Amanda Knox wrote:
> Anyway, I get kind of tired of hearing how only women get sexist comments. Men
> get a lot of it, too, and often they don't get as much support when they try and
> stick up for themselves.
Yup. I know Dancer gets a fair bit of anti-male comment and discrimination.
It's
a lot more subtle:
* We go to a social gathering. Half the people at the gathering - male or
female -
hug me. They /might/ touch Dancer's hand. We're equally popular - but he's
male.
(Humans /need/ touch to thrive)
* The thread we had about male nurses/teachers/etc. (Males teaching young
children
being less than trusted by the community)
* Fathers who become primary caregivers to their kids.
* Women tend to discuss what's acceptable/social contracts/social expectations
-
at least in my experience. ('X is planning to stay home with the children'
<cue working-mother discussion>) Dancer says that men don't, or do but only
rarely - that such discussions aren't 'normal'. And that, as a consequence
men don't transmit the social rules and each individual learns them by
trial and error.
This probably explains a hell of a lot of jokes, and a lot of male
behaviour.
> However,
> it saddens me to see a woman hide everything about herself that is 'feminine' in
> order to fit in to a male-dominated community,
And some of us see clothing as a way to avoid arrest & stay warm, and fancy
hairstyles (anything requiring more than an elastic band and a couple of
bobbypins) as a way to waste time...
I'm uninterested in most things 'feminine'.
And I've only become at all interested in gossip since I figured out that
a lot of it is a way to transmit social expectations. That's useful stuff
to know, even if you have to wade through a lot of noise to get the signal.
Jenn V.
--
Humans are the only species to feed and house entirely separate species
for no reason other than the pleasure of their company. Why?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Jenn Vesperman http://www.simegen.com/~jenn/
************
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linuxchix.org
