[Discussion] Feminism and social justice, plus FAQ!

This thread is for discussing feminist issues--from the narrow meaning (a movement for social justice in terms of gender equality) to the broader meaning (a movement for social justice, period), and from the scope of issues in gaming and geek culture to kyriarchy in general.

Basic questions are allowed here for now, we will split out a Q&A thread should it become necessary.

What does a scientist look like? Children are drawing women more than ever before

When asked to draw a scientist, school-age kids in the United States are increasingly sketching women. That’s the main conclusion of a new study that compiled information about 20,860 pictures drawn by students age 5 to 18 over 5 decades.
Eleima wrote:

*GASP* It's almost like abstinence only sex ed... DOESN'T WORK... Ugh, this is definitely one of the things that drives me right up the wall, as a public health MD. It's infuriating.

And it's not as if this should even be news to anyone; hasn't the data on this been pretty rock-solid since the turn of the century? Or even longer?

So frustrating.

Farscry wrote:
Eleima wrote:

*GASP* It's almost like abstinence only sex ed... DOESN'T WORK... Ugh, this is definitely one of the things that drives me right up the wall, as a public health MD. It's infuriating.

And it's not as if this should even be news to anyone; hasn't the data on this been pretty rock-solid since the turn of the century? Or even longer?

So frustrating. :(

It was never about the data.

I like these rules a lot better than the ones we usually have inflicted upon us.

IMAGE(https://external-preview.redd.it/DPJBO_FWMCLxF_VGreks0CaH5OQETYsdTS6lHPsbUEE.jpg?auto=webp&s=5e4672060208fe61f7d24d03d9faaa2b155c3781)

Thanks Bekki, my wife loved this.

I’m gonna have to disagree with a few of them.
#4 shouldn’t be limited to horror movie. Should be ANY movie.
#9 I don’t see why I should be limited in choice of accessory after 30. If I’ve collected those ears, I darn well will continue wearing them!
Likewise, #16, I agree about the hyenas, but my fur accessory felines will be worn (when they’re willing).

Follow up article on exactly how you determine if the amulets are cursed or just gaudy would be nice.

I, for one, welcome our new waspsuit overlords (overladies?).

dejanzie wrote:

I, for one, welcome our new waspsuit overlords (overladies?).

Overyasqueens.

#3 seems like something Lady Gaga might wear. Just wait.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

#3 seems like something Lady Gaga might wear. Just wait.

#2 is something she *did* wear, though she was 23 at the time.

To be fair, it wasn't in feral dog country.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

To be fair, it wasn't in feral dog country.

The MTV video music awards in Los Angeles. Sounds like feral dog country to me.

Apparently there is some backlash on Twitter to the new Brie Larson/Nissan ad campaign promoting female empowerment. I won't link the articles because it is just assholes being assholes. It just reinforces to me that:
a) People are garbage.
b) Brie Larson is awesome.

‘I had to choose being a mother’: With no child care or summer camps, women are being edged out of the workforce (The Lily)

If day cares closed because of the novel coronavirus, Aimee expected her family to fare better than most. She worked full time as the chief executive of a tech company while her husband stayed home. He’d been taking some time off from his own tech career, managing a rental property while considering his options. He could look after their 3-year-old son, she thought — at least for a while.

“That lasted a grand total of three days,” Aimee said. (We have withheld Aimee’s last name and her husband’s name because of threats made against their family.)

Once her son was home full time, she realized they’d need a different solution. She was holed up in the guest room, wielding dual-monitors at her desk. Her husband was exhausted. “I can’t do it,” she remembers him saying: “I can’t watch him for this long.”

(...)

“When something has to give, it is very often women’s careers: their working hours, the expectations of what they are able to accomplish on the job, or the job itself,” said Caitlyn Collins, a sociologist of gender and families at Washington University in St. Louis. Early studies suggest that, while fathers are picking up more domestic labor than before the coronavirus, mothers still do the majority of housework and care of young children.

“I’m an economist, so I usually try not to say things without data,” said Martha Gimbel, a manager of economic research at Schmidt Futures. “But I feel very comfortable going out on a limb and saying that this burden is going to fall on women. We just know it’s going to be women.”

(...)

“Having a career, instead of just being ‘Henry’s mom’ or ‘Amelia’s mom’ — that meant something to me,” she said.

Craig said he cares about his wife’s personal fulfillment. Eventually, he hopes she will “find whatever it is she wants to do for her work-career piece,” he said. “I want her to be happy with that.”

But right now, he said, they need to make the best financial decision for their family.

Lauren Smith Brody, author of “The Fifth Trimester,” a manual for working moms, said couples all over the country are probably making similar calculations: When they’re deciding who should scale back at work, or quit altogether, they’ll be comparing their salaries.

