I was going to squee about getting the proof copy of the Impaler dead tree edition yesterday, but the sheer idiocy in the comments of Rowena’s post on Tuesday being perpetrated by people who should know better completely derailed that idea.
Bad move, people.
Let’s start with Rowena’s post. Aside from the fact that the elephant in the room isn’t the one the post was about, it raised some good points about the assumptions people make with respect to gender. No problem. Being aware of the assumptions you’re making is a good thing.
The problem started in the comments, with people getting all hot and bothered over Dave’s use of a very old rhetorical and semantic technique used to ferret out hidden biases. His point was quite clearly that the quote in question displayed a hidden bias that Rowena, as an intelligent, thinking person, should have caught. Fine. We all have off days. Rowena acknowledged Dave’s point, and it should have ended there.
The rest, well… it’s all in the comments thread. Go read through it if you like. I’m not going to retrample that already flattened ground.
What it demonstrated for me is that a certain segment of society is still fighting a war they won quite some time ago. The war in question is of course the war for gender equality. Women won it, at least 10 years ago, possibly earlier (note that this applies only to modern Western democracies). In the US and Australia, more women than men enter tertiary education. Many more women than men graduate from tertiary education. 50 years ago the reverse situation was considered a crisis, but now, it’s seen to be “good”, and “fair”.
I have news for anyone who thinks that. It’s no more good or fair than if you reversed the genders. Sure there are some things men will always do better than women, and some things women will always do better than men. This is called species differentiation, and it happened because the less differentiated didn’t survive to have offspring (Evolution is a funny thing. That which survives to reproduce wins. There’s no morality to it, and no purpose. We humans just add the purpose afterwards because we can’t help ourselves. Turning everything into stories with purposeful actions helped our distant ancestors survive to have descendants).
What the continuing war has done is create a prison culture, where those who think that the war won’t be won until — in the extreme cases — possession of a penis is a capital offence (to which my response is to quote the Mikado: “Yes, it is capital!”) — have had control of much of the media (when was the last time you saw an ad that didn’t depict men as stupid/helpless/grossly sexist pigs?), books, and particularly schools. Naturally, most of the rest of us figured out ways to subvert the wardens and get what we wanted while appearing to give them what they wanted. A few either bought the line the wardens were selling, or they brown-nosed.
Now the prison doors are open a crack, and the wardens are desperately trying to stop the prisoners walking out. The brown-nosers and the dupes are staying put, certain it’s all a hoax, the rest of us are pushing those doors just as hard as we can because we can see what’s outside and by damn we want some.
I’ll admit I’d have thought Australians would figure this out. A nation seeded by a prison culture would — you’d think — recognize when someone was imposing another one on them. Sadly, I appear to have overestimated at least some of my fellow countrymen. That or the ones I’m seeing are the weak-willed or the brown-nosers (none of them are wardens).
Now maybe I’ve got an advantage here, since I was raised by teachers who also happened to be blessed with rather more stubborn than the average and a streak of cussed independence wide enough to bridge Sydney Harbor. I, and all my siblings, were raised to think about what we saw and to look beyond the surface. It didn’t take me long to work out that what people said meant buggerall beside what they do.
Side note for non-Australians — and for the self-appointed warden class of Australia — Australians are among the least racist, bigoted, sexist, anything-else-ist people you’ll ever encounter. Don’t let the language use fool you: it’s quite common to see what would ordinarily be the most offensive language imaginable used as terms of affection — and the “officially sanctioned” language used as an insult. What concerns most Australians isn’t skin color, gender, or anything else surface. It’s what’s underneath. Work for what you have, don’t whinge, and give as good as you get, and most Australians will accept you. Sit back on your arse with your hand out for what you think you “deserve”, and you’ll get exactly what you deserve — no respect, and a whole lot of disgust.
Now, lest anyone thing I’ve had a sheltered upbringing, I’ve worked as a geologist in remote mining camps (about the most male location you’re going to get outside a football dressing room) where I was the only female. I did my job, didn’t ask for special favors, and was treated the way I wanted — as one of the “boys”. I’ve done hard physical labor — not particularly well, but I’ve done it. I’ve never once been treated as a lesser person, although I’ve learned language that would make a wharfie blush (trust me, you do not want to get me into the kind of mood where that gets unleashed. It’s about || that much shy of full-berserker, which I usually manage to subvert by a depression crash. Not that that’s exactly wonderful either). The point being that if you pull your weight, in most places in Western cultures it’s not going to matter whether you’re male, female, black, white, or any of the many possible variations thereof.
