The Gender Equality Checkpoint

[infinite monkey]

You're just that guy who judges women no matter what. A strong woman? She must be a ball- breaker. A subservient woman? She deserves bad treatment and a whole bunch of your personal drama.

Either way or any way between seems like a losing situation for your judgment.

[DanaC]

When the last women leaves the table in discomfort or disgust, stop the timer, and check the results. For a control - do the exact while focusing instead more on how she looks, how far she went and generally stay in line with basic dude questioning.

1. You are deliberately attempting to make other guests at this social function feel discomfort and disgust - literally timing how long it takes to drive those people away from the conversation.
2. You have set out to have a staged conversation on the pretense of innocent socialising when in fact you have a hidden agenda
3. You have made a massive assumption about how all men view and discuss their dates with women, based solely on your own personal experience. You do not have enough personal exerience to extrapolate that to all men.
4. You have made a massive assumption about how all women respond to and view men's conversation about women. You do not have enough personal exerience to extrapolate that to all women.

It is a cold way to treat friends and acquaintances.
It is a fundamentally flawed methodology for any kind of test.
It is a test that is wide open to confirmation bias
It is a test that relies on you 'reading' why those people have left - was it really the content of the questioning that made them leave, or was there something in your tone that was off-putting. Maybe the dishonesty inherent in such ulterior motives made you seem cold or strange, or pushy during the conversation. You have no idea and neither do I - because there was no control. Flipping the questions to looks does not control for changes in your own demeanour - you are not a mere observer in the test, you are a participant in the group and your participation changes the dynamics of that group and must therefore affect the results of the test, one way or another.

It is a test that relies on a wholly reductive view of gender.

Couching it in terms of wanting men to judge women on their behaviour and personality instead of looks does not remove the insidious layer of judgement you apply to women.

Maybe there's a communication breakdown here, trace, but your view of women does not seem very nice to me. Nor indeed does your view of men.

To throw one entirely unscientific personal experience out there to counter your entirely unscientific personal experience:

I was once a member of an online guild who believed I was a man. It was in the days before Teamtalk and other such things - all communication was text based - in game, in ICQ and mIRC. I became very good friends with several of the guild - to the point I eventually trusted them enough to 'come out' as female.

Back when they thought I was a guy I had the experience of talking with a group of men who thought there were no women present. Know what I discovered? The conversations were not different to the conversations I have with my girlfriends. One of them, the guild leader, was recovering from a nasty divorce and was now a single parent to his little girl. He was back on the dating scene - he would tell us about the women he'd dated - and you know what was of most concern to him? What she was like as a person. Did he tell us how awesome she looked? Sure. Did he tell us about her gorgeous smile, and beautiful hair? Yes. He was surprinsgly circumspect about what they'd done in the sack. There were odd comments about tits and ass. But the bulk of what he talked about was what she was like as a person - whether she was someone he could spend time with and whose company he enjoyed, and whether or not she'd get along with his girl. Oh yeah, and whether she believed in God. I remember that being a deal breaker with one woman. Rog was a believer - though not a bible-basher.

I've never forgotten that experience of being in a group of guys who didn;t know there was a woman there. I didn't keep my gender secret to test them or observe. It was the late '90s and being a woman in an mmorpg brought a lot of unwelcome bullshit from the mostly male players. To be accepted fully, I had a male character and initially stayed wholly in character throughout. As ad-hoc groups became guilds, then friends, I didn't want that acceptance to evaporate so i stayed male even when not in character.

I eventually came out and stayed friends with those people. The dynamic changed - and there was a tonal shift in how those men related tome now that I was known female.

It stayed with me though. Because it surprised me and confounded a lot of my expectations. The biggest lesson i took from it was that really, friends talk with friends in very similar ways whether they are male or female. The differences come in when the group is mixed. Maybe when groups are mixed, men act like men and women act like women - without the other gender there we are free to simply act as people.

I don't know. It's complicated. People are complicated. Taking a stopwatch to a social function and trying to deliberately freak out female guests with staged conversation does not give you a superior insight into people.

