#yesallwomen

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I don't have the stats off hand, but I believe it's pretty balanced between men and woman on Wrong Planet--certainly not reflective of the supposed incidence ratio of men to women.

It seems that you can count on someone to disagree with anything you say around here, especially for some of the more extreme ideas. The moderators just lock the thread if the discussion gets too out of hand.

The idea that you can't say anything discriminatory (or that can be interpreted that way) is sanitized. The idea is that we'll ban unpleasant ideas rather than disagree or argue with them.

No, the idea is that we'll curb the airing of wrong and harmful but oft-circulated ideas that are presented as fact and hurt particular groups of people in some very tangible, chronic, and serious ways. If nobody ever went and acted on these ideas, but were instead civil and fairminded to all, we could talk about "debating ideas". Unfortunately that's not how it is.

Are you referring to the recent shooting? If he posted any of his ideas on this thread, it would've been locked because of the violent content, and I doubt that banning him from any site would've stopped him from doing what he did.

Women get hurt, daily, violently, and expensively, by many, many more people than Elliot Rogder. Talk that reinforces the idea that women aren't actually people-people but some sort of class apart, or that they're some class of critter that exists for f*****g/romance/self-aggrandizement/domestic niceties, teaches that it's all right to discriminate against and abuse women.

I work in an environment in which overt sexism is very heavily penalized. Like with the loss of expensively, arduously-built careers and pariah-hood. That's a relatively recent thing -- the last couple of decades -- but it makes a profound difference in how women are treated and regarded, because nobody wants to get caught being openly sexist. Nobody wants to lose a career they spent a decade or more building. And being afraid of that tends, after a while, to make people feel not-quite-right about quiet sexism, too, and leaves them more inclined to notice that they've been wrong. And to change. The students who grow up in that "we don't talk that way" environment are very easily shocked by open sexism, recognize it as a problem, and are much more willing than the older people were to ask themselves serious questions about their own attitudes. And life is much better for women than it used to be there. Are there still problems, yes. There's still a fight over pay parity, harassment, the kinds of unconscious sexism that leave the guys in charge inviting the new guys out and ignoring the new women. But I know that very few people, where I work, would dare to treat me as meat on parade. It isn't something I have to worry about as I go through my day. And it isn't something I have to pretend to like in order to keep my job.

The talk and the environment matter.

Yes to tarantella. That is all.

This isn't a workplace, this forum in particular is about sharing your dating experience and ideas. You're expecting workplace civility from a crowd of mostly males (higher rate of dx) with with difficulties in social skills in a love and dating forum.

I can't speak for your experiences, but I've personally seen the type of sexist you've described prove their point over and over. I've befriended a few guys like that, they're often charming and fun to be around, but they definitely don't do right by others, some get plain psychotic sometimes. I have yet to see any of them get called out to their faces, I mean all kinds of guys can catch hell for saying the wrong thing, but the adage is true, it's not what you say, it's how you say it.

People who are being victimized tend to complain about being victimized. If you find it irritating to listen to, imagine how it is to live it.

When men did that, as well as gender-neutral advocacy, you ripped on them:

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postxf256422 ... ml#6014434

You didn't even bother to check what they were working on:

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp6017868.html#6017824

You can't blame them for not speaking up, then treat them like dog crap when they do, then complain when the only advocates left are confrontational.

Unfortunately a lot of people who complain about being victimized aren't actually being victimized. Often times one's own shortcomings or weaknesses are why one ends up in a unfavorable situation. It is much easier to blame "society" or a dominant group for one's situation than to be self-critical. For this reason it is important to heavily scrutinize claims of victimization and assess their validity, and not immediately empathize with and therefore legitimize the "victim".

And...is there anything that you know about victimisation of women, or about discrimination against women that leads to their being impoverished and shut out of opportunities?

Anything you've seen on any of these threads, for instance?

Well, regarding the "impoverishment" of women, yes it is true that there is a slightly higher % of women who are under the under the poverty level than men, but I'm not sure if that is due to discrimination or other factors. Likewise with women being "shut out of opportunities". Since men and women have differently structured brains, and men produce much more testosterone, I think the differences in employment may be more due to genetic predisposition than discrimination - in the US today that is. If we're talking about 50 years ago, or other countries like Pakistan or somewhere like that, there is a massive amount of discrimination that takes place against women which is truly horrible. But today in the U.S., I think discrimination against women exists, but the power differences that have arisen between men and women mainly exist because men and women typically develop diverging skill sets due to their different brain structures and testosterone levels.

Keep in mind, this is an autism forum, it's fine to point out issues of discrimination against women, but it is likely that people with autism face more discrimination for being who they are than women, at least in my opinion. Every group can be discriminated against, but the degree to which it occurs depends a lot on the culture. People don't necessarily recognize how this might affect people with ASD because the field of Disabilities Studies was late to the party, while studies on race-class-gender have long been established.

For instance, with the crazy guy who killed people, it was interesting to me how big a reaction to the "yes all women" theme got, but virtually nothing on regarding the difficulties that people living with ASD face, along with the mental health problems that can accompany it. To me that indicates that people are much more sensitive to problems that women face than they are to problems autistics face, even though the latter are often much more severe. I think that is why some people get upset when feminists rage against discrimination against women, when there are other groups that are worse off that don't get the same attention.

