Fleabag on X - ""I sometimes worry that I wouldn't be such a feminist if I had bigger tits." - #Fleabag"
A Generation of American Men Give Up on College: ‘I Just Feel Lost’ - WSJ - "American colleges, which are embroiled in debates over racial and gender equality, and working on ways to reduce sexual assault and harassment of women on campus, have yet to reach a consensus on what might slow the retreat of men from higher education. Some schools are quietly trying programs to enroll more men, but there is scant campus support for spending resources to boost male attendance and retention... “We do not see male applicants being less competitive than female applicants,” UCLA Vice Provost Youlonda Copeland-Morgan said, but fewer men apply. The college gender gap cuts across race, geography and economic background. For the most part, white men—once the predominant group on American campuses—no longer hold a statistical edge in enrollment rates, said Mr. Mortenson, of the Pell Institute. Enrollment rates for poor and working-class white men are lower than those of young Black, Latino and Asian men from the same economic backgrounds, according to an analysis of census data by the Pell Institute for the Journal. No college wants to tackle the issue under the glare of gender politics, said Ms. Delahunty, the enrollment consultant. The conventional view on campuses, she said, is that “men make more money, men hold higher positions, why should we give them a little shove from high school to college?” Yet the stakes are too high to ignore, she said. “If you care about our society, one, and, two, if you care about women, you have to care about the boys, too. If you have equally educated numbers of men and women that just makes a better society, and it makes it better for women.”... skyrocketing education costs have made college more risky today than for past generations, potentially saddling graduates in lower-paying careers—as well as those who drop out—with student loans they can’t repay... Men in interviews around the U.S. said they quit school or didn’t enroll because they didn’t see enough value in a college degree for all the effort and expense required to earn one. Many said they wanted to make money after high school... Men dominate top positions in industry, finance, politics and entertainment. They also hold a majority of tenured faculty positions and run most U.S. college campuses. Yet female college students are running laps around their male counterparts... Female students in the U.S. benefit from a support system established decades ago, spanning a period when women struggled to gain a foothold on college campuses. There are more than 500 women’s centers at schools nationwide. Most centers host clubs and organizations that work to help female students succeed. Young women appear eager to take leadership roles, making up 59% of student body presidents in the 2019-20 academic year and 74% of student body vice presidents, according to W.H. “Butch” Oxendine, Jr., executive director of the American Student Government Association. “Across all types of institutions, particularly two-year institutions, but also extending into public and private four-year institutions, women dominate student government executive boards,” Mr. Oxendine said... Young men get little help, in part, because schools are focused on encouraging historically underrepresented students. Jerlando Jackson, department chair, Education Leadership and Policy Analysis, at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Education, said few campuses have been willing to spend limited funds on male underachievement that would also benefit white men, risking criticism for assisting those who have historically held the biggest educational advantages... Keith E. Smith, a mental-health counselor and men’s outreach coordinator at the University of Vermont, said that when he started working at the school in 2006 he found that men were much more likely to face consequences for the trouble they caused under the influence of drugs and alcohol. In 2008, Mr. Smith proposed a men’s center to help male students succeed. The proposal drew criticism from women who asked, “Why would you give more resources to the most privileged group on campus,” he said. Funding wasn’t appropriated, he said, and the center was never built. The University of Oregon has one of the few college men’s centers, which offers help for mental and physical health. “Men don’t need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” said Kerry Frazee, director of prevention services, who works with the center. “No one can do it all by themselves.” "
Feminists just blame the men for being losers for not being ahead despite benefiting from "patriarchy". And good luck if you're a white man
Women get more student debt, so this is framed as misogyny and structural sexism
Weird how men are underrepresented in colleges despite having so many role models. It's almost as if the claim that people are underrepresented because they don't have "role models" is wrong
Why do women prefer richer men? - "a recent study of heterosexual couples in Sweden shows that while women have become more likely to marry men with lower education levels than them, they still tend to marry men in higher pay grades. What’s going on? The researchers thought the gender wage gap might be at work: If men make more than women, then you’d expect husbands, in general, to earn more than their wives. But when the researchers used a simulation to randomly create couples from the general population and compared those unions to the real couples they studied, random matching predicted that well-educated women would be the higher earner in the couple more often than was the case in the real couples they studied. This suggests that “highly-educated women appear to have an especially strong preference for men who out-earn them.”"
