Man if Clay Shirky can do it, we can all do it!
Clay Shirky wrote a rant about women. I’m here to follow it up with my own.
What’s interesting is that I’d heard similar things from someone (I seem to recall maybe Anna McPhee perhaps on ABC Fora or Q & A) with data suggesting that gender inequality, from a pay-scale and promotions perspective, could mostly be accounted for (in recent times) because of “assertiveness issues” of women. This article roughly covers it. Shirky echoes both the ideas presented that women will often wait for a position to be given to them instead of trying to take it, and that they don’t self promote themselves and their skills to the extent that men do it. Shirky goes as far as to call men cons and liars.
So I’m going to consider this as fact. Of note is that I’m more like a woman in this regard: I won’t lie or self promote, though I like to think of it more like Goku in Dragonball Z (hiding my power level until I need it, at which point it will reach OVER 9000). Overall, it gladdens me to know that we’ve practically “solved” gender inequality in the work-force. There’s still issues but the pay difference is like < 20% now, which is fine.
I really like Anna McPhee (if she’s the one I’m thinking of). She’s got a very practical approach to improving the quality of life of women, and will do so in a methodical manner. Most of all, she’s not... umm... well she’s not sexist. A lot of feminists can be positively vile when referring to men, even when doing so in an (apparently) nice way. Eve Ensler’s TED Talk was one I really couldn’t swallow, as a male. The whole thing talks about men as these violent creatures who go around raping and hurting and demeaning women, and she colours masculinity with this as well. She pretty much says "Everyone, even men, have a little girl inside, and she is everything positive about you. Everything else is pretty much shit."
Err thanks. At this point I can nod and smile and move on, but I really want to retaliate with something like "That’s nice, but luckily I have a penis, so I don’t really have to listen to what you say." How’s that for embracing my inner girl? Because you know what? People have looked at bullying, and when boys bully boys, that shit is fine. In fact, many problems have been solved by people punching each other out. You only ever see two people with black eyes sorting their shit out, not starting new shit.
The cancerous bile that comes out of little girls who bully other little girls can destroy their lives. This is why internet bullying is such a problem among school aged girls: because even though you can’t punch each other out on the internet, you can say hurtful and demeaning things, or spread rumours, or whatever the hell else little girls know how to do. Wanna embrace that?
Things aren’t so simple. Little girls aren’t all lovely and huggable and little boys aren’t mean spirited fucktards. Maybe Eve should try letting her inner girl go every now and then and think about the little boy languishing.