Is Feminism Still Relevant?

[Pearl]

I'm trying to not acknowledge ignorant statements/people. But sometimes they irritate me so much, I just have to acknowledge my irritation:


Virginia Republican Says A Pregnant Woman Is Just A 'Host,' Though 'Some Refer To Them As Mothers'



You know what's scarier? This thing was elected to office.

[corianderstem]

I'm not sure that's the comparison he wants to make. If a pregnant woman is a host, doesn't that make the fetus a parasite?

[Pearl]

Originally Posted by corianderstem

I'm not sure that's the comparison he wants to make. If a pregnant woman is a host, doesn't that make the fetus a parasite?

Exactly.

[jeevey]

I really identified with this blog post because I have been the Loud Girl once or twice in my life, if you can imagine it. Make sure you make it to the second paragraph, which is where it really starts.

No One Will Love A Loud Girl

Nov. 20, 2012 By Chelsea Fagan




Among the qualities which are almost universally considered feminine, a certain amount of poised restraint and delicate softness is usually up there with “pretty” and “smells good.” Women are these gentle flowers, these perfect little pillows of silk and decorative beading which exist to cushion life, to make it more soft and pleasant and nice to look at. A woman, beyond not just talking back, is expected to be a good sounding board for the humor of others — particularly men. We are there to coyly laugh at a man’s jokes, reminding him that he is funny and smart and desirable, rarely making a comeback of our own.
And we can tend to overlook these stereotypes as anachronistic views of what a man and woman were expected to be back in the days when a real-life Don Draper was spreading his misogynistic seed all over lower Manhattan without a care in the world. We can sometimes believe that this point of view has all but disappeared, replaced by a new, more complex love for a woman who is able to speak her mind — and does so without waiting for permission. But one need only be said loud girl just once, feel the sting of someone telling you that it is “ugly” or “unattractive” or “manly” for a woman to curse, or make jokes, or laugh the loudest, to know that this sentiment still exists deep beneath our skin.

One could make the argument that, with the Zooey Deschanels and Mila Kunises of the world, we have begun to turn our affectionate sights towards a woman who is intellectually nimble, who makes jokes and keeps up with the boys in a way that challenges them. But even a cursory analysis of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope reveals her to be acerbic only in a non-threatening, sweet way. She challenges you, but only the way a pillow fight might injure you. She remains soft, warm, filled with girlish interests and hyper-feminine clothing which serve to balance out her more sardonic humor or biting wit. And, as if it were even a question, she is stunningly beautiful and thin.

But for normal girls, girls who just happen to be loud and like bathroom humor and cursing and don’t see any of this as particularly incongruous with the concept of being a desirable woman, it can often feel as though, in order to find love or acceptance, part of you will have to be muted — or at least strongly dulled. No one, it seems, would accept someone who is constantly running at 100 percent, who curses a blue streak or doesn’t take shit or puts their foot down. Who could possibly accept that sense of humor is something to be shared in a couple, not dominated by one party to which the other one is constantly playing the charmed and placated audience? On more than one occasion, I have been told directly that I am “too loud,” “too much,” “too manly.”

What does that even mean, “manly”? Is a sense of humor or the ability to speak up in a conversation a quality we’re really consecrating entirely to the xy chromosome? Does uttering a curse word suddenly take a tally mark from the “woman” column and mark it with jagged urgency in the “man” one? Is there a fixed amount of bold or talkative you can be before you become ugly — and let’s be honest, is it directly proportional to how physically attractive you are? (I’m sure people are much more likely to tolerate a foul mouth or loud laugh coming from a woman who looks like a supermodel.) What a sad little box to put ourselves in as humans, this idea that we can only share a certain amount of our personalities before we become, by default, undesirable. It seems that everyone misses out in this equation, that even if two people genuinely love the other for who they are, there will always be a sense of paranoia that, on the greater societal level, they are not doing something “right.” They are too loud, too frank, too much of a presence in the relationship.

Of course, with time, I discovered that there are people who enjoy women who speak their mind and make their presence known. They think cursing is funny (and even rather nimble when used properly), they enjoy laughing at jokes as much as telling them, and they are not threatened by a female presence who doesn’t just fade into the background to make for lovely, decorative wallpaper. But it is something one has to remind oneself of every day, something that is far from reinforced by the media and society around us. For every person that loves you when you are at 100 percent, there will be two who tell you you shouldn’t talk so loud or say that word. They will tell you it is “unladylike” and expect that it will turn off some invisible switch in your brain that leads you to be so… you.

