest work,” and what everyone else does is slacking or taking advantage of the system or outright exploiting others?
What kind of back-handed ad hominem is that? “Oh, all the honest jobs are moving to China.”
What’s funny is, the jobs that rely on toil are those most easily replaced by machinery. The real engine of economy is in the design and creation of machines that replace physical labor with automation. A job done largely by people with Charmin-soft hands in cushy offices. (This does, of course, ignore the vastly important work of scientists, of both the theoretical and experimental variety.)
Xe really has no clue on pretty much any subject xe attempts to address, does xe?
@nigel:
I guess I’m not an honest worker since most of my day is spent researching, writing, reaching out to colleagues and contacts who may know something about what I’m talking. I sit on a cushy chair, I have a fan blowing in my general direction, I can be on the Internets.
Here, I think, we have found the crux of illithid’s issue: the de-machofication of work. After all, office work requires no skill, which is why women, who have less skill than men, because they do better in school, do it better.
Or something.
Good point.
Japan is well-known for it’s labor-intensive heavy industry, while the majority of sweatshop workers in China are male. QED.
And by D I mean Duh.
So let me see if I get this straight –
Women, who are not in control of the economy or government, have forced society to accept that what they do best, which they do less of, is good. And that’s bad.
Or something.
Anyway, Power to the People!
And by people I mean real people, the ones with penises. And by penises, I mean real penises – big, strong, strapping, horse-like members breaking rocks and splitting logs in the windswept northwest, not the sad, flaccid, women-directed wormy members found in boardrooms and offices. Band together to save the penis!
…or am I reading too much into this?
Gee, here I help bring new drugs to market by designing workable and scalable chemical processes with proper paperwork for the regulatory bodies, I must be a parasite. Why doesn’t illithid apply for a similar job, as it pays well? Oh, that’s right, the proper education and experience are needed, and he went the route of being ignorant and inexperienced.
Don’t you realize, Nerd? Edumication makes you one of those evil East Coast Elites.
And, once again, Juliet de Farge decides that misogyny is something women have to clean up, not teh menz. Do a little Googling on how employers react to women who are strong negotiators.
Michael Blayney, to Illithid:
Just had to see that again.
And there you go bashing menz again. We get it, you think all of us white menz are parasitic idjits, just waiting to jump all over you for every little comment you make.
Rise up, Menz! Fight the Woman! End the oppression! You have nothing to lose but your low-paying, dead-end, dangerous filthy jobs!
@Kel:
Look, Kel, I really dislike your overt disparagement of people who don’t read and write English as their first language – and do so fluently!
If you wanna spout your English-first nonsense because of your “imagination”, then I suggest you do it on Free Republic. This is an anti-English space and always will be.
dammit. Maroon beat me to it.
Perhaps we should have a “Misreading Kel” contest.
I don’t know what Quadrant you’re posting from, but here over in Delta, the majority of workers are not machine-designers, or even computer programmers.
I’m not a “shithead” for thinking that a huge chunk of the economy hinges on exploting others. You have to be quite naive to believe that it doesn’t. Capitalism thrives on exploiting others, and any given bureaucracy, public or private, will grow in size as bureaucrats artifically inflate the complexity of their service to make themselves irreplaceable and to create more work for themselves.
Nor am I a misogynist for knowing that “Women continue to be highly overrepresented in clerical, service, and health-related occupations, while men tend to be over overrepresented in craft, operator, and laborer jobs” (Source>.) I have nothing against health-related occupations. The two other sectors mentioned in which women are overrepresented are the ones in which “soft skills” (which seems to be a euphemism for “ability to act charming”) are all-important.
A job performed overwhlemingly by men, you forgot to mention. Especially before the days of drop-dragging programming, when most of the graft was done. Computer programmers are not part of the “soft skills brigade”. (Even though to my great dismay, I’m learning that day by day they’re incrementally being subsumed. Google the Dilbert Principle.)
I suppose it’s useless to point out that administrative, and all medical positions (As opposed to doctors, which still are) were traditionally masculine until recently, at which point both prestige and salary dropped. Kind of like how early programming (with cards and such) was generally done by women, and considered easy, unimpressive work, until computing became mostly male, and suddenly the prestige appeared.
Also, with regards to murder: it’s worth asking who’s doing the murdering. (Hint: not generally women.)
(Headdesk)
False cause, Strawman, Special pleading, Black-or-white, Begging the question, Appeal to nature, Anecdotal, Cherry-picking, Personal incredulity, Appeal to emotion, Fallacy fallacy.
BINGO, like, five or six times already.
On Privilege
Here are the most male-dominated professions:
Brickmasons, Blockmasons, and Stonemasons
Roofers
Small Engine Mechanics
Cement Masons, Concrete Finishers, and Terrazzo Workers
Logging workers
Heating, Air Conditioning, Refrigeration Mechanics and Installers
Bus and Truck Mechanics and Diesel Engine Specialists
Tool and Die Makers
Structural Iron and Steel Workers
Crane and Tower Operators
Here are the most female-dominated professions:
Secretaries
Dental Hygienists and Dental Therapists
Early Childhood Educators and Assistants
Court Recorders and Medical Transcriptionists
Dietitians and Nutritionists
Audiologists and Speech-Language Pathologists
Babysitters, Nannies, and Parents’ Helpers
Receptionists and Switchboard Operators
Nurse Supervisors and Registered Nurses
Estheticians, Electrologists, and Related Occupations
All that liaising! Must be so tough!
Wow, ill. Are you totally stupid?
You may live in an area where the majority of work is hard labor, but that isn’t the fucking point and it never was. Those workers are not considered “economic drivers” ‘cos 1) they earn (relatively) low wages and 2) they’re easily replaced. More and more manual labor is being automated or shippd over seas where labor is even cheaper.
Geez, guys! I went from a manual labor job to a desk job earlier this year, does that make me a class traitor? Or does it not count ‘cos I’m a lady?
Oh yes. Bricklayers, roofers and steel workers are going to desk jobs in droves, I tell ya! In droves!
illithid:
No. You’re a shithead for insinuating that everyone who isn’t a heavy laborer is an exploiter.
I absolutely understand there is a divide between those who are exploited, and those who do the exploiting. There’s a strong reason for the Occupy movement, a movement to which I am sympathetic.
But heavy labor is neither more nor less noble than engineering a new backhoe, or designing a better engine, or writing architectural software.
I didn’t think I needed to. That wasn’t the point.
But since you bring it up, why do you think engineering, software development, and construction are male-dominated fields?
me:
Nor is it more noble than filing, answering help-desk calls, sweeping the floor and emptying the trash, or asking, “Do you want fries with that?”
I never said they were. But they’re not economic drivers, either, dumbass.
You are stupid, aren’t ya, illy?
Still no citations from the fuckwit so everything it says and concludes can be *POOF*, dismissed as fuckwittery. Most men don’t do “heavy labor” these days. More lies and bullshit. Nobody at our manufacturing site does “heavy labor”.
Also: if you compare manual labor that is traditionally done by men and manual labor that is traditionally performed by women, who wins out on the pay scale?
Indeed. Let’s stop laying bricks. Or working our own steel, so we have to get the Chinese to perform even the simplest of steel crafting. Not economic drivers, so who gives a shit? They’re just rednecks, after all.
@illithid #266
That’s exactly right, ill. You’ve convinced me. We SHOULD throw all blue-collar workers (especially the men!) under the bus, just like everyone here has been saying.
Oh. Wait. NO ONE has been saying that. And of all the commentors here, only one person has used the word “losers” to describe people (men, in particular) who fall through the cracks/ struggle financially/ work hard-labor or dangerous jobs. That commentor would be you. I don’t even know what you’re trying to say anymore.
Good job putting words in my mouth, asshole. I never called anyone a “redneck”, nor did I imply that anyone was a “redneck”.
The original point was about economics drivers, not your current pet theory that men have it so hard ‘co they’re construction workers. And do I detect some racial bigotry in your statement, too?
If you’d kindly answer my question: Who receives better pay: people who work in traditionally male manual labor jobs or traditionally female manual labor jobs?
Bricks have nothing to do with anything other than in your delusional mind…The economic engines in first world countries is driven by finance and technology. You must not be in either.
It’s interesting. The turtle appears to believe that men are paid more due to their talents and drive, but also that men have been failing out of the system (ie not finishing school, not gaining relevant work skills in order to get all those cushy jobs the wimmenz are getting), presumably because they are not talented and driven enough. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to believe that men are all superhuman or total failures.
