bad math, round 1
Do you know who makes up the majority of the electorate in America? Yeah, that’d be women. That means *gasp* WOMEN have more of the voting power. It’s been this way since the 1964 election.
according to this breakdown of the 2012 election (via exit polling), women are 53% of voters. which is technically a majority, but barely more than the 51% of women in the general population. i don’t believe the difference is statistically significant but please don’t make me do the math
tl;dr men and women vote in roughly equal proportion
it’s kinda weird to use voter turnout as a measure of political influence when the viable presidential nominees are always men. though bravo to Belva Ann Lockwood for getting on the ballot in 6 states all the way back in 1884 damn
Women also control about 80% of consumer wealth, and 51.3% of the private wealth. That means that WOMEN have more of the spending power.
i wish there were a source here other than a book (which only covers part of it) because i’m very interested in the breakdown of these numbers
i did find this nielsen (lol) article which suggests to me that women do more of the spending because they buy most of the groceries and clothing and have more of a vested interest in a lot of appliances. which doesn’t sound quite so much like “control” unless the choice between jif and skippy is critically important to your life. (it is to mine!)
the same article suggests that the spending done by men is increasing steadily, which is cool if it means regular shopping is becoming less of a Wife Thing
your article says women own half of the stock held in the US, but keep in mind that the richest 10% own 80% of all stock, making this statistic of dubious value to most women. the census does show that the wealthiest women own a sizable share of wealth (albeit still less than men, and in fewer numbers), but that still just suggests that oprah is rich, which is not a surprise. also none of these things are very clear about how joint ownership affects the numbers; mitt romney’s wife probably owns half of his assets, even though we probably wouldn’t think to name her as the millionaire, and i can’t actually remember her name.
Women are also favored in every form of the legal system (custody cases, shorter prison sentences for the same crime, etc). That means that WOMEN have more of the legal power.
the very article you link about custody cases suggests that determination of the “primary caregiver” often determines custody, and the standard 50s-era nuclear family structure is a stay-at-home mother with a working father. i don’t know if 80% of families still look like that, but surely it plays a big part.
not to say that custody battles always end fairly, but there is more room for nuance than you are giving here. also it’s encouraging that the first paragraph of the article says mothers are explicitly not to be automatically given custody.
i’m surprised that i couldn’t find much of anyone talking about that prison gap article (except MRAs celebrating its existence), so i had to go read the damn thing. the article contains some fascinating insights that were lost in the huffpo article, such as: 30% of the gender gap in drug cases is due to differences in drug quantity; 20% of the gap is non-drug cases is due to severity in crime (which is hard to measure and may be much less or much more); black men are penalized significantly more harshly than anyone else, whereas black women appear to be treated about the same as non-black women. most of the article is actually about mitigating factors like these, yet the only number in the conclusion is the 63%. there’s no prosaic conclusion about how much of the gap isn’t explained by the bulk of the paper. kind of disappointing.
also unusual: it appears that there are four times as many men in the sample as women, but this is never commented upon. and it’s not that three quarters of women get off without a sentence, because this data supposedly tracks all the way back to initial arrest records or something. hmm.
Women also make up the majority of college graduates, and the school system favors girls from KINDERGARTEN. This means that WOMEN have more of the educational power.
CNN suggests that this growing difference is because men decide they’ve racked up too much debt and drop out to start working, whereas women who’ve dropped out generally have lower starting salaries and are dissuaded from doing the same.
which i suppose makes sense, since the huge spike in tuition costs did start just before 1985, the year your article cites as the first year women outnumbered men as graduates.
your first huffpo article says “that girls are truly only outperforming boys in ‘non-cognitive approaches to learning’ – defined as attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization – leading to better grades from teachers.”
i’m not sure what i should conclude from this. schools “favor girls” because they grade on whether you can pay attention and work on your own, not just by how you do on standardized tests? is the argument that boys shouldn’t need to be flexible or organized to succeed? i don’t get it. these sound like pretty reasonable criteria to me, and if boys are having trouble with them, that is an alarming problem.