I only wish that in the movies that pretend to give us a “different” girl or a “loud” girl, that she could really be just that. I don’t need some dumbed-down facsimile of someone who speaks her mind. I don’t need a woman in a little girl’s dress who occasionally says the word “shit” and giggles coyly about it for ten minutes. I want the full brilliance of a woman’s intelligence, her wit, her loud voice and booming laugh and commanding presence. I want more broads, more women who put themselves out there in every shade they come in, who are not muted or shamed into a quiet complacency by the glare of a disapproving romantic prospect. And I want everyone to be able to say they love these women without fear of judgment, because laughing is laughing, and who cares if that trucker humor came from a beautiful woman’s mouth?

Chelsea Fagan

[Irvine511]

different, but same:

The 300 Workout: How Movies Fuel Boys’ Insecurities
Eliana Dockterman @edockterman March 11, 2014

Young men—whether they were looking for their battlefield gore fix or a chance to geek out over the historical inaccuracies of a sex scene between Themistokles and Artemisia—lined up for the opening of 300: Rise of an Empire on Friday. And though some parents may forbid their teens from seeing the R-rated film because of the blood and violence, they should probably be more concerned about the Greeks’ sweaty, washboard abs.

The average guy wants 15-27 more pounds of muscle and a three to four percent decrease in body fat. And a new study published in JAMA Pediatrics in January found that 18 percent of boys are very concerned about their weight and physique. Failure to attain these unrealistic body goals can lead to depression, high-risk behaviors (like drinking and drugs) and eating disorders. Though about 15 percent of boys concerned with their weight are worried about thinness, about half are concerned with gaining more muscle and an additional third are concerned with both muscle gain and thinness.

Many of these changes are thanks to media images—and the 300 movie series is leading the way in the promotion of unrealistic male body standards (buttressed by video games and clothing ads featuring scantily clad men).

When the original 300 film hit theaters in 2006, a grueling fitness program called the “300 workout” swept gyms across the U.S. as men hoping to get gladiator-like bodies signed on. The workout, which was developed to get the cast of the films in fighting shape, has a pretty basic concept: 300 reps of various exercises with no breaks. But it is so intense that the cast had to train six hours per day, five days per week for four months before they could even attempt the 300 workout, and only one actor, Andrew Pleavin, was able to actually complete it. In a Men’s Health interview, Gerard Butler admitted that he could not workout for a year after filming 300 because the program made him so physically exhausted.

And yet publications like Men’s Health touted intermediate and beginner versions of the 300 workout. Instructional YouTube videos of similar workouts abounded. Suddenly average guys were aiming for 300 bodies.

Why? The ripped male bodies that grace our movie screens have boys thinking they’re inadequate. Research has shown that 25 percent of men with a healthy weight think that they are underweight. And a recent TODAY/AOL Body Image survey found that men worry about their appearance more than they do about their health, family, relationships or professional success. Fifty-three percent of men said they felt insecure about their appearance at least once a week.

Parents, teachers and doctors often miss male weight disorders because the symptoms are not the same as with females, according to a recent Atlantic article. Most eating disorder assessment focuses on girls who starve themselves or induce vomiting in order to look thin. Boys are engaging in a different type of unhealthy behavior—working out obsessively, taking natural but unregulated substances like powders or shakes to bulk up and even using steroids. Such efforts can hurt young boys’ growth and, in the case of steroids, cause behavioral problems, rage and depression.

“Instead of wanting to something unhealthy to get smaller, they’re using unhealthy means to become larger,” Dr. Alison Filed, an associate professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and the lead author of the JAMA Pediatrics study tells The Atlantic.

Health professionals are slowly defining the line between health-conscious behavior and over-the-top behavior for boys and men. But it will likely be a while before public awareness catches up to the dangers posed by the overemphasis on impossible physical goals.

[Pearl]

Regarding Irvine's article, I read once that porn has a negative effect on men's self image too. They think that if they're not as big as Ron Jeremy (or bigger), they're too small when in truth they're just average and many women are OK with that. Sometimes being too big can be intimidating for some women.

[PhilsFan]

Twitter's worst account is here:

https://twitter.com/TrophyWifesHus

[BonosSaint]

Today's NY Times

Science

Top Math Prize Has Its First Female Winner


By KENNETH CHANGAUG. 12, 2014



An Iranian mathematician is the first woman ever to receive a Fields Medal, often considered to be mathematics’ equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

The recipient, Maryam Mirzakhani, a professor at Stanford, was one of four winners honored on Wednesday at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul, South Korea.

The Fields Medal is given every four years, and several can be awarded at once. The other recipients this year are Artur Avila of the National Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics in Brazil and the National Center for Scientific Research in France; Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University; and Martin Hairer of the University of Warwick in England.

The 52 medalists from previous years were all men.

“This is a great honor. I will be happy if it encourages young female scientists and mathematicians,” Dr. Mirzakhani was quoted as saying in a Stanford news release on Tuesday. “I am sure there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years.”

