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Old 04-13-2015, 03:35 PM   #16
BigV
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Change is happening everywhere, even Saudi Arabia.

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Women have made strides in Saudi Arabia during the last 10 years, in employment, at universities, and even in politics. But they still cannot drive, and continue to face severe social restrictions, as Barbara Plett Usher in Riyadh finds.

Safe behind the gates of a large beautiful villa, women take off their black robes and don the latest in trendy exercise outfits.

They have to be discreet. Women's fitness programmes are relatively new in Saudi Arabia and they do not want to attract censor from religious authorities who promote the state's austere version of Islam.

"Girls have not had any exposure to any type of movement at a young age so whenever they come into the gym it's like… teaching a baby how to walk," says the instructor, a European expatriate.

Like most of those interviewed she did not want to be identified because of a potential backlash from religious conservatives.

The health club starts off new members slowly, but it also pushes the boundaries by offering extreme fitness training known as Crossfit - a combination of weight-lifting, gymnastics and cardio workout.

To a soundtrack of girl-power music the women lift barbells and jump onto 18-inch boxes, cheering each other on.
and driving? That's a no-no.
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In an upscale restaurant, a group of young professional men and women network over coffee and fizzy fruit drinks, quietly defying the kingdom's strict gender segregation.

"It's sort of like meeting up in a bar in a normal country, just without the alcohol," observed one woman.
Women are banned from driving in Saudi Arabia, although some have showed defiance

But none of the female lawyers and investment bankers present could drive themselves home. Saudi Arabia is still the only country in the world where women are prohibited from getting behind the wheel.

A campaign against the ban petered out because of a government crackdown and lack of public support. And two women who tried to protest were recently detained on terrorism charges.
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Old 04-13-2015, 04:07 PM   #17
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Dana, I can tell you spend a lot of time thinking about stuff like, this... and you make some really solid points.
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Old 04-13-2015, 04:46 PM   #18
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Hehehehe. Very good.
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Old 04-13-2015, 05:27 PM   #19
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I think the most sexist show in US in the 70s was "Three's Company".

Brit-twist: it was an American re-do of "Man About the House" but, you know, where the chicks are hot. They might as well have designed the entire show in order to run the opening credits every week -- with Suzanne Somers at 0:21. And particularly what her chest does at 0:25. You may watch it, for science:



Did you notice that jiggle? I did... I was 14. So this is pretty much seared into my retinas permanently. I'm not really complaining here.

The show was actually described by network execs as jiggle television.

But when you watched it, Three's Company was also secretly subversively feminist; you I may have watched it for the jiggle, but here was a very heterosexual male actually living with two hot young women and they were friends and he never really set out to bed either of them. This was instructional to a young man.
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Old 04-14-2015, 03:33 AM   #20
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Found this in today's Grauniad: Video games need fewer 'sexy' women and more you can actually fancy

http://gu.com/p/47d86

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Old 09-03-2015, 08:45 PM   #21
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Happy I stumbled upon this one - This is an incredibly well done thread with an excellent analysis.

One point I can relate too - if in a somewhat different way - is the experience you describe in the OP as a child, not in regard to gender, but in regards to physicality.
Initially it was fine - I was a skinny kid and it was very easy to imagine myself in most heroic roles - but puberty had other plans for me... Which created a certain dissonance. None of the fictional characters I related too on the level of personality looked anything like me. Large man in fiction usually range between good hearted but dimwitted to outright bullies. The wisecracking bastard who likes to keep cards up his sleeves and think on his feet is almost always the lean short actomorph (The only real exception I remember to eventually arrive was from what turned into a pretty low quality show - Tyr from Andromeda). Mind you, imagining yourself with a different body type is not quite as extreme as imagining yourself as a different gender, but I think the effect is still the same - you feel less comfortable making that connection.