that same CNN article quotes: “our research shows that boys’ underperformance in school has more to do with society’s norms about masculinity … Boys involved in extracurricular cultural activities such as music, art, drama, and foreign languages report higher levels of school engagement and get better grades than other boys. But these activities are often denigrated as un-masculine. … Boys have less understanding than girls about how their future success in college and work is directly linked to their academic effort in middle school and high school.”
surprise, gender stereotyping ruins everything
There isn’t a “pay gap” there is an EARNINGS gap. It’s nobody’s fault if women decide to work less.Here’s two sources.
well, not so fast. you might as well say “it’s nobody’s fault if men decide to commit crime more often”. why do women decide to work less?
i basically hate the whole wage gap argument since both sides have piles of studies that claim to control for every imaginable variable and still come out with wildly contradictory results. fucking statistics.
it sure looks like something funny is going on, and i wish we could figure out what that something is and address it instead of arguing about who to blame for it.
Anonymous asked:Thank you for the article on smarm, it was very good. Now that I think about it... a great deal of social justice is very smarmy, isn't it. Not "what you say", but "how you say it"...
actually it’s mostly the reaction to social justice that’s smarmy in my experience, which is where the notion of “tone policing” comes from
there is an awkward and blurry line here of course
sometimes people do get shot down for “tone policing” or “concern trolling” when the speaker really is being pretty abrasive
but then who defines “too” abrasive? it’s not like being angry about imbalances is unjustified; snark is a response in kind
besides, it would seem that people who are polite about hot topics are rather more often just ignored. which is, perhaps, one of the driving forces of smarm: if you were nicer, it would be easier for me to not listen to you at all. by being snarky, you got me all riled up, and now i have to feel things. curse you, feminazis!!
i do wince when it degenerates to “cis people are scum” because i know how that will be received. majority groups are surprisingly tender about being vilified for their group identification (hmm)
but how can you blame someone for feeling that way? imagine if the most horrible parts of your life were inflicted by group A upon you merely for being a member of group B
and this is where the equivocation becomes laughable: if a woman hates or fears men as a group because she’s been assaulted a dozen times by a dozen different men, how is that remotely comparable to a man who is a jerk to women because they’re women
maybe stop being a fucking dickhead to outsiders and it won’t make your tribe keep looking like a bunch of xenophobic assholes
this meandered a little but it is basically the train of thought i went through when wondering whether social justice really did need to be “nicer”
the answer is: i don’t know and it doesn’t matter because people will do what they feel they need to do regardless
also it’s kind of funny how mel-vs-lulz is a microcosm of all this. reactions condemned by the people who caused the reaction first, utter obliviousness to one’s own antagonistic behavior, etc.
re: lulz
this is a post on lulz griping about mel
i was considering replying there but then the reply would be lost in the aether and i think i wrote an interesting thing so i will put it here instead
Yeah I remember her back then too, she used to be a lot more tolerable.
True story: One time at Anthrocon, she and several friends went to a restaurant and two or three of the guys at the table were talking about WoW to each other. Out of nowhere, she yelled out “OH MY GOD, WHO FUCKING CARES?” to them loud enough to interrupt everyone else’s conversations. The guys weren’t even talking to her, and they weren’t being loud or obnoxious in any way. She just decided she shouldn’t have to endure other people talking about things to each other that she doesn’t care about I guess. This is the kind of shit she does.
There’s a reason why she’s lost so many friends over the years, and it’s not because her friends suddenly turn out to be shitty people.
true story: i have also done this, also at Anthrocon, and almost certainly to the same group of people
imagine you are a dealer at a con. you spend the majority of every day selling, including lugging stuff back and forth to your hotel room and finishing commissions. so you only have a few hours a night to hang out with people you get to see once a year. those same people aren’t dealers, so they do whatever they want all day.
you go to a group dinner during your limited evening with me, your hypothetical internet buddy. and all i do is talk (to the people i already talk to 24/7) about the particulars of how various dynamic language implementations prevent threading from interfering with reference counting.
would that not feel slightly inconsiderate, or even like i’m wasting your time
when you hit the point that you never feel like you have enough time to do what you want, it’s hard to hang around people who don’t know what that’s like. not all lost friends are bad people; sometimes you just don’t live in the same world any more.
