Thread: The ugly reality of misandry Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.
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Posted by EtymologicalEvangelical (# 15091) on
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This video says it all.
Discuss.
(Yes, and even the spellchecker for this site doesn't recognise the word misandry!)
Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on
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Well, as orfeo pointed out in Hell that video glosses over the property inequities that distorted the voting rights and I went on to say that the video also ignores all the pay and employment inequities, educational chances for women within that period and a whole lot more.
Yes, there are some sexist aspects to our cultural and legal systems that are enshrined in law and act to the detriment of men and some that act to the detriment of women. I'm not sure that pointing out just those that affect one gender is any less sexist than refusing to acknowledge that society is inequitable
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
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What a load of crap. Full of illogic and unsupported accusations. It's "hard to know it's happening" because it's not.
Posted by Arethosemyfeet (# 17047) on
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Nope, not seeing it at all. I don't think I've ever been in a situation where I've been treated less favourably for being a man, and certainly not as a result of "misandry". It's bullshit. The characterisation of paedophiles and rapists as male is actually a by-product of misogyny - part of the assumption that women are passive, do not have desires for sex or control and are less morally independent.
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
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And all the stuff about "soldiers" dying, not men, and "craftspeople" working, not craftsmen, ignores the fact that women serve in the military and work in formerly all-male trades and professions. We say "firefighters" because some of them are women.
Moreover, just because someone has pieced together a bunch of clips doesn't make this an argument about language and society -- if he wants to do some real research, then maybe we'd pay attention. But I'm afraid that research wouldn't support his claim in the way he'd want it to.
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on
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It's a different video, CK. Not that I think this one is much of an improvement. The news clips part is laughably bad. I could quite happily pick an entirely different set of news clips to 'prove' the exact opposite point.
Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on
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Oops, my bad. Couldn't face watching it again, so didn't click.
Posted by Arethosemyfeet (# 17047) on
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And the crack about "craftsmen" follows a shot with a person with tied back hair who could quite reasonably be female. A tad of misogyny assuming that because they're wearing hard hats and fluorescent jackets they can't possibly be women?
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
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And anothing thing ... lumping "women and children" together as victims infantilizes women and reflects their general perceived or real lack of power in many situations -- it's misogyny, not misandry.
Finally -- at least for the moment -- the one thing I would grant is that we do seem to undervalue men's lives in certain ways. All the discussion about women in combat talking about whether people are ready to have their daughters come home in body bags to me says that we as a people are all too ready to see sons come home in body bags (though I think no one is ever ready to see their own child that way). At the same time, I think this shows how "man" is still the default setting for "human being" -- we say that people are killed when we mean men, because by "people" we mean "men" a lot of the time, and we say "women and children" because women and children are special cases, exceptions, peculiar and particular representations of humanity, not Humanity or Mankind as usually understood.
Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on
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The nice pictures of people working on the railway line - my daughter is a mechanical engineer and works in that environment - mostly in the office designing but she has the full track orange hi-vis walking gear because she walks it fairly regularly.
The statistics on rape - best we can do with the under-reporting 91% of rape convictions are rapes of women, 9% are rapes of men.
Child abuse - that one has been under-reported too - but the figures now are suggesting 20% of paedophiles are women and that one really does hit the headlines when a woman is convicted.
Posted by alienfromzog (# 5327) on
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The thing is misandry is real. It's just so much less significant that misogyny.
And yes that film is a piece of tacky, and very limited propaganda.
As I said on the Male Feminist thread it is a simple fact that women are far more often the victim of sexism than men for lots of historical and cultural reasons.
That in and of itself is no defence for sexism against men of course but it does sound like special pleading (not to mention pathetic or worse hypocritical) to hear men whine about how hard it is to be a man because of the evil feminists.
Let's start with this then:
quote:
Saul of Tarsus (famous for being anti-women...):
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Just a thought.
AFZ
[ 29. August 2013, 19:25: Message edited by: alienfromzog ]
Posted by EtymologicalEvangelical (# 15091) on
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Although I don't altogether agree with his viewpoint, Yorick was right to point out in hell that indoctrination of children is a form of abuse. Therefore it is wrong - and a form of child abuse - to indoctrinate children with sexist ideas. One only needs to look at the way men are often portrayed in the media and in advertising. A good example is a sitcom like The Simpsons. Homer is a bumbling and irresponsible fool, whereas Marge is mature and sensible. Even the children don't escape the vicious stereotyping. Bart is often nasty and stupid, whereas Lisa is so gifted, responsible and courageous.
It's the drip drip drip effect of subliminal ideas that poisons children's minds by a process of reinforcement. But, of course, it's all justified on the basis of the ethics of revenge: "you once victimised us, therefore we need to rebalance society by victimising you - or rather your children". So anti-Christian, so deluded and so ultimately futile.
[ 29. August 2013, 19:33: Message edited by: EtymologicalEvangelical ]
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
At the same time, I think this shows how "man" is still the default setting for "human being" -- we say that people are killed when we mean men, because by "people" we mean "men" a lot of the time, and we say "women and children" because women and children are special cases, exceptions, peculiar and particular representations of humanity, not Humanity or Mankind as usually understood.
Oh, tosh. It simply tells us that it is men whom we expect to get killed in war situations. Because they still make up the vast majority of combatants in all wars, including those wars fought by the few nations that do allow women in frontline combat. Furthermore, from old chivalry to modern humanism, there is an expectation that one affords at least some level of protection to non-combatants of the enemy. And "women and children" is code for that, largely because it remains an accurate description for the majority of such non-combatants, at least in large conflicts. Where big groups of mostly (or often exclusively) men clash in war, talking about the killing of "women and children" basically indicates that some of the combatants have started to indiscriminately kill all of their enemy.
[ 29. August 2013, 19:37: Message edited by: IngoB ]
Posted by EtymologicalEvangelical (# 15091) on
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quote:
Originally posted by alienfromzog
That in and of itself is no defence for sexism against men of course but it does sound like special pleading (not to mention pathetic or worse hypocritical) to hear men whine about how hard it is to be a man because of the evil feminists.
What is actually pathetic and childish is the inability to respect people as individuals, and to refrain from stereotyping.
But one theme comes up again and again on this site when discussing sexism and racism, and this is the seeming inability of those who feel they are standing up for the 'victims' to refrain from stereotyping their supposed oppressors. It's all "whites are racist, men are sexist, middle aged white men are bigots" and so on. And if these "white middle aged men" DARE to complain about hypocrisy, they are then dismissed as pathetic whingers.
So crass it's unbelievable.
![[brick wall]](graemlins/brick_wall.gif)
Posted by Kelly Alves (# 2522) on
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quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Homer is a bumbling and irresponsible fool, whereas Marge is mature and sensible. Even the children don't escape the vicious stereotyping. Bart is often nasty and stupid, whereas Lisa is so gifted, responsible and courageous.
WHo has the bigger fan base, Bart or Lisa?
And those degrading stereotypes of men hide privilege-- Homer can't handle the most basic of fatherly tasks, so it is up to Marge to manage the kids, the house, and him "because she is so superior." Bart gets to do all the daring, adventurous, attention-getting stuff while Lisa's role is to constantly piss on his parade-- "because she is so wise and sensible." The compliments are not really compliments-- they are designations of duty.
Oh,and by the way, all those degrading stereotypes were crafted by a man. A man created this premise:"You can't hope to be adequate at even the most basic aspect of contributing to the smooth running of a household, so it's better if you just drink beer and watch sports all day. People won't judge you; in fact you can spend the bulk of your life doing that and, if you throw in a heart-to-heart with the kid of your choice once a month people will talk about what a wonderful father you are."
I agree, the stereotypes of Homer and Bart are hugely sexist, but why are guys not picketing Matt Groening over it?
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
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That's what happens when we don't acknowledge our privilege and lay it down.
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on
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quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
One only needs to look at the way men are often portrayed in the media and in advertising. A good example is a sitcom like The Simpsons. Homer is a bumbling and irresponsible fool, whereas Marge is mature and sensible. Even the children don't escape the vicious stereotyping. Bart is often nasty and stupid, whereas Lisa is so gifted, responsible and courageous.
Sorry, but your example of male oppression is that most comedies have male leads? The "bumbling and irresponsible fool" (or the "nasty and stupid" one) is the character getting the most laugh lines. That's the nature of comedy and has been well know since Aristotle, who famously (though not famously enough apparently) observed that the distinguishing feature of comedy is that it portrays characters who are worse than normal.
At any rate, I'm not going to cry a river over how men are always "oppressed" by getting the lead roles in comedy, though it should be noted that "Bart Simpson" is actually a woman.
Posted by Aravis (# 13824) on
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I get the impression that in the past ten years, misogyny has become much less socially acceptable in the "middle classes" (potential tangent alert!) and misandry has taken its place, with some vague and unfounded sense that this is redressing the balance. It can get nasty. I was recently asked to give evidence at an employment tribunal in a case of workplace bullying where there was obvious misandry (the case was settled out of court, to my great relief).
However, further down or further up the social scale, misogyny is still alive and well.
Both appal me and I find it very difficult to understand the mentality behind either attitude.
Posted by Honest Ron Bacardi (# 38) on
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
At the same time, I think this shows how "man" is still the default setting for "human being" -- we say that people are killed when we mean men, because by "people" we mean "men" a lot of the time, and we say "women and children" because women and children are special cases, exceptions, peculiar and particular representations of humanity, not Humanity or Mankind as usually understood.
Oh, tosh. It simply tells us that it is men whom we expect to get killed in war situations. Because they still make up the vast majority of combatants in all wars, including those wars fought by the few nations that do allow women in frontline combat. Furthermore, from old chivalry to modern humanism, there is an expectation that one affords at least some level of protection to non-combatants of the enemy. And "women and children" is code for that, largely because it remains an accurate description for the majority of such non-combatants, at least in large conflicts. Where big groups of mostly (or often exclusively) men clash in war, talking about the killing of "women and children" basically indicates that some of the combatants have started to indiscriminately kill all of their enemy.
English has a tendency to throw up autohyponyms. Which is to say when we have a class of words, we tend to use one of them for the generic usage as well as its specific usage. If I say "where's your house?", I'm really just asking where you live. You may well live in a cellar/castle/apartment etc. House has taken on a generic meaning.
It may well be that you are indicating how that comes about. The potential negative issue with it in the case of "man" is well-discussed. "Woman" is the marked form, "man" the unmarked. A similar thing is going on here, which I think was more RuthW's point. Linguists use the word "marked" for more than just words that have just received an extra syllable etc. as a mark.
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Honest Ron Bacardi:
"Woman" is the marked form, "man" the unmarked. A similar thing is going on here, which I think was more RuthW's point. Linguists use the word "marked" for more than just words that have just received an extra syllable etc. as a mark.
Yes, thanks, that's a better way to put it.
IngoB, you're quite right in what you say about whom we expect to see as combatants -- which is why I said what I did about undervaluing men's lives. Being the default setting for humanity has both upsides and downsides for men. In the case of war, it depends on how you view war. As a pacifist, I will say again that I think we as a people are far too ready to see our sons come home in body bags. But many people see serving one's country in military uniform as a high honor and privilege, and it's one that has traditionally been reserved for men. We are still arguing about whether women should have the (to me dubious) honor of serving in combat.
