Attacks in Paris + Belgium

[Jockney]

It infantalises because the views of these people are childish and immature. "I don't like it= Ban it". It is pointless to get all worked up about the language and ignore the point being made.

the point is being made explicitly via the language, i.e. i wish all these idiot little girls would just shut their mouths and be mindful of their place. its usage might be unconscious but it was constructed quite purposefully to convey that sentiment. if it's a criticism of tumblr soapboxing in general there are plenty of other ways to express that point.

 

[mnb089mnb]

Most offensive thing about its usage was the incorrect use of an apostrophe.

 

[Womble98]

the point is being made explicitly via the language, i.e. i wish all these idiot little girls would just shut their mouths and be mindful of their place. its usage might be unconscious but it was constructed quite purposefully to convey that sentiment. if it's a criticism of tumblr soapboxing in general there are plenty of other ways to express that point.

Putting that psychology degree to use?

I would make the criticism regardless of whichever person made that point. Tumblrinas is simply a way of expressing the fact that they are acting like little kids, and as tumblr's userbase is (I think) largely female, I think it is fair enough.

Most offensive thing about its usage was the incorrect use of an apostrophe.

Sorry.

 

[Jockney]

Putting that psychology degree to use?

I would make the criticism regardless of whichever person made that point. Tumblrinas is simply a way of expressing the fact that they are acting like little kids, and as tumblr's userbase is (I think) largely female, I think it is fair enough.


Sorry.

or linguistics or cultural studies or whatever.

language is not neutral. i think you're either being disingenuous or else are ignorant but this doesn't seem to be going anywhere so probably best to leave it.

 

[Ebeneezer Goode]

i'm not entirely sure how exploring biology helps to explain the manifest inequality that exists in industrialised societies, [...]

If you have an even playing field, then biologically different people would necessarily interact with it somewhat differently. There are loads of biological explanations for the so-called gender pay gap for example, but feminists have a tendency to jettison them because it challenges their view that we're all free-thinking consciousnesses that just happen to inhabit bodies with different sexual organs.

besides marxist approaches aren't obsessed with sexism/homophobia/racism in and of their selves. they're fundamentally concerned with power and how it operates. this extends to racism, sexism and the like but encompasses so much more, it's an holistic philosophy and, whether you agree with it or not, it does set out to tell the 'broader story'

I understand that that's the aim, which is in essence the problem, because power dynamics can't explain the complexities of inequality. The core assumption is wrong. It assumes that equality is the default state, and that human constructs get in the way of that. In reality the opposite is true. Equality does not exist in nature, it's something we can only create under the law and to a lesser extent our culture too.

Bizarre. How is the across-the-board reduction of women down to their sexual attributes in lieu of three-dimensional characterisation something that even 'female gamers want too'?

That's quite a leap in logic. You're going to have to explain how sexy armour - which women seek out and ask devs for - means that female characters have been reduced to little more than their sexual attributes before the question becomes worth answering. I've played MMOs with women since about 2009 and I think I have a decent handle on the stuff that bothers them and the stuff that doesn't. Depictions of women being whiny or damsels - yes, a sexy new tier set - no.

It's lagging behind in representation both in terms of staffing and artistic depiction: console games are made by and aimed at one specific demographic for the most part. It's very inclusive up to a point: until you disagree and then you're doxed, harassed, threatened and slandered. Of course those are extreme examples. But then you didn't hear of this shit after #OscarsSoWhite, did you. The good folks at IMDb weren't taking to reddit to dig up shit on Jada Pinkett-Smith's sex life, or calling in bomb threats to Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment blocks.

You make it sound as if the other side weren't doxxing or harassing people too. I don't see how either should be used as a stick to beat the gaming industry with.

 

[blade1889]

Genuine question here...what are the loads of biological reasons for the gender pay gap?

 

[TheMinsterman]

Anita Sarkeesian and GamerGate are not what I expected when I clicked to check up on how this thread was going.

Good work.

