EppsNet Archive: Sexism

The Jerry Hall Problem

 

Sylvester Stallone’s Wife Jennifer Flavin Files for Divorce After 25 Years of Marriage – people.com Women have got it made, my friends. No matter what you hear about sexism, glass ceilings, misogynist Republicans, etc., men can’t do what Jennifer Flavin (and others) can do, i.e., marry a rich, older spouse, get divorced, take a windfall profit, and still have a lot of good years ahead of you. Flavin is 54. Her soon-to-be ex-husband is 76. I read the other day that Jerry Hall filed for divorce from Rupert Murdoch. I didn’t even know she was married to Rupert Murdoch. I know she was Mick Jagger’s partner for long enough to have four kids with him. The child support from someone of Mick Jagger’s wealth, while I don’t know exactly what it is, has got to provide a very handsome income stream. Jerry Hall is 66 years old. She looks good… Read more →

Woke White Boy on Sexist Toys

 

Continuing to segregate toys based on gender just works to perpetuate nasty sexist stereotypes, plus it severely limits the development of all young people. Be sure to engage in a conversation about sexism with your friends and families over the holidays! — WWB Read more →

Why is Michael Bloomberg a “Racist”?

 

Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York. That’s true in virtually every city. That’s an old quote from Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, cited in “The Notorious Michael R. Bloomberg: His racist stop-and-frisk policy as New York mayor can’t be forgotten.” in the New York Times. My first thought is, instead of jumping right to calling the man a “racist” (translation: “anyone who disagrees with me”), run the numbers and tell us if the statement is true. My sense is that he might be a little off on the numbers but not a lot. And my second thought is that the statement is both sexist and ageist but to my knowledge no one has objected… Read more →

5 Questions on the Covington Story

 

A group of black men taunted a group of white kids as faggots, incest babies and niggers (one kid was black). Would the story have been reported differently if the men were white and the kids were black? Would the story have been reported differently (or at all) if a white guy was banging a drum in an Indian kid’s face? Would the story have been reported differently if no one was wearing a MAGA hat? Would the story have been reported differently if the kids were girls instead of boys? (Again, assume no MAGA hats.) Should morality of action be calculated based on race, sex and hats? (I’m going to say no to this one.) Read more →

More Christmas Songs That Should Be Banned

 

A pair of hop-a-long boots and a pistol that shootsIs the wish of Barney and BenDolls that’ll talk and will go for a walkIs the hope of Janice and Jen — “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” Baby dolls for little girls and guns for little boys?! Continuing to segregate and advertise toys based on gender just works to perpetuate nasty sexist stereotypes, plus it severely limits the development of all young people. Be sure to engage in a conversation about sexism with your friends and families over the holidays! Read more →

They Submitted Fake Papers to Peer-Reviewed Journals — Here’s What Happened Next

 

Three writers produced 20 intentionally outlandish academic papers and submitted them to the best peer-reviewed journals associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as “cultural studies” or “identity studies” (for example, gender studies) or “critical theory.” Seven of the papers were accepted for publication and seven more were still under review when the authors elected to end the experiment. Their point would seem to be that scholarship in these fields is based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances. Just about anything can be published, so long as it falls within the moral orthodoxy and demonstrates an understanding of the existing literature. The authors summarize their methodology as follows. (I’ve inserted the material in brackets from elsewhere in the article, which you should look at in its entirety because there’s too much good stuff to summarize.) What if we write a paper saying we should train… Read more →

Thomas Jefferson on Hillary Clinton

 

My fellow Americans — Hillary Clinton is still rattling off all the “reasons” she lost the 2016 presidential election: misogyny, the FBI, sexism, the NRA, Russia . . . To my knowledge, she has never correctly identified the actual culprits: the patriotic men and women of this country. Read more →

And That’s the Truth: Modern-Day Sexism

 

[And That’s the Truth is a feature by our guest blogger, Sojourner Truth– PE] I heard a gal talking about being snubbed in a social setting where she was the only woman. She says it was “modern-day sexism.” I guess “old-fashioned sexism” was you can’t vote. Modern-day sexism is “unconscious bias,” which means I ain’t gonna ask you why you did that, because you don’t even know why you did it, but I know why you did it, and that is because you are sexist. These gals are all a bunch of voodoo mind readers. They got one explanation for everything that happens in the world. If I had me a dollar for every time someone just knowed why I did something without asking me and they was dead wrong, I could quit blogging and retire. And that’s the Truth! Read more →

Two Reasons For the Low Number of Women in Computer Jobs

 