One related thing I am curious about - directed at Dana but anyone can answer - if you dislike the depiction of the dumb dad, how do you feel about the companion trope, the wise mom who was always right all along? Do you think that in itself could have an impact?
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Old 09-03-2015, 08:47 PM   #22
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I felt like this needed to be in a separate post...

Regarding comedy, I think there's an answer, but it's not quite the same answer as other industries: Longevity.

You can have more female comedians inspiring young wannabes, but there are other hurdles in this case, to have more wannabes in the first place, they are going to need to be not so young.
The reason is that childhood and development is different based on gender, and not just because of the media. For one, young boys use humor to compensate for a lack of other social skills when young girls tend to have more developed social skills to began with. Later in the early teens, while a lot of girls are handling a heavier weight of an earlier puberty and dealing heavily with social adjustment, that's often when boys start getting interested in philosophy and the universe and meaning and the good old road for existential crisis that makes humor into a coping mechanism. Later in the late teens early twenties, when girls are getting heavily into those very subjects, more men are focused on trying to catch up socially and often use humor to get women's attention, while women are rarely rated on their humor at all.
Later in life, things tend to equalize. More men learn to judge women on character, which includes humor and philosophical view points and coping mechanisms with all that comes from it... In part because we can afford too, and because we learn what can happen if we don't. More older women become proud of their humor as a result.
More importantly, while men face a more even slope, women tend to face a much wider hill, from being on top and having things easier then men to the bottom and having things a lot harder then men.
This includes physical trauma (men are more likely to have it from violence earlier, women from health problems later). It includes financial problems (Women have an easier time early in the service sector, but much more difficult recovery after parenthood). It includes dating possibilities - which include within it both desperation and loss, and generally the reality of people being nicer to more attractive people. Even regarding rape, if I remember correctly, males are more likely to experience it as child molestation before puberty, females are more likely to experience it as teens after puberty, which is among the longer digestion periods as far as trauma is concerned.
The overall result is that a lot of the shittier things life throw at you seem to hit women slightly later in life. Comedy usually comes from a dark place of learning to digest all those shitty things life throws at you, and as a result, it takes life longer to cook fucked up women then fucked up men.
Have people live longer and make it more normal to start careers when you are older (Which are trends that are happening), and you'll end up with more women comedians. People living longer less structured lives at a time where it's becoming normal to change careers more and more times in life is what going to enable more female comedians.
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Old 09-03-2015, 08:48 PM   #23
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Last but not least... Ok, actually totally is least.

Regarding sexualization: I vote for more dicks, not less nipples.
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Old 09-04-2015, 01:06 AM   #24
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I can only speak from my own experience on this but: I have always used humour as a social coping mechanism. It may be that my experience was different because of my health problems - I had extreme and disfiguring eczema covering around 80-90% of my body for most of my childhood, from around the age of three - so my problems integrating with other children started quite young. By the age of six or seven I was very much an outsider.

I do recall that amongst the friends I did make as a kid (there were ups and downs on that front throughout , as for many I don't doubt) humour was our prime currency. The girls I hung around with, just as much as the lads, communicated through jokes and rehashing the funny lines and catchphrases we'd heard on tv. The girls I was friends with, were usually very much like me in that regard. essentially, I and the girls I related to, just as the boys I related to, were pop-culture nerds.

This idea of girls finding socialising somuch easier - and being emotionally literate at an earlier age than boys may be true for some - but really doesn't describe my, or many of my friends', experience of girlhood.

By the time I got to puberty, I already had the body image issues and the socialising issues. I was into dark speculative science fiction, philosphy and history. I was a nihilist and loner - the word emo hadn't yet been coined.

The problem with generalisations about gender is that they only ever apply to a particular band on the spectrum of experience. Lots of girls struggle with the things they are supposed to find easy and naturally gravitate towards the things that aren't supposed to draw their attention. Same goes for the lads.