Happy? Of course not. Those who are invested in claiming a bias that no longer exists are going to continue insisting it’s still there and finding it because if you look hard enough you’ll find anything you really want to find. It’s like the people who go through books looking for teh secks: they always find it, something that says much more about them than it does about the books. Those who’ve bought the line will hang onto it because it hurts to be wrong. The brown-nosers will switch sides as soon as it’s obvious where the power is — they’re not invested in the ideology at all, just the power.
So, thank you so much for derailing my happy-author-squee and triggering this long rant. I hope it hurts. More to the point, I hope getting hurt forces the culprits in question to actually use those dormant brain cells, because my idiocy-tolerance isn’t good these days.
Mad Genius Club 
27 responses to “Fighting the won war”
Bravissimo!
Thank yew, thank yew. Donations may be made c/o Naked Reader Press
Good Rant!
And having been in some arguments about this, may I point out that women did not _displace_ men in college; colleges expanded to meet the increased demand. (And got greedy for all those students loans being offered and started recruiting. But that’s a whole other rant.)
This was a war without losers, no one was dragged down so that others could rise. The people still shrilling on about it appear to be horrified by the lack of male blood. Or lost status or something. I really wish they’d fly themselves over to the Middle East and deal with some serious gender issues and leave the West to finish up the last minor adjustments.
Pam,
Actually, there are losers in this war. Can you imagine what would happen to the person who told the female equivalent to the joke about the “useless lump of flesh on the end of a penis”? Also, it’s a little difficult to enter college without having graduated high school or later acquired a GED. With fewer men graduating high school, there are going to be fewer of them entering college. So no, that point isn’t valid either.
It’s rather funny about how the serious gender issues in the Middle East suddenly became “cultural richness” or something on September 12, 2001. Not funny ha-ha, either.
Actually there ARE losers, Pam. I know the plural of annedocte isn’t “data” but in our circle, our boys are the only ones (knock on wood) to enter senior college out of highschool. HOWEVER all the girls did. This included a pair of twins where the girl went to college, the boy’s grades weren’t good enough. And I’ve seen it happen. Kids go along, at about the levels you’d expect till puberty, and then suddenly the boys are on the skids. Mike can explain this better than I can, but the emphasis now is not just on homework, but on the kind of repetitive or “decorative” homework boys moslty don’t do well at. Also, teenage boys don’t REALIZE how to schedule their time. And don’t tell me that’s how they learn. Girls develop neurologically “ahead” of boys. Mike told me when we were having problems with the kids that they simply didn’t have the … nervous system wherewithal to comply with what was being required of them. So boys fall behind in middle school (or drive their mothers insane trying to keep them on track.) Most of them never catch up. And that’s a crime and a serious problem.
Has the percent of men in the US getting a college degree dropped? I can’t find any definite reference on a quick google hunt. Over all the percent of the population with a degree has climbed to an all time high (in the US) of 27.2%, men slightly higher than women.
Certainly there are fewer men than women in college, but are there fewer men than there used to be? _That_ would be losing.
Numbers not incresing as fast as women’s, but still increasing, is not losing, well unless you’re a member of a religious sect that think women ought to be submissive, and no out shine men.
Now, I think we’ve all argued, or rather joined in villifying, public education at the lower levels. And I can see that having a serious effect on college success, or even attendance. Or acceptance at a “top” university. In Europe, failing the wrong tests can keep one out of uni. Not here. One just settles for a “lesser” college, or even takes remedial classes.
Ah, here we go. Mind you, this is the US, not the World, or even the Western World.
Between 1999 and 2009 male enrollment in college increased 35%. Graduate programs since 1988: Male numbers increased by 36%. Yes, women are doing even better, and have passed up the guys _currently_. But the number _and_ percent of the growing population is still increasing. Sounds like win-win to me.
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98
“Much of the growth between 1999 and 2009 was in full-time enrollment; the number of full-time students rose 45 percent, while the number of part-time students rose 28 percent. During the same time period, the number of enrolled females rose 40 percent, while the number of enrolled males rose 35 percent.”