Whither Hypergamy? - "In one of the most widely-cited papers on the subject, demographer Yue Qian compared couples in the 1980 Census and in 2012 American Community Survey. She found that during the intervening decades, though wives became more likely to marry down in terms of educational achievement, “the tendency for women to marry men with higher incomes than themselves persisted.” In fact, women with the same or more education than their husbands were more likely to marry up... In every union type, including those with a more educated female partner, “men are the most likely to be the main earners.” That Sweden’s commitment to gender egalitarianism is close to a state religion and that women have been partnering with less-educated men for decades only adds to the salience of the findings.
Women go for richer men. Rich women go for even richer men. And even in Sweden, rich women want even richer men
Clearly, the solution, in the most feminist country in the world, is even more feminism
Research Stating 'Women Ask For Pay Raises As Much As Men' Is Misleading - "today’s headlines describe research asserting that women and men are equally likely to ask for pay raises, but women are just less likely to receive them. I read the actual research paper, and I’m not convinced. There is a substantial body of research supporting the notion that women are less likely to ask for more money, and the new research does not reverse this finding in any way. Women’s reluctance to negotiate for higher salaries has long been considered a major factor in the gender pay gap. And it impacts paychecks of women at all levels of the corporate ladder... why does the new research suggest that women ask for raises just as much as men? It doesn’t really. In fact, I believe it shows just the opposite... Perhaps it should have been a red flag that this research did not appear in a peer-reviewed academic journal, but merely as a working paper on a university website."
A 'Strictly No Men Allowed' Night Club Is Coming - "A nightclub strictly for women with “no men allowed” is coming to the UK next month as part of a nationwide tour and it’s safe to say women are thrilled about it. Lick Events will take over the Ritz nightclub in Manchester on May 7 for the special evening and I’ve never wanted to be anywhere more.
Lick nights are “for women, by women.”
That means literally no men allowed. They’re not welcome. This one is for the ladies and aims to provide a safe space for women and transgender people to be able to enjoy a night out safely without harassment or worse by men."
So much for "stereotypes"
Power relations means never having to say you're sorry. Of course, all the men just need to identify as non-male to get in
'Insulting to her': Mary Wollstonecraft sculpture sparks backlash - "It took 200 years to get a statue honouring the life of pioneering philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, but its creators have faced criticism from almost the moment it was unveiled. The new sculpture was met with dismay and bafflement by some when it was unveiled in north London on Tuesday, with critics asking why it did not directly depict Wollstonecraft and why the “mother of feminism” had been celebrated with a naked female form. The sculpture, which shows a silvery naked everywoman figure held up by a swirling mingle of female forms, is the product of 10 years of hard graft and persistent fundraising by the Mary on The Green campaign, which raised the £143,000 required for its creation... Hambling told PA Media that the statue was every woman and clothes would have restricted her to a time and place. “It’s not a conventional heroic or heroinic likeness of Mary Wollstonecraft. It’s a sculpture about now, in her spirit,” she said. Bee Rowlatt, a writer who has been a central figure in the fight to have a statue of Wollstonecraft, said the statue represented “an idea of collaboration” and the birth of feminism... Writer Tracy King, who was involved in the Millicent Fawcett statue campaign, said: “Any passing teenage boy is not going to think, oh, that’s an icon of feminist education. They are going to think – tits!”"
