So I just read this article about how people end up fucking up whatever task they’re doing when they feel like they’re being watched. Scientists have discovered that the sense of being observed actually SHUTS OFF a part of the brain, the inferior parietal cortex.
Given the fact that women are constantly watched in our society, and we are constantly REMINDED that we are being watched by people making fun of fat, “ugly”, or gender-nonconforming women, it makes me wonder how many women have messed up important tasks or projects or just day-to-day activities because A PART OF OUR BRAIN is permanently being deactivated?
Like talk about a fucking handicap.
Women are constantly held under the microscope- whether we are attractive or unattractive, the gaze of patriarchy never ends.
Just last week I was walking my dog and bent over to literally pick up poop. Suddenly I heard whistling and looked up cause I knew I was the only person around. Sure enough, about 300 feet away, some construction worker was perched on top of a building, grinning at me and calling out stuff I luckily couldn’t hear because he was so goddamn far away.
I wonder what it does to women to have this constant source of stress hanging over us, each and every day, knowing we are being scrutinized and examined no matter what we’re doing. I wonder how many more accomplishments, life-changing discoveries, inventions, etc would have been achieved by women if we didn’t have this constant brain-handicap imposed on us by men.
This feeling of being watched extends even when we’re alone and affects our abilities- here’s a study where women took a math test while in a bathing suit and performed significantly worse than women fully dressed, even though all the women were alone when taking the test. The men in bathing suits and the men fully-dressed had no significant difference in performance. It is a major fucking handicap.
(I don’t remember how to make a cleaner link on my phone, sorry)
Tag: feminism
There is a pernicious belief, that manifests itself in
dozens of different ways and adapts itself to whatever the environment
requires, that women who go against gendered expectations are snobs who think
of themselves as better than other women. It can go so far as to insist that a
woman who doesn’t meet a particular gendered expectation must be privileged
over other women who do and/or that this woman is actively attacking other
women. The specter of Miss Trunchbull slicing
off an innocent child’s pigtails looms large in our culture.It’s important look out for it because it’s insidious and
you will be blindsided when it comes for you.
You might find yourself emotionally prepared for the snide looks from
frat dudes when you don’t shave your legs, or able to brace yourself for
everyday fatphobia, laugh at the caveman
who thinks women’s natural faces are ugly.
But you might get poorly prepared for, for example, the kind of backlash
that Alicia Keys got for going bare-faced: accusing her of flaunting her wealth
and natural beauty (only rich women can afford to go without make-up) or of “making
a statement” that shames women who do wear make-up. You may have to deal with the idea that, in
fact, you, by violating a gendered norm, are the bad feminist who hates women.
Stalking For Love is a popular media trope where invasive stalker-like behavior is presented as an endearing or harmless part of romantic courtship. The hero will often go to extraordinary lengths to coerce, trick or otherwise manipulate his way into a woman’s life.
SUPPORT THIS PROJECT
If you’d like to see more long-form video essays focusing on the intersections of entertainment and masculinity, please help fund this series on Patreon. If you’d rather make a one-time donation you can do that via PayPal.LINKS AND RESOURCES
• Are Hollywood movies teaching men and boys that predatory behavior is OK?
• Stalking, actually: Why men who reject rejection are not romantic heroes
• How Bollywood Plays a Role in Normalising Stalking
• Study finds romcoms teach filmgoers to tolerate ‘stalking myths’
• Study: I Did It Because I Never Stopped Loving You
• How Rom-Coms Undermine WomenRECOMMENDED BOOKS
• All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
• The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
So they held a feminism talk for my university group (of mainly science majors) …
The lecturer: “Research has proven that seeing women only performing a limited number of roles in the media prevents young girls from exploring all career options. My PhD explores how”
Some white male idiot: “Ughhh… have you considered that maybe the ‘general public’ are bad at making decisions???? I cErtainly didn’t choose an engineering degree because I saw a particular mAn do it… all women are just idiots and your PhD is wrong blah blah blah…”
(At this point my eyes cannot physically role any further back, and several women have their hands angrily in the air)
The lecturer, a legend: “engineering huh? Tell me, did you ever have a female math teacher?”
The idiot: “Ummmmm…. well no.”
😑😑😑😑
No, I’m serious, if women all got together and went into electrical engineering or automotive repair en masse, then ten years later people would be talking about how it was a “soft field” and it would pay proportionately less than other fields.
Likewise, if men moved en masse to bedeck themselves in sparkles and make-up, then suddenly you’d get a bunch of editorials talking about how classy they look.
None of these things are inherently masculine or feminine; none of these things inherently elevate you or drag you down. But whatever women are seen to do is automatically seen as being inherently more frivolous than anything men do. And shaming women for not pigeonholing themselves into a narrow range of acceptable “masculine” behaviours is just going to result in the goalposts getting moved once again.