Posted by Hawk (# 14289) on
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quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Homer is a bumbling and irresponsible fool, whereas Marge is mature and sensible. Even the children don't escape the vicious stereotyping. Bart is often nasty and stupid, whereas Lisa is so gifted, responsible and courageous.
Actually Marge is nagging, neurotic, and overbearing, while Lisa is irritatingly goody-goody, socially inept, and naive. (Even Maggie is a vicious attempted-murderer). In comedy women are presented in unflattering terms just as much as men. For the simple reason that perfect, well-adjusted people aren't funny.
Your analysis of popular culture betrays your simplistic, preconceived prejudices I'm afraid, and your firmly attached blinkers to anything that doesn't support them.
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on
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The great irony is that the video wheels out all these examples of a generic term being used where a man is involved, and complains that this means men doesn't exist, when it actually means that people can be relied on to assume a man is meant. That's sexist, but not in the way the video intends!
Posted by Kelly Alves (# 2522) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
The "bumbling and irresponsible fool" (or the "nasty and stupid" one) is the character getting the most laugh lines.
I thought of that later. Yeah, that, too. The dignified, sensible ones are the "straight men/ women." And who wants that role?
Posted by PaulBC (# 13712) on
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I could only tolerate about 90 seconds of this
video. Sounds a bit silly to me
Posted by Plique-à-jour (# 17717) on
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lol
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
IngoB, you're quite right in what you say about whom we expect to see as combatants -- which is why I said what I did about undervaluing men's lives. Being the default setting for humanity has both upsides and downsides for men. In the case of war, it depends on how you view war. As a pacifist, I will say again that I think we as a people are far too ready to see our sons come home in body bags. But many people see serving one's country in military uniform as a high honor and privilege, and it's one that has traditionally been reserved for men. We are still arguing about whether women should have the (to me dubious) honor of serving in combat.
I'm not a big fan of the military. However, I do not see there a general "undervaluing of men's lives". An officer in the army certainly has ample opportunity for doing that in a tactical sense, but I do not think that it is right to attribute this to the military as such. The high honour and privilege of serving in military uniform, and on top of that the particular honour given those serving in combat, exactly provide the "valuing" of soldiers' lives. Part of the salary package of soldiering is gaining social esteem. Where soldiers sign up voluntarily, rather than being drafted, we know that this package is better than other options in men's (and these days women's) minds.
As for the question whether it is right and just for women to have access to the same deal, I think this boils down to a more fundamental question. Are the sexes good for something, are they aimed at general purposes (even with lots of individual variation), or are they accidental like hair colour and at most provide annoying practical restrictions to the individual will. The question had to wait in the military till technology had largely removed the impact of physical differences between the sexes. An all female phalanx would have lost 9 times out of 10 against an all male one, but an all female squad with modern firearms has a basically equal chance against an all male squad with modern firearms, at least in ranged combat (which is now the much preferred type of combat). I assume there are considerable issues with both logistics and maintaining discipline in switching to a mixed sex army. But apart from these, the discussion of women in combat is mostly interesting for the conflict between modern ideals of equality and near instinctive evaluations of what is proper to the sexes.
Posted by kankucho (# 14318) on
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A ![[Devil]](graemlins/devil.gif)
part of me hopes this video goes viral. He's going to feel a right Charlie* in a few years time when he realises his C-minus graded fourth-form sociology essay is immortalised for all time on the internet.
(*Oo-er. Bit o' misandry there, ladies 'n' gennerman, yes indeed!)
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
As for the question whether it is right and just for women to have access to the same deal, I think this boils down to a more fundamental question. Are the sexes good for something, are they aimed at general purposes (even with lots of individual variation), or are they accidental like hair colour and at most provide annoying practical restrictions to the individual will.
In regards to military service we're not talking about "general purposes", but rather a very specific purpose. In other words, the question becomes if there's something inherent in women that makes them unsuitable (or at least less suitable than the vast majority of men) to pilot an F-16 or repair a tank. (Modern warfare requires about eight to ten support personnel for every front-line combatant.)
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on
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quote:
Originally posted by kankucho:
A part of me hopes this video goes viral. He's going to feel a right Charlie* in a few years time when he realises his C-minus graded fourth-form sociology essay is immortalised for all time on the internet.
(*Oo-er. Bit o' misandry there, ladies 'n' gennerman, yes indeed!)
It's only misandry if you despise him for being male, not if you despise him for being analytically incompetent.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
In regards to military service we're not talking about "general purposes", but rather a very specific purpose. In other words, the question becomes if there's something inherent in women that makes them unsuitable (or at least less suitable than the vast majority of men) to pilot an F-16 or repair a tank. (Modern warfare requires about eight to ten support personnel for every front-line combatant.)
Nope, that's not the fundamental question. That's simply a practically significant but conceptually shallow question about abilities, which is inevitably being asked only once the question I've pointed out has been answered. If we say that war is a thing that only men should do, then it becomes entirely irrelevant whether women could perform some or even all of the tasks that warring men have to do. Your question is already operating on the assumption that there are no such general themes to the sexes. In which case we basically consider people as sexless when assigning them to tasks, and merely ask whether they are "up to the job". We may be forced by biological realities to acknowledge that certain jobs will continue to be male-dominated, say because they require a lot of upper body strength. But that is then not a sign for anything, but simply a statistical "brute fact", a mere accidental correlation of some characteristic with sex that has no further relevance other than that it exists. If you happen to be a woman with massive upper body strength, then the fact that most women cannot do this job means nothing concerning whether you should get this job. It's not a man's job, it's an "upper body strength" job.
My point was that concerning soldiering, we see the final holdout of the old "this is a man's job, this is a woman's job" thinking against modern "this is a job for whoever can do it" thinking. People still feel queasy when thinking of a woman firing a machine gun to kill enemy soldiers, and not because they think that the woman would miss a lot. Whether they are right or wrong in feeling that is a different question. I'm just pointing out that I think that this is what is happening there.
Posted by Gwai (# 11076) on
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It's not just in the military though where men are the default. Surely, IngoB, you hear people say things like "It was me and two other people on the train car and then this woman came on..." The other two people of course turn out to be men. And that's an anecdote, but I hear that kind of thing all the time, and say it sometimes too, I'm sure. Anyone who disagrees that men are the default, I challenge you to listen for a day to the way people around you talk.
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
My point was that concerning soldiering, we see the final holdout of the old "this is a man's job, this is a woman's job" thinking against modern "this is a job for whoever can do it" thinking. People still feel queasy when thinking of a woman firing a machine gun to kill enemy soldiers, and not because they think that the woman would miss a lot. Whether they are right or wrong in feeling that is a different question.
As blogger Fred Clark pointed out on a similar subject, assuming that personal distaste or a queasy feeling is a sufficient argument is a mistake.
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
I'm not a big fan of the military. However, I do not see there a general "undervaluing of men's lives". An officer in the army certainly has ample opportunity for doing that in a tactical sense, but I do not think that it is right to attribute this to the military as such.
I didn't mean that within the military men's lives are undervalued. I meant that in our society as a whole men's lives are sometimes undervalued, and that we are willing to sacrifice men's lives in combat is one example of that. Dangerous work is still generally seen as men's work, though of course more women are doing some of those jobs.
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on
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quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
Dangerous work is still generally seen as men's work, though of course more women are doing some of those jobs.
Do we have any ideas as to how this came about?
I'm certainly aware that there's been a history, when women express an interest in dangerous or tough work, of looking at them with a degree of puzzlement and asking "why would you want to do that?" Basically it gets suggested to a woman that she ought to be pleased that she's 'protected' from such work.
But one could ask the exact same question of a man: what is it that motivates you to undertake something you know to be dangerous? But a man doesn't tend to be asked to justify whatever motivational drivers lead him to decide that he wants the job in spite of the danger.
Posted by seekingsister (# 17707) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Gwai:
It's not just in the military though where men are the default. Surely, IngoB, you hear people say things like "It was me and two other people on the train car and then this woman came on..." The other two people of course turn out to be men. And that's an anecdote, but I hear that kind of thing all the time, and say it sometimes too, I'm sure. Anyone who disagrees that men are the default, I challenge you to listen for a day to the way people around you talk.
There's the old brain teaser:
A man and his son are in a car accident. The father dies and the son is rushed to the hospital. The boy is wheeled into the operating room. The surgeon walks in and says "I can't operate on this child, he's my son." How is this possible?
The answer being of course that the surgeon is the child's mother. At least there's hope for the future!
http://patients.about.com/b/2010/09/12/riddle-me-this-who-is-the-surgeon.htm
quote:
It was posed again recently by the producers at Good Morning America. A group of adults were asked - the general public - people on the streets of New York - and the great majority could not come up with the right answer.
But then the producers asked a group of fifth graders from a school in NYC - and the majority of them got it right.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Gwai:
It's not just in the military though where men are the default. Surely, IngoB, you hear people say things like "It was me and two other people on the train car and then this woman came on..." The other two people of course turn out to be men. And that's an anecdote, but I hear that kind of thing all the time, and say it sometimes too, I'm sure. Anyone who disagrees that men are the default, I challenge you to listen for a day to the way people around you talk.
The plural of anecdote is not data, whether in YouTube videos or in SoF posts. Furthermore, in the particular example given I would say "people" actually acts as a mask for sex. Let me write the statement with sex:
- It was me and two other men on the train car and then this woman came on...
- It was me and two other women on the train car and then this woman came on...
In both cases, I would expect that the sex of the other people in the train car has been flagged for me because it will be important in what comes next. That is to say, if the speaker continues either 1. or 2. with the following
- ... and she was talking to someone on her mobile. I say "talking", I mean "screaming". And this was the quiet coach. After a few minutes I couldn't stand it any longer...
Then I would be wondering at least a little why he (1) or she (2) had bothered to mentioned the sex of the other people in the coach. Whereas if the speaker had continued in the following matching fashion
- ... and she started looking us over, one after the other. It was really quite obvious. I guess she fancied the guy next to me most, because she leaned over to him ...
- ... and she said something like "Isn't this nice, just us girls together." as if we were her best friends instead of total strangers. She then started talking about ...
then it would make total sense to mention the sex of the other occupants.
I think language is rarely "neutral", it always operates on prior expectations. If I say
- 300 people attended the yoga seminar.
- 500 people visited the school fair.
- 200 people clashed violently with police.
then what would you say were the compositions of "people" in this? I would say more women than men and few if any children in 1., about equal proportions of men, women and children in 2. (perhaps more children, perhaps slightly more women), and mostly men in 3. with perhaps some women but no children. Nevertheless, it's always the same word "people".
And often this lack of neutrality is more subtle. For example, if I say "Suddenly I saw two people running towards me!" then who is that? Well, the statement as such (without wider context) for me triggers the "fight or flight" category. Sudden incoming motion is potentially dangerous, in particular if exclaimed. And because of that, I would expect you are probably talking about men. Because two children running towards me are not dangerous, and two women running towards me are (on average) less dangerous.
So basically, I don't buy simplistic language usage stats, whether they try to prove or disprove misandry/misogyny. Language is gloriously complicated.
Posted by Arethosemyfeet (# 17047) on
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quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
Dangerous work is still generally seen as men's work, though of course more women are doing some of those jobs.
