Sexism

(Just trying to be on topic.)

1. Do you like to know the specs of shit you buy.
2. Do you listen to other people's problems.
KEY: 1. Yes = you are male.
KEY: 2. Yes = you are female.

(I scored a point higher than the average woman on empathy and a point lower than the average male on systematizing. I'm guessing I would have scored lower on the empathy portion if it didn't so often confuse "awkwardness" with "empathy" and higher on the systematizing portion if it were more about systematizing ideas and less about systematizing railway schedules, home appliances, and other stuff I'm not all that interested in.)

The latter proves I'm an imbecile, I guess.

I have no time for these silly tests. Which proves how bored I am.

I was sort of offended by the stereotyping in the questions. How is your EQ lowered if you're simply opinionated and like to discuss politics? What does an SQ have to do with sociability?

And I love how an extreme SQ correlates to Asperger's Syndrome (fair enough), but there is no "syndrome" for extreme EQ. Funnily enough, even though I have high "EQ", I find it easier to "empathize" with extreme SQs (because I'm analytical, logical and systems-minded) than with extreme EQs (who would probably seem irrational and superstitious to me).

Also, I don't think that an ability to read between the lines or paraphrase is necessarily an EQ thing. I think they are taking traits that women tend to display and simply placing them in the "EQ" category when they are just as analytical (and more complex than) simply following a manual to the letter.

This just affirms your low EQ Kerry!

Oops OTM.

I have a balanced brain. I'll be signing autographs later on.

There's a not-so-well-linked page at http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/image/0,13030,938137,,00.html which shows the little graph thingy about whether or not you'd be considered "balanced" or "mostly female or male" or whatever.

While I wasn't surprised that my empathy is well above average (60), I actually expected the SQ to be higher for me than it was since I do think of myself as someone who can understand systems and whatnot. I was actually on the low side of the average scores on that one (25).

Then again, when I was in school I got a BA (theatre) and a BS (computer engineering), and while I did fine in both, I didn't exactly have fun getting the BS. In fact I found it quite tedious, just like every job I've had in front of a computer since.

I'm still trying to be on topic.

I got lower than average on both EQ and SQ! Move up, Starsky!

I came out as BS.

(On the edge between "balanced" and "male," although I suspect the more common meaning of BS applies here.)

Deep into the range of autism. Because, as you all know, if you like to buy stereo components but could give a rat's ass about how everyone at a party is feeling, you have a severe mental disorder. Un-frickin'-believeable.

I am very interested in the details of life on other planets!

EQ=59
SQ=20

especially the wording on the systemizing questions. mental!

EQ=30
SQ=66

i think the test is dumm too. i have a below average (for women) empathy quotient and yet heaps of people confide in me.

EQ = 42
SQ = 49

I am a type B then

EQ=25
SQ=50

(rest of world: well no wonder)

Looks like I'm battling Gareth for role of most womanly guy.

EQ = 25
SQ = 26

What's wrong with being sexy?

Probably got major boy-points for (eeek) liking science.

There are more men around here, but the women will have stronger views cause they feel closer to the subject, by and large.

So I apparently
a) am a boy
b) am 'Extreme Type S' and
c) pretty much have Asperger's Syndrome.

Gee thanks, The Guardian, you've made my Tuesday. But yes, very silly questions. Haha of course I wouldn't want to know the engine specs if I was buying a car. As a lady I'd go for one that matches my handbag!

But what if everything does have a sex, even Justice? What if all existing cars, for instance, are by and for men (as Volvo's new concept car 'by and for women' implies)? When Robert Lutz, Vice Chairman of General Motors, calls the Volvo concept car 'sexist', you see where this term has got us, and how it belongs to the toxic ideology that things have no colour, no gender, no accent because they're inherently neutral.

General Motors should change its name to 'Particular Motors'. General Motors should admit that it is a man. 'Sexist' is a word from a world where nothing has a gender because everything is secretly male, male by default. Where the gulf between 'equality of opportunity' and 'inequality of result' (which is its logical consequence) has become so wide that the way we speak about things (the neutrality we hope to find) and the way we find them to be in reality (the messy particularity we do find) has become farcical.

