Always #LikeAGirl · 7:39am Feb 3rd, 2015
Responding to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjJQBjWYDTs&feature=trueview-instream and especially the top comment by Jeffro Johnson:
So we're watching the Superbowl. We'd already had one awkward commercial with the domestic violence "pizza" 911 call. But when this "like a girl" spot comes on, it just got real quiet. When it finished, it was like people didn't know what to say. There was kind of a pregnant pause between the ads. At the moment of maximum embarrassment, my son lets out this huge sighing type yawn. I put my arm around him and said said, "oh yeah, me too, man." People lost it and laughed for a good two minutes then. (The commercials are just crap this year. What a joke.)
Quite a joke indeed. This is akin to the rightly-ridiculed anti-"bossy" campaign that was a big social justice thing for all right-thinking human beings everywhere: hogwash masquerading as legitimate concern for the well-being of children. Do you know how you protect the self-esteem of girls? Same way you do for boys: tell them that kids are cruel, that sticks and stones may break their bones, and especially emphasize that for all the pain that it might cause them at the moment, all of their hurts are the mud puddle you step in on your way to the ocean of life. What woman who is not deliberately and purposefully emotionally shredded throughout their entire growing years will care about any of this? Hell, what such woman is even going to REMEMBER that 'like a girl' was used as a pejorative around them when they were growing up? The people who put together this sort of thing accomplish nothing, but to create an artificial and completely absurd sense among the women and girls disposed to listen to this blatherskite that some special wrong has been done them, and that they ought to fixate on this alleged damage, and treasure it, and accept it, and ultimately poison themselves with it. Because the only thing that lies among the debris of petty hurts in the past is the gaunt remnants of a burden that all psychologically healthy adults bury so they can move forward with confidence and determination towards an ever-brighter future.
Like "bossy" and a host of other imbecile crusades for "justice" that is nothing of the sort, this sort of thing turns otherwise proud, confident, successful, healthy woman into thin-skinned harridans on the lookout for anything that might possibly be an injury, that they might exploit. It blinds them, shrivels them, and ultimately harms them. A full half of the yin and yang that is the binary genders of the human species is diminished and with it, the entirely of humanity because a man is less of a man without the woman, and a women is less so without the man. It's a balance, a noble balance that represents the pinnacle of what we all might be and this entire affair is a tragedy in motion. The folks who put this sort of thing together, and put all such things together, very likely think they're doing a noble work that will make women better off and ennoble them but there is no nobility, no raising up, no moving froward, no freedom, no flight, no greatness, no healing in a fixation on petty wrongs and a vast wastage of time and labor trying to repair what no human can. An adult fully equipped to rise to the heights of their ability and ambition is one that has struggled with these issues, has looked certain ugliness in the face, has fought the good fight, and has been made the better for it. We steal this mastery of self, this claiming of the most vital power, at great hazard to our society and terrible injury to little girls who might otherwise have grown into the free and beautiful creatures that are an ornament and monument of whatever place they might wish to be. You cannot earn calluses without blisters, cannot cradle a precious newborn without the agony of childbirth, cannot shoulder the inevitable burden of losing a loved one to death and find yourself equal to it, cannot attain academic honors without sacrifice, cannot armor yourself against insults without being stung. Life is pain, but only so life can be joy.
So, pressure makes diamonds? 'Cause I thought that too much negativity makes kids miserable, and that bullying can destroy lives. True, being called weak might cause you to strive harder, but it also means that you have to fight an uphill battle to gain the same privileges. Not that being a Feminazi is a good thing, and they shouldn't make mountains out of mole hills, but the global income of women is still less than that of men, and there are plenty of other stereotypes.
However, I believe that men face worse than women. Girls can be a lady or a tomboy, a nerd or a model, a mom or a career women, but men have only one acceptable role: to be perfect. Juggling athletic with intellectual prowess, being sensitive but not 'girly', strong, handsome, good with kids, etc. A provider that is somehow always home for his kids, and does all the repairs at home himself. In other words, they must be perfect, while girls can be more...relaxed and free to be themselves.
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Please tell me you're not trying to cite a patently nonsense claim often advanced by the Left that women make X amount of pennies for every dollar a man makes, and that we need to somehow pass legislation to stop this. Such legislation has been on the books in the US since the 1960s if I'm not mistaken.
The disparity comes from the fact that men go into technical fields and get good jobs while women go into more lefty liberal arts stuff. So, when you take a global average, it looks like women are making less money for doing the same work. How do we fight that? Certainly not with federal legislation; you start regulating what people can major in (and by extension choose as their careers) and you're halfway to the USSA. Nope, like too many other things, it's gotta be up to the parents and the women themselves.