Do we have any ideas as to how this came about?
Historically, I can hazard a guess. In times when maternal mortality was sky high the rich and powerful, even on a relative scale within a village, might lose a wife before producing an heir, or at least reaching the point where they're not bothered about sex anymore. Greater wealth will make it easier to secure a bride. Unless some way is found to equalise the mortality rates for men and women, you have a whole load of surplus men knocking around. Count this double if the society allows polygamy. War, risky hunting, dangerous sports etc. give an opportunity to eliminate men and reduce the risk of social unrest resulting from men not being able to find a wife.
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on
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quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
Dangerous work is still generally seen as men's work, though of course more women are doing some of those jobs.
Do we have any ideas as to how this came about?
I'm not sure that's necessarily true. For example, dangerous sweatshops will often preferentially recruit women. (e.g. virtually all the casualties from the Triangle Shirtwaist fire were women) I think it's more accurate to say that the dangers inherent in certain male-dominated professions have been glamorized to a degree that they're now seen as an attractive part of the job.
Posted by Gwai (# 11076) on
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Looking at deaths on the job in the U.S., it looks like on page 8 that 92% of the people who died on the job were men though that's somewhat offset when you look at hours worked. (Though I don't think one should take into account hours worked since women who work at home with the children don't even count in those numbers. It's not like very many people of either gender are just sitting around.
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
Dangerous work is still generally seen as men's work, though of course more women are doing some of those jobs.
Do we have any ideas as to how this came about?
I'm not sure that's necessarily true. For example, dangerous sweatshops will often preferentially recruit women. (e.g. virtually all the casualties from the Triangle Shirtwaist fire were women) I think it's more accurate to say that the dangers inherent in certain male-dominated professions have been glamorized to a degree that they're now seen as an attractive part of the job.
Sorry, I think you're confusing working conditions maintained by particularly heinous employers with inherent dangers of a job. There's nothing about sewing clothes that screams 'dangerous profession' to me other than when a particular employer decides that the sewing ought to be conducted in a building of inferior quality.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
I meant that in our society as a whole men's lives are sometimes undervalued, and that we are willing to sacrifice men's lives in combat is one example of that.
Yes, I understood that. And I have disagreed with this suggestion. I do not think that men being sent to the battlefield is in general an undervaluing of their lives. It can be, but in fact in places with strong military traditions it usually isn't. Rather, the massive ado about soldiers, alive, veteran or dead, is precisely that valuing of their lives. If you are an electrician, grab the wrong wire and fry to death, then there will be no parade, no flag on your coffin, no gun salute and certainly not a national news report. As far as anyone but your loved ones is concerned, that's strictly "shit happens". It is different for soldiers, and that's part of the deal that they get. You may think that it is a bad deal to trade social honour for high risk to life. Well, a good number of men throughout the ages have disagreed and these days some women apparently do, too.
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
I'm not sure that's necessarily true. For example, dangerous sweatshops will often preferentially recruit women. (e.g. virtually all the casualties from the Triangle Shirtwaist fire were women) I think it's more accurate to say that the dangers inherent in certain male-dominated professions have been glamorized to a degree that they're now seen as an attractive part of the job.
Sorry, I think you're confusing working conditions maintained by particularly heinous employers with inherent dangers of a job. There's nothing about sewing clothes that screams 'dangerous profession' to me other than when a particular employer decides that the sewing ought to be conducted in a building of inferior quality.
Leaving aside the fact that I was talking about the preference for female hiring in sweatshops (not the garment industry specifically), which pretty much by definition means "working conditions maintained by particularly heinous employers", I think there's a bit of a gendered assumption that running an industrial sewing machine is perfectly safe in a way we wouldn't say about an industrial drill press or any other piece of powered industrial equipment.
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on
:
Fair enough, I suppose it does depend on the size and scale of the machine in question.
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
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IngoB: Yes, dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori. You can go with Horace if you like, but I'm with Wilfred Owen.
The 10 most dangerous jobs in the US are fisherman, logger, airplane pilot, farmer/rancher, mining machine operator, roofer, sanitation worker, truck driver/delivery man, industrial machine repairman, and police officer. (I've used "man" here where the cited article does.) Of those, I'd guess women are more likely to turn up in the fields that are less physically demanding than the others: pilot and police officer.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Arethosemyfeet:
Historically, I can hazard a guess. In times when maternal mortality was sky high the rich and powerful, even on a relative scale within a village, might lose a wife before producing an heir, or at least reaching the point where they're not bothered about sex anymore. Greater wealth will make it easier to secure a bride. Unless some way is found to equalise the mortality rates for men and women, you have a whole load of surplus men knocking around. Count this double if the society allows polygamy. War, risky hunting, dangerous sports etc. give an opportunity to eliminate men and reduce the risk of social unrest resulting from men not being able to find a wife.
Really? We need to construct conspiracy stories about elites of the distant past now to avoid saying the obvious, namely that men on average enjoy "war, risky hunting, dangerous sports etc." more than women, and indeed are better at it? That they are to a considerable extent made for such endeavours, in particular combat, whereas women are not? Compare the bone structure of male and female skulls, compare their strength, speed and endurance, compare peak performance in throwing, hitting and punching. Why are there so few sports - originally derived from warfare as civil equivalents - in which men and women compete with each other on equal terms? If I tell you that chimpanzees form "killer squads" that patrol the boundaries of their territory and try to wipe out other chimpanzee groups if they can, what would you guess how many female chimpanzees are found in those "killer squads"? Right, adult males it is.
I'm sure one could also point to plenty of relevant differences in the emotional and social makeup of men and women, but unfortunately those things are hard to measure and the playground for ideology. But there is exactly one reason why women are even being considered as soldiers now: technology. Where most kills come from pressing buttons at a distance, one can think of integrating women into the high tech war machine. For most of the existence of humankind though, there simply was no question who was doing the regular fighting. And that's not because of gender role ideologies, that's because men on average had a considerable edge in all manner of fighting prior to modern firearms. And having an edge counts in war. A lot. (All this includes, by the way, ancient ranged combat. How many women could shoot six arrows a minute over ten minutes with an English longbow of draw-weight of around 600 Newton?)
Posted by QLib (# 43) on
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I guess they're not including prostitution as a job.
[ 30. August 2013, 17:44: Message edited by: QLib ]
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
(All this includes, by the way, ancient ranged combat. How many women could shoot six arrows a minute over ten minutes with an English longbow of draw-weight of around 600 Newton?)
You obviously don't share my devotion to Pixar movies. ![[Biased]](wink.gif)
Posted by Arethosemyfeet (# 17047) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
How many women could shoot six arrows a minute over ten minutes with an English longbow of draw-weight of around 600 Newton?
It's a bloody stupid example when the only reason men could do it was years of enforced practice that resulted in huge deformities. Get women to do the same training and then make the comparison.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
IngoB: Yes, dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori. You can go with Horace if you like, but I'm with Wilfred Owen.
I'm not friend of war or any actual violence. My position is reflected by my choice: faced with (short) compulsory military service, I did not become a conscientious objector in order to do (somewhat longer) social service, but rather chose to do many years (a decade when I signed up) of social service most weekends with the German Red Cross as replacement activity. I still do not know how to shoot a gun, nor do I have a desire to learn. But I'm also no pacifist. (I also really like martial arts in a typical nerd over-compensation move. It's not logical, but it sure is fun...)
quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
Of those, I'd guess women are more likely to turn up in the fields that are less physically demanding than the others: pilot and police officer.
Actually, I really like the idea of women in the police force. Policing should not be a kind of ongoing civil war on behalf of the state against misbehaving citizens. Regular police should not maximise its fighting force, but rather they should optimise their civilising influence. It seems to me that men and women working together tend to keep each other in a green zone away from excess. Of course, that's only a trend not a guarantee...
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Arethosemyfeet:
It's a bloody stupid example when the only reason men could do it was years of enforced practice that resulted in huge deformities. Get women to do the same training and then make the comparison.
It's a perfectly valid example. One simply could not have trained up a sufficient numbers of women for these tasks, even if one had wanted to. Sure, some women could have done it as well after gruesome training, but most men could do it after gruesome training. And that they got deformed by these strains on their body is neither here nor there for that difference: the few women that could be trained to do this kind of continuous explosive application of upper body strength would have suffered the same deformities (or worse, given the usually more fragile skeleton of women). There simply are serious physiological differences between the sexes, and they do make men better "fighters" on average. Deal.
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Arethosemyfeet:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
How many women could shoot six arrows a minute over ten minutes with an English longbow of draw-weight of around 600 Newton?
It's a bloody stupid example when the only reason men could do it was years of enforced practice that resulted in huge deformities. Get women to do the same training and then make the comparison.
But I think we can make the comparison. Professional sports, particularly athletics. Men and women both train for years and years to make it to the very top - to win Olympic gold and world championships.
And the men are faster than the women. The men can jump further, throw further, lift heavier weights.
I don't think it's because the men train any harder or longer than the women. It's because there tend to be physical differences between men and women.
It's completely different, in my view, when it comes to activities that are based on skill. But if you're talking about activities that involve sheer physical strength, then sorry, there's plenty of evidence that women are not, on average, going to match it with men.
This says absolutely nothing about any individual woman vs any individual man, of course, but I'm pretty sure that Ingo has recognised that and is making his point at the general level. A point that I agree with. I don't think there are many practical differences between men and women, but this is one of them.
[ 30. August 2013, 18:33: Message edited by: orfeo ]
Posted by Arethosemyfeet (# 17047) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Arethosemyfeet:
It's a bloody stupid example when the only reason men could do it was years of enforced practice that resulted in huge deformities. Get women to do the same training and then make the comparison.
It's a perfectly valid example. One simply could not have trained up a sufficient numbers of women for these tasks, even if one had wanted to. Sure, some women could have done it as well after gruesome training, but most men could do it after gruesome training. And that they got deformed by these strains on their body is neither here nor there for that difference: the few women that could be trained to do this kind of continuous explosive application of upper body strength would have suffered the same deformities (or worse, given the usually more fragile skeleton of women). There simply are serious physiological differences between the sexes, and they do make men better "fighters" on average. Deal.
Just because men could, on average, cope with a higher draw than women doesn't mean that insufficient women would have coped with the particular draw quoted. I'm quite agree that the former is true, but we simply don't have the data on the latter.
Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on
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quote:
But I think we can make the comparison. Professional sports, particularly athletics. Men and women both train for years and years to make it to the very top - to win Olympic gold and world championships.
And the men are faster than the women. The men can jump further, throw further, lift heavier weights.
I don't think it's because the men train any harder or longer than the women. It's because there tend to be physical differences between men and women.
[/QB]
You're comparing athletes. I suspect that all the women athletes would be able to jump further, throw further, lift heavier weights, and run faster than the majority of men, whether those men have trained or not. There's a vast amount of overlap in the male and female bell curves for whatever ability is being measured, physical or mental. In a lot of cases, the weakest individuals can be male, as are the best.
Of course, in behaviours where testosterone is a major factor, the overlap is rather less. And I would be reluctant to draw too many conclusions from chimpanzees. Apart from them having female serial killers, as well as the killer gangs. One significant feature of their lives is that they are still forest dwellers in a rather small area, with a few tool skills involving twigs and pebbles. We aren't.
