Tuesday, February 22, 2011

* Mother Earth: Galactic Vampire?















PK, I think your definition of sexism is a little too easy. A lot of discrimination against men happens because of assumptions that they are superior--or at least, about what roles they take within the family and society. For example, studies find that men have a harder time convincing a boss to let them to be flexible with their hours to take their kids to the doctor, stay home with them when they're sick, pick them up after school, etc. This is due to the assumption that this is the mother's job, not the father's--the same gender roles frequently used to confine women to domestic activities. The same happens when men try to find teaching positions at the preschool level--it's hard for them not only to convince people that they're qualified to be caretakers of young children, but people often assume there's some kind of pedophilia going on. Just see the Friends episode where a male nanny is the butt of most of the episode's jokes. That's discrimination at it's worst, against men, but it's hard to gauge what place superiority/inferiority have in this, particularly in a broader, cultural sense.
Penny Lane:
Your comment reminds me of how EXCITED I was to at last be getting a MALE teacher in fifth grade after 5 previous years of female teachers.
Here's the REAL SEXIST discrimination against MALES: Biological Determinism.
Because we were born with a chest which has the potential to develop muscles instead of (shall we say) " milk-makers", 160 MILLION young MALES have bought the cultural bias that a male's DUTY is to overwhelm and subdue opponents, and so, in the last hundred years, the blood of those 160 million males (give or take a few million) has oozed into Mother Earth, making her, I suppose, a kind of galactic vampire.
Nice.





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