This is literally what happened to basically every field women have entered. The opposite happens when men enter. Computers used to be a “woman thing” until the guys who did it got really mad about how badly their job was viewed and realized they could fix it by forcing out women.
Also happened/ is happening with the fields of biology and psychology….
I honestly wonder how much of the backlash against public education in the last generation has been due to teaching becoming a woman-dominated profession.
Fashion used to be a men’s thing. Then women got involved in the late 17/1800’s, so men went the other way because it came to be seen as “frivolous” and “anti-intellectual” to care about how you looked. Add in the homophobia that arose around that time, bam, staid bland dress. Ditto leggings/tights, that are now called attention-whoring when on men they were required to show you cared about your figure and had the money to pay for such a fitted item.
People want to say misogyny doesn’t exist, that male privilege doesn’t exist. Look beyond “living memory” and you’ll find that’s what drives the “inexplicable reversals” society seems to make on many things. Hell, just look beyond your own society, and you’ll find out that what’s considered “for men” elsewhere is held in high esteem while here it’s scoffed at purely because it’s “for women”:
- Skinny jeans are the height of masculinity in several east Asian societies, rather than being seen as “gay” in the USA because of their association with femininity.
- Medical fields in Russia are valued like kindergarten teachers are here, because it’s women who are the doctors instead of men.
- Love and romance are highly valued in eastern countries, because men are interested in it too—of course they would be, surely you want to share your life with someone? Here, it’s strictly a women’s subject.
The field of anthropology as a whole illustrates this.
Significantly higher proportions of females compared to males are currently entering the fields of archaeology and biological anthropology, and as this occurs, the prestige, funding, acceptance as valid kinds of science, etc, are fading quickly.
This has already occurred with linguistic anthropology and cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology in particular went VERY quickly from being seen as a manly, scientific discipline (e.g., Franz Boas, Bronisław Malinowski) to being seen as a touchy-feely female thing.
Let’s examine a traditionally male-dominated role that is very well-respected, and well-paid, in many parts of the world — that of a doctor. In the UK, it is listed as one of the top ten lucrative careers, and the average annual income of a family doctor in the US is well into six figures. It also confers on you significant social status, and a common stereotype in Asian communities is of parents encouraging their children to become doctors.
One of my lecturers at university once presented us with this thought exercise: why are doctors so highly paid, and so well-respected? Our answers were predictable. Because they save lives, their skills are extremely important, and it takes years and years of education to become one. All sound, logical reasons. But these traits that doctors possess are universal. So why is it, she asked, that doctors in Russia are so lowly paid? Making less than £7,500 a year, it is one of the lowest paid professions in Russia, and poorly respected at that. Why is this?
The answer is crushingly, breathtakingly simple. In Russia, the majority of doctors are women. Here’s a quote from Carol Schmidt, a geriatric nurse practitioner who toured medical facilities in Moscow: “Their status and pay are more like our blue-collar workers, even though they require about the same amount of training as the American doctor… medical practice is stereotyped as a caring vocation ‘naturally suited‘ to women, [which puts it at] a second-class level in the Soviet psyche.”
What this illustrates perfectly is this — women are not devalued in the job market because women’s work is seen to have little value. It is the other way round. Women’s work is devalued in the job market because women are seen to have little value. This means that anything a woman does, be it childcare, teaching, or doctoring, or rocket science, will be seen to be of less value simply because it is done mainly by women. It isn’t that women choose jobs that are in lower-paid industries, it is that any industry that women dominate automatically becomes less respected and less well-paid.
I think one of my least favorite types of responses to people speaking up on sexual harassment and sexual assault is are articles like “in wake of weinstein, men wonder if hugging women still ok”, and comments like “this is why men don’t pursue women anymore”, “i don’t wanna work with women cause i don’t want a lawsuit”, or “i don’t even look at women anymore cause everything is sexual harassment”. this is a particular brand of rape culture, men acting as if women are overreacting, as if men don’t have the basic social skills to know the difference between wanted and unwanted advances, as if women simply setting boundaries is “cramping their style” and “emasculating” them, as if the rules of respecting women are super confusing, so confusing that they’re supposedly forcing men not to interact with us altogether.
this is an act they’ve been putting on for decades: playing stupid, pretending not to know better and then getting upset when we tell them what “better” is. if that doesn’t show you how emotional and emotionally manipulative they are, i don’t know what does.
So well written, I feel this entirely.
All women are forced to live under an arbitrary and unfair system which sorts us into the categories of “Fuckable” and “Worthless.”
The solution to this is NOT to expand the definition of “Fuckable.”
Not shaving and not wearing make up are literally nonbehaviors. They’re a complete lack of action. But doing nothing is considered masculine because men are the only ones who are allowed to just be.
take time to figure it out 