 

[Ian_Wrexham]

Anita Sarkeesian and GamerGate are not what I expected when I clicked to check up on how this thread was going.

Good work.

She's a wing of ISIS you know

 

[Ebeneezer Goode]

Genuine question here...what are the loads of biological reasons for the gender pay gap?

Women take more time off to have children, that's the most obvious one, and in some high end professions this is unacceptable. That's the most concrete example, but there are lots of other routes for exploration such as the reason behind why women tend to opt for supposedly more feminine jobs that often pay less, or why they settle for less in contract negotiations than men do. It could be that women are biologically less aggressive or assertive than men are, or it could just be that that's how they're conditioned to behave in male dominated societies. We won't know until we take the former explanation more seriously and perhaps disprove it by attempting to prove it. I suspect what we'll discover is that there's a mixture of the two to one extent or another. We have evolved to serve slightly different functions after all.

 

[Captain Scumbag]

Hmm…

It's true that women in their 20s and 30s (and sometimes their 40s) have more disrupted careers than their male counterparts, and it's true that this partly explains there being less women than men in senior management or executive positions (where the really high pay is), and it's true that the disruptions are mainly to do with having children and taking maternity leave. And it's also true that there's an obvious biological dimension to this as women can get preggers and we can't.

But it's a mistake to see the whole thing simply and solely in terms of biological difference. It's largely a socio-cultural thing and how that's reflected in employment/parental law, which then has the effect of reinforcing the socio-cultural attitudes that partly produced the legislation in the first place. We're still a society that, rightly or wrongly, views women as more suitable than men for care-giving roles, and that's reflected in the obvious inequality that exists regarding paid parental leave.

My wife and I are expecting a child in July. In early June, my wife will begin 9 months of maternity leave. During that period, her employer will have to pay her full salary while she stays at home and contributes nothing to the business. And to compound the annoyance, they'll have to pay someone else to do her job during her absence. I, by contrast, will get 2 weeks of paternity leave.

Now, I'm not complaining. I'm not bashing maternity leave. For entirely selfish reasons, I'm glad things are the way they are. But there's an obvious inequality, and it's naive (or wilfully stupid) to debate general inequalities in pay (e.g. men on average earning more than women) without taking this starting inequality into account. If your frustration is with self-described feminists (male or female) refusing to acknowledge things like that, fine. I've been there many times; and, yes, it's rather maddening.

But it's also frustrating when people (not necessarily you, BTW) take stuff like maternity leave and file it under "biological difference" and argue that the outcomes are somehow inevitable. Women enjoying far superior rights with regard to paid parental leave definitely creates prejudicial attitudes that may inhibit their progress in the work place, but those superior rights are very much a human invention. It's not unavoidable. It could be undone.

 

[Ebeneezer Goode]

It's not so much my issue that biology must explain all of it, or even necessarily any of it (though I heavily suspect it does), it's that the biological argument is usually dismissed out of hand as quickly as possible in favour of social theorizing, when in my view biology should be the first and most obvious port of call. For what it's worth though, I don't see how paternity leave can ever be truly equal. Some women are going to have to stop many jobs long before they actually give birth, which you could never justify for men. In fact depending on the job maternity leave doesn't even cover it, with some women essentially having to just end their careers to give birth, if only temporarily.

This is all relatively innocuous at least, but I fear we could be making serious mistakes with our approach to the trans issue. We're encouraging people to pump themselves full of hormones and essentially surgically mutilate their genitals without having any real idea of what we're dealing with. The calls for the phenomena not to be classified as a mental disorder seem almost entirely political, with next to no tether to science at all.

 

[Ian_Wrexham]

Hmm…

It's true that women in their 20s and 30s (and sometimes their 40s) have more disrupted careers than their male counterparts, and it's true that this partly explains there being less women than men in senior management or executive positions (where the really high pay is), and it's true that the disruptions are mainly to do with having children and taking maternity leave. And it's also true that there's an obvious biological dimension to this as women can get preggers and we can't.