Ingrid Daubechies, a professor of mathematics at Duke and president of the International Mathematical Union, called the news “a great joy” in an email.

“All researchers in mathematics will tell you that there is no difference between the math done by a woman or a man, and of course the decision of the Fields Medal committee is based only on the results of each candidate,” she wrote. “That said, I bet the vast majority of the mathematicians in the world will be happy that it will no longer be possible to say that ‘the Fields Medal has always been awarded only to men.’ ”

Much of the research by Dr. Mirzakhani, who was born in Tehran in 1977, has involved the behavior of dynamical systems. There are no exact mathematical solutions for many dynamical systems, even simple ones.

“What Maryam discovered is that in another regime, the dynamical orbits are tightly constrained to follow algebraic laws,” said Curtis T. McMullen, a professor at Harvard who was Dr. Mirzakhani’s doctoral adviser. “These dynamical systems describe surfaces with many handles, like pretzels, whose shape is evolving over time by twisting and stretching in a precise way. They are related to billiards on tables that are not rectangular but still polygonal, like the regular octagon.”

Dr. Avila, 35, investigated a different area of dynamical systems, including an understanding of fractals. Dr. Bhargava, 40, was recognized for new methods in the geometry of numbers, especially prime numbers, and Dr. Hairer, 38, made advances in the study of the effect of random noise on partial differential equations, capturing the effect of turbulence on ocean currents or the flow of air around airplane wings.

While women have reached parity in many academic fields, mathematics is still dominated by men, who earn about 70 percent of the doctoral degrees. The disparity is even more striking at the highest echelons. Since 2003, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has awarded the Abel Prize, recognizing outstanding mathematicians with a monetary award of about $1 million; all 14 recipients so far are men. No woman has won the Wolf Prize in Mathematics, another prestigious award.

The Fields Medal was conceived by John Charles Fields, a Canadian mathematician, “in recognition of work already done” and as “an encouragement for further achievement.” Judges have interpreted the terms of the Fields trust to mean that the award should usually be limited to mathematicians age 40 or younger.

Dr. McMullen, himself a Fields medalist, did not speculate on why it had taken so long for a woman to be recognized. “I would prefer to look forward and celebrate this occasion,” he said, “and see it as a sign of positive trends in society and in science.”

[Hawkmoon269]

One thing (maybe insignificant for some people) that I really don't understand from first world countries, like the US, with such a long history of feminist activists is why when a couple gets married the woman changes her last name... That just doesn't make sense to me, and I really would not want my daughter to do that.

[BVS]

Originally Posted by Hawkmoon269

One thing (maybe insignificant for some people) that I really don't understand from first world countries, like the US, with such a long history of feminist activists is why when a couple gets married the woman changes her last name... That just doesn't make sense to me, and I really would not want my daughter to do that.

Family cohesion?


Sent from my iPhone using U2 Interference

[deep]

Especially if she got a cool last name from her dad.

[Galeongirl]

Originally Posted by Hawkmoon269

One thing (maybe insignificant for some people) that I really don't understand from first world countries, like the US, with such a long history of feminist activists is why when a couple gets married the woman changes her last name... That just doesn't make sense to me, and I really would not want my daughter to do that.

Tradition I guess. Here it's more common to add the husbands name to the woman's name, so the woman's last name is husbands-wifes. But it's optional, you can choose to keep your own name, or the husband can take his wife's name if he wants to.

[anitram]

I have both last names (culturally it is what we do and I kind of like that approach).

I think it's like anything, do whatever you feel comfortable with.

[elevated_u2_fan]

My wife didn't bother to change her last name but that's mostly because it was such a hassle and we're lazy

[Diemen]

My wife and I both hyphenated our last names together. My mom flipped out about it (but then she tends to get worked up about everything...), and it's a little more cumbersome since I already had a long last name to begin with, but it's really no big deal.

[Irvine511]

memphis and i are keeping our names. it would never occur to us not to.

were a child to enter the picture, much different discussion ...

[PhilsFan]

It's one of those things where, and this is unfair, if you have a kid and the parents have different last names, people are going to assume you either had the kid out of wedlock or are divorced.

[Irvine511]

my gay friends have hyphenated, and i've seen two dads keep their names but combined their last names with a "." for their child.

i really don't know what to do.

i know it's silly and patriarchal, but i guess there is something nice about everyone having the same last name.

though it seems to me that it might as well be the mother's last name that is passed down and not the father's, since she did do the birthing and all and at this point women earn about as much bread as their husbands.

[iron yuppie]

Originally Posted by Irvine511

i really don't know what to do.

i know it's silly and patriarchal, but i guess there is something nice about everyone having the same last name.

How would you go about deciding whose name gets designated for the child? Seems like a very difficult conversation.

[elevated_u2_fan]

whoever's name sounds the coolest, obvi