U.S. women, on average, still make 81 cents for every dollar a man makes, concentrated in industries that tend to pay less. (For many women of color, the wage gap is far greater: Black women make 62 cents to the white man’s dollar; Latinas make 54 cents.) And because mothers tend to get hit with a “motherhood penalty” when they have kids, Brody said — costing them an average of $16,000 per year in lost wages — while fathers often enjoy a “daddy bonus,” the higher earner in a heterosexual couple is likely to be the man.

"I can't watch him for this long"... Dude has one kid to look after. "Watch him"... It's called parenting, you doofus. This article unfortunately cements something I'd already seen happening in my social media, with mothers struggling (myself included) during the lockdown. It's heartbreaking and infuriating and yet so, so unsurprising.
Domestic abuse aside, it's just one more reason why I'd rather be a single mother than stuck with a useless excuse of a man.

"(Aimee’s husband declined to comment for this story.)"

Eleima wrote:

I'd rather be a single mother than stuck with a useless excuse of a man.

Your point is a powerful one. I think that one of the end results of these months of quarantine/social distancing will be that you will not be the only one to come to this conclusion.

What I want to know is why it is assumed that Aimee would be any better at "watching him" for that long than the useless excuse of a husband?

Yes, I am female, but one of the biggest reasons I chose not to have children is that I simply have no energy to "watch them" for any extended period of time. The few times I babysat other people's kids nearly took everything out of me even if I really liked the kids and had fun with them. So while I can empathize with the husband's incapability of "watching" his own child, the automatic assumption that she was any more capable of it infuriates me!

Maybe Aimee will come to feeling incapable of having him as a husband so she would need only "watch" one child instead of two. Since he's dumping everything on her anyway, it's not as if he's now useful for anything at all but taking up space and making the food and utility bills more expensive.

To a limited extent, I'm sympathetic to Aimee's husband. If you haven't had to take care of a three-year-old all day long by yourself before—it sounds like maybe they had daycare?—then being thrust into that position is exhausting and intimidating. Watching kids that young for that long is a whole set of skills and metaphorical (and physical!) muscles that if you haven't spent time recently developing can be hard to suddenly need to use.

A lot of parents recently got a similar experience suddenly being asked to be part-time teachers as schools went remote. After a few days, I'm not surprised if he wanted to throw up his hands and not have to do it anymore.

But that doesn't mean he should have, and it doesn't mean that Aimee was any better equipped to do all-day childcare on her own. It doesn't sound like that had been the prior arrangement, so her all-day toddler skills aren't going to be all that much better.

This reminds me of my cousin. When his first child was born, he changed a dirty diaper and was so grossed out that he gagged and heaved. I get it; dirty diapers can be f*cking disgusting! But he refused to ever change a dirty diaper again and didn't for any of his three kids. He didn't want to do it, and he expected the women in his life to accommodate that.

Instead of rising to the occasion and learning how to do something difficult, my cousin (and Aimee's husband) pushed that off onto a woman and expected to have his way. It's a staggering level of entitlement and cowardice.

I'm working remotely from home. The wife was furloughed, which turned out to be a godsend because of daycares closing. We have two boys, aged three and ten. We're home schooling the ten year old while trying to survive the three year old.

Daycares open in a week. We're putting the three year old back in because we can't take him anymore. I'm frazzled and my wife is completely done.

So, I feel for the family. Anyone stuck in quarantine with a three year old deserves some slack. Not having the ability to go to playgrounds or other social activities is basically a nightmare scenario for three year olds and their families. Moreso if that three year old is as headstrong as our youngest.

Handling a single 3yo all day is called, Saturday in that house. What's so difficult? Set a schedule, switch activities every hour, here:

By 8, get dressed, have breakfast
8-9: read and play blocks
9a: go for a walk (if possible, could be in a city where that's verboten) or ride a balance bike
10a: snack
1030: Sensory/creative time - Playdoh, coloring
1130: lunch
12-ish: nap (hopefully the kid naps)
230: snack
300: outside time again of some sort for awhile
400: watch 30m of Daniel Tiger
430: have the kid help set the table
500: dinner

By that time the partner should be free to help out. The primary parenting...parent...will be absolutely drained.

But come on.

On the flip side, our daycare teachers deserve raises!

We've our share of workers out on furlough due in large part to childcare dependency. In the period just prior to their furlough where they were having to juggle work and childcare they were exhausted and experiencing differences of opinion with their partners. It was putting a real toll on them physically, mentally, emotionally. How important is childcare. How important is schooling. Golly.