Don’t be ridiculous Audley. Women can’t do manual labor! They are fluffy and silly things. All the women working as maids, elder assistants, and child care workers (not to mention male-dominated jobs) are really just sitting around in cushy chairs all day, doing their nails and gossiping.
Naturally, I didn’t say that. What I did indicate is that I see no reason why jobs requiring no skills other than “soft skills” should be so high paid. The natural hypothesis seems to be “people in power, taking care of their own”. Your hypothesis is more like, “The magic of the free market pays every worker what he or she deserves.”
No, more like “education” has little to do with what talents that are meaningful in succeeding in most professions.
Nepenthe,
And think about waitresses! They get at least thousands of dollars per week on average in tips and all for having the easiest, cushiest job EVAR!
Yes, because scientists, doctors, nurses, pilots, engineers, architects are all… Wait… Where do they fit in again? The underclass of hard working, brick laying, steal smelting Manly Men? Or the lazy parasitic pretty birds?
Wait a minute, I just noticed your nr.258! You apparantly do think people like nurses and dentists are mere parasites!
Fuck off, asshat.
Why do I get the feeling our fuckwit is not working at the moment, nor even actively looking for work? Perhaps because since it is a Menz™, it should be supported by a woman, who also fixes him a sammich on her lunch hour….
One system of comparing different jobs.
Okay, everyone, I think I have it figured out:
Men have it hard because they have to work hard labor. Or jobs that are technically skilled. Except that “education” isn’t meaningful in giving someone the skills needed in most professions. Which is why so many men are dropping out or not finishing school, because the technical skills are useless compared to skills you don’t get from “education”. And since they don’t get “eduction”, which probably has something to do with “soft skills”, they have to work hard labor, which is dangerous and doesn’t get paid as well as jobs that require technical skills or “education”.
I think I just reasoned myself into a circle, and now I’m all dizzy.
Everyone is hammering all of the other “points” made by this MRA fuckwit, but I haven’t seen this addressed – and it’s something that always pisses me off.
These stupid fucks who say, “DUR LOOK AT DA WELFARE QUEENS WHO HAVE A FLAT SCREEN AND AN XBOX FOR THEIR [little niglets, is what they often want to say, but are gracious enough to say] CHILDRENS!!! LOL OMG GAMING THE SYSTEM OMG THEY ARE BASICALLY RICH!!!”.
FUCK this pisses me off. I have no fucking money. Even when I was in the military making a decent living I didn’t have any fucking money, because I had to help my mother out quite a bit financially. I still have an flat screen and an Xbox.
Why? Because the flat screen cost me 100 bucks second hand, and the Xbox cost me 175. That’s 275 bucks. That’s like a fucking weeks wage. A fucking week.
It wouldn’t even feed a fucking family of 3 for more than a week or two.
These fucks pretend like a one time expense that keeps the children of poor family in fucking basic god damn entertainment comfort for yearsis fucking lavish, gold-plated, one-time-use frisbee’s that disintegrate upon use, purchased fucking daily at tax-payer burden.
God damn fuck the privilege of these assholes is infuriating.
I’ve even seen these arguments where the “luxury” in question is a fucking refigerator. A REFRIGERATOR.
Meh, I’m going to stop now, because I’m off the rails and am having difficulty with coherence and rational thinking what with the rage and all.
Tkreacher: Don’t you get it?
Poor people are lazy, worthless, and morally inferior. That’s how they get poor in the first place, duh!
They don’t deserve luxuries like entertainment for their children or food that doesn’t come dry and processed out of a box!
Liberturd scum like Illithid won’t be happy until poor people are cancelling christmas and selling beloved family pets because they can’t afford dog food any more. Then they will be worthy to lick up the crumbs under the table.
Don’t forget the implication that these welfare queens get this stuff in return for sexual favors (because they can just go ‘get a boyfriend’ and mooch off him, you see.)
I don’t understand the Turtle’s denigration of so called soft skills. Working as part of a team, effective asshole handling (an important part of any job!), and general not-being-a-tool are, in fact, skills. That’s why some people are better at sales and management than others.
Sure, it’s sad that macho-macho men are supposed to be assholes, and thus have been trained to have no soft skills, but I fail to see how that means that soft skills should automatically be devalued. (I mean, besides the fact that anything women do should automatically be devalued, obviously.)
And, if women are so great at soft skills, to the point where the poor men just can’t compete, why are men still paid more for jobs based on soft skills? Why are men vastly over-represented in upper management? How on earth did the world manage to run before women entered the workforce en masse? Why can’t the sad, sad men learn soft skills, like neuroatypical people must do?
I’m just so confused!
I can’t afford a flat screen television. I can’t afford an XBox. I’m only working 20 hours at the moment (it’s the most I can get), but I couldn’t afford either when I was working 40 hours either. Even taking your figure of $100 each (although I seriously doubt you can get a good flat screen that I had in mind for £100), I couldn’t afford it. I know more plenty of working class families who haven’t been able to afford flat screens and Xbox 360s.
So no, it’s not a question of privilege at all. I just happen to be better at critical thinking than you.
And another thing, shit-for-brains, is that flat screens and Xbox 360s are items for which the price is rapidly falling. A few years back and an Xbox would have cost £300, and a flat screen £1,000. Obviously most anecdotes your remember about so-called “weflare queens” are more likely to be from that period rather than the very present moment. The fact that prices have dropped doesn’t make anecdotes from last year (actually, not anecdotes — more like everyday life) suddenly invalid.
illithid:
I’d like to know exactly which of these “soft skills” jobs you’re referring to. So far you’ve just seemed to include anything that didn’t involve Manly Labor.
And I believe I have never spoken in support of some kind of magical free market. If you’ve read much of anything I’ve ever posted, including my response to you, I think you’ll find I readily agree there is vast socioeconomic disparity that exists because of the perpetuation of social status. This has nothing to do with some mythical Welfare Queen, but all to do with the fact that poor neighborhoods have no grocery stores, but plenty of convenience stores, pawn shops, underfunded schools, terrible public transportation, check-cashing kiosks (basically, modern-day loan sharks), and so on.
My hypothesis is more like, “Real Labor is not the economic driver it once was. Physical labor has been (and continues to be) displaced by modern technology.”
Basically, most everyone is underpaid. It’s not just you Manly Men. When a cashier or stocker at Wal*Mart can’t afford to live by shopping at Wal*Mart, there’s a problem.
illithid:
I do wish you’d start doing that, then.
Nepenthe,
OOOH!!!!! ME, MISS! ME! I KNOW, MISS!!!! I KNOW!!!!! MISSSSSSSS!!!!!
{Arcs out of chair like leaping dolphin}
It’s because learning be hard, miss. And men don’t have to learn ‘cos bitches ain’t shit, miss. Begging your pardon, miss.
Can I have a gold star, miss?
Louis
Okay you owe me a new irony meter. You just melted that last one.
It was a triple insulated, concrete reinforced, bunker situated Irony-o-matic 5000 with the extra platinum Sarc-o-flectors too. Melted. Molten. Pool of bubbling slag. Right now. Those things aren’t cheap buddy.
Incidentally, these “welfare queens” of which you speak, what would you like to see happen to them? A return to the 1800s perhaps?
Louis
Welfare queens get Time Travel too? UNFAIR!
Hey, tkreacher! Didja see the awesome way illithid sent your comment back in time when things were more expensive so that it would support his comment?
Ill, you could be making a fortune with that time-travel device. Clearly you’re not as good at critical thinking as you think you are. Or perhaps you’re just more ethical than I am.
Sorry fuckwit, you show no critical thinking abilities whatsoever. If you did, everything you say would be backed up by citations, otherwise everything you say is *POOF* dismissed as fuckwittery, as it is. I see nothing but what I would consider as anger on your part toward those whe actually get an education and then a good job based on that eduction, especially if they have ladyparts. And those people contribute much more to society than you do, and should be paid more.
@Louis (284)
That’s Ms. dammit! *slaps riding crop against palm*
All this jibbering and jabbering about welfare queens and undeserved ‘female privilege’ (blech), really seems to come down to an angry little shithead MRA who’s pissed off to see anyone he regards as ‘beneath’ himself get anything but the bare minimum of survival.
This is the face of privilege. A pissed off little bag of shit who thinks it’s ‘unfair’ that single mothers occasionally get ‘luxuries’ like big screen TVs or Xbox 360s for their children. I liked (despised) the implication that most of these welfare queens are just mooching off their ‘boyfriends’. Because, you know, women can just go out and ‘get a boyfriend’ just like that.
And these (surely poor, hardworking, honest, and put-upon) men never exploit, physically or sexually abuse, or take advantage of women in that situation.
