On 1/9/2014 12:15 AM, Tim Cook wrote:
> On 2014-01-08 23:10, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> Well... The problems I have with that as an argument for questioning
>> their views on the subject is..
>
> Hmm.  I'm not sure I'm questioning the views on the subject as outlining
> that the views presented in that context aren't necessarily a pure
> random sampling that can be extrapolated to the whole population.  There
> are, without a doubt, a large number (far larger than there should be)
> of females whose experiences are as bad as presented.  However, I posit
> that the whole point of the site is to bring attention to those things
> /happening/ vs. all the times where it doesn't happen, so there's
> notable skew in that direction.
>
Well, the problem is, you can't always be certain, without looking at 
other factors, like.. "how many women on campus, in general, dress like 
that anyway?", which might make the results meaningless. I mean, alcohol 
is obviously a risk, but.. is it more of a risk than something else, if 
half the campus is drinking every weekend? And, how do those things 
extrapolate in the general population, where you might be, for example, 
not drunk, dressed in a business suit, or uniform, for work, etc., and 
almost certainly not matching "any" of the criteria given?

Frankly, I have seen a bit too many cases like this:

https://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_luvwphS7LD1r6zdqno1_500.jpg

To believe the, "how you dress matters", claim, for one. The dark alley 
one.. is a maybe, but the percentage of people that stalk like that is 
low, except.. maybe on a campus, where nuts might hang out, because they 
*presume* they can find "loose women" to stalk. So, what does that say 
about dark alley some place else, where there isn't an expectation that 
random victims will wander through, for their convenience?

>> Well, that and, one of the major points I am trying to get across is
>> that the "male centric" view that sits over top of our culture already
>> biases *everything*, including, historically, the interpretations of
>> data, and/or even the collection of it, in such studies.
>
> How much, I wonder, of Patriarchy is actively constructed by females?
> Not just as a 'if you're not fighting to destroy it, you're supporting
> it' thing, but directly working towards reinforcing its features?  Women
> aren't just a passive element that are only there to be victims of The
> System; much as some like to insist that women have no real agency
> because their voices aren't heard, throughout history there is a *major*
> impact from their actions, and they are just as complicit in 'how things
> are' as men.  Is it so important to have your name in headlines or the
> history books?
>
Supported by, certainly, it happens all the time, all you need to do is 
look at the bloody idiot women who support extreme Republican positions 
in the US. Creating it.. only in the sense that they where brought up in 
it, many people convinced them, via upbringing, that it made sense, and 
is "natural", or "meant to be", and they turned around and just parroted 
that back, as defense of the world they already live in, to other 
people, including their own kids.

>> Its a bias that is so pervasive that the *automatic* reaction of
>> nearly everyone,
>> male and female, when an assault happens, is to either joke about what
>> "she" might have done, or question it, but not what the guy did.
>
> That's the big point that Patriarchy is harmful to men, too; the reason
> it's not questioned what the guy did is because it's taken for granted
> in modern, Western society that males only think about sex and are
> mindless monsters that have no rationality (while women are able to
> magically control how men behave simply by what they wear and how they
> present themselves).  Such a mindset is harmful to /everyone/, really.
>
Hmm. To an extent yeah. But it goes beyond that. There has been a 
default assumption about "purity", and a lot of other things. Someone 
once made a damn good argument, I think it was on a video blog called 
"Sex+", that no one, once they start looking at other people in terms of 
sex are "innocent", that virginity is a delusion, and, she even has one 
video torpedoing the very idea that "deflowering" is a real thing, and 
not just a sign of the person doing it a) not knowing any better, b) not 
being willing to take time, and c) a result of neither partner knowing 
what the F they are really doing. As she points out, the opening in 
question has to stretch to allow a baby to go through, but.. somehow, 
the first time, you can't stretch it enough to get a two inch tube into it?

But, beyond that, a guy that sleeps around get patted on the back, even 
*when* he has taken some sort of absurd purity pledge. Its no big deal 
if he breaks it. A woman with a high sex drive... is a slut, period, 
even if by "high" you mean, "Slept with one guy, one time.", before 
dating someone else. And, yes, again, its a gibberish idea supported by 
both men, and women, often completely unintentionally, because you just 
tell girls one thing about their behavior, and boys another, from the 
moment they are born. Even levels of aggressiveness, how they handle 
situations, etc., are a result of "training", not wiring. Girls are just 
as nasty about outsiders, but they **learn** to use a sort of inclusive 
exclusion, where they give someone they don't like a role to play, then 
tell them, "Just wait there, we don't need you yet.", sidelining them, 
while convincing the more gullible ones that they are being "included". 
Guys may, sometimes, do the same thing, as a kind of joke. Both do so, 
to hurt the person, sometimes, but.. girls are told "this" method of 
dealing with the situation is right, because its non-violent (don't hit 
you brother, girls don't do that!), while guys, do it to add to the 
pain, but may just beat the shit out of someone, because its "OK" for 
them to be physically aggressive.

Lots studies on this sort of thing too. Out of which bits of truth get 
teased, but only after we stopped "assuming" there was something 
inherently different between the sexes, and asked, "How much of this is 
a result of how they where taught to handle situations, and, more to the 
point, how to **not** handle them, and what does that do to how they 
express the same aggressions?"

The progress we make in fixing this isn't going to come from trying to 
"protect" people from threats that only exist as threats because they 
are part of a list of "built in" assumptions, in the current social 
structure. That doesn't work, because the assumptions simply change, as 
clothing styles, and the like, do, without addressing the underlying 
problem, which is that the assumptions exist at all. Its going to be 
fixed by torpedoing the idea that men and women are "naturally" 
different, when, all too often, they are merely living in parallel 
cultures, without realizing it, in which "crossing the line" and doing 
something from the other "culture" gets punished (a guy being just as 
ignored, or punished, for doing something feminine, though perhaps a bit 
less so, than when a woman, even today, enters a field heavy with men). 
We still have the same problem today, for example, that Johnson ran into 
decades ago, when in science and medicine. And.. try to be a straight 
guy doing hair dressing, or something, and see what happens...

Though, I must admit, its funnier than hell that, back when Masters and 
Johnson where doing work on sex, women where freaked at the idea that 
other women might be looking at their private parts, while having an 
medical examination, but now.. you are just as likely to have them 
freaked out by a guy doing the same thing. Somehow, the same problem 
persists, its just shifting categories, instead of going away. I am sure 
there are less clear examples of this happening too. Because, the 
underlying issues never get addressed, the assumptions just shift.

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