Equal Pay for Unequal Work—A Symptom of Prosperity - "That teenage boys can soundly defeat the Matildas or that a male tennis player ranked in the 600s might defeat Serena Williams does not necessarily reflect a disparity in technical skill. Rather, it reflects a disparity in attributes such as speed, height, and physical strength which combine to produce an advantage so overwhelming it precludes the possibility of fair competition... it seems that a team attracting lower revenue for the sport is also now being paid the same as a team which attracts more customers. And if pay parity between the Matildas and Socceroos is simply based on the fact that each team is representing the country in their respective competitions, then surely it follows that youth teams and Paralympic teams deserve pay parity as well. If pre-existing disparities in pay between men and women are said to be caused by sexism, then, by the same logic, the comparatively small percentage of team budgets currently set aside for youth and Paralympic teams would be evidence of ageism and ableism, respectively. The Matildas’ landmark deal may actually prove counterproductive for the pay gap movement. Sporting controversies like those discussed above only serve to highlight differences between the sexes and raise questions about the conflation of equality and sameness in other areas. This could muddy the waters on equal pay disputes in more conventional workplaces where individual differences in pay entitlement aren’t as obvious to outsiders. As is the case in many parts of the world, leading Australian figures have continually misrepresented wage gap statistics which only further fuels suspicion... There is also no evidence of unequal pay between sexes within each of those disciplines but considerable evidence of discrimination against males in childcare... Murray’s suggestion that society is increasingly suffering from Ken Minogue’s St George in retirement syndrome appears to be the best explanation for this phenomenon. Rather than being stimulated by factors like the slow death of god or a global financial crisis, perhaps our unprecedented and widespread prosperity have made us the victims of our own success and privilege... Despite arguments made by Generations Y and Z, we are generally more privileged than our grandparents. In fact, one of Generation Y’s most pressing concerns is how to fund our record-length retirements without bankrupting society. This is a far cry from the likelihood of dying on a worksite or battlefield before your 30th birthday, and makes it more difficult to accurately understand the nuances of historic inequality in the workplace. Our unprecedented levels of prosperity offer us the privilege of devoting resources to fixing problems we perceive in the world, whether they be real or perceived. The World Bank and other sources have observed the correlation between prosperity and activism in the environmental movement. In effect, a starving family doesn’t have time to think about their impact on the environment, let alone campaign to ban plastic straws. A starving society doesn’t have the time to ascertain if there is an equal number of males and females both accumulating resources and rearing children. There is a possible solution to at least resolving the artificial economy of sex in sport and reorienting it toward both merit and equality—marketability. Women’s sports may struggle to reach the same physical calibre as men’s sports, but they can be more entertaining than men’s sports and attract proportionate revenue"
The "myth" of the slippery slope strikes again
'Feminism is sexist': The women backing Brazil's Bolsonaro - "Ms Pacheco is one of those who dislikes the feminist rhetoric of the #EleNao campaign. "Feminism is political, and it's sexist," she argues. "It's worse than machismo." "Feminism supports feminine superiority. Feminists treat men like dirt, as if they have to be submissive. Take the political left for example - men on the left are always submissive, they treat women as better than them," she adds... Many, like Carina Soledade, reject the idea that a woman's role is to look after the children. Ms Soledade is among a group of women who argue that in Brazil, gender equality already exists, even if official statistics would suggest otherwise."