It’s quite a simple principle. Receptionists and secretaries don’t deserve as much as skilled sheet steel workers, construction workers and the like. Having technical skills, as well as working under horrible conditions, means difficulty. This should be rewarded. Jobs which require little other than staying in a warm room and keeping things tidy and sounding pretty, are not jobs with as much difficult as most of the male-dominated professions I cited. It should not be surprising that men have higher pay on average.
You keep going on about technology, but actually you’re only proving my point. Technical fields are dominated by men. People with mastery of technology are overwhlemingly men. The typical starting salary nowadays from a computer programmer is £15,000. Significantly less than would be expected by a graduate in, say, human resources, who has no technical skills whatsoever, and probably better working conditions too. It’s a question of people in power (the bullshitters, the lingo-spouters, the soft skills brigade) taking care of their own. Remember the executivs who gave themselves 40% pay rises during the recession? That’s who I’m talking about. Interesting which side you choose to align yourself with. Think yourself a man of the left? I think you’re a fraud.
No, I’m merely giving an answer to why men are higher paid than women. I think the minimum wage should be much higher.
Nepenthe, #289,
My apologies, Ms.
Louis
P.S. On the subject of beatings, Stephen Fry, when he was being bullied at school, used to say something to the effect of “No, no! Don’t touch me, I’m becoming dangerously erect!”. Worked every time!
This is rich coming from a guy who spent the entire thread shitting out MRA talking points and self-righteous liberturd spew.
The morally bankrupt asshole is accusing you of fraud! The guy who goes on about how easy women have it thinks YOU’RE a ‘Fauxgressive.’
Feel proud, from a bag of shit on legs like this, there may be no higher compliment.
And yet you’ll find one in the home of every welfare queen.
Nothing. If anything, welfare should be bolstered. The majority of people on welfare are struggling. My point is merely that if you’re denying that a not-insignificant minority of welfare scammers does exist, then you’re deluding yourself. I know they exist, as I have some in my family.
illithid:
Why? I learned how to operate a hoe in 3 hours. It took me about three days to learn to be a hook tender. These are not highly-skilled jobs. It takes a receptionist a long time just to learn out to type at 60 WPM. These “unskilled” jobs require as much (or more) skill than many construction jobs.
At what point have I said those jobs shouldn’t be rewarded? Nowhere. In fact, I think you’ll find just the opposite.
My point is, these “unskilled” jobs require skills you likely will never possess. Just because a job looks easy doesn’t mean it is easy.
And receptionists and secretaries don’t make a whole helluva lot either.
myeck waters and mythbri,
No no, guys. Time machines used to cost much more in the past, which is where illithid would go to buy his time machine, see? And he couldn’t afford a time machine at what they used to cost in the past, because he’s only working 20 hours a week, see?
But if he were a lesser man, the kind of man who would, like a woman, get a child and go on welfare and use his welfare queen money while working in a climate controlled office being charming and using soft skills like having sex while playing chess – poorly – he could go back into the past and afford a time machine.
How would he get to the past without first having a time machine, you ask?
Well, obviously, google and men’s hardships and welfare queen magic and other stuff like critical thinking and such.
Ah, yes, all those women captains of industry leeching off the poor but honest working man.
That maybe one’s ability to contribute economic value to the company is irrelevant here. Nice to know that you’re not a capitalist.
You’re anti-welfare, so I know you’re not a socialist.
Do you have any ideology or philosophy at all? I mean, other than believing and saying whatever you think benefits you in a given moment?
Or maybe we’re underestimating you & you’re a feudalist?
illithid:
So? Where’s your hard numbers?
My wife was regional director for a welfare-to-work program. The vast majority of people on welfare just want a job that pays a living wage. The percentage of recalcitrant welfare recipients was less than 1%.
That’s hardly “not-insignificant.” In fact, I’d say that’s hardly significant at all.
Whoops. Hadn’t read #296.
Looks like illithid might be a socialist after all. Power to the People! The Penis-People!
aren’t the health risks associated with sitting around hunched over a desk all day flailing away with your fingers… if not similar than at least comparable to the health risks in industry? Stuff like back problems, weight gain, soreness and stiffness, carpal tunnel syndrome, etc etc?
Illithid, #296,
Well you and I agree on that at least. Have people here denied the existence of welfare scammers then?
Incidentally how much does welfare fraud cost the Exchequer? And how much does corporate tax evasion and avoidance cost the Exchequer? Any ideas?
Louis
(Assuming the posters were “guys” was used in my last post intentionally, as part of the sarcasm, btw. Not that I never make the mistake of assuming gender without warrant. ;) )
@illithid #292
You barged into this thread denying that any such pay gap existed, and now you’re trying to justify it. I would say that my head exploded Scanners-style, but frankly I’m not surprised at all.
Have you given any thought to the time-travel method of money-making I pitched? If not, will you sell it to me? SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!
A hoe? What the fuck are you talking about? I mentioned construction and steelworking. These professions can’t be picked up in three hours or three months.
As for receptionists. Last I knew, most receptionists didn’t have to be typists. It’s also an interesting political philosophy you have there. Those kids fortunate enough to have had the Internet at home, who developed typing skills, can work sitting down in a warm room for the rest of their lives. The lower classes, who weren’t fortunate enough to have computers, should get back to their turnips.
Aside:
In all seriousness I think there may be a kernel of a point at the core of what Illithid is getting at. The establishment, and in particular much of the liberal-left in the UK and the EU have largely abandoned and poured scorn on the working classes, particularly the white working class (see dismissive comments about chavs etc).
The liberal-left has suffered, and been somewhat riven, since the demise of 20th century fascism and there have been loud voices raised against traditionally socialist bodies like trades unions and the like. It’s been unpleasant, speaking as a liberal -leftie, to see my supposed comrades (word used advisedly) abandoning solidarity with unions worldwide (for example) for the sake of maintaining anti-corporate ideals. Why not do both?
His comment of privilege are…I’ll be generous…poisonously wrong. He doesn’t understand the concept and has focused on the word itself. An all too common error. But a criticism of the establishment abandoning the working classes is far too often absent in leftist critiques of the status quo in popular media I find. If that’s part of his point, he’s right about it.
Louis
@mythbri 306
Not only that, but he’s justified it by saying that men earn more because they do dangerous and unpleasant jobs, but also that said dangerous and unpleasant jobs are paid less than the obviously cushy jobs all the women have. It’s… I’m just so confused. If men are paid less than women, how do they earn more than women? Is there a man bonus given post-wages that I was previously unaware of?
I’m getting a headache; I may have to go lie down.
As I said earlier… aren’t the health risks associated with spending a large part of the day seated at a desk, staring at what basically amounts to a huge light, furiously typing away, at least as valid as the health risks associated with smelting steel and fighting grizzly bears and all the other ‘manly’ occupations this guy faps over?
And construction workers just hang out outside, pounding on shit and putting things on top of other things. Where’s the difficulty?
Sounds like playtime when I was six years old.
I fought a grizzly bear in the lab once.
Never, ever, EVER get drunk, kidnap a grizzly and give it acid. It only pisses them off.*
Louis
* Some of the above may not be true. It was a rabbit. Wellll, when I say rabbit, Paramecium. But that things was really pissed off. It broke my microscope and everything.
The Penis-People who are skilled labourers who toil under horrible conditions, and receive absolutely no appreciation for their efforts. But who cares! They’re just oxen-like morons mindlessly pushing hoes. Did I mention that being charming in a warm room is the highest skilled job in the universe?
@Nepenthe #306
Because…because LOOK OVER THERE! SOMETHING SHINY THAT DISPROPORTIONATELY AFFECTS MEN, BUT ISN’T BECAUSE OF HARMFUL PATRIARCHAL STRUCTURES!
@illithid
I’m still waiting for your response to my offer. Or is time-travel too hoity-toity and “soft-skilled” for you?
Feralboy12, #311,
I’m sorry. I know a number of builders and that is not what they do at all. They rock up early in the morning, have a cooked breakfast, start drinking, maybe have a spliff depending on their proclivities, lounge about on site reading the Sun and making comments about the tits on page three, casually steal a bit of copper or a couple of useful items off the site for later sale down the pub, lay a brick, cut a joist, toddle off for a liquid lunch, look at the strippers in the local pub, have a cheeky casual vomit on the way back to site, swear at passers by a bit, piss in the sink of whatever they are building, have a cheeky wank over a copy of Club International in a deserted bit of the site, go to the pub, sell stolen goods, go home via knocking shop.