It may be wrong to make rigid and deterministic links between gender and behaviour, but it's also wrong to leave gender out of account. It's perverse to call someone foregrounding gender a 'sexist' while gender is still an important differentiator -- a signifying difference -- in all societes, a distinction already clear to young children. The 'sexist' women at Volvo made a car addressing the particularities of women rather than pretending to be 'universal'. The future is in their modest situatedness, not in General Motors' bogus universality.

When the West wants to attack some other culture -- in other words, kill both men and women who live there, and impose its military and business interests -- you can be sure the first you'll hear of it is remarks about 'the rights of women'. These 'rights' turn out to be rather limited, though. They turn out to be restricted to the right to be more like western women. They do not include any rights that we think are wrong.

And I see your beloved French protectionists have an interesting attitude to the rights of Muslim women to their own culture.

If the American state says 'When in the world, do as the Americans do', the French state says 'When in France, do as the French do.'

*actually I wd REALLY like some faggots now, grrr

I tend to find the idea of universal rights a little philosohpically suspect, BUT given that many of these rights encapsulate ideas that ALLOW people to be what they want to be, I think we should be wary of throwing out the entire constructs on the basis that you don't like the way George Bush uses the rhetoric of rights to justify dodgy ends.

Barry in sensitive autist shocker!

I am saying a person can be anything a person can be. You've merely zoomed out to one degree less specific than gender. You feel more comfortable talking about 'people' than 'men' or 'women'. Why? There is more truth in specificity. There is more humbug the more general you get. I can waffle on about 'people are like this, people are like that', but it won't mean much any more. I can say how we're all the same at some level, but that level is going to be a pretty vague and meaningless one. What's more, I might not be aware of how dangerous my rhetoric of 'unity' and 'oneness' actually is. Because if I mean 'Everybody is like me, really' then I might find no reason to object to someone being coerced into thinking, living, eating, drinking, having sex, making money and making music the way I do those things. Nothing lost, nothing destroyed. They were like me anyway.

You shouldn't be anxious about people getting down to the specifics of difference. The more microscopic and 'divisive' the better. It's this waffly -- and imperialistic -- unity talk that should really scare you. Especially when the President of the US and the Vice Chairman of General Motors are using words like 'rights' and 'sexism' to combat those who think differently.

1. The relationship between biological gender and cultural gender is arbitrary (but not random). In other words, a biological woman need not be a cultural woman. She is free to negotiate whatever gender role she feels comfortable with. However, she is not doing this in a vacuum. There will be a price (of constant conflict) for going against the grain of her culture's construction of gender.

2. Gender is a 'signifying difference' in all known cultures (although how it signifies difference differs from one culture to another). Therefore it is dishonest at best and destructive at worst to ignore the difference gender makes. If and when gender becomes a 'non-signifying difference' -- for instance, if and when gender makes as little difference as blood type -- it will be legitimate to ignore it. Until then, ignoring it will simply bolster the (gendered) status quo.

I read that as "it wouldn't be nothing without a bf (big fat) cock to (garbled) dinners."

Mang.

Um....

32 empathy
13 systematising

A balanced type B, ambi-gender score, but lower than average on both. The people whose scores most closely resemble mine are Tracer Hand and Chris Piuma, and it's interesting that they're people I've both liked when I've met them, and found common cause with in debates. (I'm a less systematic Tracer Hand... does that make me Tracer Freehand?)

RJG getting 8 on empathy doesn't surprise me at all. I was actually rather hurt by a callous remark he made last week, something like 'What if your plane to Sweden never arrives?' It cast something of a shadow over my flight, in fact. Not that he cares, I'm sure.

X post:

By the way, I think Baron-Cohen characterises 'systematising' far too much as an anal, scientific thing. I'm what Jung called an Intellectual-Intuitive type: I'm always systematising, making models of myth systems rather than mechanical systems. He doesn't measure that arts-humanities systematisation, only the science-technical type. He doesn't let you systematise in the dark, on a hunch. Divergently, poetically, rather than convergently, in a problem-solving way. (Notice he mentions the Nick Hornby character trying anally to get the record that 'completes' his collection; he doesn't say anything about the equally 'male' thing of trying to brainstorm something new, disorient oneself for pleasure, find ten new records that make one dizzy and confused...)

