"If the collective voice created by these stories teaches us anything it must surely be the realisation that it is not a young voice or an attractive voice, not provocatively dressed or just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is the voice of a woman – every woman – old and young, married and single; anywhere, anytime. For as long as we continue to perpetuate the assumption that sexism affects a particular ‘type’ of woman, we will continue to focus on the victims rather than the problem. And the sheer range of women who have testified through our project proves that sexism is far too ubiquitous to be ‘asked for’ or ‘attracted’ by some women and not others. Sexism is neither selective, nor deserved. It affects us all."
Chris Robshaw is the hero of English rugby, but his girlfriend's revelation hasn't done his manly reputation any goodposted by Catseye at 8:35 AM on February 20 [2 favorites]
Domestic bliss: England captain Chris Robshaw and his girlfriend Camilla Kerslake, who has revealed that he is happy to do the hoovering at home
[...]
Of course, Kerslake is not the first woman to carry out a public castration of her other half in the mistaken belief that it will make their relationship appear to us more equal.
Essentially the steam engines represent the middle class who are subservient to the upper class as represented by the fat controller (who is corpulent, representing wealth and luxury). Their only purpose is to serve him and be loved by him. If not, they are potential scrap. The trucks represent the Proletariat or the working class who have to be kept under control in case of some kind of Marxist insurrection, in which the ‘natural’ order of the island would be disturbed.posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:43 AM on February 20 [10 favorites]
"But on the other hand, my wife, who is a perfectly normal, attractive woman, could probably count on one hand the number of times anything along these lines has happened to her. So much so that the one time she was catcalled in our driveway is one of her favorite stories.Even setting aside other factors that could influence one's likelihood of being catcalled, one would imagine that those factors would only distort the probability of encountering a catcaller in any fixed interval of time, which should otherwise logically fall into a Poisson distribution. This would already statistically explain both the large number of women who have experienced little to no catcalling, the large number of women who have experienced a lot of catcalling, and the many women who experience constant catcalling - and this is just considering the collision dynamics absent things like geography, class, and perceived toughness that would only further explain the wide range in experienced catcalls.
Is she completely oblivious? Does it just not affect her? Are other women just too sensitive? Are they somehow getting my wife's share of harassment?"
My daughter didn't join in for a while. 'She's feeling a bit shy,' I explained to one or two other mothers, as she sat on my lap for a while, watching. 'I wish I had a girl,' said one. 'So quiet. Thomas is such a handful.' Later I heard the same mother in the kitchen, with Thomas clinging to her leg and refusing to speak. 'He's like his dad,' she was saying. 'Grunts rather than talks when he's fed up. Honestly, boys...'I am glad I'm not currently a parent trying to negotiate my way through all this, because eesh.
At one point the party disintegrated into a fracas. One boy was slow to pass the parcel on. A girl, furious with him, stood up, her tiara askew, and punched him in the face. He screamed and ran from the room and refused to rejoin the game, so the hostess sat him at the tea table while she laid out the cakes. The parents in the circle passed judgements on why he wasn't in the circle. 'Boys aren't great at playing games at this age,' said one. 'They just can't sit still! It's so much harder for them, I think.' 'Boys are just so much younger than girls in many ways,' said another. At the end the children were handed their party bags, colour coded in pink and blue, with plastic bracelets and hair clips inside for the girls and bouncy balls and plastic spiders for the boys.
Pink girls, blue boys. Princesses, fighters. Shy girls, grunting boys. Good girls, aggressive boys. That's what we want to see, so that's what we see. Even if our children so often diverge from expectations, and the princess becomes the puncher or the fighter wants to chat, this hardly seems to dent the strength of the stereotypes. And the assumptions made by parents are often being backed up by stronger gender divisions in the marketing carried out by toy companies. So our children are now growing up to see that the toy cookers on sale at Marks and Spencer are labelled 'Mummy and Me', while the toy tools and drills are labelled 'Daddy and Me'.
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My card company, Inclusiveness and Shit Greetings, tries to avoid even the widest definitions of sexism. But we stopped producing our "Congrats of Your Intersex Bundle of Joy" card because it sold terribly.
posted by Mayor Curley at 7:59 AM on February 20 [4 favorites]