diarrhea
so we switched cat food recently, to a “sensitive stomach” formula (lol)
the cats have developed diarrhea in response, and anise in particular is not handling it very well: he has a bad habit of sticking one or both back feet in it while trying to figure out how to cover it up. cleaning this up usually requires a bath and some mopping.
so as a result of this mundane lifestyle change, we now sort of drop everything and run over to chaperone when we hear the tell-tale sound of impending diarrhea. sometimes it’s fine. sometimes it is a disaster and we have to spend the next few minutes cleaning up the offender and mopping up any mess. because they don’t care that they’re covered in their own diarrhea; they might shake a foot here or there, but for the most part, they seem perfectly happy to wallow.
and they’ll wiggle and frown at us, and look really sad and hurt, like we’ve betrayed them by doing this to them. “why have you done this awful thing to us”, they seem to ask. well it’s because we know if we don’t intervene immediately, you’ll merrily track your own excrement all over our living space and a lot of our stuff. we know this from experience. and then we’d have to clean it and you up anyway. they of course have the option of just not stepping in their own diarrhea most of the time, which seems plainly reasonable to us, but we can’t exactly communicate that to them.
so we have to catch the problem at its root and clean it up immediately. it’s a bit of an inconvenience, but ignoring it would be far less pleasant all around.
by sheer coincidence the last three paragraphs also exactly describe our interactions with lulz
let’s all go to Abilene
i admit i’m still dying to know exactly why lulz has so much sand up its ass over mel
there’s this recurring wringing of hands over what a horrible person she is, but despite the volumes of scorn and attempts to find imaginary gossip (that has little bearing on anything anyway), there’s never any coherent explanation
occasionally there’s some tale about how one artist copied another and mel insisted credit be given where due, but even if every such case were clearly bogus, that’s a pretty flimsy reason to hate someone so severely. at worst it would mean she… cares a lot about art? shocking
meanwhile everyone she knows gets lumped in too and written off as horrible people with just as little explanation.
“narcissists”, say the people who think they should get to decide who is allowed to speak about personal issues. “delusional”, say the people who think a single anon from 4chan years ago is a good source. “passive-aggressive”, say the people apologizing to everyone but the person they wronged. “immature”, say the people calling a 120lb girl fat. “autistic”, say the people who don’t understand or care when they’re unwanted.
the best one is “victim complex”, from the people literally making her a victim—and even from their perspective, it’s obvious that every post in every thread would do nothing but fuel a victim complex. same applies to “ego” (fueled by perceived victories, in battles they’re initiating) or the accusation of a “hugbox posse” (aka friends, or maybe just people who disagree with them, who of course will show up at every new report of some incident). they are directly causing the impressions of the things they claim to hate so much about her.
i will say that again: they are directly creating the caricature they claim to hate so much.
but they don’t stop, or maybe can’t stop.
and i don’t know why, really. it’s easy to write off one person as unbalanced, but a group of more than two or three people is a little harder.
maybe it’s part of the culture, part of the tribe identification. if you don’t hate who everyone else makes a big deal of hating, you become a much more accessible target for their ire. after enough time passes, no one even remembers why they hate her, but the hate remains because now it’s a mark of identity. ask why the hate, and they’ll try to recall scraps of justifications they’ve heard before. ask why the hypocrisy, and the question glides right by, because they judge their targets by whatever lofty-sounding criteria are convenient at the time, but themselves by how well they fit in the group.
or maybe not. who knows.
i’m sure they’d disagree, and chalk it up to a victim complex. because the people they try to silence can’t possibly be victims. victims only exist when someone does something wrong, and all they’re doing is reacting in kind to all the horrible things their targets have done.
if only they could remember what those things were…
On Smarm
(^ this is a link btw; i don’t think my theme makes that very clear)
this is a fabulous article
but it’s long so i cut out some good parts for lazy people
What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.
Smarm would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can’t everyone just be nicer?
…
Here we have the major themes or attitudes of smarm: the scolding, the gestures at inclusiveness, the appeal to virtue and maturity.