Johnson: Why men interrupt - "“Mansplaining”, before it was so named, was identified by Deborah Tannen in her 1990 book “You Just Don’t Understand”... “the reason is not—as it seems to many women—that men are bums who seek to deny women authority.” Instead, she says, “the inequality of the treatment results not simply from the men’s behavior alone but from the differences in men’s and women’s styles.”... men talk to determine and achieve status. Women talk to determine and achieve connection. To use metaphors, for men life is a ladder and the better spots are up high. For women, life is a network, and the better spots have greater connections. What evidence shows that male and female styles differ? Among the most compelling is a crucial piece left out of the “simple sexism” explanation: men mansplain to each other. Elizabeth Aries, another researcher, analysed 45 hours of conversation and found that men dominated mixed groups—but she also found competition and dominance in male-only groups. Men begin discussing fact-based topics, sizing each other up. Before long, a hierarchy is established: either those who have the most to contribute, or those who are simply better at dominating the conversation, are taking most of the turns. The men who dominate one group go on to dominate others, while women show more flexibility in their dominance patterns. The upshot is that a shy, retiring man can find himself endlessly on the receiving end of the same kinds of lectures that Ms Tannen, Ms Chemaly and Ms Solnit describe... the best way to think of this is not the simple frame that women need to learn how to combat “old-fashioned sexism”. Rather, both sexes need to learn the old-fashioned art of conversation."
Meme - Tallglassofwine @Obywinni: "When a husband cleans the house, he's not offering his wife help he's cleaning his house. Same thing when he takes care of the kids, he isn't doing his wife a favor they're his kids as well."
MovicApparel, AnambraX: "Same thing when a wife pays the rent, and fees, and provides money for food. It's her family she is doing it for, not man. I agree with you. Roles should be flexible and not insanely rigid."
Tallglassofwine: "This isn't totally true"
Feminism is only meant to benefit women
Meme - Fight the Patriarchy: "Women are pushed to marry early because they know that the older we get, the more we learn about men, the less likely we'll actually want one"
We're still told that feminism is not about hating men
Meme - "You have to be strong and empowered but also be oppressed and a victim"
"This is how Hollywood writes female characters"
There’s a Stress Gap Between Men and Women. Here’s Why It’s Important. - The New York Times - "Women are twice as likely to suffer from severe stress and anxiety as men, according to a 2016 study published in The Journal of Brain & Behavior. The American Psychological Association reports a gender gap year after year showing that women consistently report higher stress levels. Clearly, a stress gap exists... “It’s been well documented in our Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, for example, that prevalence rates for the majority of the anxiety disorders are higher in women than men.”... Research from Nova Southeastern University found that female managers were more likely than male managers to display “surface acting,” or forcing emotions that are not wholly felt. “They expressed optimism, calmness and empathy even when these were not the emotions that they were actually feeling,” the study said. Surface acting is a prime example of “emotional labor”... “Some professional women aspire to do it all: reach the top of the corporate ladder and fly like supermom,” she said. Editors’ Picks Meet a 25-Million-Year-Old Koala You Could Cuddle Like a Cat The Tissue That Connects Our Muscles May Be a Key to Better Health Why ‘Girls’ Rule the Internet When women don’t reach this ideal, they feel guilty and even more stressed
Women worry about stupid shit, then get upset men don't sweat the small stuff like them and aren't miserable like them
Of course the writer misuses the term "emotional labour"
The Cost of Misusing the Term ‘Emotional Labor’ - "The problem, however, is that both Hartley and Hamlett — and at this point, almost everyone on the internet — is misusing the term. That’s according to professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, Arlie Hochschild, a fairly solid authority on the matter considering she coined the term in her 1983 book on the subject, The Managed Heart. The original meaning was the labor involved in regulating, evoking and suppressing certain feelings while you’re at work — as Hochschild puts it, it’s “trying to feel the right feeling for the job.” It described work for which you are paid (although not always adequately compensated) and didn’t only apply to labor performed by women. So while pink-collar roles like flight attendant, waitress and teacher require the presentation of certain feelings — a dour or snappy flight attendant isn’t performing the emotional labor expected of her — so do blue-collar roles like policeman and bill collector (a cop with a Julia Roberts smile has also missed the mark). Now, the term “emotional labor” has expanded, perhaps mutated. It’s most often used to mean “the unpaid labor expended by women to cement social relationships and keep households running,” which is the way it’s used in the above Harper’s Bazaar articles, on MEL’s own guide to emotional labor and a similar guide written by yours truly (life comes at you fast). On Twitter, where there isn’t so much concept creep as concept hyper-acceleration, the term now essentially means “women expending energy on some unpaid task.” Reminding your boyfriend what star sign you are? Emotional labor. Explaining your tweet to a Reply Guy? Emotional labor. A constant, now irony-poisoned refrain is that men should Venmo women who “educate” them about sexism and male privilege, even if such education consists of little more than replying to an obtuse or sexist remark with a paragraph about Male Privilege 101 ($50 please)... The suggested solution to this alienation — to conceive of social/caring acts in terms of their market value and demand crude monetary compensation for them — strikes labor studies graduate Avery Alder as dubious. “If we’re going to politicize basic kindness between friends and community members, I worry about doing so with the language of labor,” she writes. “Because labor demands compensation, and I think ‘my kindness to you demands compensation’ has insidious implications.”"
