The soft war against women

[seabeyond]

We stand today at a crossroads. In a time of economic crisis, with men fearful for their jobs, with an aging population that will need the care that women have traditionally given, with a popular culture and its new technology sexualizing women to a degree perhaps never seen before, and with female political candidates who oppose many of the rights women have fought for gaining political acceptance, it is a dangerous time. Beneath the shiny veneer of the “You Go Girl!” message is a more sinister reality. The culture is becoming extremely hostile to feminism’s goal of equality between the sexes. The new “soft” war against women is less a frontal assault than an ongoing, and very effective, guerrilla movement. Under a veneer of success, women are losing ground in a myriad of ways. While some high-profile women in politics or in corporate America are touted as “proof” of women’s power, across the board women are slipping backward. Women’s progress has not just stalled, in many ways it is being jammed into reverse. Once we thought that when women achieved a “critical mass” in the job market, when there were enough of them to make a difference, the whole work environment would improve. But progress has been slow. Some social scientists now believe that, in fact, “critical mass” is working the other way. Too many women are competition for men, and there’s a major pushback.

*

But the mass media these days are totally uninterested in women’s problems. Men are the big story — and how women are harming them is nearly always the subtext. In fact, argues Andrew Hacker (in his book “Mismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Women and Men”), women’s achievements may diminish men’s self-confidence and even their masculinity. “We will soon see … how far self assurance associated with manliness can survive when each year sees more appointments and promotions going to the other sex.” Society is falling apart, the message goes, and you women, because of your unique caring natures, have to put it together again. Smart young women should desert high-paying jobs, and choose, instead, to concentrate on being the perfect mother, a hard job that will occupy all your time. If you do work, take a job that requires caring and helping, because that’s what you are good at. You are not made for risk or high-level leadership. You are naturally uncomfortable with power. (As Fortune asked rhetorically on its cover: “Power: Do Women really Want it?” The answer, according to many, is no. Women are happier in more traditional roles.

*

A continuing hyper-sexualization of women and girls dominates the media and the culture. As critic Gail Dines notes, “Something has shifted so profoundly in our society that the idealized, pop culture image of women in today’s pornified world is no longer a Stepford Wife but rather a plasticized, scripted, hyper-sexualized, surgically enhanced young woman. The media world we live in today has replaced the stereotyped Stepford Wife with the equally limiting and controlling stereotype of a Stepford Slut.”

In October of 2010, Fraternity pledges at Yale chanted as they marched across the campus. This is what they shouted:

My name is Jack

I’m a necrophiliac

I fuck dead women

And fill them with my semen

No means yes

Yes means anal

(repeated)

Fuck al-Qaeda

Fuck al-Qaeda

(repeated)

Fucking sluts

Fucking sluts

(repeated)

USA

USA

So not even women at one of the nation’s most elite campuses can escape the growing contempt and threat of violence directed against females. The message of these chants is that women must be available to any male demand (even when they are dead) and that they are sluts who are equated with murdering terrorists in the eyes of their male fellow students. Some future media historian may refer to the present era as the Age of Pornography. Never before have there been so many images of women in sexual poses that are demeaning, violent and subservient. Clothing marketed to young teens today would only have been seen in the past on hookers or strippers. This hyper-sexualization of young women is taking a major toll, leading to severe mental and physical health problems. Some of these include risky sexual behavior, high rates of eating disorders, depression, low self-esteem, and reduced academic performance. In a 2007 major report on girls, the American Psychological Association found the media emphasizing young women’s sexuality “to a stunning degree.”

*

According to the report, if girls learn that behaving like sexual objects earns them approval from society and from people whose opinions they respect, they may begin to “self-sexualize”; in fact, to become their own worst enemies as far as their health and well-being are concerned. Unfortunately, too many young women are unaware of this backsliding. Today, the battle for women’s rights has largely shifted from the legal, legislative area to a struggle for hearts and minds. Though legal battles remain, the messages that are creeping into women’s heads may be the most damaging. We are being persuaded to be our own worst enemies. The “soft war” is disturbing and pervasive but too little noticed. The many ways and the many arenas in which women are slipping behind are obscured by narratives about men failing (which some of them are, but not elite white men) and about the ways in which achievement can only bring women misery and pain. (And, by the way, destroy society in the process.)

http://www.salon.com/2010/11/07/caryl_rivers_soft_war/

[redqueen]

1. This is excellent. Should be in GD. nt

[hlthe2b]

2. wow."if girls learn that behaving like sexual objects earns them approval... they may self-sexualize

Indeed. The most disheartening thing I have seen in recent decades is the tendency for so many "unknowing/unseeing" women to become the tool of the patriarchy and this self-destructive trend.

[seabeyond]

3. most disheartening thing I have seen...women to become the tool of the patriarchy

i couldnt agree with you more.

[MadrasT]

4. How *dare* we judge other women.

They are all "empowered", don't ya know?



And why do you hate sex?

[seabeyond]

5. lmfao.... was snarkin with you

and snarking with you

and then busted up.... "And why do you hate sex? "

ya

lol, isnt that the funniest. and you are cute.

[MadrasT]

6. I had a really rough weekend.

Feeling cynical today.

[MadrasT]

7. This shit especially pisses me off:

Old-style feminism is dead, and good riddance, because it was unnatural anyway. Banding together with other women to get better childcare, family-friendly policies at work, and better policies against sexual harassment and discrimination is so ’70s. Many women have internalized the messages of “essential feminism,” which exalts women’s caring natures. In her book “In a Different Voice,” Carol Gilligan claims that men and women make moral decisions in fundamentally different ways, with women basing their decisions on caring, and men basing such decisions on justice. Women have superior caring instincts, she argues. In “Women’s Ways of Knowing,” Mary Belenky and her colleagues argue that men value excellence and mastery in intellectual matters, and evaluate arguments in terms of logic and evidence. Women, in contrast, are spiritual, relational, inclusive and credulous. (Never mind that no reliable scientific evidence supports such claims, they have become immensely popular anyway.)