In answer to the question about the wise mums in adverts and popular cultrure: I am fine with portrayals of wise women, as long as they are not a counterpoint to, and predicated on, a lack of male wisdom. I find the whole idea that women are somehow emotionally superior, or that they are somehow always the 'grown-up' in the relationship quite distasteful. It pisses me off when people argue that having women in the workplace will improve that workplacebecause of the special skills and qualities that women bring - because it is still predicated on an innate and all-encompassing difference between male and female brains and minds.

That just isn't how the world works. In my life I have known plenty of emotionally inept women, unable to communicate their feelings or navigate social situations and plenty of highly intuitive men, able communicate their feelings perfectly well and navigate complex social situations with ease.

When people talk about the different ways that men communicate with each other and women communicate with each other, it kind of baffles me - because for the most part my experience tells me that we actually communicate with each other in broadly similar ways.
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Old 09-04-2015, 04:50 AM   #25
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Originally Posted by DanaC View Post
This idea of girls finding socialising somuch easier - and being emotionally literate at an earlier age than boys may be true for some - but really doesn't describe my, or many of my friends', experience of girlhood.
That's because gender generalizations are usually centers of curve balls, not absolutes:

I know it's been observed in math skills, language skills, violent crime ratio's, even something as basic as height.

It's never "All [insert gender] are better then [insert opposite gender]". On any spectrum, there's plenty members of the opposite gender who'd be better then the average member of the gender in advantage, and vise versa (Hell if you modernize this to include transfolk as the gender they identify with, the cross sections could even apply to reproduction capacities, though it would be a bit more difficult to find variable criteria to draw a curve ball from).

That doesn't mean though that generalizations can't be talked about, are useless or aren't meaningful, especially in how they impact society at large (Like in the case of various industries and professions), just that they don't make sufficiently good indicator to prejudge an individual.

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In answer to the question about the wise mums in adverts and popular cultrure: I am fine with portrayals of wise women, as long as they are not a counterpoint to, and predicated on, a lack of male wisdom. I find the whole idea that women are somehow emotionally superior, or that they are somehow always the 'grown-up' in the relationship quite distasteful. It pisses me off when people argue that having women in the workplace will improve that workplacebecause of the special skills and qualities that women bring - because it is still predicated on an innate and all-encompassing difference between male and female brains and minds.

That just isn't how the world works.
I agree, but what I am more curious about is less in judging the phenomena and more in understanding it's role in larger dynamics. What does it do to young and still maturing girls to see those depictions? How does it shape world view, ego, ideals for the self, interaction with the opposite gender, and so on?
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Old 09-04-2015, 10:51 AM   #26
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*nods* which is why it baffles me when people speak of these things in absolute terms. When people say things like 'most girls' do this, or 'most boys' do that. Many of the studies which are talked about in terms of proving the distinction between male and female brains, and between male and female thinking actually show nothing of the sort - they show that one gender, when taken in aggregate, show a slightly greater tendency towards x than y. That then gets reported as 'men really are hardwired to read maps!' and 'girls really are hardwired for empathy!'.

If a study shows that,when presented with a choice between a doll and a toy truck, boys choose the truck 60% of the time and girls only choose the truck 47 percent of the time - then that does not show that 'boys naturally like toy trucks' and girls naturally like dolls'. I remember a study a few years ago that seemed to prove the old theories of girls being more talkative than boys and having more sophisticated language use and vocabulary - but they were looking a single cohort of children. In that cohort, the difference between the two genders was marginal and was only present for about a year, after which they evened out. During the period in which there was a distinction - that distinction was simply that more boys scored lower down the scale and fewer scored higher up the scale. In fact there was much greater disparity between individuals within each gender than there was between the two genders. Yet, again, it was rolled out as proof of the vast gulf that separates male and female brains.

