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Roderick

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meandered in my previous post, but part of my point is that if the discussion is taking place in a male defined space (which is the society we live in), then aren't the experiences of women potentially undervalued or lessened by the conversation itself?  Is expecting that conversation potentially sexist in and of itself?  Is that getting into the territory of "Please explain sexism/feminism to me because I don't understand it?"  By insisting that a person's feelings are the beginning of a conversation, are you insisting that a woman has to deliver a "sales pitch" to justify her experience, not just accepting her experience for what it is?

I'm not prepared to cede the very territory of conversation itself to sexism. Surely we'd be better off seeking to correct for bias rather than presume that conversation is impossible.

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For some reason my mobile ISP (not the one I use at home, just for my phone) has actually blocked this site http://feministcurrent.com/8098/feminists-are-not-responsible-for-educating-men/

I'd like to believe it's not some form of Internet censorship but I can't fathom why else it would be blocked. I'm definitely going to confirm that it's not just a once off and the site is entirely blocked and then I'll get in contact with them about it because it's really insane.

(also apologies for horrendous formating. Phones will be phones)

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You don't understand a distinction between the feeling that you are discriminated against and the action describing how that is so? It's the difference between saying that women face harassment and actually showing what that harassment looks like, as in the post above. It's the difference between a single person's experience and a common thread that goes through a million people's experience. On the end of people less understanding of feminism, that difference is the difference between beginning to perceive an ancient systemic discrimination and handwaving a 'few bad eggs because boys will be boys'.

 

The reason for the strenuousness of my objection is because if it's all just a matter of how people feel, rather than the circumstances that engender those feelings, there's nothing actionable there. Put bluntly, at that point if person A thinks person B is sexist, there's nothing that person A can say to convince person B that that's the case beyond 'that's how I feel' and nothing person B can say to convince person A they're innocent. If that's the end of the conversation, no conversation took place. No meaningful progress can be made. It erodes the very ground that conversation takes place on.

 

Everyone's personal experience is important, but it's not the be-all-end-all. As I said, it's where the conversation begins, not where it ends.

 

I think that the general concept of sexism as "the systemic societal oppression of women" and the specific concept of sexism as "words or actions that make a woman feel oppressed" can coexist peacefully, but if you're going to go to absolutes, then I'd say the former is one the one that absolves blame, that inhibits action, that removes agency, at least without the latter to inform it. Like I've said earlier in this thread, we can look to racism. Vanishingly few people I know identify as racist and a lot of them say racism is therefore dead, because they're looking at it from a broad perspective that sees the collective absence of individual intent as the absence of racism itself. Now, hopefully we here all know that racism is fully possible from well-intentioned people because of the historical framework in which we operate, and that the same is true for sexism. With that in mind, how can you divorce a given person from their often-sexist actions without the supremacy of a subjective model? Without the ability of the victim to speak authoritatively about her own victimhood, how can any person committing a well-intentioned but sexist act avoid blaming either the victim or society rather than themselves?

 

And like hell, there's nothing actionable about feelings. If person A thinks person B did something sexist (note the distinction, which I am always careful to make, between doing something sexist and being sexist) then there is something very specific and very useful that person B can do: they can apologize. They can put aside whatever preconceptions they hold about their own actions and apologize for committing what person A, almost certainly a woman, believed to be a sexist act. That's where the conversation goes. It doesn't end with the accusation, it goes to a place of healing and learning. Giving anyone the formalistic right to tell anyone else, "You're wrong, that isn't sexist," is what ends the conversation.

 

 

Ugh. It's always great to read the first like of an article and realize immediately that my faith in the goodness of humankind is going to be under siege for a little while. Thanks for posting it, Sarah.

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I was writing a response but in the midst of copious editing Gormongous preemptively put up a better one so I'll defer to that.

 

Nooo, don't make me do this all by myself!

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I think that the general concept of feminism as "the systemic societal oppression of women" and the specific concept of feminism as "words or actions that make a woman feel oppressed" can coexist peacefully

Quoting before you realize your mistake and fix it because it amuses me too much.

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Quoting before you realize your mistake and fix it because it amuses me too much.

 

... I don't understand. Did I misspell something? I can't tell.