I missed this thread altogether, maybe because even if I'd seen the title I'd have said "oh god" and gone elsewhere. But since you ask:



I don't know what "female-run institutions" you're talking about, but on the whole, we already do. And forcing isn't necessary. It's how we survive at all. The main problem is that women don't generally run institutions that have money. When we do...well, that's exactly why I used to serve on a (women-dominated) board that distributed a million state-appropriated bucks annually to agencies serving families with children under age 6. Childcare, transportation, GED fees, preschools, parent-ed, all kinds of stuff that made it possible for the parents to work and go to school, kids to stay enrolled in the same school for more than a few weeks at a time, kids to keep their daycare slots even if their parents were temporarily unemployed, etc. The problem there is that we've got an alms-based model of social services funding -- and appropriations are decidedly not woman-controlled -- so someone like your mom would never have qualified for the programs. Here, we insist on classing poverty as sin, so we give grudging help to the poor, who get stamped The Poor when they apply for these things, and voila, services. But not if you've got money to wave. If the model were social-democratic, your mom would've been in fine shape, and you guys would've gone to creches that all the moms, doctors and otherwise, were overseeing.

Women in the neighborhood wouldn't take your mom's money for watching her kids because she was trying to pay in the wrong currency for the care of too many kids for too many too-regular hours. Housewives do favors when they can, but they aren't daycares. They aren't set up to watch other people's multiple children for hours at a stretch five days a week. (And at this point they'd have to worry about whether they're running a business, because commercial daycares are state-regulated.) Even if they'd agreed, as soon as one of the husbands started kicking about how looking after you guys was interfering with the wife's taking care of him, it would've been over. And until then your mom would have been working the phones daily to arrange care for the next day anyway. And it still would've fallen apart because some lady would need to run to next-town-over for family errand and would be calling your mom's secretary to let her know this at 10 am, and then she'd be dialing and begging between patients.

(Note too that although the childcare also allowed your dad to work, it sounds like the scrambling for childcare fell to your mom.)

The point is that if you're going to employ parents and want them working something like regular hours, someone has to look after their children. And if you're going to stop discriminating against mothers and hire them, then you also have to recognize (however grudgingly) that your daddy-employees no longer have free wife-subsidized care for their children, and of course the women don't have magic free-childcare-bots popping up to replace them. At which point either the businesses themselves have to take it on (bad idea, imo), or the businesses have to turn to the government and say, "This is a national-workforce issue, not a private-business problem." Which is what most other industrialized countries have acknowledged.

When you dodge that problem or ride the brakes by having a contingent of men earnestly devoted to biblical sexism in your legislatures -- as we've done for a long time here, though slowly that's changing -- it turns out to be expensive for a few reasons. One, parents (mostly mothers) waste a shit-ton of time researching childcares and fighting for spots in adequately-staffed places that they can afford. Two, it's a drag on the workforce. If you're paying $2K/mo for childcare for two kids, you've got to have quite a job to make it worthwhile. So you get a lot of parents leaving the workforce "temporarily" to stay home, figuring it's not worth paying, then finding it difficult to get back in with the stale resume, or having to come back at much reduced salaries/responsibility. And three, it leaves a lot of kids in bad spots. Lot of parents just have to work and can't afford childcare, so they leave the kids to fend for themselves. It's one of the things I fought against here -- our after-school programs don't have enough slots, and we have a lot of transient university and other types. There is no retired grandma who can look after them after school, and they don't know their neighbors, who are at work during the day anyway. So you get tiny little kids walking a mile home and then either on their own or "supervised" by slightly less tiny kids for 2-3 hours, which isn't safe.

Other countries manage this reasonably enough that when Europeans show up here they're generally horrified by the situation. Apart from the fact that there's no state-subsidized mat leave in which your job is guaranteed held (and again, it's not a crisis, you get a temp person in for x months), there's no meaningful childcare subsidy given the cost of childcare. And the childcare maze here isn't much better than in your mom's time. There, depending on the country, you get a creche the way you would an elementary school. And the staff are well-educated professional types because they're real jobs. Here, you know, god knows what you'll get, it's whoever can't do better than $7.25/hr elsewhere, and they're transients. Which means the kids get attached and then the person leaves, over and over.

We can't have a creche system here, though, for the same reason it's such a ridiculous battle to get universal preschool. You get these guys who have a sky fairy telling them that the womenfolk are meant to stay home and look after the kids and teach them the word of Christ, and public anything's a secular plot to poison the children's pure hearts and turn them against God. So no, they won't vote for any kind of public childcare, in fact they fight very hard against it every time it comes up.

I have never felt that I was treated as "less than'for being female. I have never felt that being female made my life more difficult. I have always felt that men, all in all, have it much harder. I have not been treated as an equal because of being Autistic. I believe that men, particularly Autistic men, get the raw end of the stick.

Vicky,

I've met a big handful of aspie women, and almost all of them have been sexually assaulted. Half of them have had stalkers, half of them have been raped (and two of these women are *very* damaged). Most of them are very naive and take huge risks because they are VERY unaware of the dangers around them. On top of that, half of them have eating problems, and body image issues.

It is absolute bull that "autistic men in particular get the raw end of the stick." I am not saying autistic men have it easier, but they certainly DO NOT have it harder. You obviously haven't met enough women with ASD, or you haven't gotten to know them well. And you completely side with the men with misogynistic views on this forum. Yes, they need support, but that does NOT give them the right to spout hatred against women. It is not something they can't help. Placing the blame on women is hating women. The aspie women I've met have had an awful time, but they don't go hating men as a whole group.

Interesting point