Cases of one parent still being required to work by their employer so the other parent through our employer had to then pick up the childcare. Cases of stay at home parents becoming overburdened and needing the other parent to be there for support. We are men down just as we are women down. For us it's a better divide between men and women for parenting. It's disappointing but hardly surprising to see other companies/countries/cultures/relationships still languishing in out dated gender roles.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

To a limited extent, I'm sympathetic to Aimee's husband. If you haven't had to take care of a three-year-old all day long by yourself before—it sounds like maybe they had daycare?—then being thrust into that position is exhausting and intimidating. Watching kids that young for that long is a whole set of skills and metaphorical (and physical!) muscles that if you haven't spent time recently developing can be hard to suddenly need to use.

I've a smidgen of sympathy for him. It's valid. He just handled it horribly. I've, similarly, more sympathy for Aimee.

On the odd occasions where I watch my sister's children, three exuberant young bundles of energy, it's akin to exercising out of the blue. I'm not used to it and all of my levels deplete swiftly. Energy. Patience. Motivation. Alertness. Perseverance. Childcare is a real skill set, a broad skill set, and if you're not used to practising it you're in for a turbulent ride.

bekkilyn wrote:

What I want to know is why it is assumed that Aimee would be any better at "watching him" for that long than the useless excuse of a husband?

That similarly drives me up the wall! Male. Female. Either can be great parents. Either can be crummy parents. And everything inbetween. Bah! Gender roles.

2yo and 4 yo. Both parents supposedly working full-time from home. HahahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAhahahahahahahahAHAHAHAHAsob

I think it's bullsh*t. If you're old/mature enough to shoot a load and maintain a professional career, you should be able old/mature enough to take care of the product of said load.

Can we leave this women's thread to the women? Please.

My bad. Wrong thread.

Someone tweets about the uselessness of bras and I am surprised by the dumb angry replies from men, about how important bras are. Somehow I'm surprised despite that I exist on the internet and read through angry replies quite a lot. Here's the tweet.

"I know masks aren’t exactly comfortable, but neither are bras, and a good portion of the population wears those regularly for far less important reasons."

I wish I could stop wearing them, I guess the sticking point is nipples, makes them too noticeable in a way I couldn't bear at work. Stupid society.

Mermaidpirate wrote:

Someone tweets about the uselessness of bras and I am surprised by the dumb angry replies from men.l about how important bras are. Somehow I'm surprised despite that I exist on the internet and read through angry replies quite a lot. Here's the tweet.

"I know masks aren’t exactly comfortable, but neither are bras, and a good portion of the population wears those regularly for far less important reasons."

I wish I could stop wearing them, I guess the sticking point is nipples, makes them too noticeable in a way I couldn't bear at work. Stupid society.

If I could afford a breast reduction, I'd do it in a heartbeat and never touch a bra again. Unless you really need the support, they ARE useless, so the men don't know what they are talking about. But if you do need the support, they aren't just worn for trivial, unimportant reasons. Some women have a lot of pain as well as horrible back problems if they don't wear them (and even if they do), so again these men don't know what they're talking about. Maybe they should have stuck with jock straps or something that actually pertains to them.

I know masks aren’t exactly comfortable, but neither are bras support briefs, and a good portion of the population wears those regularly for far less important reasons.

I’ll see myself out. No need to chastise or shame me.

RawkGWJ wrote:

I know masks aren’t exactly comfortable, but neither are bras support briefs, and a good portion of the population wears those regularly for far less important reasons.

I’ll see myself out. No need to chastise or shame me. :)

The very fact that you felt the need to add that last line means you had some inkling that your post was superfluous and inappropriate.

bekkilyn wrote:
Mermaidpirate wrote:

Someone tweets about the uselessness of bras and I am surprised by the dumb angry replies from men.l about how important bras are. Somehow I'm surprised despite that I exist on the internet and read through angry replies quite a lot. Here's the tweet.

"I know masks aren’t exactly comfortable, but neither are bras, and a good portion of the population wears those regularly for far less important reasons."

I wish I could stop wearing them, I guess the sticking point is nipples, makes them too noticeable in a way I couldn't bear at work. Stupid society.

If I could afford a breast reduction, I'd do it in a heartbeat and never touch a bra again. Unless you really need the support, they ARE useless, so the men don't know what they are talking about. But if you do need the support, they aren't just worn for trivial, unimportant reasons. Some women have a lot of pain as well as horrible back problems if they don't wear them (and even if they do), so again these men don't know what they're talking about. Maybe they should have stuck with jock straps or something that actually pertains to them.

I wholeheartedly agree with the both of you. It's actually very frustrating. My own mother had a reduction because her shoulders were just ruined and she had terrible back pain. It's the kind of surgery that's not even considered plastic surgery here, because it has such a huge impact on quality of life. My mother actually wishes she'd dared to reduce more than she did, but she hadn't dared to, and she's a bit anxious to go back under the knife.