Attention
Here’s a mini revelation I had today about how attention is gendered.
I think basically everybody who cares about this stuff has by now seen the endless studies on how much more men talk than women do in meetings and classroom settings, and how there’s a huge discrepancy between how much women actually talk vs. how much they’re perceived by men to be talking. This tallies with anecdotal experience, I think: men demand a lot of attention and they receive it, and women are punished for asking for less than half as much attention.
It occurred to me today that part of the problem here might be that men think women are already getting attention, because they perceive their policing and harassment of women as attention.
When I think about the kinds of attention I don’t get, and which I want, none of it has to do with my physical appearance or with sexual activity. The kinds of attention I don’t get, but do want, are things like: recognition for my accomplishments. Respect when I speak on topics in which I am an expert. Solicitation of my opinion, whether fannish or professional.
But the attention I generally get instead in public spaces and workspaces is: comments on my appearance. Harassment for sexual favors. Requests for work favors. And most of all, all the fucking time, demands that I listen to men talking, which I’m increasingly sure is an activity that those men count under the heading of Paying Attention to a Woman. Because, y’know, they’re interacting at me, so that counts as paying attention to me. Right?
It’s the only thing I can think of that explains why women are seen as demanding attention all the time, when in fact I’ve seen numerous men literally shout women down just because their opinionboner is so fucking important to them. Men think that women are already getting attention, because to them, women getting attention means men evaluating women, talking at women, and asking women to do work or have sex with them, whereas men getting attention means… men evaluating women, talking at women, and asking women to do work or have sex with them. GOSH.
tl;dr: Not paying attention to men for ten seconds is a feminist act tbh
No, this is good and important and it really explains the idea of the “attention whore”, the idea that a woman could want “more” attention than just the male gaze we can’t opt-out from. Even just appearing at all is seen as an appeal to men, just existing in many spaces is met with the weird delusion that you’re faking your authentic presence and are just there “to get men’s attention.” So when women first appear in these spaces at all, and then correct the improper ‘attentions’ (read: objectification and patronization) of men we’re seen as “babe I’m already paying attention to you what more do you want?”
like that’s the paradox of hypervisibility yet erasure able to exist in the same world. “fake geek girl” yet “oh my god we get it shut up about being a girl who plays video games”. On one hand, the girl being there at all has to be ‘fake’ and have an ulterior motive of appealing to men. But when she asserts that she’s not there for men, suddenly she’s demanding “twice” what men think is her natural share of attention– they won’t STOP objectifying her, so they think she wants their original objectifying attention PLUS real respect.
The video games thing is a simple example. Women at work get another version of this– to be there at all and to be talked to at all seems exceptional, so being positively aggressive (asking for a raise, not being passive) is seen as “too much.” Meanwhile the aggression of men (positive or otherwise) is taken for granted.
We want constructive attention swapped for the other destructive kind. Not added to it or “more.” We want men to stop doing these dismissive, minimizing things, not for them to 'work harder’ to 'attend’ to us.
(via betterbemeta)
Thank you lord this has been long overdue 🙏🏾🙏🏾 #news #Africa #nigeria #nigerianews #africannews #worldnews
(via snizardtheesnailwizard)
Sentencing someone to prison for a miscarriage seems outrageous—but Indiana’s law is part of an increasing number of “fetus rights” laws nationwide. In thirty-eight states, violence against women that results in pregnancy loss is called fetal homicide. But, as demonstrated by Indiana, that law can be—and has been—used to criminalize the women themselves who lose their pregnancies.
Map credit: PRI, with data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.
See this? This is BEYOND FUCKED UP!
You have this ~1700-year-old book [The new testaments weren’t even written down until 100AD, minimum. The Christian Bible as we know it didn’t even exist until the time of Charlemagne] that says absolutely NOTHING about the sanctity of a pregnancy, but you keep coming up with modern laws to defend one passage that isn’t even about preserving pregnancy?
Just… WAT.
Seriously. The only Biblical law about terminating a pregnancy is only ever concerned about whether the woman lives [Exodus 21:22-25]. The results of the miscarriage are treated as property loss and not the loss of life [News flash: The Bible is terrible and you should never base modern laws on it ever].
Meanwhile, where are all the laws to prevent male masturbation? Onanism, as I recall, is punishable by stoning in the Bible. Why are there no laws against masturbation? Or the porn that causes it? And where are the laws protecting prostitutes [”Better for your seed to fall into the belly of a whore than to spill on the ground” IIRC] so that no man sins?
And anyway, all this bullshit started with the Pill and Roe V Wayde. It’s not about faith. It’s about forcing women to suffer because they obviously had sex.
