Misogyny at root is about seeing women as subhuman, as not having any inherent value but the use others get out of them, and lashing out when that is challenged.

But that's not really the point, we could debate misogyny vs sexism vs whatever for ages, and it's not really relevant. I was just pointing out that you'd probably not feel it were merely pandering (and there's a lot of pandering in the world, there's nothing wrong with it) if the depicted men the same way. Pandering is an added thing, not the whole of the thing. There's a difference. But I find that people have trouble seeing the difference when it comes to women, as they're so inured to seeing women depicted as objects that it doesn't register. A good way might be to compare something like the hawkeye initiative to the ways men are depicted when the intention is fanservice directed at women and gay men. It's a good way to see the difference between "here is a character, who exists to do xyz, and also they are sexy" and "fuckability is the only characteristic this character possesses, and their sole purpose is to turn you on, and that's the only reason we added them in."

Even then. Even when you're attracted to members of your own gender, you still don't like seeing yourself reduced to nothing more than a sexual object. It's totally not a required part of finding someone attractive or appreciating the eyecandy or whatever. it's just that reducing a character down to that one characteristic "sexy" that is unpleasant.

You just disproved your own example. Who is the point of view character in Meet the Parents? It's Ben Stiller's character. He's the one you're *supposed to sympathize with* He's the protagonist. His fiancee is practically nothing more than a cardboard cut out. She's exists for the sake of the plot; she doesn't have a character. She's ancillary.

But nice try.

I doubt you'd see it the same way if the situation were reversed.

Let me ask you something, when you see those movies with the bumbling loser and the hot empowered "bitch", which one do you sympathize with? Which one is the narrative sympathetic to? Who is the character you're meant to identify with?

Hint: it's never the woman. Who, as you pointed out, is usually perceived as a "bitch". (who just gets down on a guy trying to have a good time! god, women!)

If you think that's feminism in action, rather than just more of the same patriarchal bullshit, well, you're sadly mistaken.

That is extraordinarily disingenuous of you, to pick out two random (and highly controversial, even within academia) *second wave* feminists and represent them as the face of modern feminism (and academic feminism, at that) to the point that I can't even credit you with ignorance, like the other poster, but can only see deliberate malice. Along with quoting a fictional character from a novel and making it look like it's a direct quote by the author of the novel. FFS.

Well, among other things, the only form of currency the US government will accept for the payment of taxes, etc, are US dollars. Think about casino tokens: why are red chips worth 5 dollars? Because within the casino, those tokens will be honored for $5 worth of goods, services, or wagers. And you can exchange another currency (dollars) for a red token at the rate of $5/token. If you were say, stuck in the casino indefinitely, and the casino decided that it would no longer accept anything other than chips in payment of your food tab, then well, you'd be eager to exchange your dollars for tokens, and despite being worthless pieces of plastic, the tokens would in fact have inherent value to you.

I'm not shocked, but I am a little disappointed that the discussion here completely missed the main point, which was that maybe all these "women in tech" pushes are fundamentally flawed because they don't actually focus on the women in tech and the careers they've built. Instead the focus seems to be on "look at ms cutie teenager coding!" rather than "look at Ms. Senior Developer working on these interesting projects", and it's detrimental.

That actually makes a lot of sense to me. People need to be able to picture the future of something, an end result. A teenage girl isn't going to really be able to picture herself as a coding wunderkind unless she already is, and if all the images of adults in interesting STEM positions are white dudes, she's going to have a harder time imagining "hey, I could learn this, and then one day be doing job X!" And I think it's important that all this happens at a really subtle level, so it develops a series of expectations that are very hard to counter.

And it's something that's easily applicable outside the specific topic of women and IT jobs. If you want to motivate someone to volunteer, you don't tell them about George The Super Volunteer who single handedly saved orphans, you tell them that you need people to help sort canned goods in order to get food to hungry families. Specific action, specific outcome, both framed in such a way that the person can easily envision themselves in that role. People need to imagine not only how they could do something, but what it would achieve.

If I were trying to get boys to consider careers in nursing, I wouldn't just talk about boys who like biology, I'd talk about men whose nursing careers were successful and rewarding.

I have a friend who spent a summer working as a truck driver. As a trainee, she had another driver with her. Anytime they stopped, she couldn't go anywhere without the other driver present. At first she thought this was an exaggeration, but quickly learned to stick to it, because if she were seen as by herself, even for a minute, she got seriously harassed, mostly on the assumption that because she was female, she must be a prostitute. It was worse when they realized she was a driver.

Forget young people. The people in our communications department (ages between 30-60) managed to design and mail out a postcard advertising an event for kids that included an astronomy segment as one in which we were going to teach kids "astrology".

Of course they mailed it out to all of the parents, community partners, schools, and donors before showing it to anyone in my department (which was responsible for the event).. The word was in really large type and bold as well.

Because all male departments already exist, and when they do no one even notices, because it's assumed to be right and natural? It's the same idiotic question as "why does an oppressed minority get to have culture/clubs but it's considered racist to have a White booster group?" whine whine whine.

Well, they should get off their fannies and do something about this whole ridiculously resilient ridge that's keeping it from raining at all this winter in California (and is possibly related to the arctic conditions elsewhere...?) Damn it, you just can't trust the military industrial complex to do ANYTHING right. Where are the supervillains when you need 'em?

Yes, I would. In the advent that I had enough money to pay someone to give me an organ, I'd still be aware that the point at which someone is will to violate their bodily integrity for money is someone who is so hard up for cash that the issues of consent become irreparably fucked up.

The issues are different if we're only talking organ donation from corpses, but as other people have pointed out, even that creates extremely perverse incentives.

Kind of off topic here, but the past tense there is sadly inappropriate. Prison labor is still pretty common especially in the south.. They're even having prisoners do labor for corporations. That way, the big companies get all the savings of using unfree labor in china, but they get to do it at home, so they can stick a "made in america" label on it.

And the prisons are still full of people who are guilty of being black. Then there's the whole extraordinarily depressing school-to-jail thing. (including a judge in Pennsylvania who was taking bribes to ship kids off to juvie and....well, this http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/11/school_prison_pipeline_meridian.html where kids end up incarcerated for things like talking back to teachers.

Because it's exploitative, the way the act of performing surgery is not. Compare to how selling yourself into slavery is illegal, even though theoretically it's "your own body".