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feminism is fuelled by misandry and a need to present men as the oppressors of women.
few women in Asia make it to the top. Social norms undervalue girls and women, with sex-selection abortions resulting in an estimated 1.3 million girls per year not being born in China and India alone.
CommentsStill, women have benefited from Asia’s economic development. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2011, rising prosperity has narrowed gender inequality in many countries. Women are making progress in health, education, economic opportunity, and political empowerment, which they can leverage for future leadership.
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Data for indicators of women’s leadership in Asia, though limited, show that the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand are consistently among the top performers. With the addition of economic and occupational parameters – such as women in senior management positions, promotion rates, remuneration, and wage equality – these countries are joined by Singapore, Mongolia, Thailand, and Malaysia.
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Some of the Asian economies with the highest human development rankings, such as Japan and South Korea, are among the worst in terms of women in senior management, wage equality, remuneration, and political empowerment. Singapore and Hong Kong, too, display significant gender gaps in leadership, despite high human development.
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I responded to this horrendous paragraph in Moore’s piece:
‘Still, we all get bamboozled with the choices women now have. Despite everyday stories of violence and abuse against women, we are now to refer to prostitution as “sex work”. I still await the dinner party where middle-class parents tell me: “Tom is doing his law conversion but even though Charlotte hasn’t done her Sats she already says she want to do sex work! We always knew she was entrepreneurial.” (my emphasis).
I said:
‘as a woman who refuses the role of ‘victim’ I find this article insulting.
How can I assert my agency with people like Ms Moore demanding that I fit into the ‘poor little victim’ box like a good little girl?
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feminists on twitter silenced men critics, with the witty hashtag #whatabouttehmenz . But as Mark Simpson wrote in his article about misandry being the acceptable prejudice, this is a very sexist tactic:
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I passed through Singapore twice last month and that's why I read a few issues of The Straits Times. Readers are invited to write in to Singapore's English-language newspaper. The rules for doing so are set out in small type. Evidently, women must "indicate Miss, Ms, Mrs or Madam."
What the? Never mind that "Ms" was invented in order that the archaic "Miss" and "Mrs" may be consigned to the history books but, hey, the ladies in Singapore have another option just in case, you know, they happen to be in charge of a house of prostitution - or something.
But seriously, how can we expect men to take our titles seriously if we can't decide what's appropriate and what's not? Even if you remove "madam" from that robust smorgasbord of options from which people of the fairer gender may choose, it's kind of pathetic to have to decide between three different titles. Isn't it, ladies? Must we really cling onto relics from another era?
Only recently have Singapore’s feminists championed domestic workers. Considerable media attention on abusive working conditions has prompted them, as in Canada, to connect racism, disadvantaged international domestic workers, and women’s disproportionate responsibility for caregiving. Protest is led by the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) – a nationally recognized women’s organization, which since its formation in 1985 has actively rallied for gender equality in education, marriage, employment and reproductive rights. AWARE aligns itself closely with Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), a non-governmental organization campaigning for the ‘Day Off campaign’ aimed at encouraging employers to voluntarily give domestic workers a day off a week (“Day Off”, 2011). TWC2 has also joined with the National Committee of UNIFEM Singapore and the Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economic (HUMO) to demand government remedy. Their demands have brought occasional redress. On March 6th, 2012, a new law required all employers to give their foreign domestic workers a day off per week starting January 1, 2013 (Tan 2012). Feminists will need to monitor its impact.
Fertility and immigration in Singapore as elsewhere have always been connected to nation-building. They simultaneously raise questions about women’s rights and the relations among different groups of women. Today the feminist movement in this island-nation has begun to address such concerns and join similar protests across the region and the world.