But it's a mistake to see the whole thing simply and solely in terms of biological difference. It's largely a socio-cultural thing and how that's reflected in employment/parental law, which then has the effect of reinforcing the socio-cultural attitudes that partly produced the legislation in the first place. We're still a society that, rightly or wrongly, views women as more suitable than men for care-giving roles, and that's reflected in the obvious inequality that exists regarding paid parental leave.

My wife and I are expecting a child in July. In early June, my wife will begin 9 months of maternity leave. During that period, her employer will have to pay her full salary while she stays at home and contributes nothing to the business. And to compound the annoyance, they'll have to pay someone else to do her job during her absence. I, by contrast, will get 2 weeks of paternity leave.

Now, I'm not complaining. I'm not bashing maternity leave. For entirely selfish reasons, I'm glad things are the way they are. But there's an obvious inequality, and it's naive (or wilfully stupid) to debate general inequalities in pay (e.g. men on average earning more than women) without taking this starting inequality into account. If your frustration is with self-described feminists (male or female) refusing to acknowledge things like that, fine. I've been there many times; and, yes, it's rather maddening.

But it's also frustrating when people (not necessarily you, BTW) take stuff like maternity leave and file it under "biological difference" and argue that the outcomes are somehow inevitable. Women enjoying far superior rights with regard to paid parental leave definitely creates prejudicial attitudes that may inhibit their progress in the work place, but those superior rights are very much a human invention. It's not unavoidable. It could be undone.

I think what you say is right; that maternity and paternity leave could (and should) be equalised and the burden of childcare placed equally on both parents. That would only go a small way to addressing the inequality though, as without considering immaterial labour to be as important as waged labour, you're still demanding more (in general) from women.

Childcare is affective/emotional and immaterial labour. It's not like your wife will be sitting on her arse watching TV the whole time she's looking after a tiny, screaming infant; maternity leave is - obviously - not a paid holiday. What's probably true as well is that even when she returns to work, she'll still bear a disproportionate load from organising childcare, schooling, medical stuff. Which isn't meant as a slight against your hypothetical parenting skills (congratulations btw) but as an assessment of the reality of things most of the time.

It's certainly one of the reasons that the amount of money you have to live on shouldn't be linked to the monetary value of your waged labour to your employer. That's one of the fundamental contradictions inherent in lean-in/pro-capitalism feminism - that, by its very nature, capitalism discriminates against women - by deeming some forms of labour worth money and others not.

We live in a world, on the one hand, where family is less and less economically important (i.e. no-one has children because they need someone to provide for them in their dotage, women need to have jobs rather than just marry and breed, etc) yet we maintain practices, such as inheritance, like the idea that labour of childcare should be unpaid, that belong to a medieval paradigm and entrench the economic importance of the family unit.

[It's also the case that capitalism rarely pays properly for affective labour - being an IT manager pays more than an HR manager, not because it's more skilled but because the skill in HR involves emotional labour - and that is a significant reason for the gender pay gap]

 

[Ian_Wrexham]

It's not so much my issue that biology must explain all of it, or even necessarily any of it (though I heavily suspect it does), it's that the biological argument is usually dismissed out of hand as quickly as possible in favour of social theorizing, when in my view biology should be the first and most obvious port of call. For what it's worth though, I don't see how paternity leave can ever be truly equal. Some women are going to have to stop many jobs long before they actually give birth, which you could never justify for men. In fact depending on the job maternity leave doesn't even cover it, with some women essentially having to just end their careers to give birth, if only temporarily.

Assume you've read ~200 years of Marxist and feminist writing before deciding that biological essentialism was right after all.

This is all relatively innocuous at least, but I fear we could be making serious mistakes with our approach to the trans issue. We're encouraging people to pump themselves full of hormones and essentially surgically mutilate their genitals without having any real idea of what we're dealing with. The calls for the phenomena not to be classified as a mental disorder seem almost entirely political, with next to no tether to science at all.