Um, no, and fuck you very much, and I am so very goddamn tired of having that role thrust upon me because I have a vagina.

And this shit is showing up in "scientific" research and people are swallowing it without question.

[seabeyond]

8. i had a man agressively argue with me on du, that women connect emotion to sex

now really, i dont get it. i dont even like saying "making love". that makes no sense to me. i never use that phrase. and as much as the man DEMANDED that sex had an emotional connection for me, it was a scientific FACT, i could not grasp or wrap my mind around that idea. clueless.

i hear ya.

[ismnotwasm]

15. What? We can't go out and get laid?

Leaving the wrong phone number to let then down easy?

Or avoid their calls

Or end up being stalked because we weren't emotional and the dude was away too emotional?

Maybe I just hallucinated all that.

[seabeyond]

16. ya. i can remember more than a couple. lol

[redqueen]

9. Yep, there'a a lot of junk science.

It's a huge problem.

[CrispyQ]

10. An outstanding article!

I thought this was amazing:

Women’s gains are hard won and easily lost. New research shows that even when women reach the top in male-dominated professions, they are vulnerable. Yale researchers found that if such women made small mistakes — even a single gaffe — they were more likely to fall from that position than a man would be. The phenomenon is known as “the Glass Cliff.” Another aspect of the “Cliff” “is that women are overrepresented in precarious leadership roles associated with high risk and an increased chance of failure.” In fact, according to a team of British researchers, women were only appointed over qualified men to the top job when there was a high risk of failure.

That last sentence especially galls me. I can just hear the boys in the boardroom, "Let's put a woman in that position & if she fails we can blame it on the fact that she's a woman." And I can imagine how supportive management was to that woman.

[seabeyond]

11. same with the first black president.

[CrispyQ]

13. I completely agree with that, as well.

It will be decades until another black is elected. However, they will also use it to hold women back, too. "Well you know how it worked out with a black man in charge . . . " Voice fades with heavy implication.

And, damn! Arsenio doesn't look any older than when I saw him in Coming to America! Some people manage to hang onto their youthful appearance!

[BlueIris]

12. 'Zactly.

I've seen that happen at least twice in my own life. Position a high risk dead end? Let's save our more important staff members and give it to a woman or someone else we want to get rid of.

[seabeyond]

14. kicking for the fun of it. looking for something particular, but we sure have some great stuff way

back here

[ismnotwasm]

17. You know reading that

I don know if there is another way to have a revolution--a century long revolution, but the last 40 years plus changing economics get frightened men to react badly. There's genuine hatred as well, but it used to be more about who owns women's sexuality, now there's a realization that's ain't it anymore it's jobs and position. Women are in college but aren't in top, decision making positions

Take a look at this

This is a list of women who currently hold CEO positions at companies that rank on the 2013 Fortune 1000 lists. Women currently hold 4.2 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions and 4.5 percent of Fortune 1000 CEO positions.

http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-ceos-fortune-1000

Or this at Harvard

When the committee extended its analysis, Kramer reported, some fields and many departments across FAS “are doing well relative to peers [at other institutions] and to the rate at which Ph.D.s are being awarded.” Thus, she discounted general “leakage” from the academic pipeline that siphons women out of Harvard’s faculty ranks. Rather, she focused on the demographics of several large FAS departments, compared to peer institutions’, to highlight seemingly large disparities—with Harvard trailing well behind the peer mean proportion of tenure-track women in economics, government, and English, for example. She concluded that in at least some instances, Harvard is doing less well at recruiting, attracting candidates, and sustaining tenure-track women faculty—“at every step of the process.”

(Such concerns have prompted deeper inquiry. Lee professor of economics Claudia Goldin, president of the American Economic Association, has begun investigating the disproportionately male enrollment in undergraduate economics concentrations. She has found pervasive unawareness of this gendered skew in economics departments, and suggests that women’s disproportional early attrition from the field, after introductory courses, raises the need to rework the curriculum to stress the discipline’s utility in analyzing socioeconomic problems, not solely its business and finance applications.)

http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/09/where-the-women-aren-t

Or this report of women in medical leadership positions (stat heavy)

https://www.aamc.org/members/gwims/statistics/#.Ur4aGH-9KK0

I can find many more examples.

So a soft war is a good term, I do know that our foot is in many doors threatening what's been taken for granted for years and years. So frightened people, include into some feminists who think it's still about sexuality are only partially right--we are actual competition now, not because we are female, but because we can do the job. You know--the ones 50 years or so ago society thought we couldn't do.

[seabeyond]

18. we can do the job. You know--the ones 50 years or so ago society thought we couldn't do.

all the things people lived by has gone to the wayside. all the conditioned norm people attributed to biological is being disproven.

ya.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

20. K&R

[CTyankee]

21. The men at Yale were terribly oppressed by the PROMINENT presence of a WOMEN'S CENTER

right on campus! That's right! The Yale men had to see it there EVERY DAY of their bright college years, causing no end of pain and suffering to them! They had to fight back! They had to make a stand!

Won't anybody think of the little boys that are abused in such fashion?














Oh, and

[xulamaude]

22. Glad this was kicked up :)

Interesting read.

[smirkymonkey]

23. God, so depressing.

Thanks for the article sea! Even though it bummed me out.