I saw this chart on LinkedIn with the heading “Chart: Women in tech continue to face uphill battle” and the hashtag #STEMSexism. The first reason for the low number of women in computer jobs is that we rarely hear about women in computing except in the context of pay gaps, harassment, discrimination, “uphill battles” and #STEMSexism. It’s self-perpetuating. “Computing is a terrible profession for women in so many ways.” Followed by “Why aren’t there more women in computing?” You’ve answered your own question. If you think computing is a hostile profession (I do not, btw), why do you want more women to go into it?   The second reason for the low number of women in computer jobs — sometimes the simplest explanations are the best — is that women prefer to do other things. Men and women are different and make different choices about their lives, as a result… Read more →

Liberalism and the Wrath of the Privileged Whites

 

The largely white and affluent solid liberals are notionally egalitarian and opposed to white privilege, but they include many of the most privileged whites in America. . . . Millions of working-class whites felt that Obama was talking about them, too, when he said, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” And many of those same Americans knew that Hillary Clinton was talking about them when she ranted about the “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it” deplorables. — Pete Spiliakos | First Things Read more →

To Young Women Considering a Career in Technology

 

You’ve probably read a lot of articles about how sexist and awful the culture is for women in technology. I think if anything deters young women from technology careers, it’s this glut of articles saying how sexist and awful the culture is. I’ve worked in software development for 30 years. In my experience — and feel free to discount this because I’m not a woman — the culture is not tough for women. If anything, men give women the benefit of the doubt because they’d like to have more women around. As Holden Caulfield used to say, “I like to be somewhere at least where you can see a few girls around once in a while, even if they’re only scratching their arms or blowing their noses or even just giggling or something.” Yes, I have seen bad things happen to women in tech, but I’ve seen bad things happen… Read more →

Hillary Clinton and the New Ghostbusters

 

The Democratic party and the makers of the new Ghostbusters movie apparently share the idea that you can foist a transparently awful product on the American public as long as you have females in the lead role(s). Have you watched a Hillary Clinton speech? I yawn and cringe in equal measure. At a campaign stop in North Carolina she actually read the word “sigh” — intended as a cue that she should sigh at that point in the speech — from a teleprompter. I cringed twice, once when she read it and once when I reflected on the phoniness of a candidate needing to be scripted to that degree. Read more →

Bernie Sanders is Wrong About Everything But He’s Raised the Intellectual Climate

 

Socialism has been discredited about as thoroughly as possible, but one thing I greatly admire about Bernie Sanders is this: He’s never made a political issue of the fact that he’s Jewish. He doesn’t say “It’s high time we had a Jewish president.” He doesn’t say “If you’re Jewish, you should vote for me because I’m Jewish.” And most importantly, he doesn’t dismiss criticism or critics as anti-Semitic. And because he doesn’t do any of the above, I don’t see his supporters or the media doing it either. It would be easy for him to do those things because it’s what people expect. Political discourse in America consists mainly of people calling each other racists, sexists, homophobes and bigots. It’s hard to complete a sentence without someone taking offense to a trigger word, a microaggression or a dog whistle. Abraham Lincoln once said this: If you have ever studied geometry,… Read more →

A Loser Mentality

 

Don’t hesitate to vote with your uterus. — Hillary Clinton (paraphrased) “Women should vote for women” is a loser mentality. I’m glad to see that it’s not working. The Clinton camp is also tagging as “sexist” criticism that isn’t remotely sexist, just as criticism of President Obama is routinely tagged as “racist,” as though there’s no substantive reason why anyone would not like these two people. I’m not a Bernie Sanders fan but I haven’t heard Sanders or anyone affiliated with him even one time mention that he’s Jewish, that he’d be the first Jewish president, that all Jews should vote for him or that criticism of him is anti-semitic. Embed from Getty Images Read more →

The 12th Man

 

The home crowd of the Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks is known as The 12th Man. Isn’t this awfully sexist? Doesn’t it marginalize female Seahawk fans? Wouldn’t The 12th Person be a more appropriate appellation? I’m surprised there isn’t more outrage over this. It seems like the kind of thing that someone should be really bent out of shape about. Read more →

Top 5 Creepy and Sexist Christmas Songs

 

Maybe you can use them as a way to engage in a conversation about sexism with your friends and family over the holidays! For example, it is NOT okay to suggest that all a woman wants for Christmas is a man (I’m looking at you, Mariah Carey). Or that women are materialistic and shallow and want lots of accoutrements. Except earrings, obviously. Read more →

Happy Labor Day

 

When there’s BBQ ribs to be eaten, it’s every man for himself. Wait, that’s sexist. Let me rephrase. When there’s BBQ ribs to be eaten, it’s every mf’er for themselves. Happy Labor Day! Read more →