Nah, take that bigoted nonsense and fuck right off. If there's anything that there's no scientific basis for, it's the existence of a gender binary.

newsflash - what is and isn't a mental disorder is very political. The government is trying quite hard - by pushing stuff about "work resistant personality types" - to claim that being unemployed is a mental disorder. People were once shot for having PTSD, were sectioned for being gay. The idea that science can - outwith of social norms and pressures - arrive at conclusions regarding mental health is nonsense.

Maybe if we lived in a society where gender fluidity/non-conformity was more acceptable there would be less pressure for trans women to seek medical/surgical treatments - but attitudes like yours are probably the main barrier to that.

 

[blade1889]

Before we start throwing around claims about transgender having "next to no tether to science" lets first do a very quick google.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/840538_1

Oh look, there is supporting science.

 

[Ebeneezer Goode]

You've both leapt to attack a stance that I haven't even taken. I never said a word about gender being binary, nor have I suggested that transgenderism as a phenomena wasn't backed up by science. I don't for a second question the fact that it exists or that the people going through it are genuine about that, but that has absolutely nothing to do with whether we should accept their state as a healthy one to be enabled. There are some people born with the unshakable belief that they should be disabled, that it's their identity, or that one of their limbs is foreign to them and should be amputated. It seems to me that the rational position is to try and understand these phenomenas fully before we consent to hacking bits off.

 

[Ian_Wrexham]

You've both leapt to attack a stance that I haven't even taken. I never said a word about gender being binary, nor have I suggested that transgenderism as a phenomena wasn't backed up by science. I don't for a second question the fact that it exists or that the people going through it are genuine about that, but that has absolutely nothing to do with whether we should accept their state as a healthy one to be enabled. There are some people born with the unshakable belief that they should be disabled, that it's their identity, or that one of their limbs is foreign to them and should be amputated. It seems to me that the rational position is to try and understand these phenomenas fully before we consent to hacking bits off.

Are those people getting killed for not looking disabled enough?

 

[Ebeneezer Goode]

Are those people getting killed for not looking disabled enough?

I'm not sure how this point is meant to strengthen your argument.

 

[blade1889]

"We're encouraging people to pump themselves full of hormones and essentially surgically mutilate their genitals without having any real idea of what we're dealing with. The calls for the phenomena not to be classified as a mental disorder seem almost entirely political, with next to no tether to science at all."

It is a complex issue we need to understand more...but your suggestion that we haven't any real idea what we are dealing with is refuted by there being scientific studies (as above) into transgender.

As the above scientific study suggests there are many credible, biological, explanations for why trans should not be classified as a mental disorder.

Now maybe I'm completely misunderstanding your point or you've worded it incredibly poorly but I am absolutely attacking your stance that there isn't scientific evidence for not classifying transgender as a mental disorder. And I think its very bad to assert it is a mental disorder, removing its classification as a mental disorder removes stigmas associated to there being a cure or treatment so that people can live happily as their assigned genders at birth, stigmas that are very damaging.

This review of the article I posted above explains what I'm trying to say but better
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150213112317.htm
The paragraph starting "medical care of patients..." (I cant C&P for some reason) being the most relevant

 

[Ebeneezer Goode]

We're encouraging people to pump themselves full of hormones and essentially surgically mutilate their genitals without having any real idea of what we're dealing with. The calls for the phenomena not to be classified as a mental disorder seem almost entirely political, with next to no tether to science at all.

It is a complex issue we need to understand more...but your suggestion that we haven't any real idea what we are dealing with is refuted by there being scientific studies (as above) into transgender.

As the above scientific study suggests there are many credible, biological, explanations for why trans should not be classified as a mental disorder.

Now maybe I'm completely misunderstanding your point or you've worded it incredibly poorly but I am absolutely attacking your stance that there isn't scientific evidence for not classifying transgender as a mental disorder. And I think its very bad to assert it is a mental disorder, removing its classification as a mental disorder removes stigmas associated to there being a cure or treatment so that people can live happily as their assigned genders at birth, stigmas that are very damaging.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but the case being put forward in that article is that transgenderism has biological underpinnings. It doesn't wade into the mental disorder argument as far as I can see.

