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Roderick

Feminism

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Ah yeah, you're right. I was reading "express your feelings of support" as a separate statement. Although that bit you quoted kind of contradicts the stuff about not putting the spotlight on it. I guess she's saying you can condemn what's happening to someone as long as you don't refer to the person by their twitter handle, but surely it only takes someone a couple of seconds to find that handle themselves.

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Study: Boyfriends Insecure, Wish to Hoard Success for Themselves
 

Results: It didn’t seem to matter to men what the circumstances of their girlfriends’ success was. Whether the success was social or intellectual, whether it related to the boyfriend’s failure or was just something the woman achieved independent of anything the boyfriend did, the men still tended to feel worse about themselves when their girlfriends succeeded. This only goes for implicit (subconscious) self-esteem, though—men didn’t explicitly report feeling worse about themselves, whether because they didn’t consciously notice or because they didn’t want to portray themselves as insecure jerks, we cannot say.

 

“The lack of difference lends some support to the idea that men interpret ‘my partner is successful’ as ‘my partner is more successful than me,’” the study reads.

 

In the face of a partner’s success, women felt better about the future of their relationship, and men felt worse. Men felt better about the future of their relationship when their partner had just failed.

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I feel worse about myself when ANYONE I know succeeds, but that might just be because I hate myself.

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I have no doubt that something like this study is trying to prove exists, but I really question their data. They only used 32 couples, most from the University of VA who were an average 19 years-old. The end of the report admits that a flaw in their research was not studying older men, possibly to see how maturity effects this situation.

That said, I'd fully believe that men act this way with female partners. I'm just not positive this study provides enough good proof.

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I'd be interested in seeing the experiment carried forward and looking at homosexual couples to see if the gender lines fall the same way, or if a reaction like this is more related to historical heterosexual norms.   And, as Argobot said, to look at a much wider age range.  Or extend it to look at relationships beyond romantic.  There are interesting questions here, but their data and results are super limited.

 

Usually I think that studies that focus on college kids are kinda bullshit, as it's way to restricted to draw larger conclusions about the populace (and restricted in a lot of subtle ways due to the limited societal access to college).  But relationship studies might be one exception to that (and I stress the might in that sentence).  It seems that there are a lot of relationship habits people form around that age that stick around for a long time. 

 

I do agree with Twig though that I've felt that sting of jealously/envy when a good friend is successful (regardless of gender).  Reflecting back, it does seem to be more likely for that reaction to happen the closer I am to someone.  If a casual acquaintance has a big life success, I'm more likely to be just immediately happy for them than if it is a very close friend.  It's not something I like.  I recognize that I feel that way, that it is bullshit to feel that way and that what I want to feel is that I'm happy and proud of my friend.  Then I try to internalize and project that happiness for them.  I wish that was just my automatic reaction though.  I never considered whether or not that reaction may be a learned, gendered reaction. 

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Yeah it's definitely one of my worst qualities. Back when I got laid off (oh god that was over a year ago) alongside some of my friends, and I watched them all find jobs while I sat there receiving rejection after rejection, all I could feel was anger and resentment. Worst.

I'm willing to believe it's more likely for men to feel that way, in part because that's how men are supposed to feel. We're all competitive, striving to be the best, right?! Woo! Societal pressures create our desire to win. It's the complete opposite of what's probably the common societal pressure on women. But...

 

I agree with Argobot that it's probably a common thing in a male-female relationship, regardless of age bracket, but I'm not sure it's because men don't like it when women succeed. I think it's because men don't like it when anyone succeeds.

 

Maybe. I don't know.

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Yeah it's definitely one of my worst qualities. Back when I got laid off (oh god that was over a year ago) alongside some of my friends, and I watched them all find jobs while I sat there receiving rejection after rejection, all I could feel was anger and resentment. Worst.