I do like his point that 'a key feature of the theory is that your sex cannot tell you which type of brain you have. Not all men have the male brain, and not all women have the female brain'. That tallies with my (ahem, numbered) point above;

1. The relationship between biological gender and cultural gender is arbitrary (but not random).

Kind of ordinary, a bit girly on the empathy thing.

Good times.

It would not be sexism, per se, to cite statistics that show that physical strength correlates with gender in certain definable ways. it would be sexism to use those statistics to claim no woman should be allowed to work in a job requiring physical strength beyond the mean for women, because "it isn't possible for a woman to do that job."

It isn't sexist to notice that an individual has a certain level of competance and a particular gender. It is sexist to believe or assert that gender is an infallible predictor of anyone's ability, except where the correlation is 100%. For example, 100% of men do not get pregnant, therefore it isn't sexist to assume a man can't get pregnant.

If the term is being misused, that doesn't mean the term has no value.

The same applies to 'sexism'.

The terms don't actually have the close relationship you're proposing. According to Merriam-Webster, Racism is:

a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

Sexism is:

1 : prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially : discrimination against women
2 : behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex

Racism as defined here is a much narrower and more serious thing, almost a religion. How many people today believe that race is the primary determinant of human traits? Very few, I think. The word goes back to the 19th century, with its rather extreme xenophobia. The definition of sexism is much more catch-all, and only goes back forty years or so. It's about characterisations which foster stereotypes. Lots of people are 'sexist', according to this definition. It doesn't say anything about the sexist seeing gender as 'the primary determinant of human traits'. It's just about the casual linking of traits to gender. Only the word 'against' makes it pejorative.

I think use of the term 'sexist' since the 80s ('political correctness gone mad shockah!') has shifted to something even more vague and general, something closer to N's definition than Merriam-Webster's. Now people use it to mean, basically, any association of gender, especially female gender, with particular characteristics, especially in the context of links they personally don't like the sound of. Now, their personal motives for not liking the sound of the characteristics associated with 'female' may be that they actually don't like women, or that they don't like the way other cultures construct femininity differently from their own, or just that difference in general makes them uneasy.

Used in this trigger-happy way, the words, originally designed to draw attention to race and gender, are now being used to get them -- and in fact all differences -- taken off the table and swept back under the carpet. The words are no longer the enemy of unthinking reflexes, they have become, themselves, an unthinking reflex. GM's Lutzman calls a car designed by women 'sexist' because he considers the design features women designers themselves put into a car to be 'degrading to women'. He has a conception of what women are, and even if actual women contradict it with their actual desires and needs, they're still wrong. They're 'sexist'.

At this point, he's simply using 'sexist' as a word for 'what I don't like about women'. He might as well be calling the Volvo designers 'effete' or 'girly'. He's revealing his own disdain for women's values and suggesting that, insofar as they're not men's values, they're 'degrading to women'. This is like saying 'It's only their fagginess that lets gays down' or 'Don't call the Chinese Chinese... they've come on a long way since then'.

Basically average.

Two female colleagues on Facebook are sharing a Daily Mail article about the dreadful man-ogling feminazi hypocrite lawyer, and saying "I totally agree, it's gone too far the other way!" There is literally no way to get involved with this without being a mansplaining prick, is there?

love too sexism

Typed out a reply; deleted it because I realised I just didn't have it in me to discuss sexism/mansplaining/etc. on ILX one more time and face the hassle and clusterfucking or just low level meta-sniping. Then felt absolutely awful about doing so, because it's just one more way that I have conceded one more bit of the Internet as ~male space~ where expressing opinions is, like wearing a short skirt, thought to be an invitation to any and all abuse or just low-level bother you might attract. Felt proud of myself for avoiding the argument, then felt disgusted with myself for not being assertive, then thought for a while about you, individually, Sick, and remembered that we have had many good, productive discussions about this kind of thing, so it might be worth saying... something.

So why did I type all this out? Because I thought it was important, Sick, to provide some context of what goes through just one individual woman's head before I talk about ~sexism~ on the Internet. And what we might mean when we complain about "mansplaining" and why it sucks when a man swoops in to tell you things about things he has never really experienced. How weighted these conversations are for one side of them.