Of course, we can never tell women to lower their expectations, because that's misogyny
Does anyone know what emotional labor means any more? - "Sitting on a chair, looking bored, isn’t sexism, some said. Others rightly accused Green of projecting. Many highlighted the absurdity of painting Sanders as a misogynist given his long history of championing women’s rights... Fundamentally, these tweets are a salutary lesson in why some insights are best saved for WhatsApp chat. But it also exposes the intellectual confusion of popular feminism, and the devolution of a movement that once solicited collective social and political gains, but has increasingly become little more than a framework for the expression of personal grievances. There is possibly no greater example of this mangling of feminist terminology than the term “emotional labor”... In addition to emotional labor, there is also what Hochschild terms “emotion work”: managing your feelings for a greater social or familial good. This may include the scheduling of family events, or keeping the peace between siblings. The two concepts are often confused, but when people talk about emotional labor, what they usually mean is emotion work. Seeing the Bernie tweets circulating after the inauguration, the feminist academic Dr Hannah McCann of the University of Melbourne called it “a classic example of how the term is being misused”... "emotional labor is not a concept you can extrapolate into any interaction that women have.” The overuse of the phrase “emotional labor” began in earnest with the publication of a viral Harper’s article by the writer Gemma Hartley in September 2017... The book consists of a series of interviews with predominantly married women about how they house-train their husbands – the husbands are mostly not interviewed, but observed like zoo animals... Earlier generations of feminists posited radical solutions to the gendered imbalance in domestic work, such as paying women for housework... Like the worn-out gusset on a pair of tights, over the following years, the term “emotional labor” has grown baggy with overuse. Hochschild, for her part, is horrified by how the term has been distorted. “It’s very blurry and over-applied,” she told the Atlantic in 2018. (When I emailed Hochschild asking for her thoughts on the Sanders incident, she responded: “Poor man.”)... The current emotional labor discourse has collided with the vogue for speaking like a therapist. This attitude is best summed up with a 2019 viral tweet thread from the feminist educator Melissa A Fabello. “Asking for consent for emotional labor, even from people with whom you have a longstanding relationship … should be common practice,” Fabello wrote. Being a friend? Emotional labor. Sympathising with a colleague after a rough encounter with your boss? Emotional labor. Emotional labor has become a catch-all term substituting for a wide range of expressions: politeness, tactfulness, courtesy, professionalism, friendship. As emotional labor distended as a concept, bloating across pastel-coloured Instagram activist pages and Etsy shops, it encountered neoliberal, “secure the bag” capitalism, and the two had a demon child. In this iteration of emotional labor, people should expect monetary recompense in exchange for being there for family and friends.. to me, personally, compensating our friends for being kind to us does not feel like gender solidarity, it feels like a relationship between worker and boss... At other points, online emotional labor discourse veers into straightforward misandry: the Instagram account @realmanbabies, which has 15,000 followers and advertises itself as “about emotional labor and sisterhood”, shares memes that read “you’re never childless, when you have a husband” and “how to love a man – don’t”. “It’s just man versus woman,” says McCann, about this sort of perspective. “That’s it. Men oppress women. There’s no class analysis.”... Where does this all end? In a recent interview with US women’s publication the Cut, the novelist Lauren Oyler expressed a deep fatigue with the contemporary state of feminist discourse. Oyler argued that feminism has been hijacked by wealthy women who aren’t suffering much, if at all: women who get mad at Bernie Sanders for not wearing a tie to the inauguration, because they project on to him every shitty boss who ever put his feet up on the desk. The women who could most benefit from feminist organising probably don’t care about Sanders’ posture at inauguration, because the real ills in their life are low pay, long hours and harsh conditions – not smiling at events when they’d rather not."