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Argh I am frustrated. You keep on telling me things that I know and accept. I am not saying there isn't room for both ideas to exist, but I am saying that they are different, if related ideas, and saying that one of them defines sexism is reductionist. I'm not saying women can't speak out about their victimhood or that it should be in any way disregarded, as I have said many many times and am beginning to become peeved at having to repeat, but I am saying that saying that's the extent of what sexism is or what our understanding of it has to be is lazy, and does a disservice to those who have actually put in the research to find boundaries of the problem beyond the solely experiential.

 

I'm going to have to stop and take a nap and by the time I get back this thread is going to have 12 more pages and I won't be able to keep up. I'm angry at the implicit idea that trying to pull things into the realm of shared reality has a necessary, rather than created, gender bias. That idea seems super insulting to both women and to scientists to my perception. The idea that because some people's lazy formalism gives them an excuse to dismiss women's voices is a good reason to avoid reasoned thought altogether-- WHAT. People complain a lot about the non-apology of 'I'm sorry you're upset', but without a greater understanding of what we are doing wrong and how we are hurting each other that is literally the only kind of apology we can make. We will never understand how we hurt each other, or how we can make things better, or why we acted that way, the entire extent of our understanding will be that one person was hurt by the actions of another. In a person-to-person interaction, perhaps that is all that is needed -- but for making things better tomorrow? For making things better for everyone? It's not enough.

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Nooo, don't make me do this all by myself!

 

I dunno, you're pretty good at it.  Unlike myself, who by and large doesn't actually know what they're talking about and is mostly speaking out of my ass.  And here comes a pretty good example of that.

 

I read the article Sarah linked as well.  I didn't even glance at the comments because I'm already too mad at things in my life but the topic did get me thinking again about an idea I had a while ago.  Would it be a completely terrible idea to have a well known male and female writer/journalist/blogger put up posts written by themselves but with the other person's name attached for some period of time before revealing the truth?  I'm not trying to suggest that a woman should hide her identity behind that of a man's or anything like that.  But I would be curious to see what the results of comments and reactions would be.  Would the comments be more civil just because a man's name was on the byline instead of a woman even though the words themselves were written by a woman?  Would the people who make horrible comments under the articles with a female author's name suddenly reverse them if they found out the thoughts were actually those of a male?

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... I don't understand. Did I misspell something? I can't tell.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, you mixed up the words sexism and feminism. Am I making a fool of myself now?! D:

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Unless I'm misunderstanding, you mixed up the words sexism and feminism. Am I making a fool of myself now?! D:

 

Fuuuck, Twig. No, you're right. I'm just tired and frustrated. I hate this thread, I know it's holy work, but it still stresses me the fuck out to post in it because I don't know shit and am just trying to be the best ally I can be. That said:

 

Argh I am frustrated. You keep on telling me things that I know and accept. I am not saying there isn't room for both ideas to exist, but I am saying that they are different, if related ideas, and saying that one of them defines sexism is reductionist. I'm not saying women can't speak out about their victimhood or that it should be in any way disregarded, as I have said many many times and am beginning to become peeved at having to repeat, but I am saying that saying that's the extent of what sexism is or what our understanding of it has to be is lazy, and does a disservice to those who have actually put in the research to find boundaries of the problem beyond the solely experiential.

 

I'm going to have to stop and take a nap and by the time I get back this thread is going to have 12 more pages and I won't be able to keep up. I'm angry at the implicit idea that trying to pull things into the realm of shared reality has a necessary, rather than created, gender bias. That idea seems super insulting to both women and to scientists to my perception. The idea that because some people's lazy formalism gives them an excuse to dismiss women's voices is a good reason to avoid reasoned thought altogether-- WHAT. People complain a lot about the non-apology of 'I'm sorry you're upset', but without a greater understanding of what we are doing wrong and how we are hurting each other that is literally the only kind of apology we can make. We will never understand how we hurt each other, or how we can make things better, or why we acted that way, the entire extent of our understanding will be that one person was hurt by the actions of another. In a person-to-person interaction, perhaps that is all that is needed -- but for making things better tomorrow? For making things better for everyone? It's not enough.