Posted by Gwai (# 11076) on
:
IngoB: You begin by objecting to my comment about men as default because it's not statistics, but by the end you particularly say you don't buy language usage stats either. So I won't bother you with any.
But the reason I challenged you to listen to when gender is mentioned around you is because I've done it and I was surprised. Beforehand I would have said about what you did that when gender is mentioned it's because it's relevant. Having listened, it's just not true. When people are described, perceived gender(and race) are used in certain circumstances regularly for no obvious reason, for instance, in workplace situations. You live in a different country than I do with a different culture. Maybe that really isn't true of where you are. Maybe where you walk people don't automatically move out of the way for men in suits the way they don't for similarly well-dressed women. Maybe you live in a world where three year old girls don't have to ask their mothers, "Mommy, why are all the people in the stories and songs always boys?"
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
It's completely different, in my view, when it comes to activities that are based on skill. But if you're talking about activities that involve sheer physical strength, then sorry, there's plenty of evidence that women are not, on average, going to match it with men.
Men do not out-compete women merely in the "pure power" sports. The close to universal separation into sexes in sports is not some patriarchal hang-over. If it could be removed in these equality-obsessed times, it would be. But is is solidly based in distributions of anatomy and physiology, and it will not be removed because that would make it very difficult for women to become outright champions in their chosen sport. Tennis is a "skilled sport" where the obvious has been confirmed, sort of - see here, in particular "Karsten Braasch vs. the Williams sisters".
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
This says absolutely nothing about any individual woman vs any individual man, of course, but I'm pretty sure that Ingo has recognised that and is making his point at the general level. A point that I agree with.
Well, yes. Although this general level does translate into likelihood at the individual level if we have no other information.
quote:
Originally posted by Arethosemyfeet:
Just because men could, on average, cope with a higher draw than women doesn't mean that insufficient women would have coped with the particular draw quoted. I'm quite agree that the former is true, but we simply don't have the data on the latter.
Fair enough, we do not. I think with an activity so strenuous as to actually deform bones we can make some rather easy guesses, but whatever. I was not really making a point about English longbows and who can handle them with sufficient training. I was making a general point about the overall suitability of the sexes for the kind of physical combat that held sway from time immemorial to early modernity.
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
There's a vast amount of overlap in the male and female bell curves for whatever ability is being measured, physical or mental.
Well, I agree that it would be most informative to have distributions of key physical performance characteristics compared by gender. But in about half an hour of googeling, I've not come up with really useful graphs. So I would ask you on what basis you made your statement? Have you actually seen many of such bell curves for physical measurements, and if so, could you please point me to some?
quote:
Originally posted by Gwai:
Maybe where you walk people don't automatically move out of the way for men in suits the way they don't for similarly well-dressed women.
Around here moving out of each other's way tends to be a matter of common courtesy, and I have not seen much evidence for strong dependence of that on clothes or gender. If at all, I would say that women get given way slightly more often, as nod to old politeness rules ("ladies first" and all that).
quote:
Originally posted by Gwai:
Maybe you live in a world where three year old girls don't have to ask their mothers, "Mommy, why are all the people in the stories and songs always boys?"
Typical German childhood favourites of my generation include "Pippi Langstrumpf", "Biene Maja", "Heidi" and "Bibi Blocksberg" in all of which the main protagonist is a strong female. My mother (post-war) generation had as favourite book "Wunderbare Fahrten und Abenteuer der kleinen Dott", again with a female hero. Excellent book, by the way, I much enjoyed reading that as well. Obviously there were also stories with boys or men as heroes in my past, perhaps even more of them. Though that could have been my selection bias as a boy, and overall I would say that things were fairly even where I come from.
Posted by Horseman Bree (# 5290) on
:
Perhaps the male who posted the OP would like to comment on exactly how this case demonstrates his complaint?
As I read it, a 14-year-old girl is being blamed for getting herself raped. She then commits suicide as a result of the stress from her peers deciding that she is a "slut" or some other vile form of person.
And the Man, who at 49 y.o., is old enough to know better is getting a 30-day sentence, because the judge decided that the male person (I can't call him a "gentleman, since he went out and tried to reoffend) had suffered enough, and it was the girl's fault anyway.
I suppose the male in question is just a bumbling cartoon fool who can't be expected to do anything but "make mistakes" under all circumstances. Putting him on trial is just an example of misandry, I guess.
Oh yeah, there's no rape culture in any of our societies.
How come no men have to be "modestly" covered so they will avoid the threat of rape from over-excited women?
Come on, EE, let's see a good argument. You haven't done anything but whine so far.
Posted by Dinghy Sailor (# 8507) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Horseman Bree:
How come no men have to be "modestly" covered so they will avoid the threat of rape from over-excited women?
Because men's fashions already cover far more of the body than do women's fashions? Because most men have the natural advantage of being bigger and stronger than most women?
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Dinghy Sailor:
Because men's fashions already cover far more of the body than do women's fashions?
That depends very much on where you are and what you're doing. Gyms and beaches were the first counterexamples to spring to mind.
Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
quote:
Originally posted by Dinghy Sailor:
Because men's fashions already cover far more of the body than do women's fashions?
That depends very much on where you are and what you're doing. Gyms and beaches were the first counterexamples to spring to mind.
In these parts, standard male beachwear is a pair of voluminous shorts that stretch from waist to knee, and probably have enough spare room to hide a basketball.
By contrast, standard female beachwear is a few wisps of lycra just barely covering the essentials.
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
quote:
Originally posted by Dinghy Sailor:
Because men's fashions already cover far more of the body than do women's fashions?
That depends very much on where you are and what you're doing. Gyms and beaches were the first counterexamples to spring to mind.
In these parts, standard male beachwear is a pair of voluminous shorts that stretch from waist to knee, and probably have enough spare room to hide a basketball.
By contrast, standard female beachwear is a few wisps of lycra just barely covering the essentials.
...so you don't find it relevant that men are encouraged to walk around flaunting their uncovered chests and women aren't?
[ 31. August 2013, 05:35: Message edited by: orfeo ]
Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
...so you don't find it relevant that men are encouraged to walk around flaunting their uncovered chests and women aren't?
Like I said, standard female beachwear reveals much more skin, and is much more form-fitting, than standard male beachwear. I don't think I know too many women or gay men who have a thing for men's nipples (which is about all you see in a man that you can't in a woman on the beach). Heading south, in the standard beach attire, one can discern the form of a woman's hips, buttocks and thighs, whereas these features are obscured in the shorts-wearing man.
(And if you're not at the beach, or the swimming pool, I'd rather you wore a shirt, with sleeves, whatever sex you are.)
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:
I don't think I know too many women or gay men who have a thing for men's nipples
Ah well, given that I spend a lot more time in gay bars than you do, your relative deficiency in at least one part of this list is understandable.
Posted by goperryrevs (# 13504) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Arethosemyfeet:
Nope, not seeing it at all. I don't think I've ever been in a situation where I've been treated less favourably for being a man
I'd say the only one I can think of is the sometimes unfair way fathers are treated in terms of access to their children. Hence Fathers for Justice etc.
But even this is a by-product of society's expectation that it's women that do the child-rearing while the men go off to work, so you could easily see it as an off-shoot of misogyny anyhow.
Posted by Honest Ron Bacardi (# 38) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by goperryrevs:
quote:
Originally posted by Arethosemyfeet:
Nope, not seeing it at all. I don't think I've ever been in a situation where I've been treated less favourably for being a man
I'd say the only one I can think of is the sometimes unfair way fathers are treated in terms of access to their children. Hence Fathers for Justice etc.
But even this is a by-product of society's expectation that it's women that do the child-rearing while the men go off to work, so you could easily see it as an off-shoot of misogyny anyhow.
Orfeo has already pointed out one of the ironies of that video in the OP. There's another one there too, which involves the use of "misandry". Just take another read through these three threads (2 purg, 1 hell) on related topics and see who is laying down the law on what men can and can't do or call themselves. It's almost exclusively other men!
It's not that misandry doesn't exist at all. And as a matter of fact there are various other ways that men can suffer under the status quo and other shipmates have already identified some. I have been known to post on the complexities of domestic violence. The thing is that the twit in the video accuses feminism of misandry. If it exists there, it is located within the works and writings of the more extreme second-wave writers, most of whom are now either so decrepit or dead that they are history. To accuse feminism of misandry is to make exactly the same error that caused all that grief on the other threads - describing an entire group by the properties of the derelict few.
As a matter of fact, doing that has a name. It's called demonization. It's a form of essentialism, and usually says more about the perpetrator than anything else. It never ceases to amaze me that people are startled by others going into orbit when it is done to them. If people were to follow the wise advice given by RuthW and QLib in how to avoid it, we could have saved ourselves a lot of grief in every direction over three separate threads.
[ 31. August 2013, 10:23: Message edited by: Honest Ron Bacardi ]
Posted by Horseman Bree (# 5290) on
:
Since the minor tangent in my post seems to be the only one getting any attention, I am offering
a discussion of "Which one is oppressed?"
Both examples are clearly in response to male needs, just as high heels are.
Men do not have to subject themselves to such scrutiny.
Men do, OTOH, have to cover up the fact that the significant majority of them are deficient in the looks department, particularly the area covered by the baggy shorts. Being embarrassed beats actually doing something about the flab. Most men do not wear budgie smugglers, thankfully.
And how many men, of any appearance, going topless, would have to deal with this sort of situation as a threat: "Still not asking for it" ?
Unlike the US, it is legal in Canada for a woman to go topless in public. (Given the idea of winter, topless is quite often not a good idea!)
Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on
:
Initially, IngoB, I thought "how on earth can I find an online source for what I have known since college, rather a long time back, and seen backed up on various occasions, in places I can't recall.
But first I found this:
quote:
11. The best male long jumpers for State College since 1973 have jumped an average of 263.0 inches with a standard deviation of 14.0 inches. The best female long jumpers have averaged 201.2 inches with a standard deviation of 7.7 inches. This year Joey jumped 275 inches and his sister, Carla, jumped 207 inches. Both are State College students.
(a) Find the standardized values for Joey’s and Carla’s jumps. Which athlete had the more impressive performance? Explain briefly.
(b) Assume that male and female jumps are Normally distributed. Find the percentiles for Joey’s and Carla’s jumps. Interpret these percentiles in context.
A test from themathlete.weebly.com
It clearly refers to what I believe to be true.
And then I found this:
Overlapping curves
And then, with an illustrative curve of marathon times:
War and gender
There is supposedly a link to a Fig on lifting capabilities, but I couldn't get it.
The article bears reading in the context of this discussion.
It also refers to other primates, which reminds me that we have a major difference from them, in that the sexual dimorphism among humans is much less than that in the others. So much less that in some communities, it is barely distinguishable. (I used to do people watching round the local shopping centre, and looking at sizes was fascinating. Couples where the dimorphism was almost as great as in gorillas. Couples where heights and builds were equal. Some where the woman was taller.
(It also occurred to me that in earlier times, a village of very small, but normal, people could find the occupants of another normal village where people were bigger to be giants. And the "giants" might think of the small ones as elves. The differences were that great. But not to do with gender.)
Posted by Cod (# 2643) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by goperryrevs:
But even this is a by-product of society's expectation that it's women that do the child-rearing while the men go off to work, so you could easily see it as an off-shoot of misogyny anyhow.