Which, funnily enough, some of the most vocal advocates of the whole wage-disparity nonsense are female college students. Who have the full freedom to do whatever the hell they want to do with their major and career. Yet they chose to major in 17th century Vietnamese literature with a minor in gender studies, and then bitch about not making the same amount of money as an aerospace engineer.
The whole claim of wage disparity in civilized countries just perfectly demonstrates why feminism in the 21st century is accomplishing exactly the opposite of what it ostensibly sets out to do - it's rapidly becoming women yelling at men to build them the world they want to live in, because they aren't smart enough or capable enough to build it for themselves.
I hate getting bogged down in lengthy gender-politics disputes, because as time goes on it increasingly becomes a bunch of morons screeching at each other and agreeing with each other's bullshit, and in the other corner a bunch of intelligent people who similarly recite and agree with the same series of points. There's less and less to actually talk about in the field with every day that goes by, but I will stop and correct seemingly-false claims wherever I see them. This annoyingly perpetuated "women make $0.75 on the dollar!" claim pisses me off almost as much as the whole "Americans designed a $1M space pen; Russians used a pencil" joke.
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What I am saying is that I don't like the fact that stereotypes exist, but they do and one should not let them govern their lives. Deal with them, and try to grow stronger from the experience. However, one should always keep in mind that they do influence your life and how people, even yourself, look at you.
One economist testified to Congress that hundreds of studies have consistently found unexplained pay differences which potentially include discrimination. Another criticized these studies as insufficiently controlled, and opined that men and women would have equal pay if they made the same choices and had the same experience, education, etc. Other studies have found direct evidence of discrimination - for example, fewer replies to identical resumes with female names and more jobs went to women when orchestras moved to blind auditions.
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There's also the issue that women can get pregnant and then disappear for months of federally-mandated maternity leave. Makes them a liability. Not saying it's right to discriminate based on that, but the whole "women are 100% equal to men in all respects" thing that's so popular right now is actually totally false. Sexual dimorphism is a fact. People need to get over it.
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Oh, I completely agree with that. I doubt we'll be having male and female athletes competing against each other in the Olympics, and brain wise the genders are wired differently. It's still the same old human brain, but there are biological differences.
I would like it if people were only based on their actions, and not the first impression.
2767136 In a lot of cases, that's simply not feasible. If you need a position filled, you can't watch all 500 applicants for six months to get a good handle on who they are beyond the first impression.
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I am talking about resumes, and how friends get promoted more often than someone who is just a co-worker. I see it all the time at my job that all the influential people are buddy buddy, while girls who have been working longer and have an outstanding track record still get passed by when promotions are due.
*Edit* Sorry, I guess I can see what you mean by arguments getting personal and heated.
+Mitsu Hadeishi What do you imagine me to be afraid of? That the sort of pop psychobabble absurdity you're floating will gain social traction? I fear nothing of the sort, because the nonsense has no chance of getting into the heads of strong, confident, secure women who're comfortable in their own skin and pay little attention to this jabberwocky about internalized presumptions and stereotypes. Mature women have long since learned how to sigh and shut out peripheral wastes of their time and intellectual energy like this concern about "bossy" and "like a girl". This sort of nonsense gets into the heads of the "low-hanging fruit" among girls and women, the sort of people who are already lost and vulnerable and in need of support, comfort, and a friend to build their esteem and help them get back on the road to becoming one of those mature woman who brush all of this aside. It poisons the vulnerable, not the strong, distracting them from the noble endeavor of building self-esteem and a sense of security in their identity and personhood. Just like a disadvantaged young black man who feels lost and hopeless is especially vulnerable to greedy demagogues preaching the prevalence of white oppression, while another disadvantaged young black man with a sense of purpose is entirely unaffected, a girl who feels ignored, unloved, without hope or purpose, and seeing no way out is the most likely to embrace cockamamie theories of her victimization by words, phrases, and nebulous assumptions. For illustration purposes, Fortune Magazine once published an article about a woman named Darla Moore whom it labeled "the toughest babe in business". As you can easily imagine, there was a hue and cry about the use of the word "babe" in relation to a strong and highly successful woman. Darla Moore responded to this concern by pointing out that all those people who were making an issue of the term "babe" are unlikely to ever make the cover of Fortune praising them for their achievements in the cutthroat world that she lives in. Likewise, girls and woman who are poisoned by this mindless concern for "bossy" and "like a girl" and nebulous presumptions and beliefs and a whole host of other blatherskite are in danger of being crippled by it and never achieving what they might have if they'd gotten the encouragement and counsel of a wise mentor instead. In this, as with other things, history is the most reliable guide and the indisputable truth is that women have never needed people to coddle and shelter them from the horrors of "bossy" to achieve great things so it would be nice if the people inventing solutions for a problem that does not and has never existed would turn their attention to being those wise mentors guiding vulnerable girls on the path upwards to confidence, comfort, and the esteem of both themselves and those who know them.