 

What shared reality is there besides the galaxy of women's experiences of sexism? The idea that there is some unknown, almost unknowable frontier of sexism that men and women need to work together to explore, understand, and document is, quite frankly, baffling to me. Sexism is already well understood by the many feminist scholars out there, some of whom have been linked before and will be linked again in this thread. Saying that the most pressing concern for us, as people living day to day with sexism, is to think reasonably about it, rather than to exert a muscular empathy on its victims, is what seems insulting to me. If it were possible to attack society itself, to break down oppressive structures directly, then I'd agree with you, but it's not possible. We can only affect society through its constituent parts. Sexism is combated by confronting sexist actions person-to-person, because it's people who commit them in the end, however society informs them.

 

And I really don't know what you're saying about apologies. I feel like you're reading me pretty uncharitably to say that what are demanded from the perpetrator of a sexist act is an empty apology. Rather, I hope they would say, "I'm sorry. I didn't know that was sexist. What did I do and how can I not do it again?" That, in my opinion, which is of course only my opinion, does much more to end sexism, if ever a thing could really be "ended" in full, than all the hand-wringing we've been doing about objective definitions of sexism.

 

Basically, at the end of the day, I'm asking you this: if a woman tells you that you did something sexist, what is your response? If your response is going to be an apology, empathy, and an effort to learn, then I'm content to say we agree, because I really don't care about formulating any abstract theories of sexism for day-to-day application. It is not useful to me as a man and I'm not sure it would be useful to most women. If it's useful to you, if it makes you a better ally of women and queers, then go for it, so long as it doesn't lead you to silence or marginalize.

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I don't get why we need to do this deep dive on the difference between feeling something and documenting something, or trying to establish a scale of first degree and third degree sexism. We can very easily observe the cesspool of gaming culture that results in very real death/rape threats, hostile work and social environments, lower pay, and limited opportunities.

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And I really don't know what you're saying about apologies. I feel like you're reading me pretty uncharitably to say that what are demanded from the perpetrator of a sexist act is an empty apology. Rather, I hope they would say, "I'm sorry. I didn't know that was sexist. What did I do and how can I not do it again?" That, in my opinion, which is of course only my opinion, does much more to end sexism, if ever a thing could really be "ended" in full, than all the hand-wringing we're doing about objective definitions of sexism.

 

This is my interpretation, so don't take this as his representation of his own views - I think what he's trying to say is that if there's no semblance of objectivity or a shared sense of what's sexist, you can only apologize from your limited perspective as a male that can't inherently identify his own sexism without the arbitration of a female. As a result, we're dealing with two kinds of sexism that are related in some ways, but are divided by individual female perspective versus shared consensus. One doesn't trump the other, they're just two problems that need to be addressed that will have some effect one each other.

 

This is highlighted in something I agree with in theory, but can't universally accept in practice - the idea that women have no responsibility to inform men about what they're doing wrong. The reason why this is a belief held by many feminists, in my estimation, is that placing the burden of education on women unfairly shifts full responsibility to women, when in fact everyone is responsible for properly respecting their fellow woman or man. How this belief is practiced, however, sometimes amounts to the following:

 

Man: [says something with some inherent, pervasive sexist element]

Woman: "Hey, that's sexist and I don't like you!"

Man: "I'm sorry. I didn't know that was sexist. What did I do and how can I not do it again?"

Woman: "You're the 20th person to treat me in that same exact way today, if I spent my time explaining it to every person I'd be out of a job. Get out of my face!"

Man: [dejected because he was unable to receive the guidance of a woman, has no cultural consensus to consult for self-guidance]

 

So, obviously slightly exaggerated in a couple ways because I can't help but be a little bit of an ass, but I hope you get the general idea. I think you guys need to get away from the idea of a cultural consensus being absolute and overriding of the individual female experience, instead an independent but not mutually exclusive concept.

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I think in the end we're all mostly agreeing and are getting bogged down by semantics and extremely fine details which are naturally going to vary from person to person.  That seems to be the conclusion most of the arguments in this thread reach.

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Fuuuck, Twig. No, you're right. I'm just tired and frustrated. I hate this thread, I know it's holy work, but it still stresses me the fuck out to post in it because I don't know shit and am just trying to be the best ally I can be.