One should be very cautious with that analysis. An alternative analysis is that increased acceptance of women in the workplace has not been matched by an equivalent increased acceptance of men's increased parental roles. I feel very much like a second-class parent despite my efforts and believe also that my children are encouraged to see fathers as second-class parents by by society in general and their school. For example, some while back I checked through my children's school books and worked out that references to mothers outweighed fathers by about 5 to 1. This lopsidedness is not deliberate. It is the result of unexamined attitudes. Nevertheless, I think is real enough, and to categorise it as a result of misogyny trivialises the very real harm it causes.
Posted by goperryrevs (# 13504) on
:
Sure, I agree that the harm is very real, from personal experience too. I was musing the roots of the problem. Whatever those roots are, for an individual dad facing prejudice, or even separation from his kids, it doesn't really matter. The situation is shitty and unfair, however it came about. That needs to change.
Posted by Dinghy Sailor (# 8507) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
Initially, IngoB, I thought "how on earth can I find an online source for what I have known since college, rather a long time back, and seen backed up on various occasions, in places I can't recall.
But first I found this:
quote:
11. The best male long jumpers for State College since 1973 have jumped an average of 263.0 inches with a standard deviation of 14.0 inches. The best female long jumpers have averaged 201.2 inches with a standard deviation of 7.7 inches. This year Joey jumped 275 inches and his sister, Carla, jumped 207 inches. Both are State College students.
(a) Find the standardized values for Joey’s and Carla’s jumps. Which athlete had the more impressive performance? Explain briefly.
(b) Assume that male and female jumps are Normally distributed. Find the percentiles for Joey’s and Carla’s jumps. Interpret these percentiles in context.
A test from themathlete.weebly.com
It clearly refers to what I believe to be true.
What's the point in this?
The answer to the question is that the standardized Z scores are Z=0.857 for Joey and Z=0.753 for Carla. That means that Carla jumped further than 77% of "the best female long jumpers" in this presumably fictitious college league and Joey jumped further than 80% of "the best male long jumpers" in this same fictitious league.
The figures were almost certainly made up for the exam but even if they weren't, I think you're mistaken about what they mean. What they say is that half of "the best" male athletes in this league will jump at least 263 inches and that 68% of them will jump between 249 and 277 inches. Half of "the best" female athletes will jump at least 201.2 inches and 68% of them will jump between 193.5 inches and 208.9 inches. 95% of the male athletes will jump between 235.5 inches and 290.5 inches, while 95% of female athletes will jump from 186 to 216 inches. That's a pretty large difference between the sexes!
Again: what's the point of this anyway? The abilities of both men and women are distributed on curves: well yes, anyone will tell you that. It would take a complete ignoramus to say that every single man has been faster, and stronger than every single woman ever. The point is that men are on average faster and stronger than women, these effects are very reproducible and anyone who thinks that there aren't real phyical differences involved is denying reality.
I am a (very) amateur bike racer. Could Lizzie Armitstead or Marianne Vos beat me any day of the week? Of course they could, but they train all day while I work for a living. Could they beat me even if that wasn't the case? Probably yes too, because they're the top of the genetic pile. However, once we get the same bunch of amateurs of both sexes together, my golden rule is that while I hardly ever win, I've done okay if I beat all the ladies - and I usually do, despite some of them training harder than me.
Take some real data: if you look at the British time trial records. There was only ever one time that a woman beat a man's record: Beryl Burton's 12 hour record, set back in 1967. That record is probably more famous than Burton's seven world titles, because beating the boys at their own game was such a special moment, with such rarity value.
Some women can outperform some men - well yes, obviously, and especially in our slob society where a minimal amount of training will let you outperform most people. Does that mean that there are no real, significant differences between the sexes in terms of physical performance? No, it doesn't.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
Initially, IngoB, I thought "how on earth can I find an online source for what I have known since college, rather a long time back, and seen backed up on various occasions, in places I can't recall.
Are you sure that you are not confusing this with IQ distributions? What you say works for those. For physical performance, not so much...
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
It clearly refers to what I believe to be true.
It claims massive differences between men and women, the female average being almost five standard deviations away from the male one. There is very little overlap of these bell curves.
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
And then I found this:
Overlapping curves
That's an opinion article with nothing resembling data in sight...
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
And then, with an illustrative curve of marathon times: War and gender
I had found that one. The graph was so small and badly described, I then tried to find something better. I found a couple of amateurs analyzing some data scraped of marathon websites. But I couldn't find anything really decent. Anyway, the graph you link to shows a massive difference in averages, about 2 standard deviations away I would say, with men running over a mile per hour faster on average. Also the male distribution is clearly skewed to high speeds (not a Gaussian), the female one isn't. There's consequently a massive dominance of men at the highest speeds. This is really different to for example the IQ graphs, which I still think is what you are thinking of.
(By the way, in googling for racing results separated by gender, I found what must be the worst Nature paper ever: Athletics: Momentous sprint at the 2156 Olympics? These jokers extrapolate the 100 m records linearly over more than a century, and conclude that eventually women will sprint faster than men! I seriously cannot believe that they got this through peer review at all, never mind in Nature... Extrapolate a few more centuries like that, and women will need zero seconds for the 100 m. ROTFL!)
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
It also refers to other primates, which reminds me that we have a major difference from them, in that the sexual dimorphism among humans is much less than that in the others. So much less that in some communities, it is barely distinguishable.
I've lived and worked in several countries on several continents, and have visited dozens of countries. Never have I encountered a human population where bodily differences between men and women were "barely distinguishable" on average.
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
Couples where the dimorphism was almost as great as in gorillas. Couples where heights and builds were equal. Some where the woman was taller.
Nobody has claimed that the tallest woman is shorter than the shortest man, or anything like that. That's not needed for statistically highly significant differences.
Posted by Justinian (# 5357) on
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
(By the way, in googling for racing results separated by gender, I found what must be the worst Nature paper ever: Athletics: Momentous sprint at the 2156 Olympics? These jokers extrapolate the 100 m records linearly over more than a century, and conclude that eventually women will sprint faster than men! I seriously cannot believe that they got this through peer review at all, never mind in Nature... Extrapolate a few more centuries like that, and women will need zero seconds for the 100 m. ROTFL!)
Oh, I don't know. I rather think that Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children (a.k.a. Andrew Wakefield's notorious paper) was worse ethically, practically, and in terms of the methodology and practical outcomes. But yes, Nature does appear to be about one step up from New Scientist or Scientific American despite its reputation.
quote:
I've lived and worked in several countries on several continents, and have visited dozens of countries. Never have I encountered a human population where bodily differences between men and women were "barely distinguishable" on average.
On what scale?
quote:
Nobody has claimed that the tallest woman is shorter than the shortest man, or anything like that. That's not needed for statistically highly significant differences.
Indeed.
That said, there's one sport I can think of where women do often outcompete men. Ski Jumping. So they separated it into mens and womens (and right now it's the only olympic sport with only a mens' event).
Posted by Horseman Bree (# 5290) on
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Oh well, not getting any answers, might as well throw another rock into the pool.
Thicke vs Cyrus at the VMAs.
Miley Cyrus is clearly going through a "dump-Disney" phase, and has managed to get a lot of attention. Robin Thicke doesn't have the stunted-adolescence problem, but managed to get a pretty good gig.
Cyrus gets all sorts of negative comment about showing her sexuality (despite being at the peak of her sexuality) while Thicke gets nothing much but a few people saying vague things about inappropriate - not that he's married or anything. Cyrus gets blasted for appropriating black music forms (as if that never happened before) while Thicke gets the publicity for a hit song. I'm not seeing the misandry here.
Another case: In the Texas legislature, Wendy Davis spoke for eleven hours about abortion, while standing in one place and not drinking or going to the bathroom. The only thing reported was the colour and make of her shoes. Nothing of substance in eleven hours of speaking. Meanwhile, the men can say anything, however stupid and irrelevant, and get applause.
Some states insist on raping women with an ultrasound wand if they want an abortion, but, when a proposal to do a rectal probe with the same instrument to check on prostate problems, it is voted down instantly.
No misandry at all, just lots of misogyny.
EE seems to be calling persecution just like those white evangelicals, who are trying to get women and blacks back under control, scream about being persecuted when the Supreme Court rules that GLBTs and women are actually people.
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Fair enough, we do not. I think with an activity so strenuous as to actually deform bones we can make some rather easy guesses, but whatever. I was not really making a point about English longbows and who can handle them with sufficient training. I was making a general point about the overall suitability of the sexes for the kind of physical combat that held sway from time immemorial to early modernity.
On average, men are taller, stronger and faster. It does not inherently follow that insufficient numbers of women could perform acceptably well* in combat. This is true of many male-dominated jobs.
Women bear children. This alone is sufficient explanation as to why they would not be the primary hunters and warriors. Attitudes, once set and culturally accepted, change slowly.
*And acceptably well is the general standard of performance of men in combat.
quote:
Originally posted by Justinian:
That said, there's one sport I can think of where women do often outcompete men. Ski Jumping. So they separated it into mens and womens (and right now it's the only olympic sport with only a mens' event).
Well,
quote:
On 6 April 2011 the International Olympic Committee officially accepted women ski jumping into the official Olympic program for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia
Though it is a tad ironic this Olympics would find an area in which to be inclusive.
Posted by Dave W. (# 8765) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
And then, with an illustrative curve of marathon times:
War and gender
There is supposedly a link to a Fig on lifting capabilities, but I couldn't get it.
It turns out you can see the Google Books scan of the page that has that figure here; the curves show much less overlap than the ones for marathon times.
Posted by Cod (# 2643) on
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quote:
Originally posted by goperryrevs:
Sure, I agree that the harm is very real, from personal experience too. I was musing the roots of the problem. Whatever those roots are, for an individual dad facing prejudice, or even separation from his kids, it doesn't really matter. The situation is shitty and unfair, however it came about. That needs to change.
Its roots are indeed in a system that benefitted men. It does not follow that as a result men benefitted from this particular practice. My own father spent my entire childhood (and that of my elder siblings) working very hard. We knew not to bother him in the morning, or indeed in the evening when he came home from work. I don't think my siblings or I ever appreciated what he did for us. All we knew was that he always seemed to be in a bad mood and didn't really know how to talk with us.
I am also pretty much the sole breadwinner in my family. Happily, I am able to spend far more time with my children than my father was able to spend with us, but I see the same problem taking place. I am surprised by this, because I actually spend pretty much as much time with the Codlets as Mrs Cod does (she is generally out doing one thing or another during the weekend). But when I see what the children are actualy being taught, either formally through school or informally in other ways, I don't see much if any recognition that fathers can be carers, nurturers etc, or that they have feelings that can be hurt. Insofar that they are mentioned at all, it is as strong stoics. Of course, elsewhere they are idiots who may or may not be useful at chopping up firewood or DIY, and may or may not be able to earn a crust.
Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on
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Cod, that's not so true in the UK (and it looks the US from trying to find references). There are a number of initiatives involving fathers in caring because research is showing that more actively involved fathers lead to better outcomes. Locally the library service runs Saturday morning sessions with fathers/grandfathers and children called Daddy Cool and there are a number of school based initiatives to work with fathers and children.