…
But let’s get at the deeper substance. What defines smarm, as it functions in our culture? “Smarm” and “smarmy” go back to the older “smalm,” meaning to smooth something down with grease—and by extension to be unctuous or flattering, or smug. Smarm aspires to smother opposition or criticism, to cover everything over with an artificial, oily gloss.
…
Smarm should be understood as a type of bullshit, then—it expresses one agenda, while actually pursuing a different one. It is a kind of moral and ethical misdirection. Its genuine purposes lie beneath the greased-over surface.
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If negativity is understood to be bad (and it must be bad, just look at the name: negativity) then anti-negativity must be good. The most broadly approved-of thing about Barack Obama, in 2008, was his announced desire to “change the tone” of politics. Everyone agreed then that our politics needed a change of tone. The politicians who make speeches, the reporters and commentators who write the articles expressing the current state of political affairs, the pollsters and poll respondents who ask and answer questions about politics—in short, the great mass of people who do anything that could conceivably generate something that could be called a “tone” of politics—all were dissatisfied with the tone.
…
Romney was responding to the response to the disclosure of his private fundraising remarks dismissing 47 percent of the electorate as unreachable parasites. Romney had been caught in breach of the agreement never to speak divisively—and so he clambered up to a new higher ground, deploring the divisiveness of dwelling on his divisiveness. He had been attacked as a person, the kind of person who would write off 47 percent of the public. How low could the Obama campaign get? What ever happened to changing the tone?
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The sin of snark is rudeness, the anti-snarkers say. Snark is mean. And meanness and rudeness are the worst misdeeds in the world. So Robert Benmosche, the chief executive of AIG, told the Wall Street Journal that the hard-working, heavily compensated employees of his disastrously run company were being persecuted—that the critics of AIG, “with their pitch forks and their hangman nooses,” were “sort of like what we did in the Deep South. And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong.”
Ever since the global economy imploded, the people who imploded it have been talking this way. The plutocrats are hurt that anyone should resent the power of wealth. They spent the past election fretting aloud about “class warfare,” which under the rules of smarm means any mention of the fact that classes exist, and that some classes have more or less money than others.
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These terrible snarky people even go on television, sometimes. CNBC let Salon’s Alex Pareene on the air, and he dared to describe JPMorgan Chase as “corrupt"—to the shock and disdain of the hosts, who could not imagine why a bank that was facing at least $11 billion in fines (later amended to $13 billion) for wide-ranging misbehavior could be characterized that way. (To actually say a plain and direct word like "corrupt” is more outlandish, in smarm’s outlook, than even swearing. A disagreeable attitude is one thing, but a disagreeable fact is much worse.) “The company continues to churn out, you know, tens of billions of dollars in earnings and hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue,” Maria Bartiromo said. “How do you criticize that?”
…
So what if Snowden is telling the truth? Just look at the way he’s telling it.
…
If any one thing gave rise to this essay, it was a long-running dispute that I had, on blogs and Twitter, with an award-winning magazine journalist. This writer, a specialist in features and celebrity profiles, had published online a piece of advice to young writers, urging them to seek out as their subjects the obscure and unknown.
Find-the-overlooked-person is an old saw in feature writing. At its best—Jimmy Breslin interviewing JFK’s grave digger—it encourages real attention to the subjects, while at its worst it feeds into a messianic tendency for certain writers, who believe that it’s their attention and their prose that gives meaning to the lives of common folk. In this case, though, it was more or less the opposite of what this award-winning writer did for a living, and I said as much, in a blog post. The argument escalated from there.
The reason it escalated, I eventually realized, was that we were speaking in completely different terms. He was giving instruction to aspiring writers—as Eggers had given instruction to literary-minded college students—that was itself aspirational, a guide to the feelings that a person ought to have about being a writer. A writer, the writerer proclaimed, ought to take an interest in ordinary people. I was describing what he actually did.
He took this to be malice, personal malice. His friends and supporters agreed that I, and the people who agreed with me, were motivated by envy of his career and his gifts, that we were cynics, snarking from the sidelines (a powerful recurring metaphor, those sidelines, for this class of writer, who is by implication in the game). One woman who criticized him (his female critics seemed to have an especially hard time getting through), he dismissed as “a dabbling writer” and a “graduate student.”