Best summer job I ever had.
Louis
* Again, some of the above might not be true.
I confess to being confused.
I have a job that puts me in an office, at a computer, for more than half the time. Does that mean that I have displaced a mere woman and am thus getting paid more? or that I have displaced a highly educated woman and should thus be paid less? What about the time I spend conduncting tours in a shop in which we rebuild locomotives? Is that manly work (big fucking machines) and I should be paid less? or is that women’s work (talking about the big machines) and I should be paid more? How about the time I spend at forest fires and other federal incidents? What does that get figured under? Am I doing man’s work so I get more income but am paid less? Or am I doing women’s work so I get less income but am paid more?
Has ill answered my question: what pays more? “Male” manal labor or “female” manual labor?
Wow there, Captain Asshat, you did mention secretaries. Secretaries generally are typists. (Actually, a lot of receptionists are too, go figure)
@Ogvorbis #317
Are you charming and pretty while you sit at your desk? Do you have “soft skills”?
No, no, no. If it doesn’t require a He-man like musculature, it’s not a skill. You see. That’s why all these people:
are just Pretty Birds. You see, if you’re not a builder, a steel worker or a WWE Wrestler, you’re a parasite oppressing the real workers.
Well, believe it or not, but creating real-life buildings isn’t Lego. But for the sake of argument, even if you were correct (you’re not), we still have the following factors:
(1) Construction is physically taxing, and you’re liable to be exhuasted when you finish work. Even standing all day can be draining, but construction workers do a deal more.
(2) You’re outside exposed to the elements — in particular, the cold and rain.
(3) Much greater risk of physical injury than receptionists.
I maintain that it’s only decent and proper that men have higher average pay than women.
illithid:
Wait, what now? I started on £18,300 and that was 20 years ago.
Try this. £14-46k.
Oh look. £14-25k. Quelle surprise.
And if I look at where the likely job growth is going to be over the next ten years, I might surmise that you’re simply snooty about those icky soft-skill jobs (home health care? child care?) that you simply detest for being somehow unmanly.
—
You know, I’ve been the hiring manager for dozens of those sit-down, air-conditioned, well-paid jobs, and I can only say this: if you got over your inverse class snobbery and deigned to apply for one of them, I’d have shitcanned you at first interview for being a whiny over-priveleged asshole.
When I think “unskilled cushy labor, requiring no physical work, only smiling at people and being charming” I think nurse. All the nurses I’ve ever met were dumb, pretty women who would break a nail at the thought of lifting a patient or dealing with… bodily fluids.
And that’s the other thing I’ve noticed about nursing. At the end of their 10-12 hour shifts, nurses seem so spry and fresh, ready to go run a marathon or something, if women were capable of doing those physical things. They also are rarely exposed to dangerous conditions, like violent patients, toxic chemicals, or communicable diseases.
Yes? And now it’s different. I’m currently trying to get a job in computer programming myself. I’d consider myself lucky to start at £15,000. I don’t have a comp sci degree, but most people going after these same jobs do. In fact, it’s so competitive now that unpaid internships are quite commonplace.
I admit it. When I was working as a nuclear mechanic in the Navy I was paid much less than what I get now as a computer gazing executive.
Nepenthe, you get the benefit of my doubt, but 324 scared me until i saw 325. Whew!
@Audley #318:
No.
I consider nursing to be one of the most honourable professions period.
@illithid #326
So were you forced out of getting a computer science degree by a woman? Would you not have learned valuable skills from such an “education”? Were you learning too many or not enough “soft skills”? If you’re looking for a job (best of luck, by the way) that will likely require you to spend your day sitting in a warm room in front of a computer, does that make you a parasite on the backs of men who do real work?
@illithid, #326:
Bwahahahahahahaha!
I am so sad that little lad wants to work in a field without proving to his employer that he has significant skills…and that as a result, he starts near the bottom of the pay scale.
How horrid!
How unfair!
@329
But nurses are mostly women! And women do cushy jobs! Damn, you are a confusing little turtle.
@Crip Dyke
Sorry, should have been more clear about my sarcasm. I know too many doctors and have been a patient too many times not to have immense respect for nurses and the difficulty and underpaid, underappreciatedness of that job.
Illithid,
Just out of idle curiosity: do you think that the difficulty of “working under horrible conditions” alone should be rewarded?
Regardless of whether it’s Penis-People with something you would consider “technical skills.”
Good to see you can recognize a strawman argument when somebody else makes it. Now try turning that critical thinking skill on your own straw people.
Sorry fuckwit, half the chemists are women these days. Women are in engineering and other technical professions, and their numbers are increasing. You appear to be particularly stupid, and don’t look around you, and at facts. Now, even in my field, chemistry, starting salaries are equal, but not after a few years on the job. Male privilege, rewarding the males before the females.
And that makes your chances of such a job??? And do you know why having degrees are important??? It isn’t just knowing the programming language, but the structure and algorithms of programming too.
@Nerd of Redhead 335
But programming is a technical skill. Which men have. Just because. Only women would have to go to school to be educated in a technical skill. Or something.
I’m going to have to take an aspirin.
Oh, I think our fuckwit is confusing computer programming with data entry, which isn’t programming, but using computers. That would make the expected salary reasonable.
Actually, I do have to prove my skills. There’s programming tests, which I pass with flying colours. There’s questions about object-oriented methodology in interviews. There’s sometimes a request to see the projects I’ve worked on. Twice now I’ve gone through all of this and have been rejected in the interview for, as far as I can tell, subjective reasons. (One interviewer was frank enough to say that I wouldn’t fit into the business environment.) Meanwhile, a human resources person with a degree in Psychology can “prove she has significant skills” by spouting some buzzwords in an interview.
And no, I’m not a “little lad”. I’m fast approaching 30. It’s not an easy economy for someone who doesn’t have “people skills”, yet doesn’t want to spend his life pushing hoes.
Anyway, this is not about me. It’s about how the doctrine of “soft skills” is stifling our economy.
@illithid
Of course, that argument relies on two assumptions:
1. that those jobs are “for” men
2. that they justify the PRESENT wage gap.
1 stems from sexism and 2 is bass-ackwards bullshit.
Illithid,
But you’re also maintaining that the most deserving type of work isn’t being rewarded properly.
So, at best, it looks like that difference in average pay doesn’t exist for the reasons you’re arguing it’s justified.
Ahem. It’s also being able to talk to people and find out what they do, and how they do it, and what they really
wantneed. You know, soft-skill stuff.Where do garbage collectors fit in this scheme of merit?
No, the “fuckwit” is not. He programs in C++ and Java and can expect a starting salary of £15,000.
If your personality in your interviews is like what you’ve displayed on FTB, I can’t say I’m surprised. Not getting a job sucks, and having skills is important, but all jobs require working with other people to some extent, in many to most cases very closely with other people for long periods of time, and nobody wants to work with a self-important jerk. If you’re being told you come off that way,
evenespecially if you don’t know what you’re doing to cause that impression, you need to invest in some social skills work either through classes or personal therapy.Since the others are busy giving you a well-deserved verbal bashing, I’ll give you some well meaning advice.
Usually – a statement like this from an interviewer can be transelate as: You come across as disruptive to the working environment. From your performance here I would guess that would be from a certain lack of social skills.
The good news: Social skills are skills. They can be trained. The best exercise: When you meet negative attitudes from other people, stop, think and come up with at least three possible reasons – at least two should be within your own sphere of control. (ie -“he’s an femnazi idiot doesn’t really cut it)
@the turtle 338
You know that you’re able to learn soft skills, right? You too, could learn how to not be an asshole. If you conduct yourself in interviews in anyway similar to how you conduct yourself here, I wouldn’t fucking hire you either, because you wouldn’t fit into a business environment. Or any environment where other people were present.
Sorry, you are still a youngster to those of us with AARP cards. And it sounds like you are putting the blame for your problems everywhere but where it belongs. On you. If you need people skills, find the equivalent of Toastmasters and learn how to meet and interact with other people. Here you come off as a you-think-you-know-it-all liberturd. I would learn to how to be less of a know-it-all. In fact, you being interesting what other people think, rather than your pontificating and showing your ignorance and misogyny, would help you tremendously. The best conversationalists are those who are interested in others.
Ohhhhhhhhhh. I see now…..
Women don’t ever REALLY have significant skills, especially when they’re applying for jobs with a degree.
Men, on the other hand, even WITHOUT a degree, can have significant skills – and probably do, just by virtue of possessing the Y chromosome.