Haha. Don't worry about it. You're clearly a good person. It was just a funny mistake!

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Doesn't Patrick Klepek catch a lot of vitriol for writing about similar issues? I'm not sure changing the name from Mary to Martin will do much, because the people who are already inclined to lash out against these issues will do so regardless of the byline.

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I'm not prepared to cede the very territory of conversation itself to sexism. Surely we'd be better off seeking to correct for bias rather than presume that conversation is impossible.

 

I'm not arguing that conversation is impossible, I'm arguing that the conversation exists in a sexist framework and may also be sexist, intended or not.  As such, I do not believe that it is ever a requisite that someone engage in conversation, and that their choice not to engage has no bearing on the validity of their experience.  Your argument feels like it's undermining to people's experiences if they aren't willing to engage in that conversation.  To imply that a conversation ought to happen is to mandate part of a woman's reaction to something sexist, and that's not something that anyone gets to do. 

 

Nooo, don't make me do this all by myself!

 

I'm sometimes hesitant to jump into an ongoing conversation (even if it doesn't seem that way!), as I don't want to unintentionally take it different direction or misconstrue someone else's argument simply by participating. 

 

 

I dunno, you're pretty good at it.  Unlike myself, who by and large doesn't actually know what they're talking about and is mostly speaking out of my ass.  And here comes a pretty good example of that.

 

I read the article Sarah linked as well.  I didn't even glance at the comments because I'm already too mad at things in my life but the topic did get me thinking again about an idea I had a while ago.  Would it be a completely terrible idea to have a well known male and female writer/journalist/blogger put up posts written by themselves but with the other person's name attached for some period of time before revealing the truth?  I'm not trying to suggest that a woman should hide her identity behind that of a man's or anything like that.  But I would be curious to see what the results of comments and reactions would be.  Would the comments be more civil just because a man's name was on the byline instead of a woman even though the words themselves were written by a woman?  Would the people who make horrible comments under the articles with a female author's name suddenly reverse them if they found out the thoughts were actually those of a male?

 

I think we know what would happen, and it would just confirm what we can already see.  Take a look at how people reacted when I Fucking Love Science was revealed to be the passion project of a woman.  She never even pretended to be a man, everyone just assumed a girl wouldn't run the most popular science feed on FB.  Then there's digby, an anonymous political blogger who revealed herself to be a woman when she accepted an award in person, and her comments section went into the shitter for awhile afterwards.   And here's the story of a professional writer who continues to write under a male pseudonym because of the problems of writing under her real name.  And that's not even dipping our toes into the long history of women writing professionally as males because of the sexism baked into our culture. 

 

An experiment in the gaming sphere would be interesting, but somehow I doubt that it would end up changing many minds.  It might actually have the opposite effect. Shitheads would probably insist that they always thought there was something off about Writer X, how their misogyny sense tingled whenever a new post went up even though it had a man's name on it.

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This is my interpretation, so don't take this as his representation of his own views - I think what he's trying to say is that if there's no semblance of objectivity or a shared sense of what's sexist, you can only apologize from your limited perspective as a male that can't inherently identify his own sexism without the arbitration of a female. As a result, we're dealing with two kinds of sexism that are related in some ways, but are divided by individual female perspective versus shared consensus. One doesn't trump the other, they're just two problems that need to be addressed that will have some effect one each other.

 

This is highlighted in something I agree with in theory, but can't universally accept in practice - the idea that women have no responsibility to inform men about what they're doing wrong. The reason why this is a belief held by many feminists, in my estimation, is that placing the burden of education on women unfairly shifts full responsibility to women, when in fact everyone is responsible for properly respecting their fellow woman or man. How this belief is practiced, however, sometimes amounts to the following:

 

Man: [says something with some inherent, pervasive sexist element]

Woman: "Hey, that's sexist and I don't like you!"

Man: "I'm sorry. I didn't know that was sexist. What did I do and how can I not do it again?"

Woman: "You're the 20th person to treat me in that same exact way today, if I spent my time explaining it to every person I'd be out of a job. Get out of my face!"