 

[blade1889]

Perhaps I'm missing something, but the case being put forward in that article is that transgenderism has biological underpinnings. It doesn't wade into the mental disorder argument as far as I can see.

I did add in an edit to try and clarify better what I'm getting at that people still view it as a mental disorder and therefore people need psychiatric help to not be transgendered which is completely wrong...and refuted by the article. The biological causes (genetics, neuro etc.) would suggest it should not be treated as a mental illness that needs to be cured, instead it should be acknowledged that people have alternate genders that need to be accepted/embraced instead of treated as a mental disorder.

 

[Ebeneezer Goode]

I don't think proving that trans gender identity can't be changed with psychiatric help is the same as proving that it's not a mental disorder. All mental states are really just physical states, and many mental disorders are caused by observable brain structure too, and similarly incurable. I think these studies are more interesting from a radical feminists point of view to be honest. They utterly demolish the idea that gender is purely a social construct.

 

[Captain Scumbag]

It's not like your wife will be sitting on her arse watching TV the whole time.

You haven't met her, to be fair.

 

[blade1889]

I don't think proving that trans gender identity can't be changed with psychiatric help is the same as proving that it's not a mental disorder. All mental states are really just physical states, and many mental disorders are caused by observable brain structure too, and similarly incurable. I think these studies are more interesting from a radical feminists point of view to be honest. They utterly demolish the idea that gender is purely a social construct.

At which point I guess you get into questioning what exactly a mental disorder is. And going back to your initial point about lack of evidence of it being a mental disorder yet we stil treat it with biological methods, how would whether it be a mental disorder or not alter how it is treated? Not got the time to look it up now but from purely anecdotal evidence the methods we are using now are not perfect but far more advanced than previous when it was seen as a mental illness needing mental/psychiatric help. The same arguments for homosexuality being a mental disorder that could therefore be cured with psychiatric help had been used in the past...and were obviously very damaging.

To my mind a mental illness is something that causes damage to the person or those around them. And there isn't a reason why being trans should (as opposed to schizophrenia, alcoholism etc.)

Re homosexuality: Once more biological information came out the idea that homosexuality is a disorder or choice that could be cured slowly lost those arguments...and with them people were allowed to live their lives, be it in the case of homosexuality becoming legal or in the form of transgender surgeries so that people can live their lives as they wish without negatively impacting you, me or them.

Trans, similarly, is not something that needs to be cured. And the current 'treatments' are to help people live as who they are, not focussed on curing a 'disorder' which is why I think the biological information is important and any mention of a 'mental disorder' is dangerous and damaging.

 

[Womble98]

I wonder what your view Ian_Wrexham on age limits for transgender surgery is?

I think we need to be massively careful about kids making long term decisions which they might later on regret.

 

[Womble98]

Just to prove earlier points made
http://imgur.com/PyxkgX7

Certain degree of irony with point 4 and 5.....

[Examples of Shaming]
4. Using gendered language to describe positives/negatives
5. Speaking over or interrupting women....Manterrupting

 

[TheMinsterman]

Manterrupting? Is that part of the Holy Trinity alongside Mansplaining and Manspreading?

 

[Dr Mantis Toboggan]

one thing that i did wonder about (cause i'm a social justice femabitch whateva) is toilet names u have ladies and gentlemen which is nice i guess and u have men and women which is also nice i guess but i've seen, quite often, men and ladies as toilet names which seems problematic to me

 

[Stevencc]

There's a tartan coat wrapped around a body with no head.

Fuck the powerpoint presentation.

 

[Dr Mantis Toboggan]

There's a tartan coat wrapped around a body with no head.

u seen indiana jones and the last crusade i take it? the feminists have harnessed the power of the gods

 

[Womble98]

I know you like to take the piss and think I'm some kind of MRA, I'm really not, I think they are as misguided and bigoted as their counterparts.