I see this crap all the time and it never ceases to make me angry. (They’ve changed the title now, it used to be Women and Money, and this used to be the image beside it.) For me, it’s not a feminism issue, it’s a logic and reason issue. Do you think it’s even remotely accurate to judge a full 50% of the population (male or female) based on one massive generalization or another?

by kenjimori

It’s everywhere all the time, in all forms of media, and many conversations. The poster for The Ugly Truth is a great example. It’s a visual distillation of one type of BS that’s constantly spouted by those devotees of gender stereotypes. Women are morally elevated above petty concerns with sexual desire and follow their heart, while men are brutish, crude and follow their crotch.

I don’t see why they didn’t take the extra step of making their message even more obvious and just have Katherine Heigel bathed in white light and suspended in the air by her own smug sense of superiority as Gerard Butler grovelled on all fours drooling, trying desperately to sniff her butt with his unshaven face.

by urish

Anyone who has had open conversations with their friends and partners about current and past relationships knows that there are orders of magnitude more difference between any two people than there are between the sexes in general. Yet for some reason most people feel the need to seek out and attribute certain qualities to the gender as whole rather than the individual specifically, while conveniently ignoring the exceptions that disprove the rule. It’s classic example of confirmation bias.

by mary hodder

You say anything you can think of being true for men in general, and I’m sure I could personally name half a dozen guys that would disprove that stereotype. How about a bit of a reality check? Write down the relationship histories of 100 men and 100 women under 30, complete with details such as cited breakup reasons, real breakup reasons, opinions of sexual chemistry, any commitment issues, and so on. I would bet real money that you couldn’t accurately guess the gender of each history with more than a 50% accuracy.

Fully 50% of the women I’ve dated have have had a higher libido than me and I’d consider myself an average person. Sometimes I’m more into the relationship, sometimes they are. The only detail that’s reasonably consistent is that I’m generally the more emotionally stable person in the relationship, but that’s because I’m borderline empathically inert as an individual, not because I have a penis.

by Springsun

I read this article in the Globe and Mail, and while there is a hint of historical accuracy to it, that’s clouded over by the smog of ignorance and casual sexism, re-enforcing traditional gender roles as it goes. Without citing any studies, statistics, or even a crappy internet survey, Zosia Bielski proceeds to make all sorts generalizations about the role of women in home finance for the last 50 years.

The fact that women may have had disadvantages forced on them by societal pressures not to pursue post-secondary education is never mentioned. And forget that encouraging women to be housewives and never letting them handle money may impact their ability to balance a check book 30 years later. Those are minor insignificant details. What’s important is to continue the perception that somehow the women of today have just recently gained the genetic ability to use currency. Hurray! They’ve finally evolved!

by Farther Along

Gender stereotypes may have had a place in our society 100 years ago when there were huge differences between the life choices available to a man and a woman. Making sex-based assumptions then may have been occasionally accurate, not because of chromosomally imposed differences in ability, but because of socially imposed ones.

But suffrage, the women’s movement, WWII, the pill, and anti-discrimination laws have changed all that. Not just for women, but for men too. We may not have equality yet, but at this point any assumptions based on gender roles are more likely to be wrong than right. Continuing to reuse, reenact, and generally re-enforce these myths only serves to belittle both sexes, and should be beneath any modern member of our society.

by dorywithserifs