Man: [dejected because he was unable to receive the guidance of a woman, has no cultural consensus to consult for self-guidance]

 

So, obviously slightly exaggerated in a couple ways because I can't help but be a little bit of an ass, but I hope you get the general idea. I think you guys need to get away from the idea of a cultural consensus being absolute and overriding of the individual female experience, instead an independent but not mutually exclusive concept.

 

All of that's fair, although it does kinda presuppose a world where you can't just google what you said or did plus the word "feminist" and find out what it was that was wrong about it. I have never said that there can't be a cultural consensus, and if I did I was in error, because obviously there is and is going to be, but I will say that, in day to day interactions, which is where most instances of sexism occur, we need to give priority to the female experience always, except in extremely specific exceptions that border on concern trolling to bring up. I know that it serves a useful purpose for some, but overwhelmingly in my experience, the perceived "cultural consensus" on sexism is used by men to protect or excuse themselves from accusations of sexism, not to educate themselves when individual women fail to do so. That is why I am so vocal about the supremacy of the subjective experience of sexism, because it's important to reiterate in matters of oppression that the only tenable arbiter is the experience of the victim.

 

And, through no fault of anyone but myself, this thread has finally made writing bad copy for our library's philosophy subject guide more attractive than goofing off on the internet, so I'm going to excuse myself, too. I hope I've done some good, at least. I know we're all good people here.

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Doesn't Patrick Klepek catch a lot of vitriol for writing about similar issues? I'm not sure changing the name from Mary to Martin will do much, because the people who are already inclined to lash out against these issues will do so regardless of the byline.

 

 

I think we know what would happen, and it would just confirm what we can already see.  Take a look at how people reacted when I Fucking Love Science was revealed to be the passion project of a woman.  She never even pretended to be a man, everyone just assumed a girl wouldn't run the most popular science feed on FB.  Then there's digby, an anonymous political blogger who revealed herself to be a woman when she accepted an award in person, and her comments section went into the shitter for awhile afterwards.   And here's the story of a professional writer who continues to write under a male pseudonym because of the problems of writing under her real name.  And that's not even dipping our toes into the long history of women writing professionally as males because of the sexism baked into our culture. 

 

An experiment in the gaming sphere would be interesting, but somehow I doubt that it would end up changing many minds.  It might actually have the opposite effect. Shitheads would probably insist that they always thought there was something off about Writer X, how their misogyny sense tingled whenever a new post went up even though it had a man's name on it.

 

I suspect you're both right but as an intellectual exercise I'd still be interested in the results.  Of course that would require someone to actually do it and given the shit that most female writers already catch I would never ask anyone to volunteer for something like that just to satisfy my own curiosity.

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Doesn't Patrick Klepek catch a lot of vitriol for writing about similar issues? I'm not sure changing the name from Mary to Martin will do much, because the people who are already inclined to lash out against these issues will do so regardless of the byline.

 

Well, women in the gaming industry get shit for just about anything they say whether or not it's about "these issues". Part of what makes this whole thing so ridiculous particularly as it pertains to gaming is that people say "well, she's a stupid woman for giving that game I like a 6 because if a man reviewed it, I'm sure it'd do better".

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Somehow I missed the news about cheerleaders around the league suing NFL teams to be paid as employees.  I've always thought it was horseshit that cheerleaders don't get paid, it's part of the long tradition of devaluing the work that women do versus the work that men do. 

 

But This American Life's first half delves into the lives of professional cheerleaders and the super shitty nature of the handbooks that govern their lives.  Like instructing them on tampon use, vagina washing and how to converse in ways that men enjoy (Don't whine!  Don't have opinions a man might disagree with!).  I know that male athletes' handbooks can get ridiculous, but I'm trying to imagine someone lecturing Ray Lewis on how to properly wash his ass. 

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Somehow I missed the news about cheerleaders around the league suing NFL teams to be paid as employees.  I've always thought it was horseshit that cheerleaders don't get paid, it's part of the long tradition of devaluing the work that women do versus the work that men do. 

 

But This American Life's first half delves into the lives of professional cheerleaders and the super shitty nature of the handbooks that govern their lives.  Like instructing them on tampon use, vagina washing and how to converse in ways that men enjoy (Don't whine!  Don't have opinions a man might disagree with!).  I know that male athletes' handbooks can get ridiculous, but I'm trying to imagine someone lecturing Ray Lewis on how to properly wash his ass. 