Illithid, I’m going to give you some free advice: you should perhaps examine WHY you might not fit in a business environment. If you come into interviews with a neon-blinking ENTITLEMENT logo hanging over you like the sword of Damocles, you won’t be hired. And just judging by the way you’ve behaved in this thread and the opinions that you’ve spouted, you seem like you would be unable to work in a diverse environment without causing problems. Work on that.
Here in the states I would expect an entry level programmer to get $40,000-60,000, depending on company and skills, based on the median salary.
If some tech companies were hiring too many people with certain skills and not enough with others, it would be only a short time before other companies which had a more efficient balance rose to the top.
Thus the “problem” you claim exists probably doesn’t exist.
I thought we agreed you’d keep your filthy “hobby” out of the discussions in here.
It’s outdoor work with bad smells and at least some physical exertion, so I imagine it rates pretty high. And I don’t know what it’s like now, but 30 years ago it paid relatively well.
I’ve only known one person who actually did that sort of work, though, and I’m only relating what she told me about it.
illithid:
So, operating a backhoe isn’t construction?
I’m talking about manly men jobs. You know, digging in shit, cutting down trees, blowing shit up (the family profession, as it turns out).
What the fuck are you talking about? Nailing sticks of wood together?
I worked a summer job as a carpenter. Picked it up in a month.
I think I already explained that to you here.
Third time’s the charm! /snark
Let me repeat: I hire for these roles. For every vacancy, I typically review 40-50 CVs, first-interview 8-12 people, and further-interview 4 or 5 of those. Even then, sometimes it goes unfilled because we can’t find the “right” person. It’s hard.
Whining about two (two!) rejections, however, is just pathetic.
Several years ago the folks next door rehabbed the building. I helped out some, and when the schedule got tight they hired a professional carpenter also.
He spent the entire time bitching because they hadn’t rented a nail gun and he had to drive the nails with a hammer.
‘Tis Himself:
And when I worked construction (during my high school summers, operating a hoe) I got paid way better than I did as a network engineer at college.
Huh. Funny how that works.
myeck waters:
Bwaaaah-haaa-haa.
I’m not surprised.
There was an article awhile back about Habitat For Humanity. In some hurricane-ridden places, the HFH houses stood up better than the professionally-built, far more expensive houses.
As it turns out, not being able to drive a straight nail has some structural advantages.
I would add engineering/design methodology too.
People can often learn languages and concepts well enough on their own, and make things that work rather well.
But the thing is most commercial software projects nowadays are huge things in which many coders will participate. Those take management skills as well as pure technical ones (if you don’t believe that, it’s that you’ve never undertaken any sizable project yet). And the willingness to conform to the architecture and commenting style that is decided by the project manager, and to listen to your clients, however boneheaded their requests might seem to you.
Those who think engineers of all stripes can survive on technical skill alone, nowadays, are in for a very disagreeable wake-up call.
I’m talking about manly men jobs. You know, digging in shit, cutting down trees,
I JUST HAVE TO
kemist:
Without some people skills, you won’t get very far.
Ichthyic:
I knew that was coming. Thanks for taking the setup and running with it.
(I’ve never been a faller. And I didn’t set chokers for very long, so I can’t say I was ever a logger.)
Well, you unsubtle creature from the fucking Pharyngula slimepit
since demented fuckwits tend to project, I’m guessing we now know from whence this piece of shit came.
now who has something they call the “slimepit”, and is full of moronic wanking MRAs?
who could that be?
hmm.
Oh, fuck, she’s on to us, guys. Quick, execute CODE W.
You couldn’t do that legally or safely here.
Construction jobs are highly unionized. They check any construction site that is bigger than a shack. And they are not above threats of physical harm.
You want a code monkey job ?
Learn Cobol and VB.
I’m very serious. Those are so much needed by many companies, especially in finance and insurance, they are not above recruiting in the streets. They have obsolete systems in urgent need of maintenance.
Everybody knows C++ and java. Those are the first languages that are taught in comp. sci. degrees.
WaM:
Is that the one where we pick up a six-pack at the door?
I really hope so.
kemist:
Nah. I worked for my mom’s boyfriend, who built his own houses to rent. I was earning money for computer camp, of all things. This was the year TRON came out.
I honestly can’t say I learned carpentry. I cut boards to length (some of them even mitered, near the end) and hung sheetrock and tacked down roofing and helped build trusses, but really, I couldn’t’ve built a house on my own at the end. But I learned a helluva lot, and Claire told me he’d hire me back next summer if I wanted. So I must not’ve sucked too bad.
Computer camp was fucking awesome. I found out there were other geeks in the world. Actually, I found out what a geek really was. Also, I programmed a CompuColor II.
illithid said:
Probably astute enough to realise your misogyny was a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Well I can assure you, it’s nowhere near that in the UK, the “soft skills” capital of the world. Nowhere close. Maybe if you’re top of the class at a major university you could hope for a salary at the bottom end of that range after graduating. Otherwise, you’re looking at £15,000, or £20,000 for a London job. Which is significantly less than most “soft skills” jobs.
Oh noes. Why did you say that word? I haz an Ohrwurm now.
@illithid #368
So, we’re tabling the time-travel venture for now? You’re busy, I get it. I’ll have my people call your people and we’ll do lunch. Or, you can have your people *have called* my people and we will have already done lunch – whatever works best for you.
Jeebus crist sorry for embedding. I am such a dunce.
But that’s not what I said, is it? Also, it’s not the rejections I’m complaining about. It’s the fact that I’m having to demonstrate advanced skills merely to stand a shot of landing a low-paid job.
Suppose I could give it a whirl. Thanks.
No, no, no. It’s margaritas and mai tais. You know, soft drinks.
If FTB had a “Like” button, Matt Penfold @#367 would have been “Like”d.
No, you couldn’t.
I’m sure you worked hard and learned stuff, but the whole carpentry gig involves a lot more. Like Jeebus, I’m the son of a carpenter who did some of the same stuff you did.
My dad, on the other hand, could read a blueprint and turn it into a real thing. It required some math, some engineering knowledge, some knowledge of how things like plumbing and electrical wiring worked, how concrete was poured, how to safely use power saws and other tools, and, of course, how to drive a nail. This was back in the day before nailguns.
And when you’re driving a few thousand nails a day, being fast and accurate adds up to a lot of money saved. That was an actual skill back then.
Every job is easier when somebody else is doing it.
Most jobs are easy until something out of the ordinary happens, or something goes wrong. Then you find out who knows what they are doing and who doesn’t.
Now on one hand we got slapping in some code, on the other we got dealing with people. One of these sets of skills is actually quite hard.
Big hint: It’s not what you think it is.
Advanced skills like liaising?
illithid — this is honestly some good advice. Not fun, but good advice.
Advanced skills like computer programming. I don’t consider liasing to be an advanced skill, or indeed a meaningful skill at all. Do try to keep up.
Advanced skills like making eye-contact and answering spoken questions using full sentences.
@illithid #381
And that, young Skywalker, is why you fail.
Mythbri, 383:
+1 for you.
Best get used to a shit job then. One you most likely won’t be able to keep. Hint: liasing is necessary and helpful in every job.
I know. That’s just one of the many reasons you interview like a fuck.
Sorry, but I’ve got this job I landed with my soft and hard skills, you see. Keeps me busy.
I’m sure I’ve got some work around the house I could pay you to do, as long as you agree to wear duct tape over your mouth.
Exactly. Writing code is not hard. What is harder is taking what the client says they want, and translating that into meaningful targets in terms of what the project is supposed to achieve. Not least because the client does not really know what they want from the project.
If illithid does not understand this is is little wonder he is having problems getting a job.
Computer programming is not an advanced skill.
Whoever told you it was ?
Anyway, after receiving some thoughtful replies, I can’t summon up any anger at the moment. I’d rather leave before we start tearing into each other once again. Clocking off now. Penis owners of the world unite and all that.
And I’m not sorry for the asshole in the least. I’ve worked with my share of his types, and they’re so full on Dunning-Kruger it takes months to undo the fuck-ups they typically make.
What a fucking shitbag.
Why should any intelligent male bond with you? Learn some people skills, and the above is a prime example of what you want to avoid at all costs…
It’s a joke, you fuckhead.
How about interviewing prospective job applicants? Do you sneer at that sort of work as well?
Good luck with your next application.
Hmmmm. Not sure. COBOL will probably be automatically translated into something else over time. VB (and its evil sibling VBA) are headed towards wholesale replacement by C# and VSTO. (There’s software to automate this too, but frankly, it’s probably worth asking if it wouldn’t be worth redesigning the whole thing from scratch.)