I'm willing to believe it's more likely for men to feel that way, in part because that's how men are supposed to feel. We're all competitive, striving to be the best, right?! Woo! Societal pressures create our desire to win. It's the complete opposite of what's probably the common societal pressure on women. But...

 

I agree with Argobot that it's probably a common thing in a male-female relationship, regardless of age bracket, but I'm not sure it's because men don't like it when women succeed. I think it's because men don't like it when anyone succeeds.

 

Maybe. I don't know.

 

Especially in my early 20's, "winning" in terms of how I felt like my career was advancing relative to my peers was super important to me. As I got older and hit various amounts of adversity, I cooled my jets a lot. I don't think it was age so much as life experience that forced me to evaluate my priorities. There are a lot of factors that can come into play regarding how people grade their own success; I'm skeptical that it can always be nailed down to something universal like what your gender is.

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I might have experienced this when my relationship with my wife was just a fraction of what it is now, but at this point it's impossible for me to abstract my success from my wife's contribution or my contribution from my wife's success. We are absurdly tangled at this point and wouldn't be doing anything similar to what we are doing now if we were doing it alone.

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Especially in my early 20's, "winning" in terms of how I felt like my career was advancing relative to my peers was going was super important to me. As I got older and hit various amounts of adversity, I cooled my jets a lot. I don't think it was age so much as life experience that forced me to evaluate my priorities. There are a lot of factors that can come into play regarding how people grade their own success; I'm skeptical that it can always be nailed down to something universal like what your gender is.

I don't think it's so much what your gender is, so much as what your gender is supposed to be. Obviously in reality everyone is different. There are aggressive and passive men and women that are either happy or unhappy at another's success. But but BUT, society tells us men should be one way and women the other. I mean, obviously. That's the whole problem that feminism exists to solve. I don't know where I'm going with this. Maybe it's that just because everyone's different doesn't mean society doesn't mold us into something we otherwise wouldn't have become. In this case, it's made me a highly competitive jerk who should be executed on the spot. ]';

 

Gender expectations are stupid, I guess, is the gist of things.

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This discussion reminds me of a relatively recent conversation with my girlfriend about the depressing nature of my extended jobseeking period.

She said I put too much value into it and worry about it too much.

I responded that it wasn't just the not having a job part but that it was like I'd failed at being a person because I wasn't able to do this thing that's a basic requirement.

When she pointed out that's just an abstracted and indirect concept of the male need to be a breadwinner it took me a bit to realise how true it was because I had to cut through the programming of thinking 'this is just how people operate though, isn't it?'.

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I was watching Saturday morning cartoons and noticed something about McDonald's current happy meal promotions. They have two lines of toys, one is TY Beanie Babies and the other is Mario Kart toys, both things I enjoyed when I was a kid. Let's see if we can spot the difference between the commercials:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv3HLWJ2Uro

 

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This this is a thing that exists:

 

Women against Feminism Tumblr and Facebook page.  Featuring inspiring photos of women holding signs explaining why feminism is evil and they don't need it. 

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This this is a thing that exists:

 

Women against Feminism Tumblr and Facebook page.  Featuring inspiring photos of women holding signs explaining why feminism is evil and they don't need it. 

 

Now there are two things I'm not going to click.

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That Facebook page did introduce me to some of the dangerous misinformation that people spread to try and discredit feminism, which while it follows the same bullshit pattern that you see in a lot of shitty communities (misrepresenting data, pulling things out of context, minimizing information that doesn't fit), it's useful to be reminded about these types of things sometimes.

 

So this article gets referenced a bunch apparently in places that want to try and attack feminism as full of lies and hypocrisy.  It's about how a Harvard study confirmed that 70 percent of domestic violence is by women against men.  The headline with the piece is "Harvard study says 70 percent of domestic violence is committed by women against men", which is flat wrong, though the article does have the correct statistic in it, that 70 percent of non-reciprocal domestic violence was initiated by women. 