 

I know that they were doing that story in a way where they just wanted to represent the views of the people they interviewed but it really bothered me that it wasn't really slammed for being sexist. It was highlighted as invasive but the episode didn't really delve into the idea that the entire point of the rule book was about being flawless living dolls that didn't interrupt by doing anything other than the simple tasks expected of them. Instead the story started by saying it was invasive and weird, but it said it without extrapolating the real social constructs behind what a cheerleader is and how they're treated. And then when it went on about them balancing the line between being classy and slutty it just got worse for me really.

 

I'm actually really wondering now if This American Life generally doesn't address sexism in a satisfactory way and I just haven't noticed. I really hope that's not the case, both for what that says about the show and what it says about me.

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I know that they were doing that story in a way where they just wanted to represent the views of the people they interviewed but it really bothered me that it wasn't really slammed for being sexist. It was highlighted as invasive but the episode didn't really delve into the idea that the entire point of the rule book was about being flawless living dolls that didn't interrupt by doing anything other than the simple tasks expected of them. Instead the story started by saying it was invasive and weird, but it said it without extrapolating the real social constructs behind what a cheerleader is and how they're treated. And then when it went on about them balancing the line between being classy and slutty it just got worse for me really.

 

I'm actually really wondering now if This American Life generally doesn't address sexism in a satisfactory way and I just haven't noticed. I really hope that's not the case, both for what that says about the show and what it says about me.

I don't think This American Life sees it as their purview to cast overriding moral judgments on the stories they report on. That is an entirely different show. TAS is, especially at its best, a show about human experience presented straightforwardly, with enough context for the listener to draw conclusions or musings. They will sometimes have qualitative asides but even those are generally set up to lead into an opinion or experience shared by a subject of the story. It wasn't really "the episode" that was going on about the line between classy and slutty, it was the expressed opinion of one of the only former cheerleaders they could find who wanted to talk about it, and so that became a major part of the story itself. The content that was read from the rulebook, the expressed opinions and experiences of the interview subjects, and the implicit self-censorship of the many cheerleaders who declined to be interviewed should be sufficient to allow the listener to come to his or her own opinions. I don't think the story would have been improved by the reporter editorializing on that front. I could easily imagine a This American Life episode in which institutional and socially enforced sexism were front and center, with a variety of different stories speaking on those forces. I don't know if "slamming" things would have been a useful addition.

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That's a fair assessment, I guess I don't usually contextualise TAL as a show of impartial reporting because they're so focused on the human aspect of the people involved and sometimes that means the viewpoint of the reporter is the story, but as shown with that one it's not always the case.

 

I essentially proved your point though, that they didn't need to highlight that stuff because I reacted that way myself, probably more so than I would have if I was already being spoonfed with how I should respond. I am curious how that worked for other people with varying degrees of pre-existing knowledge of modern sexism.

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Somehow I missed the news about cheerleaders around the league suing NFL teams to be paid as employees.  I've always thought it was horseshit that cheerleaders don't get paid, it's part of the long tradition of devaluing the work that women do versus the work that men do. 

 

But This American Life's first half delves into the lives of professional cheerleaders and the super shitty nature of the handbooks that govern their lives.  Like instructing them on tampon use, vagina washing and how to converse in ways that men enjoy (Don't whine!  Don't have opinions a man might disagree with!).  I know that male athletes' handbooks can get ridiculous, but I'm trying to imagine someone lecturing Ray Lewis on how to properly wash his ass. 

 

To clarify, It's not that cheerleaders don't get paid AT ALL. From what I understand it can be awful pay and they are paying out of pocket for tans, professional hair & nails, etc but they do mostly get paid SOMETHING. I believe it's the Bills cheerleaders who got basically no compensation and are considered independent contractors rather than employees. I don't know what the employment agreements are for other teams, but I do know that multiple squads of cheerleaders across the league have filed suits for wage theft. I find that almost more galling, because being paid below minimum wage somehow maintains the illusion to people on the outside that you're a professional and not a volunteer.

 

I missed this news, too. http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/76061588/nfl-cheerleaders-exploitation-lawsuits-for-working-rights-minimum-wage This is a good rundown of how shitty it is.

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