“Since 1988, the number of females in postbaccalaureate programs has exceeded the number of males. Between 1999 and 2009, the number of male full-time postbaccalaureate students increased by 36 percent, compared with a 63 percent increase in the number of females”
Reply to MataPam – um. I’d love it to be a win-win but… It went from more or less just 5% of the US population, to 5.8% – in ten years a 0.8% increase. However male increase (4.48%-5%) was just 0.5% – putting them at the same percentage as the average for the population (5%) ten years before. Female increase (5.7% to 6.7%) was roughly 1% or 1.7% above population average, or to put it another way there are now 1.33 women enrolling for every man – or every 3 years the equivalent another entire class of men. And this – looking at figures you cite, has been going on for 35 years. What’s the average working life of a graduate? 40 years. What I suspect, looking at the figures and ethnicity figures, is the figure they’re not showing — ethnicity and gender (mirroring the UK situation, btw) which would show white boys as your least likely to go to College. Now my boys are not affected, and neither are Sarah’s, but in Societies wherever you start getting these sort of disparities between population proportions and college entry (doesn’t matter who the subsector is) you’re looking for problems into the future, you’re building an underclass. Yes, it’s a PC-awkward group. It appears this is being willfully ignored, not because it’s not an issue, but because it is one which is uncomfortable to deal with. Why a country would want to foster a white male redneck problem for the future is difficult to understand. I find myself (after a lifetime of looking out other people/groups) in the awkward position of being identifiable as part of a ‘victim’ group (even if it is totally unfashionable and un-PC). I certainly don’t want or need to cry victim for my own benefit (I despise those who use this as a free-lunch ticket). But I feel it’s foolish to ignore it.
First, allow me to repeat my fan-squee at the impending availability of an autographable Imapler. That’s the important part of this comment. The rest will be less so.
I guess I’m kind of glad that Life interfered with getting online Tuesday. First, I strongly agree with you statement about always being able to find bias if you begin with the assumption that it exists — or, as my calculus teacher in high school put it, “If you torture the data long enough, it wlll confess to almost anything.” My problem always seems to be the opposite. A lot of the time, I simply don’t seem to notice the sorts of things that get other people’s shorts in a wad. An example, at the rist of “telling tales out of school”: A couple weeks ago while we were out running errands that took us into a part of Norfolk we don’t hjave occasion to visit very often, we ate at a national-chain restaurant. Partway through lunch my wife said to me, “I hate to admit it, but I feel kind of out-numbered.” I didn’t know what she meant, until she pointed out that we and one waiter were the only caucasians in the place. I simply hadn’t noticed anything other than “people”.
Stephen — that’s me. Growing up in Portugal, I kind of assume the bias was against me, and went with it. (It was. Though only partly because of being female.) It honestly never bothered me. Letting it OWN me would have destroyed me. I know that doesn’t make sense, but it’s the truth.
Sarah,
I suspect at least some of the bias was you being your inimitable sense – and I know EXACTLY what you mean. Once you let something like that define you, you never escape the idea that other people’s perceptions are what you need to be. It does ugly things to a person.
Stephen,
The real squee has been rescheduled. Look for it on Saturday – and it’s definitely exciting.
I’m with you on seeing “people”. It gets me seriously irritated when certain people insist on categorizing people by group. That’s useful for statistics, but bloody pointless when it comes to predicting what an individual in group X is likely to do or be.
Hi, Kate. Congrats on getting the proofs for Impaler! That must be exciting.
I must admit I’m a bit like Stephen. I tend to focus on the content, not the package. I’m continually surprised when say, listening to music when someone says ‘I don’t listen to male singers’ or something like that – I honestly don’t think about the gender of either writers or musicians – it’s all about the work itself. Same with people. I can tell you women are accepted throughout the engineering professions. If they perhaps don’t populate the top levels that is more down to their own deicisons IMO, rather than any bias. I don’t intend to go for upper management or CEO of the month – and that’s my decision.
Chris,
Thanks!
I tend to be more concerned about what’s inside the wrapper than what the wrapper looks like. It always struck me as stupid that possession of an innie or an outie would make any difference other than the obvious and fun one.
For the record I don’t think the war has been won. I often wonder why there are no international woman’s brigades, right across the third world, hoisting the occasional Afghan Imam onto a what you might call their own petards. The silence however, is deafening.
:-)It’s interesting to note that various female friends were a lot more incensed than I was. It’s an almond for a parrot, folks. Par for the course, normal reaction. The author in question didn’t like being called on something she had no real excuse for, except ignorance, didn’t have the courage to step out and say ‘Okay that was a bad choice of words, I’d never thought about it like that.’ Which is fair enough. The truth is I wasn’t particularly offended by it, but it grated slightly, because had I done the opposite there would be a hullaballoo. I’ve been and read her entire post, BTW – here is a gem from it: “And I’m not going to be sorry about that. A part of me wants to say (hands on hips), well isn’t it about time we girls got to dominate something? Men have more of just about everything on this planet. More power, more money, more rights. Is the fact that girls hold a bigger place in YA really such a tragedy?” Please read the entire thing in context before reaching a conclusion. The one I reached was no different to the one I reached on reading that that, I admit. I am curious about the rights, and indeed the power and money. Where are mine?