 

But, the article is:

  1. Not from Harvard.  It's by a Georgia State researcher who also looks like he's worked with the CDC.  Harvard just ran an article about the study, and that article was later pulled.  Probably because so many shitheads were using it as "proof" about the reality of domestic violence.
  2. The study was focused on 17-25 year olds.
  3. It specifically sought to exclude the most dangerous abuse, the type resulting in death or trips to the hospital, wanting to address "average" violence.
  4. It also did not address the severity of the violence, which the authors acknowledge was a major limitation

It looks like we've known for decades that men and women commit roughly a similar amount of domestic violence, this isn't new knowledge.  The difference is that women are 6 times more likely to result in injuries that require medical treatment (or it kills them) than men are.

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I wonder if there's like a database of links full of information to counter links that people use incorrectly. Like if someone linked me that "harvard study" article, I could just counter with a link to Bjorn's post there, which lists a few facts in easy to understand format. If there isn't such a database there should be.

 

 

 

 

I started reading Argobot's link and I don't even think I can finish it because I am fucking disgusted. I know this isn't an uncommon thing, either. Just... fuck.

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I was watching Saturday morning cartoons and noticed something about McDonald's current happy meal promotions. They have two lines of toys, one is TY Beanie Babies and the other is Mario Kart toys, both things I enjoyed when I was a kid. Let's see if we can spot the difference between the commercials:

This is something I've particularly noticed recently, on account of having a 1 year old daughter. Another odd data point: during the Pokemon promotion, boys got Pokemon, and girls got American Girls stuff. Which is ridiculous, because everybody loves Pokemon. Besides the fact that they're (traditionally feminine) adorable animals. I'm not sure why Fennekin is somehow coded as more masculine than Twilight Sparkle.

 

Also, this:

http://comicsalliance.com/mcdonalds-happy-meals-the-amazing-spider-man-2-gendered-toys/

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This is something I've particularly noticed recently, on account of having a 1 year old daughter. Another odd data point: during the Pokemon promotion, boys got Pokemon, and girls got American Girls stuff. Which is ridiculous, because everybody loves Pokemon. Besides the fact that they're (traditionally feminine) adorable animals. I'm not sure why Fennekin is somehow coded as more masculine than Twilight Sparkle.

 

Wait, seriously? The whole reason why Pikachu was picked as the series mascot was because it had the perfect mix of cool and cute to appeal to both boys and girls. That's baffling.

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If we're just linking sad things today: Reporting Rape and Wishing She Hadn't

 

 

I started reading Argobot's link and I don't even think I can finish it because I am fucking disgusted. I know this isn't an uncommon thing, either. Just... fuck.

 

I couldn't even reply to that yesterday, the story was too much.  The transcript of the "hearing" made me want to punch something.  I've had no training in that sort of thing, but do have some experience conducting sensitive interviews, and I could have done a much better job questioning both people.  Is it even constitutional for a student to not be able to have a lawyer with them in a situation like that?  Schools are empowered by federal law to have the power to hold these hearings, essentially operating as a court.  If you're going to take on the power of a court under law, shouldn't at least some of the rules that govern courts come along with that?

 

I still don't understand why we let college disciplinary boards handle felonies.  Like WHAT THE GODDAMNED FUCK.  If someone was murdered on campus, we wouldn't just turn it over the to school.  Not that police and DAs have been shown to be the most competent with rape cases, but still, turn that shit over to the proper authorities.  The bizarrest part of that story is how incredibly competent the campus police look.  The rolled in, did their job professionally and looked after the victim.  It's like, look at these guys, is it that hard for the rest of you to act like professionals?

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So, Max Temkin (of Cards Against Humanity fame) was accused of raping a girl while he was in college, and in reply he posted a long, somewhat mansplainy post on Tumblr where he says he thought he had consent, then says he's not going to sue her for libel because he's the better man apparently.

 

Do not know how to feel about it all.

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