Could you have this conversation without "mansplaining"? You might! But do you actually want to *have* that conversation, or just get credit for 1) avoiding it or 2) a cookie for noticing The Sexism in the first place?

Because avoiding mansplaining means looking very hard at YOUR motivations for wanting to have the conversation in the first place! Which can be an uncomfortable thing to do. The joys of being Right On The Internet can be kind of suspect when you do not have a dog in that fight, and the other person(s) do.

If you examine your motivations and the context of your experiences and you still want to have that conversation, because you really think it will be constructive and not just because you're ignorant at best or power tripping at worst, here's an idea: find women's words on the subject. Defer to the experiences and words of people who know more than you do. If you follow a lot of feminist blogs or twitters or whatever, (NOT Comment Is Free or the Daily Mail's women's pages or whatever) I'm sure you'll find lots of smart women have been saying lots of smart and helpful things. Admit your own unhelpfulness and lack of personal experience on the subject, and position it as "here, however, are the words of some women discussing this very subject, that you might find useful or interesting?" Don't just link-dump; say why you're sharing it. But allow the words and opinions on the topic to be the un-co-opted words of women who have lived inside the experiences, and negotiated the traps of talking about them online.

That's pretty much what I decided the best course of action would be, and for those reasons. And I am always grateful and happy to have these discussions with you.

Good! I'm glad!

Struggling to parse this particular article at the moment, wondered what you lot thought:

http://thoughtcatalog.com/tucker-max/2015/10/guys-heres-what-its-actually-like-to-be-a-woman/

... really weird vibes here, like in theory it's explaining how to avoid being awful to people, but it's also dripping in evopsych and seems to have this assumption that the male audience can only understand the issues when put forward in a certain way

what's going on is it's an excerpt from a dating handbook by tucker max, so when it says something that's true, the point of knowing that thing is still to get laid

Ahh I see

(No way that's his real name?)

is this some sort of apex of mansplaining, some kind of apogee that will never again be reached by mortal minds?

God that's horrible.

It's written for someone even I at my worst have never quite been

Everyone should stop dating. Nothing in the world is bleaker than reading "strategies" or "tips" on how to "pick up" women, like just stay home and read a book if you're going to be out there prowling around making women have to think carefully about how to let you down easy or whatever.

I liked this highly speculative quote though:

Psychopaths are sexually predatory, uninhibited, and confident, so although they’re only 4 percent of the American male population, they might account for 40 percent of the men who have hit on any given woman.

"The red soles of Christian Louboutin heels and the stitching on Celine handbags don’t make that much difference to their function", amirite guys, lol. Ugh. Even taking it at face value as promoting understanding between the sexes it is such a horribly bleak world view, a planet where all guys behave the same as each other but completely different from women, all women behave the same as each other but completely different from men, only now with the help of Science are we beginning to have the faintest glimmers of understanding of each other. Good job with the de-objectification there.

Otm. This piece seems designed to make people feel bad about themselves, others, everything. It's also ableist because the author talks about men with aspergers aggressively hitting on women as a common thing that happend and that has unfairly given all men a bad rap.

“Where it gets problematic is when you don’t get the picture and she has to tell you, because women don’t like having to reject men explicitly. There is a deep evolutionary logic to this preference, and it has a lot to do with minimizing the very real risks they face from publicly humiliating their suitors.”

Can't it just be because it feels nasty to reject someone

Ironically, a great way to understand a woman’s point of view is to think of her as a marketing consumer: a savvy customer evaluating your products (traits) and ads (proofs) to see if they’ll add value to her life. If you want to guarantee mating failure, all you have to do is think of her as nothing more than an inanimate object—as an “8” or a “9,” as a simplistic robot with a set of “triggers” and “hot buttons” to manipulate. At that point you’ve reduced your customer to nothing more than a cash dispenser, or, since we’re talking about objectifying a woman, a sex dispenser.

Yes please don't objectify your potential sex customer

A woman can tell how well your life is going from how you look, in about two seconds.

There's also a part where the author states the average man is attracted to the average woman but the average woman is only attracted to male models, or something. A lot of bizarre generalization goin on

i suppose all the conversation has moved to the weinstein thread but
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/sexual-objectification-harms-women