The really nasty one is MUMPS, in which most of the VA healthcare (Veterans’ Administration, not Commonwealth of Virginia) system is written.
C++ is never a bad thing to know, but I’d say learn some of the scripting languages that can sit on top of it, too (Python w/ Boost, for example). Similarly, if you went Java, I’d say learn Groovy as a complement.
I’ll do the jokes around here. Comedy’s a social skill.
So was all that other crap about men and money a joke, too?
That would explain it. illithid just admitted he does not do social skills, indeed does not see that as skills at all.
slightly malapropos
And more on-topic: Why do always the blockheads insists on demonstrating a lacking sense of humour as an encore after a “I got no social skills”-show?
This could actually be one of the wisest flounces I’ve ever seen. Perhaps our little Illithid is learning something after a…
Oh, nevermind then. Your ‘joke’ was in pretty poor taste.
VB (and its evil sibling VBA) are headed towards wholesale replacement by C# and VSTO
I don’t program any more, but when I did, back in the late 90s, even then that was where it seemed to be heading.
…well, the C sharp anyway.
Sure it was, sure. Pretty much revealed what’s in that mostly empty head of yours, too. Shitbag.
Normally we just conclude that the person has no social skills from what they say and how they say it. In illithid’s case he saved us the bother and came out an admitted not only does he not have social skills he also sees no use for them.
You have to admit, as fuckwits go he is pretty good.
Well, even if Illithid didn’t learn a lick of fuck about anything, I think I might have:
Is this what lurks behind all the MRA bullshit we see spouted? Could it be that at the heart of it all is just an angry, entitled idiot who blames everyone else for his own lack of social skills?
He tells us he doesn’t even consider social skills (that is what this liaising stuff is about, right? I’ve never heard the term before…) a skill, and then whines about women earning money for these ‘nonskills’.
I’d be tempted to feel sorry for him at this point, but we all remember that story about the young maiden who found a viper freezing in the snow and put him in her jacket to warm him back up…
In many cases, yes. I thought that was kind of obvious.
Yeap. Liaising is really just a way of saying being able to listen to people, understand what they are saying and put your position to them in way that does not piss them off.
In otherwords, being able to get on and work with people. And the fuckwit wonders why he cannot get a job when he so readily admits he cannot only not do that, he also see no point in doing it.
TLC
“liaising” is a linguistic abomination derived from:
Liaison
in general means:
Communication between two or more groups.
Co-operation, working together.
(from wikipedia)
Liaising is really just a way of saying being able to listen to people, understand what they are saying and put your position to them in way that does not piss them off.
so… framing.
/Nisbet
Brownian: In hindsight… it should have been.
In my defense: I plead newness to a lot of these concepts. Incidentally, thanks Matt and Chigau for confirming my understanding of ‘Liaising’ for me.
TLC:
It’s shorthand for communication skills and being able to cope with other people. IOW, being able to play well with others. Christ, I’m self-employed and it’s an utterly crucial skill to getting my hands on cold hard cash and acquiring new clients.
TLC:
DING DING DING DING DING! Give the Coyote a steak bone*!
“Give me a job, even though I don’t have the skills or education that are required for said job!” (Shit, dude, consider yourself lucky that you even got an interview.) “I didn’t get the job and it’s the fault of women for making manly jobs all soft, not my lack of training or interpersonal skills. Of course not. Stupid women!”
*Coyotes, being canines, like to gnaw on bones, yeah?
Sorry. Didn’t mean to put you on the defensive.
Let me put it another way: I’ve met very few bigots, be they sexist or racist, who didn’t blame the object of their hate for their failings.
When I worked construction and demo, I knew almost nothing (though I certainly knew how to destroy stuff efficiently). This Liaising thing you speak of meant people liked talking to me about what they were doing and seemed happy to answer my questions. I learned much. I mean yeah, basic stuff, but it was stuff I never understood before. Being able to talk to and learn from people meant that it really didn’t matter much that I had no experience.
That and a healthy dose of humility… a willingness to pick up a broom and dustban (yes, dustban) and play janitor for a few hours.
I freakin love steak bones Audley, thanks!
Good way of putting it. I shall remember it.
No, I didn’t say that I don’t get on and work with people. What I said is that I don’t like small-talk and usually prefer to keep my own company. I like to cut through all the bullshit and say exactly what needs to be said. Perhaps I’m naive in trusting that people will usually be adult enough to see there’s no harm in doing that.
This intolerance we’re seeing of anyone who isn’t a specialist in smalltalk is evocative of a number of things. Such as, the broken economy; the offshoring of industry and concomitant ascent of the so-called “financial services”, which has laid whole communities to waste; the loss of technological leadership of the West, and more generally, the decline of Western civilization.
TLC:
:D
I totally get how you’re feeling about this. All of a sudden, something that made no sense before just clicks!. It truly feels like a light bulb just turned on.
Brownian’s right– bigots almost universally blame their failings on everyone else. How many times have you heard arguments like these: Got no job? Undocumented immigrants are to blame for taking jobs away from hard working citizens. Didn’t get into your first choice college? Because of affirmative action, an under-qualified person of color &/or woman got “your” spot. Fell like you’re paying too much in taxes? It’s those damned welfare queen gaming the system. Etc etc etc.
Even then, it’s a skill that’s seldom put into place in practice. The programming is very much monkey work, and comprises of a small part of the job – most of the rest is business-related where you’re spending much of your time being told what to do by business analysts or fighting with managers or arguing with testers. Most of what you learned theoretically is something rarely put into practice, deadlines prevent you from coding well, and the main skill that you’re going to acquire is a domain knowledge that will mean that you’re probably going to be stuck on maintenance trying to fix code from other people who were in a similar situation but have a different way of coding from you.
The advanced skill is not going insane.
These statements are contradictory. You are upset at having to display “advanced skills” to get a job, because you do not have such skills. Yet you think those skills are computer programming, which you say you do know. Read those two blockquotes together, and think about them really hard, and then think about what those “advanced skills” are that you’re lacking.
I REFUSE TO LET THAT BE A WORD. JUST CALL IT COMMUNICATION.
@Laughing Coyote
Yup, you’ve pretty much nailed it – if illithid is a heterosexual male who isn’t very successful with women, it would only feed into the persona lurking behind the self-righteous MRA bullshit (just as he is entitled to a job with his advanced skills over women with soft skills, he is entitled to female attention despite his lack of interpersonal skills and misogynist attitudes).
There are a few things that could be considered tip-offs. Illithid mentioned he was approaching 30 – that’s right where I am, and I’ve had a few “Oh shit! This is my life, it’s all on ME, and there are all these things I have to do, and it’s HARD!” moments. I get that – but rather than finding someone or something to blame for this rough patch in my life, I’m doing my best to be an active participant in my own life, and realize that the only things that are completely under my control are my actions and decisions. I can see the appeal in finding a scapegoat for everything that scares or frustrates me about my circumstances, but it wouldn’t actually make my circumstances any better. It would just make me a hard and bitter person, wrapped up in my own tragedy and sense of being wronged by the world.
I’ve got better things to do.
“exactly what needs to be said” being what YOU DECIDE needs to be said, without any consideration whatsoever for what other people think need or need not to be said.
This intolerance is NOT of “anyone who isn’t a specialist in smalltalk”, it is nor anyone who isn’t a specialist in NOT ACTING LIKE A TOTAL SHITHEAD ALL THE TIME.
If it had been sincere, then the fact that you are the type of person who would have considered it appropriate to say something like that, and mean it, tells us much about your character, or lack thereof.
If it is a joke, then the fact that you are the type of person who considers it appropriate to make a joke about something like that, in that fashion, also tells us much about your character, or lack thereof.
And the thing that either option tells us about your character, or lack thereof, IS EXACTLY THE SAME.
So it is of sublime irrelevance whether your were actually joking or not.
And, as we used to say at my old job: “Strong NO HIRE.”
I wonder if illithid has is mind some mythic halcyon period back in the 60’s and 70’s when programmers just wrote code to someone else’s design and did not have to interact with people very much.
I doubt that it was true then. It certainly is not true now.
Any programmers get the joke? Anyone? Alan Kay? Anyone …?
Oh, and illithid, dealing with fuckwits, fools, cretins and people who you would otherwise chew your leg off to avoid are part of the work environment, and if you cannot or will not work out how to deal with such people you are unlikely to get a job, and if you do unlikely to keep it.
Well it did make me smile, but then I reckoned illithid had not meant it as a joke. He does not strike me as that intelligent.
No one flashed the Moonbat signal, delusional douche. Back to your cave.