Ironically, feminists usually hate capitalism. But they want to commodify and monetise housework
As ever, feminism (and liberalism) is just First World Problems
SNL's Leslie Jones had to fight to be paid just 1% of Melissa McCarthy's salary in Ghostbusters - "“Especially as I got paid way less than Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig. No knock on them, but my first offer was to do that movie for $67,000.” The Coming 2 America star continued to say that she had to ‘fight’ to get more money and was eventually given a salary of $150,000."
Weird. Why would a feminist project underpay a woman?
Instead of understanding why the gender wage gap exists they will just blame racism
Meme - "Screw team America. Sweden's team actually look like women."
USWNT Generated $3.25 Million But Will Take Home $7+ Million - "The USWNT financial numbers are in, and the women are due for a big payday despite an early exit from the Women’s World Cup."
Former Women’s Soccer Star Rips Team USA‘s ‘Arrogance’, Shift In ‘Culture’ - "Two-time Olympic gold medalist Carli Lloyd ripped the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team for losing their hunger and becoming increasingly arrogant over the past four years or so. Lloyd, a legend in women’s soccer, retired in 2021. During her career, the former striker was a major player in securing two World Cup championships, two Olympic golds, and was twice named FIFA Player of the Year. Lloyd took issue with the women’s team dancing and smiling after barely advancing at the World Cup on Tuesday with a 0-0 tie against Portugal, thanks in large part to the goalpost blocking a would-be goal for Portugal... In 2022, Lloyd offered similar criticism of the women’s team, even openly admitting that she “hated” playing on Team USA the last couple of years of her career. “The culture for me is what the culture has been on the national team since the inception,” she told Insider at the time. “All of those players, they brought a fight. They brought a hunger. They brought a desire. They brought mentality. They brought a never-say-die attitude. They brought finding a way, whether it’s the 91st minute, to get a ball in the back of the net. That has slowly dissipated from 2015 on.”"
Megan Rapinoe says 'equal pay' was her favorite memory of playing for US soccer - "Rapinoe, 38, made her comment after she missed a penalty kick on Sunday, marking an end to her time on the United States women’s national team after the team lost in penalty kicks to Sweden in the round of 16 in the World Cup. The athlete and activist announced earlier this year in July that she will retire soon, with this World Cup marking her fourth one with the team... The soccer player has been the subject of criticism from many conservatives regarding her views, including her support for transgender athletes competing against biological women. In July, she said she would "absolutely" support and welcome transgender athletes onto the U.S. women's national team, even if a transgender athlete replaced a biological woman. "
When you're not primarily a sportsman
Collin Rugg on X - "Believe it or not, Megan Rapinoe’s missed penalty kick that led to the worst USA women’s World Cup finish in history was *not* the team’s most humiliating performance. In 2017, the women’s team thought it would be a good idea to play Dallas’ under 15 year old boys team. They lost 5 - 2. Maybe instead of spending so much time whining about their country the team should focus on practicing soccer."
Meme - "I MISSED IT BY THIs MUcH. *Megan Rapinoe with hands spread wide*"
Megan Rapinoe Explains Her Laugh After Missing Penalty Kick in World Cup Loss - "Megan Rapinoe is making it clear that the laugh that came after she missed the penalty kick in the USWNT's World Cup ouster was one out of frustration — not joy."