Posted by Avila (# 15541) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Cod:
[snip]
I feel very much like a second-class parent despite my efforts and believe also that my children are encouraged to see fathers as second-class parents by by society in general and their school. For example, some while back I checked through my children's school books and worked out that references to mothers outweighed fathers by about 5 to 1. This lopsidedness is not deliberate. It is the result of unexamined attitudes. Nevertheless, I think is real enough, and to categorise it as a result of misogyny trivialises the very real harm it causes.
I think the schooling references are deliberate - there has been a concern not to alienate children who don't go home to a 2 parent family at the end of the day - the previous assumption in resources from earlier times. And with single mums being the most common weekday carers they get to stay in the books.
It may be intended as a reflection of the way things are but as you note it also reinforces a view.
This is one area that I agree makes assumptions about what men don't - or can't - do.
Posted by Cod (# 2643) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Curiosity killed ...:
Cod, that's not so true in the UK (and it looks the US from trying to find references). There are a number of initiatives involving fathers in caring because research is showing that more actively involved fathers lead to better outcomes. Locally the library service runs Saturday morning sessions with fathers/grandfathers and children called Daddy Cool and there are a number of school based initiatives to work with fathers and children.
I'm glad to hear it.
For completeness I should add that I grew up in the UK (in the 70s and 80s). The point to note is that neither I nor my siblings were ever really encouraged to appreciate the importance of what our father did. Perhaps it was though to be too obvious to need stressing, but the result was that his hard work was taken for granted. The importance of love and affection is something every child will appreciate without being told, but mere money is never a big deal unless there isn't any.
What troubles me now (and as I type this I realise I'm in a bad space and perhaps should retire from this thread) is that I am becoming just the bad-tempered dad who goes off somewhere during the day, comes home, cooks, moans, and despite the extrea time I get with the kids, remains *just* the Dad.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Justinian:
On what scale?
You mean concerning what observables? Height, weight, skeletal features (more robust head, wider back, bonier extremities ...), more visible bone/musculature (less overall fat 'cover') and walking motion would be the most visible.
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
On average, men are taller, stronger and faster. It does not inherently follow that insufficient numbers of women could perform acceptably well* in combat. This is true of many male-dominated jobs.
Women bear children. This alone is sufficient explanation as to why they would not be the primary hunters and warriors. Attitudes, once set and culturally accepted, change slowly.
*And acceptably well is the general standard of performance of men in combat.
First, the question is not whether a weaker unit (e.g., made up of women) is better than no unit. Of course it is. Throughout history, weaker units have had their tactical uses. For example, the Romans put their teenagers / young men as skirmishers in front of the battle line, to pelt the enemy with spears, and then to duck back behind the battle line as the main clash commenced. That's a highly efficient use of a weaker unit. Putting them up directly against a stronger unit is usually a bad idea though, unless the commander is willing to sacrifice troops for the delay that they cause in being slaughtered...
I'm sure that also in the ancient world there were occasions of what we have come to call "total war", in particular in sieges of cities. But if you are about to draft an army from your populace, while leaving a considerable part of them to get on with business, then it is natural to draft men, not women. That is very much not just a function of child bearing or patriarchal culture. On average, a unit of men will be better for (ancient!) warfare than a unit of women, or indeed than a mixed unit. And if the resources are limited, then you want to go for the best that you can get in building up an army. Arguably, drafting mixed units would have been best for maintaining regular life at home (men would have been missed at home much more in the past than in our times full of machines). But it doesn't help to have maintained home better if the war gets lost, and so this was not done.
I note that these comments apply pretty much regardless whether we talk about units that favour "individual fighting power", think of "wild" barbarians, or "organized group fighting", think a phalanx or Roman "block left, poke right" shield lines. The averages always count in the end, whether it is who loses some duel-like individual combat or whose line breaks first. Furthermore, it is not at all just about direct combat. The question how fast you can march your troops from A to B with full (often very heavy) gear often is decisive in wars. Give every soldier armour, weapons and "livelihood" gear of about 30-50 kg to carry, and march them 100 km to the next battle. How quick can they do it? In what state will they be when they arrive? Often battles have been won simply by virtue of who got there first and was able to set up in advantageous position. The same is true for military "on the fly" building: how fast until those trenches are dug, how quick for the makeshift bridge to be established? Or for moving heavy equipment in and out of battle: how quick will that two story siege tower be pushed to that city wall under heavy fire?
The idea that choosing men as war fighters is merely some kind of ingrained cultural preference is really quite inane. Only now are we technologically so advanced that the clear differences between men and women do not play as much of a role any longer in battles. I've never been a soldier, thank God. But I have been a martial artist (past tense, hopefully present tense again soon), including some serious weapon fighting (FMA). I think I have a fair idea what men and women can do with a bit of technical / fitness training in pre-firearm combat, generally speaking. You do not want to field a unit of women against a unit of men, drawn randomly from the population and all other things (numbers, health, training, gear, ...) being equal. Bad idea. Period. That some elite unit of amazons could have kicked ancient male Greek ass, I will readily accept as a (mythical...) possibility. But that doesn't change these general considerations.
Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
And then, with an illustrative curve of marathon times:
War and gender
There is supposedly a link to a Fig on lifting capabilities, but I couldn't get it.
It turns out you can see the Google Books scan of the page that has that figure here; the curves show much less overlap than the ones for marathon times.
Thanks for that. I could tell from the percentages in the text that that was the case - but would point out that that figure refers to trained soldiers, not the general public, and the marathon includes a much wider selection, from the elite runners to the amateurs (but excluding those like me who don't run anywhere if they can help it). And my original point was that looking at the overlap required looking at the whole population. The soldiers, not being conscripted, will be a self selected group, as are the runners. I couldn't find anything that did that.
One thing in that article (I think, it might have been something else I found) was the comparison of upper body strength. When I was at all girls schools, my inability to haul myself up a rope was regarded with scorn - eventually a colleague who trained at a PE college enlightened me on what could be expected from girls and what couldn't. My legs are full of muscle, my arms aren't. Muscle is heavy.
But, I also remember a programme about Victorian kitchens and professional cooks - and I wouldn't want to gamble on their upper body strength. Everything we do with gadgets and more was done with their arms. Whisking, blending by pushing food through sieves, kneading huge quantities of dough, and particularly sticking in the mind, twisting wet cloth to extract consomme. The same sort of thing goes for launderers. If you train people to use their bodies, abilities develop. (I think the article referred to what can be carried in less effete societies - water pots comes to mind - where women are more often seen carrying than men are. And what is carried has to be lifted.)
I suspect that (undoped and un-whatever the eastern bloc used to do) women in the throwing events would have a large overlap with the general population of men, and most of those events are based on what were originally war activities. Who would care to take on Fatima Whitbread at the javelin?
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
I suspect that (undoped and un-whatever the eastern bloc used to do) women in the throwing events would have a large overlap with the general population of men, and most of those events are based on what were originally war activities. Who would care to take on Fatima Whitbread at the javelin?
Who would care to take on Fatima Whitbread at the javelin? Why, male javelin throwers who are equally professionally training this, of course. As you can read here, "men throw a javelin between 2.6 and 2.7 m in length and 800 g in weight, and women throw a javelin between 2.2 and 2.3 m in length and 600 g (21 oz) in weight." So men throw a heavier, bigger javelin and still their world record is 26 meters further, covering about 36% more distance.
You really have to start to compare like with like here. You cannot take a top female athlete and compare her to untrained males. In terms of warfare, one would not expect most recruits - either male or female - to reach world record throwing distances with a few months or perhaps years of training. Let's say they manage to throw half the distance, about 50 m for men. But one can expect something like that 36% difference between men and women (not even counting the weight difference). So the women may throw something like 37 m. Is an extra 13 m reach going to make a difference? Depends on the situation, of course, but in general: yes, definitely. For example, a skirmishing unit needs to throw and then run back: if they get caught out they are basically dead against the heavily armoured regular troops. An extra 13 m distance mean a lot when you need to turn heel on charging troops and run for your life...
Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
You do not want to field a unit of women against a unit of men, drawn randomly from the population and all other things (numbers, health, training, gear, ...) being equal. Bad idea. Period.
And following up on lilBuddha's earlier point, even if men and women had identical strength and speed, you still wouldn't want to put your women on the front line. It would be demographic suicide. If 30% of your men don't come home from war, you haven't really altered your new population production ability. Kill off 30% of your women, and it drops 30%.
Posted by Dave W. (# 8765) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
And then, with an illustrative curve of marathon times:
War and gender
There is supposedly a link to a Fig on lifting capabilities, but I couldn't get it.
It turns out you can see the Google Books scan of the page that has that figure here; the curves show much less overlap than the ones for marathon times.
Thanks for that. I could tell from the percentages in the text that that was the case - but would point out that that figure refers to trained soldiers, not the general public, and the marathon includes a much wider selection, from the elite runners to the amateurs (but excluding those like me who don't run anywhere if they can help it). And my original point was that looking at the overlap required looking at the whole population. The soldiers, not being conscripted, will be a self selected group, as are the runners. I couldn't find anything that did that.
[…]
But, I also remember a programme about Victorian kitchens and professional cooks - and I wouldn't want to gamble on their upper body strength. Everything we do with gadgets and more was done with their arms. Whisking, blending by pushing food through sieves, kneading huge quantities of dough, and particularly sticking in the mind, twisting wet cloth to extract consomme. The same sort of thing goes for launderers. If you train people to use their bodies, abilities develop. (I think the article referred to what can be carried in less effete societies - water pots comes to mind - where women are more often seen carrying than men are. And what is carried has to be lifted.)
Now it seems you're trying to have it both ways - you deprecate the US Army results because they're for "trained soldiers", but then suggest men's and women's capabilities might be practically the same since "If you train people to use their bodies, abilities develop."
(And I suspect the training effect on soldiers is probably a lot less than that on marathon runners. The few marathon runners I've known put a great deal of time and effort into preparation; the fitness standards of the US Army aren't anywhere near as challenging.)
I think your original statement that there's a "vast overlap" of the curves describing the distribution of physical capabilities of each gender isn't supported by the evidence. Here's one study which explicitly compared elite female athletes with untrained males:
quote:
Hand-grip strength has been identified as one limiting factor for manual lifting and carrying loads. To obtain epidemiologically relevant hand-grip strength data for pre-employment screening, we determined maximal isometric hand-grip strength in 1,654 healthy men and 533 healthy women aged 20-25 years. Moreover, to assess the potential margins for improvement in hand-grip strength of women by training, we studied 60 highly trained elite female athletes from sports known to require high hand-grip forces (judo, handball). Maximal isometric hand-grip force was recorded over 15 s using a handheld hand-grip ergometer. Biometric parameters included lean body mass (LBM) and hand dimensions. Mean maximal hand-grip strength showed the expected clear difference between men (541 N) and women (329 N). Less expected was the gender related distribution of hand-grip strength: 90% of females produced less force than 95% of males. Though female athletes were significantly stronger (444 N) than their untrained female counterparts, this value corresponded to only the 25th percentile of the male subjects. Hand-grip strength was linearly correlated with LBM. Furthermore, both relative hand-grip strength parameters (F (max)/body weight and F (max)/LBM) did not show any correlation to hand dimensions. The present findings show that the differences in hand-grip strength of men and women are larger than previously reported. An appreciable difference still remains when using lean body mass as reference. The results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men.
Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on
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I have been basing my comments on a) what I have been taught, and b) some things I have read since over the years. (Plus noticing anecdotal things like the way I could match male teachers who insisted one gripping my hand over firmly when shaking it. And the bunch of shaven headed Japanese Buddhist monks and nuns I met where it was not at all easy to identify which were men and which were women.)
I shouldn't have said vast. But the overlaps are there, much more so than in other primates. And I do think that arguments about men's and women's usual positions in society should be based on the whole distribution of whatever is being measured across all the members of each gender, and not just the extremes. Fatima Whitebread may well have been hefting a lighter javelin than the Olympian men, but she was a heck of a lot better at it than most of the men who weren't on the field in the Olympics. The argument about gender differences should not be based on Olympians of either sex, or cooks, or archers, but upon hoi polloi, both men and women. It's the middle of the curve that matters.
(And in IQ, the middle wasn't shown as different when I was at college, while the male tails extended further than the female. Even though, in the non-verbal 11 plus, more girls qualified for grammar schools than boys, only for a "correction" to be applied downwards. So I have read and been told. I've tried to find a reference of this "common knowledge" but not even a Snopes' myth bust of it.)
Anyway, where does misandry come into this? I don't deny it's out there, but I don't think saying some women are better at some things than most men is an example. (I know it's out there, 'cos I saw a book yesterday called "Completely Stupid Men" with a "joke" on the cover. "What do you call a man with half a brain? A genius." I feel bad I didn't discuss the suitability of including it on the Age Concern stall. By a woman (apparently). My best male friend denies it's misandry because it's funny. I disagree. A different target and it would be misogynist or racist.)
Posted by Honest Ron Bacardi (# 38) on
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There's an interesting exception to the general physical strength observations, which is "ultrarunning", eg ultramarathons of 100 miles and the like. They are usually run with both sexes competing against each other as equals. There's an article here in a running magazine about it, but the effect is real and there are peer-reviewed papers written on it.
Posted by Honest Ron Bacardi (# 38) on
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Penny S wrote:- quote:
(And in IQ, the middle wasn't shown as different when I was at college, while the male tails extended further than the female. Even though, in the non-verbal 11 plus, more girls qualified for grammar schools than boys, only for a "correction" to be applied downwards. So I have read and been told. I've tried to find a reference of this "common knowledge" but not even a Snopes' myth bust of it.)
Same here. There are quite a few things said to have been done which I have not been able to track down evidence for either way. IQ annual test results are normed to 100 of course, and I would not be entirely surprised to learn that this was done separately by sex. Some of that other stuff sounds increasingly far-fetched, but who knows? Evidence kindly sought.
Posted by QLib (# 43) on
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I think it would be difficult to get evidence, because it varied from one local authority to another - it depended on how many girls and boys grammar school places they had.
Posted by Honest Ron Bacardi (# 38) on
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Point taken Qlib, but comments I have heard related to general rather than local practice.
Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on
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Including that there were generally more boys' places than girls'.
I've been trying to track down another "common knowledge" item, in average heights. For many years I have thought that my height, 5ft6in, was average for my cohort of women - and it looked like it from looking around me. And that average for men was 5ft8in - not particularly dimorphic. I know I used to notice that many older men were not as tall as me.
Now the UK figures are 5ft4in for women, up from 5ft3in in 1912, and 5ft9in for men, up from 5ft8in in 1912. I can't find anything in between. I was taught that there had been an increase in heights because of better nutrition. (The current figures are similar to the States.) One site has graphs showing heights at different ages - it's obvious that modern girls grow quicker than a century ago, but stop earlier, presumably with earlier menarche. I don't know if anyone can find figures for mid-century.
Height graphs
One of the comments refers to a peak in British heights 2 decades ago due to free milk after the war, but without any link.
Interesting if I have always been taller than average, despite being shorter than my younger sisters. But that figure stuck because it was my height. A difference of 2 inches between the sexes isn't much, but 5 inches is.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
The argument about gender differences should not be based on Olympians of either sex, or cooks, or archers, but upon hoi polloi, both men and women. It's the middle of the curve that matters.
Fine. Men are taller, heavier, stronger, faster, more explosive, more enduring (up to a point, see below) and more robustly built. I'm talking there about the "middle of the curve", which according to you matters. And I'm talking about statistically significant differences, with the averages separated by a couple of standard deviations or more. That is what the data say, including the data you referenced yourself. So if there's a job where most of these features are relevant, as for example in ancient combat, then the hoi polloi men should be preferred to the hoi polloi women for that job. At least so if the sole criterion is who is going to be better at the job, on average. For our example ancient combat, we indeed see that fighting was dominantly done by men. Now, there may be other reasons for that, like needing to keep women alive as "procreation reserve", or patriarchal culture, or whatever. But it remains true that the selection of men as fighters was entirely reasonable on grounds of the differences in anatomy and physiology alone.
Are we agreed? Then we can finally move on...
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
Anyway, where does misandry come into this? I don't deny it's out there, but I don't think saying some women are better at some things than most men is an example.
How about strenuously denying that men are on average better at some things than women? Can we count that as misandry?
quote:
Originally posted by Honest Ron Bacardi:
There's an interesting exception to the general physical strength observations, which is "ultrarunning", eg ultramarathons of 100 miles and the like. They are usually run with both sexes competing against each other as equals.
Actually, while googling for data I saw several scientific articles which suggested that as the distances get longer and longer bio-mechanical and physiological theory suggests that at some point women will have a physical advantage.
Women also do well for example at extreme sled dog races, so perhaps they are on par if not better than men at "ultra-endurance" in general.
Posted by Anyuta (# 14692) on
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
So if there's a job where most of these features are relevant, as for example in ancient combat, then the hoi polloi men should be preferred to the hoi polloi women for that job. At least so if the sole criterion is who is going to be better at the job, on average
Or....one could base the decision on who meets the criteria, rather than on gender. Sure a job that requires one to lift heavy weights is going to have more men than women qualify (assuming that's the only criterion), but should women who DO meet the criterion be excluded simply because most other women don't?
It works the other way too, although few jobs I can think of are based on criteria which most, but not all, men would fail.
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
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quote:
IngoB:
{Lots of evidence to support the claim that men are better natural warriors than women, and also ...}
The idea that choosing men as war fighters is merely some kind of ingrained cultural preference is really quite inane.
quote:
Leorning Cniht:
And following up on lilBuddha's earlier point, even if men and women had identical strength and speed, you still wouldn't want to put your women on the front line. It would be demographic suicide. If 30% of your men don't come home from war, you haven't really altered your new population production ability. Kill off 30% of your women, and it drops 30%.
Historically, it has made complete sense to choose men to fight wars rather than women. But since it made sense, isn't it possible that this eminently practical choice has shaped our culture in ways that affect how we view men, their lives, their roles in society?
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Anyuta:
Or....one could base the decision on who meets the criteria, rather than on gender. Sure a job that requires one to lift heavy weights is going to have more men than women qualify (assuming that's the only criterion), but should women who DO meet the criterion be excluded simply because most other women don't?
Sure, I have no problem with strong women doing heavy lifting. As far as drafting armies go, there are however plenty of complicating factors. Factors that in the ancient world would have strongly spoken against including say 10% women in an army, even if that were the due proportion according to biological talent...
Posted by SvitlanaV2 (# 16967) on
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I don't think it's been anyone's goal to develop a 'misandristic' culture, but some commentators say that societal change has created a crisis of cultural masculinity. Some men might experience this as misandry.
There's the collapse of manufacturing; the decline of (un)skilled labour; and the rise of women's professional status, which means more competition for white collar jobs. There's a heightened ambivalence about the role of the armed forces. The rise of the service industries appears to have benefited women more than men.
Then there's the personal sphere. I imagine that the decline of grand narratives has been harder for men than for women. Men have traditionally been expected to be willing to sacrifice themselves for causes - but now there are no more causes. Sexual liberation was supposed to be great for men but it seems to have left them with a reduced sense of responsibility, even a reduced purpose in life, whereas women still dominate in the vital role of childcare or are given custody of children after divorce. Maybe the male presence in the home was always optional to an extent, but this seems to be especially true today.
The above refers particularly to cultural confusion in the (postmodern) Western world. Elsewhere things are obviously different - although there are apparently some scientists who think that biological maleness will completely die out in the very long run.
Posted by Dave W. (# 8765) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
I have been basing my comments on a) what I have been taught, and b) some things I have read since over the years.
Well, I too have learned and read things that turned out not to be true, so I know how it goes sometimes.
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I shouldn't have said vast. But the overlaps are there, much more so than in other primates. And I do think that arguments about men's and women's usual positions in society should be based on the whole distribution of whatever is being measured across all the members of each gender, and not just the extremes. Fatima Whitebread may well have been hefting a lighter javelin than the Olympian men, but she was a heck of a lot better at it than most of the men who weren't on the field in the Olympics. The argument about gender differences should not be based on Olympians of either sex, or cooks, or archers, but upon hoi polloi, both men and women. It's the middle of the curve that matters.
Did you see the abstract I quoted in my last post? The average hand-grip force was 64% higher for men than for women, and "90% of females produced less force than 95% of males." The centers of the two distributions were quite far apart, with very little overlap indeed.
I don't think this should have implications for "men's and women's usual positions in society" except perhaps insofar as hand-grip strength (or some other physical strength) is a prerequisite for a particular job - and even then individual assessment makes more sense than simple selection by gender. But the observed dimorphisms are likely to result in many of those jobs being filled mostly by men.
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
And I do think that arguments about men's and women's usual positions in society should be based on the whole distribution of whatever is being measured across all the members of each gender, and not just the extremes.
But this started out being about what trained people could do. Not what everybody could do.
And this, I think, is the big problem with your argument. Because you're not just positing a gender-blind world, but a talent-blind, skill-blind one as well.
Which is not only not how the real world works, I don't think it's how we WANT it to work. We don't all randomly flit from task to task whenever the mood takes us, ignoring whether or not we, and the people around us, have any aptitude for the task at hand. I have a job that I appear to be naturally talented at, as well as having developed my skills over recent years. I have a very long list of jobs that someone would be mad to employ me for. And every employer assesses the candidates for a job and picks the best one, not the one in the middle of the bell curve.
There aren't many cases where I think 'the best person for the job' is more likely to in fact be a man, but I think it'd be just silly to insist, in the few cases where men are evidently better suited, that we need to have equal numbers of women present rather than accepting that it's 'usually' men's place in society. It would be every bit as silly as insisting on ideological grounds that 50% of wet nurses need to be men.
Posted by Jay-Emm (# 11411) on
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Originally posted by RuthW:
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IngoB:
{Lots of evidence to support the claim that men are better natural warriors than women, and also ...}
The idea that choosing men as war fighters is merely some kind of ingrained cultural preference is really quite inane.
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Leorning Cniht:
And following up on lilBuddha's earlier point, even if men and women had identical strength and speed, you still wouldn't want to put your women on the front line. It would be demographic suicide. If 30% of your men don't come home from war, you haven't really altered your new population production ability. Kill off 30% of your women, and it drops 30%.