And this, dear folk, is what is coming. The start of it can already be seen, in the news every few weeks now. Women being charged with sexual harassment, abusing schoolboys (and girls) and abuses of power in offices. And the male (and some female) public saying ‘sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander’ and getting incensed because of any sign of unequal treatment. And, as it was with men — a lot of the damage is collateral and unintentional. And a lot of it is trivia. Mark my words it’ll trickle into race and orientation soon too. Gay clubs being closed down for not letting in hetrosexuals. Black organisations pilloried for not having representative membership — all of which is actually fairly silly, but a logical consequence of fighting the won war, and excuting friends when you run out of enemies.
Dave,
As always you’re the coolest, most sensible head in the place. There are plenty of places in the world where the war needs to happen – they just aren’t HERE. There are quite a few imams in places like Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, (and the list goes on) who I’d like to hoist on…. something. Probably not a petard unless it got inserted in Slice first.
For the record, what got me pulling on the hobnailed boots with extra spiky bits was the unthinking assumption that it’s perfectly fine to give women a boost at the expense of men. No, it’s not. As soon as anything gets boosted at anything else’s expense you’re setting up for a nasty backlash.
Plus, you’re my friend. I defend my friends. With nuclear weaponry if need be 🙂
Dave,
No, the war in the third world (or the second. I DO visit Portugal, thank you) has not been won. However they’ll get right on that as soon as they’ve changed all the History signs to Herstory and all the women to womyn. Power through the abuse of linguistics. Or something. I wonder how one says Herstory in Dari and Pashto?
How do you say “Herstory” in Dari and Pashto (and several other languages)? “Put on the burka and shut the f*ck up”
Sarah,
Probably the same way it’s said in a number of other languages. Usually starting with *thud* and going downhill from there.
Lin,
On a good day, maybe.
Lin, it’s “amazing” how the “feminists” ignore women’s real problems in Muslim countries.
I guess they’re more concerned about evil Westerners than they are about the “abused non-Western cultures”.
Paul,
It wasn’t that way until a smidge over 10 years ago, then it changed overnight. And that’s about as far as I’m going since by now the flimsy curtain of avoiding the P word is rather tattered.
I’d like to avoid the P word altogether, but when it’s poisoning the publishing well, that’s not possible.
Nod, I’ll be careful to avoid it myself. I’ll admit it isn’t always easy for me to do. [Sad Smile]
Dave, I would not be surprise to hear some PC types to call “whines” about men getting not getting “fair treatment” to just being “men complaining that they aren’t on top”. After all PC types still talk about “male privilege”.
Paul,
That’s already happened and is happening. Dave (and the rest of us) could probably tell stories that would make your scales curl.
I think that the argument that the total number of men in college hasn’t decreased is a reasonable one. “Everyone has more” makes sense if nothing else has changed.
For what it’s worth, I think that the real problem is that college means less than it did before. So everyone really doesn’t have more after all. I think about this all of the time since I just started back to university. It’s a catch-22. It’s hard (or near impossible) to get a job (just a normal sort of job that is mostly on-the-job training) without a degree, and yet a degree doesn’t get you a job either. But it’s still a minimum requirement. Everyone can go, just take out a loan or three, so what is your excuse? But it doesn’t really give you anything either. Not really. So I think that a lot of the young men not going to college have looked at the situation and made a rational choice (even if not a good choice). The question might be, why do so many young women feel entitled to spend that much time and money on something that may not pay-off in the end?
In any case, I’m taking a critical thinking class (I’m getting cracked molars from hearing about how lovely Cuba is, and I can’t tell if the teacher is serious or if he’s playing with us to see how far he can get until students call him on it) and the book has an example of an argument explaining how women are economically disadvantaged in Western nations and then while discussing this example said this fact was beyond dispute. Our teacher asked who agreed and who disagreed and said we should have a short statement ready to support our opinion for the next class.
Maybe I can encourage some of the young ladies to think and some of the young men to stand up for themselves.
Synova,
You should have an interesting time… Just watch what happens with the grading. If you’re lucky your teacher will grade honestly on the strength of your arguments. If not, you may have to parrot to pass (I’ve had a few of those – it’s not fun).
By actually asking who agreed and who didn’t there’s a fair chance you’ve got one of the better ones – and if you can spark an original thought or two you’re well on the way.
Good luck!