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I agree, but what I am more curious about is less in judging the phenomena and more in understanding it's role in larger dynamics. What does it do to young and still maturing girls to see those depictions? How does it shape world view, ego, ideals for the self, interaction with the opposite gender, and so on?
Not sure really, how to answer that. So much of this stuff happens at a subconscious level. I think, like much of this stuff, it is a double edged sword. The idea of women as somehow the 'grown-up' in a relationship (with the fellah as basically one more kid for her to chivvy along) also plays out in childhood with the notion of 'boys will be boys' while girls supposedly roll their eyes at their antics. So - ok, that shold in a sense give girls a boost to their self-esteem - but it can also be a conceptrual trap that makes them grow up faster and take on the expectation that they shold be sensible - it is coupled with the idea of girls as clean and demure - they aren't supposed to roll around in the dirt getting filthy and exploring the world with gay abandon,like the boys who are, in that rubrik, big kids.

Similarly, messages about male strength and vitality may have a positive impact on boys - but can also be a conceptual trap that reduces the number of social and emotional strategies that they are comfortable employing.


Personaly, I always gravitated more towards getting dirty and exploring the derelict factory up the road with my friends. We were a mixed bunch of boys and girls and we were pretty much all covered in grime with scraped knees. It used to rankle with me when my dad or one of my aunties would tell me that what i was doing wasn't 'ladylike'.

The double edged sword of female wisdom is that the 'grown-up' woman, surrounded by her actual children and her big kid husband, seems a bit of a killjoy - where fun and larking becomes a male trait. Games and toys, and fun are for children and men. That was a message I despised as soon as i became aware of it. It also ran counter to my own experience - ten to a penny if there was larking about in our house, Mum was at the centre of it.

As to how that plays out in the real world - it's fairly recent that computer gaming has started to become a mainstream passtime - up until a few years ago computer games were seen as play, as frivolity. Lots of girls played computer games - but many dropped off by the time they hit their early teens. In my own experience, I stayed with gaming for a long time. This past 3 or 4 years is probably the longest period I have had in my life without a game on the go. When I was 12 and home computers really broke through, loads of us got computers for Christmas. As i recall, there were at least 5 or 6 of us girls in our class who'd been given computers (mine was a Vic20, my best friend had a C64, another friend had a spectrum, one girl whose dad was a regional manager of some big business had a BBC Micro - can't recall the rest). We all talked games and swapped and met up at each others' houses and got involved in the computrer club that one of the teachers set up after school.

By the time I was 16, I knew very few girls who played computer games (or at least who discussed them). I knew plenty of lads who did. By 16, girls wanted to seem grown-up and looked down on the boys who were acting like big kids. The whole culture was coding games as play and therefore for children. That meant they also got coded male - or more accurately not female.

There were lots of other factors at play - some of which took 10 or 15 years to play out - but I do think thatmay be one of the reasons that girls tended to drop off games when they got to their teens in a way that boys didn't: boys had cultural permission to continue playing into adulthood and girls did not.

Now that games are becoming more mainstream and there is a greater acceptance of them as an adult passtime - more girls are staying with games into adulthood. Again, there are many factors at play, but I do think this is one of them.

It also plays out in the world of sports. It may well be one of the reasons that girls are less likely to play sports once they leave school than boys. Sports, like computer games, are play - and play is for children and men.

One of the most positive changes in our culture in recent years, to me anyway, is a much greater sense of play extending into adulthood for girls as well as boys. And a much greater sense that boys and men can be emotionally confident and equally socially adept is probably the other really good change. Obviously I'm basing this on British culture, I don't know what it's like elsewhere.
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Old 09-04-2015, 12:29 PM   #27
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I haven't made a connection between the women-are-wise trope and the scoffing at play-culture, that's an interesting one. That part is certainly cultural - Out of the cultures I've known upclose, the most evened out places in regards to the participation of girls in play-culture seems to be Holland and Canada (At least Ontario).

I admit I was steering towards a different direction: Thinking about my own anecdotal experiences in conjunction with the tropes brought up here, I can't help but wonder if for a woman who is influenced by the imagery of the women-are-wise trope, admitting to be wrong is almost akin for a macho man admitting to be weak.
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