god, i hate teenage girls, they’re so vapid and awful
like, let’s go over a list of all the terrible things teenage girls have done
- volunteered for the first line of defense at the battle of stalingrad to fight against nazis
- invented science fiction
- rode twice as far as paul revere, in the pouring rain and alone, to alert americans to the approaching british during the revolutionary war
- pioneered the art of investigative journalism, and its use as a tool of social justice
- turned the tide of the hundred years’ war
- put themselves in the line of fire, often literally, in order to help end injustice
- organized a student strike that helped spark brown v. board
- hid from the nazis in an annex for two years and found such great poignancy in their experience that their ordinary day-to-day-thoughts have become world famous
- led lewis and clark across the north american continent— while pregnant/raising a child
- worked to desegregate schools in 1835, as well as to end slavery
- helped found the aclu and fought for women’s suffrage; also, got arrested for being radical socialists
- wrote the first known work of literature by an american black person
like, god, what a bunch of bubbleheaded excuses for human beings
And in recent history:
- invented a generator that uses human urine
- invented a new molecule
- invented the world’s fastest phone battery charger to date
- figured out a new way to travel in space
- campaigned for educational rights and an end to terrorism despite having been shot in the head for doing so
- cured fucking CANCER
- and found a cheaper way to get fuel out of plastics
Ugh. So idle and scatterbrained 9_9
(via meefling)
Middle School Censors Student’s T-Shirt Because It Used The Word ‘Feminist’
An eighth grade student at Clermont Northeastern Middle School in Batavia, Ohio wore a black T-shirt on class photo day which included the word “FEMINIST” written across the shirt in white letters. Yet, while the shirt does not violate any school rule and the student has worn it to classes before, the school chose to doctor her class photo to remove the word.
We need feminism because: This middle school dingus of a Principal thought that the word “feminist” was potentially offensive.
I want to see a copy of that school photo now, just to count how many boys in that picture are wearing sexist and uncensored shirts.
(via think-progress)
We’re losing all our Strong Female Characters to Trinity Syndrome
Many modern action movies, including How To Train Your Dragon 2, are visibly trying to make their female characters more than trophies and …I hadn’t thought of it this way before but now that it’s been pointed out to me this makes me so sad, because it’s completely true.
(via disasterscenario)
10 Simple Words Every Girl Should Learn
These behaviors, the interrupting and the over-talking, also happen as the result of difference in status, but gender rules.
- It’s not hard to fathom why so many men tend to assume they are great and that what they have to say is more legitimate. It starts in childhood and never ends. Parents interrupt girls twice as often and hold them to stricter politeness norms. Teachers engage boys, who correctly see disruptive speech as a marker of dominant masculinity, more often and more dynamically than girls.
- For example, male doctors invariably interrupt patients when they speak, especially female patients but patients rarely interrupt doctors in return. Unless the doctor is a woman. When that is the case, she interrupts far less and is herself interrupted more.
- This is also true of senior managers in the workplace. Male bosses are not frequently talked over or stopped by those working for them, especially if they are women; however, female bosses are routinely interrupted by their male subordinates.
- As adults, women’s speech is granted less authority. We aren’t thought of as able critics or as funny.
- Men speak more, more often, and longer than women in mixed groups (classrooms, boardrooms, legislative bodies, expert media commentary and, for obvious reasons religious institutions.)
- Indeed, in male-dominated problem solving groups including boards, committees, and legislatures, men speak 75% more than women, with negative effects on decisions reached. That’s why, as researchers summed up, “Having a seat at the table is not the same as having a voice.”
- Even in movies and television, male actors engage in more disruptive speech and garner twice as much speaking and screen time as their female peers.
- Listserve topics introduced by men have a much higher rate of response.
- On Twitter, people retweet men two times as often as women.
The best part though is that we are socialized to think women talk more. Listener bias results in most people thinking that women are hogging the floor when men are actually dominating. Linguists have concluded that much of what is popularly understood about women and men being from different planets, verbally, confuses “women’s language” with “powerless language.”
This preference for what men have to say, supported by men and women both, is a variant on “mansplaining.” The word came out of an article by writer Rebecca Solnit, who explained that the tendency some men have to grant their own speech greater import than a perfectly competent woman’s is not a universal male trait, but the “intersection between overconfidence and cluelessness where some portion of that gender gets stuck.” Solnit’s tipping point experience really did take the cake. She was talking to a man at a cocktail party when he asked her what she did. She replied that she wrote books, and she described her most recent one, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West.The man interrupted her soon after she said the word Muybridge and asked, “And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?” He then waxed on, based on his reading of a review of the book, not even the book itself, until finally a friend said, “That’s her book.” He ignored that friend (also a woman) and she had to say it more than three times before “he went ashen” and walked away. If you are not a woman, ask any woman you know what this is like, because it is not fun and happens to all of us.
Last week as I sat in a cafe, a man in his 60′s stopped to ask me what I was writing. I told him, a book about gender and media and he said, “I went to a conference where someone talked about that a few years ago. I read a paper about it a few years ago. Did you know that car manufacturers use slightly denigrating images of women to sell cars? I’d be happy to help you.” After I suggested, smiling cheerily, that the images were beyond denigrating and definitively injurious to women’s dignity, free speech, and parity in culture he drifted off
In the wake of Larry Summers’ “women can’t do math” controversy several years ago, scientist Ben Barres wrote publicly about his experiences, first as a woman and later in life, as a male. As a female student at MIT, Barbara Barres was told by a professor after solving a particularly difficult math problem, “Your boyfriend must have solved it for you.” When several years after, as Ben Barres, he gave a well-received scientific speech, he overhead a member of the audience say, “His work is much better than his sister’s.” Most notably, he concluded that one of the major benefits of being male was that he could now “even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man.”
Really, practice those ten words.
“Stop interrupting me.”
“I just said that.”
“No explanation needed.”
(via all-about-male-privilege)
India sentences death for multiple rapes | Sky News Australia
Cue MRA whining in 5…. 4…. 3….
We hope that you will join us and our partners at 1 in 6 and A Call to Men on this very, very important iniative. Again, to learn more visit men.joyfulheartfoundation.org. Thank you. (x)
End ALL forms of sexual abuse
(Source: 0liviabenson, via bee-whistler)