I’ve got better things to do.
well, yeah, you’ve got all those new programming skills to learn.
if you come back, might I suggest a visit to the TZT thread for you?
it’s really not a zombie pen.
honest.
(MP, of course he didn’t mean it. It can still be a joke.)
doh! sorry mythbri, somehow your post popped up over one I was reading by illithid, and I thought YOU had posted that.
I think my puter needs a reboot.
gets a bit unstable with 17 browser windows open.
…and by YOU i meant Illithid.
*sigh*
just shoot me so I’m no longer distracted and can get back to work writing my proposal.
@Ichthyic
No problem – I’ll admit that I was confused about why I’d be directed to TZT, and I’m absolutely terrible at programming. ;)
Kel:
Indeed. Most of the hard parts of CompSci are already in the libraries. For a job interview a couple of years ago, I had to write a graph algorithm, which I did, to their satisfaction.
Then, I rewrote it using JGraphT and it went even faster. There are very few situations in which this would not have been good, or fast, enough.
The hard part’s not working out how to do stuff.
It’s working out what stuff to do.
Or even working out what the client wants so you can work out what stuff to do.
You mean liaising?
Or, as Jerry Weinberg will tell you, working out why the client is so fucked up that they’ll ask you for stupid stuff, and then explaining to them that they’re wrong in such a nice way that they’ll pay you for it.
http://secretsofconsulting.blogspot.co.uk/
;)
Everybody says that. I laughed a few years ago when I saw adds for Cobol programmers.
But in businesses like banks and insurance companies, change is very slow (Hell, my work PC uses Windows XP). Their massive data systems were often developped in-house at high cost by employees who are now retired. Replacing those systems costs a huge amount of money and they tend to wait until it’s not possible to do otherwise – and even then…
The banking/insurance company I work for these days has the same data management system since the early 80’s that was programmed in COBOL. They need to update it, are desperate for people who know COBOL, and give cash bonuses (around 1000$ or sometimes more) to anybody who will bring them a new coder.
A few concepts/languages to look up if you want to make a good impression as a coder for a banking/insurance company :
– COBOL
– COBOL.net (yes, that exists. Tremble in fear, muahahahaha !)
– VB / VBA
– SQL – esp. with Oracle
– Business Intelligence
Yeah, I did grin a bit when I read that.
But I tend not to laugh openly at these since I got embarrassed once when I didn’t know brainfuck and lolcode were actual languages.
Though that does create new problems – learning the libraries and how to put them together creates all sorts of issues, and the difficulty is in finding and resolving those errors. It’s odd to get out of university with a good knowledge of how to do a lot of the fundamentals, only to find that what the business world really wants is intimate applied knowledge of libraries. And, of course, those libraries will vary from workplace to workplace, so not only do you have a domain-knowledge hurdle to overcome but a technology-knowledge hurdle too.
Frameworks.
Heh. That’s where I ply my trade.
(I run XP, plus the VirtualBox Linux machine for real work …)
Hmmmph. I may have started out on PERFORM VARYING but I have no desire to go back. You can take your $1000 and stuff it in a PIC 9(4).
I’ll need more than a (4) to sign up. ;)
—
Aside:
SQL is essential. The correlated subquery is a thing of rare logical beauty.
I still would like to know why illithid thinks that women don’t do construction jobs and men don’t do “soft” jobs.
Also why he refuses to acknowledge that men in almost every single woman-dominated job still get paid more than women. The only job where this isn’t true is for maids, where women earn $1.02 for every $1 that men earn.
My company used IE6 because some homebrew software couldn’t handle anything more modern. Finally several senior executives insisted we be allowed to download some other browser because sites we went to didn’t support IE6 (one I use extensively doesn’t do IE7 now). So the Technogeek Department tweaked the homebrew to allow us to use Chrome.
Heehee.
The cash bonus is for those who bring in the new code monkey. Preferably alive.
As soon as someone mentions a son, daughter, nephew, whatever who studies or has studied programming around an employee of my firm, their ears perk up and they start asking weird questions that start with “hey, your son/daughter/nephew/whatever is not looking for a job, is he/she?”.
Hmm…
I had a potentially stupid thought, and, as I am wont to do, I will share that thought with Pharyngula and see how stupid it is.
Could this be the next Good Old Days, the way the 50’s were for the previous generations? The wonderful, wonderful 70’s, where Free Love reigned, and awful PCness hadn’t really taken over, and the world was a shinier place?
Because if so, how sad.
Don’t get me wrong, I had a little fun in the 70’s, but to look nostalgically back upon them? *shudder*
I’m afraid every generation has their version of the Good Old Days™.
As well as a low opinion of their youth, if I read what older people have to say about the student strike that’s presently going on in my place. Apparently the 20-somethings getting beaten up, shot with rubber bullets and peppered up in the streets are all unruly spoiled babies.
When it happened in the ’60s and ’70s, that was different. After all, ‘we’ were fighting for important things — human rights and an end to the Vietnam War. These damn kids today just want money. And they need to get off my lawn!
Oh how often I’ve heard that the present day youth don’t have a real stance on things and are protesting without good reason, while the older generations, well they are the mighty heroes of may 1968.
Anri:
The 70s could very well become the Good Old Days™ if the religious right actually succeeds with making birth control and abortion illegal.
“Remember those days, honey, when I didn’t have to buy the Pill on the black market?” Yeah, I can see that.
(Says the child of the 80s. Which, let’s face it, kind of sucked.)
Ouch, good point.
But, hey, at least illithid will be happy, right?
Get those damn women back down in the mud where they belong…
*sigh*
Anri:
And careers can be MANLY! again. None of this specializing in small talk when women are barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, no sir! While men are at work, they will communicate exclusively in grunts and farts.
Audley:
Ugh. Yes, could be. I’ve talked about it before, but I had my abortion in the ’70s and there was zero fuss, anywhere. Also, PP clinics proliferated, you could find them all over the place.
Hey! I worked with those guys!
Audley, #452,
a) Hey! I resemble that remark.
b) You say this like it is a bad thing.
c) Ahhhh, memories.
d) You forgot three octave burps of the word “archbishop”.
e) All of the above.
This has been a Make Your Own Adventure Joke from LouisCorp. Jokes where YOU are the hero!
Louis
Oh! I missed this, from chigau:
I really hope that was intentional … ;)
That ended when the occupational health & safety board ruled that my uncle’s farts were a chemical hazard.
Now it’s grunts and burps.
I bet it was just to see if illithid was paying attention.
I dunno, they seem like pretty happy guys: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fM9o8MxLX3Q
That is a tremendous episode.
Mayor Quimby: Did I hear a uhhh briefcase opening?
Homer: Okay, before I show you, who wants to guess how I got the money?
Bart: Dealing drugs?
Lisa: Drugs?
Marge: I’ll have to say drugs too.
Homer: Close, but you’re way off.
http://www.lardlad.com/assets/quotes/season9/5F09.shtml
Could this be the next Good Old Days, the way the 50′s were for the previous generations?
not even close.
if anything, you should be comparing the next decade to the 1930s.
actually, make that the current decade.
You give me too much credit.
Just had to delurk to remark. Thank you, Life is a pitbull With Lipstick, for posting that great essay by Allen G. Johnson. “Privelage, Power and Diffrance” at 12:00 PM May 31. It said so much that I have tried to articulate in the past. I also have heard the same arguments from many people before.
could this be enliked to the saying that “fish don’t taste water”?
Back to lurking now.
The comments we’ve witnessed in this thread go very much against the core values of the Occupy movement. Instead of fairness, we’ve witnessed rationalizations for paying people in warms rooms higher than those who are constantly exposed to the elements. We’ve met with various pathetic attempts to legitimate paying people with pointless, irrelevant and overpriced sheepskin diplomas higher than workers with three years extra vocational experience. Above all, we’ve seen excuse after excuse after depraved excuse for off-shoring industry to other countries, so to a first approximation the only jobs we’re left with are exploitationist jobs in the financial sector, as well as jobs which don’t seek to produce anything.
What the hell? Again with the ‘warm rooms’ bullshit. Honestly, if you’re cold, you can borrow my jumper.
illithid:
Your cargo-cult attempted mimicry of the Pharynguloid plural is noted with due amusement, no less than your wishful imaginings are duly dismissed.
We have, have we?