2. Babies are cannibals and your breasts may be sexists.
A male baby requires almost 1,000 megajoules of energy in his first year of life. “That is the equivalent,” Williams writes, “of one thousand light trucks moving one hundred miles per hour.” And do you know where he gets all that energy? Not from the sun, unless you are a fern that somehow learned how to read the Internet (good job!). No, it’s from your boobs. HE’S EATING YOU. That little dude sucks it right out of you like the world’s chubbiest and least stealthy vampire. Which, of course, is exactly how it’s supposed to be—but it’s not surprising that so many women are leery of breast-feeding. On top of that, breasts (at least in rhesus macaque monkeys, whose milk is similar to humans) can actually determine whether a nursing baby is a boy or a girl, and adjust their milk production accordingly. Milk for girls is thin but abundant, while boy milk is fattier and scarcer—the theory being that girls then must stick closer to their mothers for frequent feedings, thus absorbing their social roles, while boys are easily sated and have time to play and explore. Um, way to prop up the patriarchy by reinforcing gender roles, monkey boobs.
. In a recent interview for Vice magazine, Jan Guillou, one of Sweden's most well-known authors, referred to proponents of hen as "feminist activists who want to destroy our language." Other critics believe it can be psychologically and socially damaging, especially for children. Elise Claeson, a columnist and a former equality expert at the Swedish Confederation of Professions, has said that young children can become confused by the suggestion that there is a third, "in-between" gender at a time when their brains and bodies are developing. Adults should not interrupt children's discovery of their gender and sexuality, argues Claeson. She told the Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, that "gender ideologues" have managed to change the curriculum to establish that schools should actively counter gender roles.
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Ironically, in the effort to free Swedish children from so-called normative behavior, gender-neutral proponents are also subjecting them to a whole set of new rules and new norms as certain forms of play become taboo, language becomes regulated, and children's interactions and attitudes are closely observed by teachers. One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys "gender-coded" them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys. Another preschool removed "free playtime" from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely "stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying." And so every detail of children's interactions gets micromanaged by concerned adults, who end up problematizing minute aspects of children's lives, from how they form friendships to what games they play and what songs they sing.
Most rapists were subjected to some form of sexual abuse in childhood. A startling amount is perpetrated by females. Peer-reviewed studies conclude that between 60-80% of “rapists, sex offenders and sexually aggressive men” were sexually abused by a female.
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McGill professor of Social Work Myriam Denov, who did her Phd thesis on female sex offenders, notes, as recently as 1984, a study proclaimed that “pedophilia does not exist at all in women.”
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According to a 2004 U.S. Department of Education mass study of university students, 57% of students reporting child sexual abuse cited a male offender, and 42% reported a female offender. Interestingly, 65% of the survivors of female abuse who opened up to a therapist, doctor or other professional were not believed on their first disclosure. Overall, 86% of those who tried to tell anyone at all about their experience were not believed.
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As intellectual, compelling, and truthful Katie Couric’s opinions on the media representation of women are, the film would have been so much more balanced if they, for instance, gave the young high school students at the opening of the film as much face-time as they did their more privileged interviewees. The film ends up painting a very limited picture of what women are or should be, and this juxtaposed with its ideology of “you can’t be what you can’t see” raises a huge problem. The people we don’t see in Miss Representation are women of less privilege, women with disabilities, and so on; the film ends up obscuring the ways that women are different other than just existing as a collective sisterhood.
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The staggering statistics about how much of the media industry is owned and controlled by men and how lacking the industry is in gender equality is equally shocking.
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the thing that unsettles me most about Miss Representation is its glaring lack of sufficient representation for women of color, women with disabilities, and women of less privilege than the well-to-do upper-middle class CEOs, politicians, and celebrities that we see on screen. As professors and students alike pointed out in the panel discussion after the film, one can’t help but wonder if this approach is entirely too self-defeating. While the film’s aim is to point out the misrepresentation of women in the media, does it misrepresent women in the process of doing so?
Camila Vallejo is beautiful! She’s glamorous! She’s captivating and young! She is a favorite topic in the tabloids! She has a secret boyfriend she kisses “languorously!”
And that is why she is a popular and effective leader in Chile’s student revolution.
The New York Times Magazine dedicates an inordinate amount of space over its seven pages relaying anecdotes about her looks and explaining how captivating her appearance is, rather than, you know, offering a detailed account of her personal history or, say, an in-depth look at her politics.
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It is certainly valid to analyze the role the prominent person’s appearance plays in their public perception. But from the title on down, the article fetishizes her looks, makes it a focus of the profile, and tacitly uses it to explain away her power and popularity. Not only does this lead to a one-dimensional rendering of her story, it undermines her work and person.