Historically, it has made complete sense to choose men to fight wars rather than women. But since it made sense, isn't it possible that this eminently practical choice has shaped our culture in ways that affect how we view men, their lives, their roles in society?
It would make a lot of sense, given the subjects of most books/plays are either war, (often martially) journeys or romance you instantly get your comment on lack of leads. Especially when you consider them mixing elements.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
Historically, it has made complete sense to choose men to fight wars rather than women. But since it made sense, isn't it possible that this eminently practical choice has shaped our culture in ways that affect how we view men, their lives, their roles in society?
Sure. But I see a chicken-egg problem there. Culture is not some external entity that aliens forced on us. Culture arises from people as much as shaping them in return. So if say men have a tendency to play hero, is that because of all the male hero stories they have listened to growing up? Or were all those male hero stories written because men have a tendency to play hero, making them believable as protagonist? Probably both, in some kind of feedback cycle.
As a general comment, I would say that our current culture doesn't know how to deal with groups any longer. It is always just the individual who counts. That makes negotiating group level arrangements so difficult. I'm part of that culture as much as anybody else. Witness my comment above concerning women doing heavy lifting. It was a honest comment, but still, it reflects this individualistic world view. The question whether women can do heavy lifting is not allowed, rather it has to be the question whether this particular woman can do this particular heavy lifting.
It is always difficult to step out of one's culture and judge it from the outside, but in this case we are quite aware of having overcome the "system injustice" of group level judgement. We are proud of that, in fact. However, I wonder whether this is not yet another cultural pendulum, which happens to have swung very far one way in our times. There are serious issues with denying group level arrangements, because humans are group animals and find much of their identity instinctively from the groups they belong to. There's hence a cultural price to be paid for busting open "closed groups". In some cases it sure was worth it, but I wonder if doing it indiscriminately is not eventually doing more harm than good. To go back to a fairly harmless example: obviously, to deny some strong woman the opportunity of some heavy lifting job is doing her an individual injustice. But is there perhaps a value in declaring heavy lifting to be exclusively a "man's job"? Is there room for allowing "male pride" in doing heavy lifting? In particular, consider that heavy lifting is objectively speaking a pretty shit job. It's exhausting, unhealthy, dangerous and badly paid. But putting a tag "for men only" on it might make it attractive, and by the quirks of human psychology potentially more attractive the shittier it is: for real men only. And yes, perhaps people should be able to form groups along reasonable lines, say "group of people with good upper body strength" rather than "men". But is it reasonable to expect people to be reasonable in that way?
Anyway, these are random thoughts and I do not have a "solution". I'm not even sure how much of a problem I have there. But it seems to me that finding a new "male identity" for our times, or for that matter a new "female identity", is difficult because our culture is really opposed to any such thing as a "beyond individual" identity. You cannot successfully say "men are X" if there is an instant dissenting chorus of "(some) women are X, too" or "it is unfair to reserve X for men". Maybe people should be reasonable enough to deal with probability distributions in their ideals: "most men are somewhat more X than most women". But I fear that psychologically that does not work so well. And it can be dangerous to frustrate basic psychology.
Posted by Chorister (# 473) on
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I have noticed, through observing Welsh relatives, how traditionalist they are and how protective the men are of their women. I found it quite disturbing and annoying until I realised that it was probably historical - due to the nasty dirty work in the mines being done by men and them not wanting their women to have to suffer as they had done. Women still worked at the mines, but tended to do surface work rather than the heavy duty work below.
We live in different times now, when that strongly protective attitude of one sex for the other should not be so necessary (but hopefully replaced by mutual caring rather than indifference), but at least I could see how it might have come about.
Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on
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Possibly so, but don't underestimate how horribly and miserably hard the housework of many miners' wives was. I think you're right in saying that Wales is rather (if I may put it this way) backward in gender relations- as it is in so many other social aspects.
Posted by L'organist (# 17338) on
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Chorister
![[Killing me]](graemlins/killingme.gif)
Your Welsh relatives are atypical.
I can assure you that, however much your male Welsh relatives may seem protective of the females in the family, this is purely a defence mechanism.
As any person with Welsh roots can tell you, a Welsh Mam or Non (mum or grandma) rules the family with a rod of iron - in particular treating males as simple creatures who need direction in all things and their time being mapped out for them so they don't get delusional about something so beyond them as having free will or freedom of thought, apart from the rugby anyway.
Posted by pererin (# 16956) on
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quote:
Originally posted by L'organist:
As any person with Welsh roots can tell you, a Welsh Mam or Non (mum or grandma) rules the family with a rod of iron
Nain. Or mam-gu (or even myngu) down here. Non was Dewi Sant's mam.
Posted by L'organist (# 17338) on
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Always called Non in my family - maybe a Cardiff thing???
Posted by Soror Magna (# 9881) on
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Gosh, I`ve only heard about a million times that on average, men are stronger and faster than women. ![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
However, strength and speed are not the only abilities a soldier needs. They are also not necessarily the decisive factors in every conflict.
Pop quiz, hotshot: Did the Allies defeat the Axis because their soldiers could do more pushups and run faster?
Obsessing about strength and speed is just a way to reassure men of their superiority by not even mentioning, let alone valuing, characteristics like judgment or technical skills or leadership or communication skills; things which are far harder to measure and compare, and things in which (horrors) men might not have an (on average) automatic advantage over women.
In most of the places I have worked, the ability to do the job to a particular standard (or higher) is taken for granted, and it is the ability to work in teams and get along with others that is rare and precious and highly sought after. If a man can`t do his job unless women are excluded so he can feel "male pride", then he`s clearly less qualified and less skilled than a man who doesn`t need that constant reassurance.
Posted by Horseman Bree (# 5290) on
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Exactly.
Posted by Jay-Emm (# 11411) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Soror Magna:
Pop quiz, hotshot: Did the Allies defeat the Axis because their soldiers could do more pushups and run faster?
Was WW2 before or after "ancient combat"?
I'd wondered about posting about the Russian front before noticing the qualification. (it's fascinating wiki-reading, not least the American press's reaction to a Russian snipers visit).
Which was pretty much won by sending everything!
But even then your vastly underestimating the men and women of WW2, it may have been the other things that swing the balance, but if you'd taken it away I don't think we'd have been able to pay the cost in machines/reserves.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Soror Magna:
Gosh, I`ve only heard about a million times that on average, men are stronger and faster than women. However, strength and speed are not the only abilities a soldier needs. They are also not necessarily the decisive factors in every conflict. Pop quiz, hotshot: Did the Allies defeat the Axis because their soldiers could do more pushups and run faster?
The Allies defeated the Axis mostly by sheer numbers, a better supply chain and Axis over-extension, all leading to unsustainable attrition on the Axis side. But given that we were talking about ancient (or at least pre-firearm) combat, what could possibly be the point of mentioning WWII here? Oh, and I doubt that you have heard about men being stronger and faster than women "about a million times", not even in an idiomatic sense. That is not something that is being talked about much in my experience. And fair enough, there rarely is a good reason why this would get talked about. (Unless of course women talk to other women about men being stronger and faster than women. As a man, I wouldn't be privy to such conversations. But I will assume that this was just a rhetorical move on your part.)
quote:
Originally posted by Soror Magna:
Obsessing about strength and speed is just a way to reassure men of their superiority by not even mentioning, let alone valuing, characteristics like judgment or technical skills or leadership or communication skills; things which are far harder to measure and compare, and things in which (horrors) men might not have an (on average) automatic advantage over women.
The only reason we have been obsessing about strength and speed here is because Penny S in particular denied what you have heard "about a million times". Oh, and I have no "horror" about talking about matters in which women may well be superior. For example, while I rarely hear about men being stronger and faster than women, I must have heard about ... well ... a thousand times that women are better than men at communicating. That may well be true. And?
quote:
Originally posted by Soror Magna:
If a man can`t do his job unless women are excluded so he can feel "male pride", then he`s clearly less qualified and less skilled than a man who doesn`t need that constant reassurance.
If that's supposed to address my comments on individual vs. group differences above, then it is a really shallow comment indeed. But perhaps as a woman you are just communicating way better than I can grasp as a man, and all your substantial engagement is lost on me, leaving me with the sad impression of petty point scoring.
Posted by Plique-à-jour (# 17717) on
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
If that's supposed to address my comments on individual vs. group differences above, then it is a really shallow comment indeed. But perhaps as a woman you are just communicating way better than I can grasp as a man, and all your substantial engagement is lost on me, leaving me with the sad impression of petty point scoring.
YES! Gorgeous.
Remember folks, this is the only conversation about sexism you're capable of having. Enjoy.
Posted by Mili (# 3254) on
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What do people think about this issue outlined in an article in The Age newspaper
Geelong Grammar bids to limit male students ?
Is it discrimination? Should private schools that were formally boys schools or that are long term co-ed schools but are losing girls to private girls schools just accept the gender imbalance?
The article is not clear on why the schools want to be gender balanced, apart from having a commitment to coeducation. Perhaps they are afraid they will lose all their female students if their schools are too male dominated. There is a perception here, based on certain studies that girls do better in girls schools, because boys tend to dominate classroom discussions and gain more of the teachers attention, while boys do not benefit educationally from a single sex setting. I'm pretty sure some of the Old Boys from the schools that were previously boys schools would disagree.
I attended and teach in co-ed (mostly) state schools so can't really comment on the differences between co-ed and single sex schools from a personal perspective.
Posted by Cod (# 2643) on
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I think the better question is why girls are outperforming boys and to what extent society is responsible for rectifying the balance.
If as you say, boys tend to command more of the teacher's attention, one might expect them to be doing better. The theory I've heard is that girls knuckle down while boys stuff around. But if this is true, the question has to be asked: why do they misbehave and are they not entitled to society's help in rectifying this problem by, for example, employing at least some more male teachers - if there is any evidence that boys learn better from them.
Posted by Mili (# 3254) on
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That isn't relevant for Geelong Grammar though as it is a non-selective school. It is one of the most expensive schools to attend in Australia and many of its students are very successful and powerful eg. Rupert Murdoch to name an internationally famous example. Prince Charles also spent two terms there.
I was surprised to find out they have been coed in the two senior years since 1972 and completely coed since 1976. I thought they were a boys school until much more recently. Yet they still have a gender imbalance in favour of boys and want to get an exemption from discrimination laws so they can have an equal number of male and female students.
Posted by Chorister (# 473) on
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quote:
Originally posted by L'organist:
Your Welsh relatives are atypical.
I can assure you that, however much your male Welsh relatives may seem protective of the females in the family, this is purely a defence mechanism.
As any person with Welsh roots can tell you, a Welsh Mam or Non (mum or grandma) rules the family with a rod of iron - in particular treating males as simple creatures who need direction in all things and their time being mapped out for them so they don't get delusional about something so beyond them as having free will or freedom of thought, apart from the rugby anyway.
I don't doubt that the Welsh women rule in the home; the men rule at work (and down the Rugby club). Where they go to escape, no doubt?
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on
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That has often been said of working class families in general - that the wife/mother rules at home. See 'Sons and Lovers' for a literary example.
However, it's almost certainly an exaggeration. No doubt there are families like that, but you also find the opposite, and no doubt, more equal relationships in the home.
The equivalent round the Mediterranean was said to be 'the woman is in the church, the man is in the cafe', but again it is probably more complex than that.
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