Eventually, as a final statement—Do you know who I am?—he published a list of his clips. Some of the stories were good; some were bad. As far as I could tell, though, when it came to the original question of a writer’s duty to illuminate the obscure, not one of them was a story about someone who was not famous, or who had not at least been part of a nationally reported news event.
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The actual answer, and his actual fear—the fear that keeps the smarmers tossing on their bullshit-stuffed mattresses on the beds of bullshit they would have us all sleep in—is this: We are exactly the same size as you are. Everybody is.
“why don’t you just ignore them and they’ll go away”
hey
hey
fuck that
one: no, they won’t. they went away last time for a while, until they found something new to heckle us over. so either we have a whole lot of ignoring to do or we hide anything about our lives that might get some sociopath’s dick hard. nice options
two: as long as we’re giving out useful advice, why don’t they not be fucking cunts? we aren’t talking about wild animals or forces of nature; these are adult human beings and you are relieving them of all responsibility for their actions by not expecting them to behave as such.
three: what do you think they’re going to do even if they do get bored with us? hint: they will go bother someone else, who may not be as well equipped to deal with it. one of them was practically bragging about all the artists who just stay quiet online because they’ve learned their lesson about talking about themselves or really doing anything but quietly posting new art for the dickheads to jerk off to.
this is not okay. it is schoolyard bullying, and the “just ignore it” line validates it by painting it as inevitable. so, frankly, fuck you for helping them.
calanthair-deactivated20131226 asked:Look at the latest posts on lulz. Actually, look at reality, why should they have to spell it out for you. She's advocating someone ruin a job and blackball them from working. From fucking working. Regardless of aught else he's done I think doing that is horrifying unless he's physically impeded you from functioning. Did he physically assault you or steal your money or cheat on your gf behind your back then make said gf act like it's a ban when you don't want it anymore?
allow me to refresh your memory on the order of events
- pommy throws some tantrum at mel during which he outright lies in an attempt to feel like he has power over her
- pommy appears i r l at a con where mel is selling, deliberately doesn’t reveal his own identity so he can smarm about what a cool voice actor he is, and then surreptitiously leaves his business card. end result: small girl is significantly creeped out
- pommy actively seeks me out over twitter in an attempt to antagonize me
you may notice a recurring theme here, and in fact in all of this noise
it is: we don’t hunt you guys down to bother you. you are coming to us.
and now mel has had the audacity to tell a story about one of the things pommy did in coming to us. oh no!
she’s not asking for anyone’s head; someone offered because someone cares about mel and respects her opinion and experience. (this is what that looks like, btw.)
i’m not even sure why your feathers are ruffled, given that pommy very clearly supports the court of public opinion and being held accountable for the things one actually does in public
do you require more links to things that just happened to remind you of what reality actually looks like
dontneedfeminism:
i am too lazy to reply to most of these (sorry!) because i’m far more interested in this bad math here
from your own link, and also some others i found, we get:
“In 2007, a survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that of the population surveyed 35% of the homeless people who are members of households with children are male while 65% of these people are females. However, 67.5% of the single homeless population is male, and it is this single population that makes up 76% of the homeless populations surveyed.”
i am pretty sure you’re reading this wrong because the numbers don’t make any sense otherwise. this paragraph says that 76% of homeless people are single, not single males. that gives us a male homeless rate of 67.5% × 76% + 35% × 24% = 59.7%. still an imbalance, but rather less of one.
(your interpretation would mean that 76% of all homeless people are male, even though 35% of homeless household members are male and 67.5% of single homeless are male. you cannot combine two crossed subsets like that and end up with a larger total.)
i’m also curious why there are almost twice as many homeless women with children as homeless men with children. does this mean about half of homeless families have both parents, and half have only a mother? where is the father? is he separately homeless, putting him in the single population? prison? dead? fucking statistics.
IN CONCLUSION i suspect that a lot of this numerology (especially in regards to crime and violence and other serious tragedy) boils down to problems with poverty, and gender disparity in either direction is a weird symptom of how gender intersects with poverty rates. the poor get pretty fucked in the US and i don’t think anyone who claims to be progressive in any direction is opposed to fixing that.