Ms. Yi, who was the key researcher behind the survey, said that boardrooms in Asia were not just lacking women, but rather diversity of any kind — with directors generally coming from “homogenous groups” or family owners, resulting all too often in groups of people with similar backgrounds and nationalities.
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“It is not just about the quotas, but the diversity within those quotas — it isn’t just about having three women, but women from different backgrounds who can contribute different things,” said Ms. Crewes, whose organization, P&G, employs a chief diversity officer to ensure a better distribution of different nationalities, races and gender within the company.
Journalism professor Barbara Kelley noticed a surprising trend among her women students: they were bright, successful, highly motivated—and terribly confused. Raised with great expectations by parents who told them they could do anything, they worked hard, earned top grades, polished their résumés, began impressive careers, then collapsed in metaphysical uncertainty, anxious and overwhelmed.
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Psychologist Barry Schwartz has written of “the paradox of choice.” His research has shown that too many choices can leave us confused and depressed, actually undermining our ability to choose wisely (Schwartz, 2004).
I oppose ‘strategic essentialism’ because I think it fails in its own goal of uniting ‘oppressed’ groups who have a common ‘enemy’ or oppressor. It serves to privilege (yes I can use that word too) one group’s identity and needs over other, less powerful ones.
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In the case of the backlash against Cynthia Nixon, it is clear to me that (usually white middle class and often male) gays are outraged that their worldview and their sense of self, and how they were born this way is not being prioritised. If sexuality is, to some degree, a choice, as Cynthia says it is for her, (note she is not generalising about other people), then gays lose some of their ‘victim status’ as these poor, beleagured people who are forced to live under the shadow of the heterosexual dominant group.
using hypothetical examples of girls being abused saying if it was girls being ‘sexually abused’ by men priests, people would come up with spurious justifications for it. And yet, the main reason this sexual abuse ‘scandal’ in the priesthood has been newsworthy is that the men doing the ‘abuse’ got away with it for years and years. It’s classic oppression olympics with girls and women always winning the gold victim status medal, even when they are made up examples!
I know many women are shocked by my views. They expect the daughter of Alice Walker to deliver a very different message. Yes, feminism has undoubtedly given women opportunities. It's helped open the doors for us at schools, universities and in the workplace. But what about the problems it's caused for my contemporaries?
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Feminism has much to answer for denigrating men and encouraging women to seek independence whatever the cost to their families.
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while she has taken care of daughters all over the world and is hugely revered for her public work and service, my childhood tells a very different story. I came very low down in her priorities - after work, political integrity, self-fulfilment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel.
My mother would always do what she wanted - for example taking off to Greece for two months in the summer, leaving me with relatives when I was a teenager. Is that independent, or just plain selfish?
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Victoria Bekiempis an American writer, asks, rhetorically:
‘Are women crazy?
The world’s mostly male “great thinkers” have tended to say so, characterising women as the weaker sex both physically and psychologically.’
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In a piece that states how women are diagnosed with and treated for mental health problems in greater numbers than men, she ‘blames’ theorists such as Freud for pathologising women as ‘hysterical’:
‘Sigmund Freud’s notion of penis envy. The Austrian psychiatrist claimed that women are batshit because, well, they just aren’t men. The result? Little girls would all grow up to become masochists with daddy complexes. The proof, supposedly, was rooted in the “phallic” way they liked to plait hair’.
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Apart from the complete misunderstanding of Freud, and later Foucault, (you know, Freud doesn’t exactly present men as without their problems. Oedipus, masochism, perversion, neuroses- these are not merely attributed to women by Freud), the writer is doing exactly what she says Freud did. She is giving women a ‘Big Bad Daddy’ to have a complex about – male dominated medicine and psychiatry, and the big bad wolf of ‘rape culture’.
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The novelist Doris Lessing yesterday claimed that men were the new silent victims in the sex war, "continually demeaned and insulted" by women without a whimper of protest.
Lessing, who became a feminist icon with the books The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, said a "lazy and insidious" culture had taken hold within feminism that revelled in flailing men.
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"I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men.
"You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives."
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"It has become a kind of religion that you can't criticise because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not.
"It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.
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