(Straw-worker, you truly are)
The comments we’ve witnessed in this thread go very much against the core values of the Occupy movement.
what in THE FUCK kind of drugs are you taking?
pointless, irrelevant and overpriced sheepskin diplomas
how do you know if they’re pointless and irrelevant if you don’t have one?
overpriced I’ll give you.
other than that, you don’t know what in the hell you’re talking about.
the only jobs we’re left with are exploitationist jobs in the financial sector
…
what is that, like the guy who gets the coffee for the stock trader?
…look, I understand you’re all pissed off that Western democracies have moved away from industrial manufacturing jobs, but if you think that somehow means that this was intended to make the quality of your life LESS, you’re an idiot.
there was no romantic industrial era.
the pay sucked, the hours were long, and the work was brutal.
WHY IN THE FUCK DO YOU WANT THAT?
@illithid,
Why do you think women do not do construction jobs and men do not do “soft” work?
Why do you refuse to acknowledge that in women-dominated jobs, men still get paid more than women? (with the exception of maids, where women get paid $1.02 for ever $1 men get paid.)
I think the other thing that needs to be pointed out is that it’s taken decades of outrage and action to even get close to closing some of the gender gaps – and even then there’s the real danger of backsliding. In 2002, research among the FTSE 350 companies found that almost 40% of senior management were women. When the study was repeated in 2007, the number had dropped to 22%. Not recognising that there’s a gap is only going to serve to cause the gap to reopen again.
And you’re an idiot if you think any thought is given to the quality of life of the majority when corporations choose to off-shore their industry. Whole communities have been laid to waste by this loss of industrial labour — including African-American communities in your own country.
I submit that when you find yourself fighting on the same side as bankers, telemarketers, and corporate crony libertarians, it’s time to dial it down a notch on the ideology.
There are better ways to increase quality of life than cutting jobs, taking a wrecking ball to communities, and relegating what skilled labourers we have left to the status of an underclass.
Who gives a shit what a fuckwitted uneducated loser like you attempt to think? You haven’t said anything cogent. You just whine and moan against those who realized they needed to get an education to compete in the world, and you are now at a disadvantage due to your ignorance and lack of foresight. You can’t make your point without third party evidence, so stop with the inane OPINIONS. You can’t make your point with just OPINION.
In that case it’s odd that anyone actually bothers to turn on the heating. It’s so expensive, and why bother if to be comfortable you only have to pull on a jumper?
@illithid,
Why do you think women do not do construction jobs and men do not do “soft” work?
Why do you refuse to acknowledge that in women-dominated jobs, men still get paid more than women? (with the exception of maids, where women get paid $1.02 for ever $1 men get paid.)
Uhm… You do realize that comment of mine wasn’t exactly serious, right? See, there’s this thing called a sense of humor. Some would classify it as a so-called soft skill… Oh, right. My mistake.
I don’t. It’s about percentages. I gave a link earlier back in post #254 to data which shows that construction is one of the most male-dominated professions. The same webpage also says that females are over-represented in clerical and service sectors, where “soft skills” are paramount.
You might not believe in “doing percentages”. But then you’ll have to stop being a feminist.
Let’s suppose that it is true. Now how do you know that this state of affairs is unfair? Girls perform academically better than boys. Not many feminists think that this means discrimination. Why should men performing slightly better than women be interpreted automatically as discrimination? After all, don’t women take time off for pregnancy and spend more energy than men on caring for children? And even if you could prove discrimination (and I mean prove it, not speculate about it), then what is your plan? To push the counter-offensive until you’ve taken enough territory that women have equal or greater pay than men in every single field? Or just the same or higher wages on average (which is true right now, as I mentioned earlier, for girls in their twenties)? Either way, doesn’t it seem a bit a lopsided to you that only one sex, the fair sex, is guaranteed at least half of the pie? Of any pie? Always? Whereas there are no guarantees for the other sex? Can’t you see that your side has already won, or is well on its way to winning, and is going to push the counter-offensive too far?
so the mind flayer wants the world to have more production, less service and communication?
fascinating. has anyone explained the concepts of non-renewable resources, AGW, and peak oil to the derp yet?
has someone explained intersectionality to this derp yet?
which of course is natural and right and good and not at all part of patriarchy
Gee fuckwitted loser, who knows more about statistics? Someone with training and education in the subject, or you uneducated loser like you? We understand full well statistics, which means we know why you are wrong, and feminists are right. Typical loser, projecting your intelligence and analytical powers to be better than they are. They are non-existent in reality.
Where is that, except where gender differences like size come into play? For normal work evironment, that isn’t the case. A woman can easily do my job, only light labor, and intellectual. You are the one who can’t compete, as you have no degrees, which are required, and can’t think or write, which also required.
You can’t keep looking at 3% of the jobs and think you are right. You have to look at 100% of the jobs, and then you are WRONG. That’s why we see you as an idjit fuckwitted loser. Proof you don’t have analytical powers.
and since we’re on topic, when the mind flayer was rambling about how men are more likely to be poor, he was lying.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
you wouldn’t know “far-left” if it bit you in the ankle
Well, he just might be using the ‘murkan definishun of “far left”, encompassing everyone who doesn’t hate poor, black, mooslin or alien people, the environment and wimminfolk.
(I also think he’s rather more concerned with the derp end of society than the deep end.)
also true for the UK: http://www.poverty.org.uk/07/index.shtml
btw, have we established yet that this isn’t just Hyperon airing his mommy issues again?
considering he keeps on using the sign for british pounds, I doubt it. really, he’s just being stupid.
No, I was just using a different definition:
Here’s the link I just meant to give.
So, poor has now been redefined to “homeless”.
Just stop moving the goalposts and redefining shit to suit your bias. You are being a clueless, brain-smushed asshat.
Talk about a meaningless factoid. Just like every “fact”, “percentage”, or “statistic” you have put out. Here’s a clue for the fuckwitted idjit. Homelessness is related to mental illness and substance abuse. Also none-treatment for the same. Guess who has more mental illness and substance abuse problems, and who is more likely not get into the system to be treated/helped. Thing about that before you spout such fuckwittery. More self-choices, not society making it so.
@illithid:
Maddow’s video on the matter.
Bloomberg report on the issue.
Women. Earn. Less. Than. Men. You’re looking at aggregates. You’re looking at all situations. Single women, married women, women with children, women without children.
If you control for hours worked, and if you control for pregnancy, and such – there is still a pay gap. Start watching that video I linked at about 16.30.
You are blind if you think it’s otherwise, and there is NO excuse for discrimination.
And I could attribute women in poverty to their choosing to have children instead of getting an abortion. It doesn’t help anything. Blaming people for their lack of foresight isn’t going to improve anything.
Fuckwit knows it can’t make its misogynistic case if ALL the data is looked at. It loses every time. And it knows that. So it must distort reality with meaningless factoids that appear to make its case. To regain what sees as having lost, but never had. Reality and this bozo are strangers.
@illithid:
The Republican assholes in Congress are trying to make it impossible for poor women to have abortions. They are systematically forcing already poor women to have to have another child because they can’t go somewhere like Planned Parenthood.
And yes, children are fucking expensive. Forcing a woman already below the poverty level to have an unwanted child she cannot take care of and cannot afford to take care of it not going to help them get out of that situation.
Not all situations. I linked to evidence from the Office for National Statistics which shows that women in their twenties in the UK earn more on average. Here’s an article on ten cities in America where single women out-earn men.
This would be an atrocity. I have no problem getting on that particular bandwagon.
Seems quite possible that it is Hyperon/Therion/J, so that’s the null hypothesis, in my opinion. That’s how it works, right?
Nor does you incessant and meaningless whining about your poor choice. Besides, you don’t have to make any decision on abortion. Makes your OPINION worthless, as always. Just an explanation, but not an excuse, for your bad attitude. There is no excuse for your attitude.
Again, minor cases, and not the norm, seen with larger scale statistics, which shows discrimination against women at all levels, except entry. Where, they must show such statistics to the regulatory bodies against discrimination. What a loser if you don’t see this.
@illithid:
You’re picking at outliers. Like the butler/maid job I’m talking about above. On average – with everything controlled for (age, race, hours worked, etc) – women earn less than men. Picking up one example of where men fare worse than women is ignoring the problem as a whole. Like I mentioned several times, women earn $1.02 for ever $1 men earn as a maid/butler, does that mean the system works, women earn more than men in one job we don’t have to worry about it?
Fuck no. Women on average earn $.77 to every $1 a man earns.
Well, as long as we can blame women’s poverty on women, all is good, right?
But weren’t you claiming that poverty can be measured by homelessness? And that a woman never has to be homeless because she can use sex to get an apartment with a penis? And that women earn more than men by doing less work and therefore it is the men who are poor and the women who get all the pay?