[it]

Couldn't you least have the good humor to include:
"tl-dr: How dare you would say that women would react by feeling the act of judging women for who they are as people is insidious and revolting, I feel your judgement is insidious and revolting!".

Look, if you want to dismiss it as anecdotal evidence at best, that I can understand. The control for myself was actually checked - this is not the first time I asked anyone else to do it and I did get feedback last time, but the truth is that while I did get feedback on people recreating the experiment itself I never got anyone to recreate the control or understand why it's needed - so the control for the type of questions asked was checked on a rather limited basis.
This is quite a higher level of scrutiny then I ever seen you use towards your own notions or even notions from others that you are more comfortable with, so the reason for why you are explaining the dismissal of them aren't genuine, but to a limited extent they are still somewhat applicable.

If you take issue with the generalization about how "all guys" pass judgement, I'll point you again to the fact the only people so far who have made that generalization in characterizing it as "behaving like women" were you and sundae - this started with me making an internal judgement with a friend and we are both guys, so it doesn't actually make much sense to think I am saying that not doing so characterizes "all guys".

Your issue with dishonesty and ulterior agenda's is being very dishonest with not just me and everyone else but with yourself considering the clear leeway you give your own dishonesty when the agenda for it were your own, but the message of lowering my expectations is well received.

As far as your friend, that resonates with my own experience as well, but that for me is the problem - the fact it took a divorce to get me to the point of having to face the need for judging them on whether they are decent human beings in the first place. The very fact that it was "an innovation" in how to treat or think of women and that it was not viewed or even accepted as part of the norm for guys to do (As you are demonstrating right now).

[it]

Originally Posted by infinite monkey

You're just that guy who judges women no matter what. A strong woman? She must be a ball- breaker. A subservient woman? She deserves bad treatment and a whole bunch of your personal drama.

Either way or any way between seems like a losing situation for your judgment.

I don't think I ever used the term "ball breaker" in my life, or said that someone deserved bad treatment on the basis of being subservient, so I am guessing you are dressing me up with notions of guys that you know.

As far as your main statement, the answer is no: It can be won and has been won

edit: I actually I don't think I heard the second part said by anyone about anyone in my life, and my bullshit sensor is blipping bright red on that one. "They are subservient and thus deserves my personal drama" is generally not the sort of thoughts human beings are inclined to have, for several reasons, the most critical one is that people generally view their own motivations issues and point of view as legitimate and don't lump it up as their own "personal drama" to be used as a weapon to punish those who "deserve it". I am clearly missing a story there, but my gut instinct is that to think that someone would think this way about their own actions in the first place sounds like an incredible mis-characterization that's 99% the unlikely dressing of a villainous character archetype in the sort of stories we tell ourselves and 1% inspired by a real human being.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by DanaC

That you can sit in a handful of group situations and try this experiment out and then extrapolate that out to predict how 'women' will respond, or indeed how 'men' will respond in general is ludicrous.

To prove you can't extrapolate, try that at a posh party, then try that at ghetto bar in Philly. I guarantee the results won't be the same, and I'd bet a shitload of money, at one of them you'd get cut or worse. I'll let you guess which one. This is exactly why nothing can be applied to women in general, one of the most complicated organisms in the universe.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by traceur

Couldn't you least have the good humor to include:
"tl-dr: How dare you would say that women would react by feeling the act of judging women for who they are as people is insidious and revolting, I feel your judgement is insidious and revolting!".

Look, if you want to dismiss it as anecdotal evidence at best, that I can understand. The control for myself was actually checked - this is not the first time I asked anyone else to do it and I did get feedback last time, but the truth is that while I did get feedback on people recreating the experiment itself I never got anyone to recreate the control or understand why it's needed - so the control for the type of questions asked was checked on a rather limited basis.
This is quite a higher level of scrutiny then I ever seen you use towards your own notions or even notions from others that you are more comfortable with, so the reason for why you are explaining the dismissal of them aren't genuine, but to a limited extent they are still somewhat applicable.

If you take issue with the generalization about how "all guys" pass judgement, I'll point you again to the fact the only people so far who have made that generalization in characterizing it as "behaving like women" were you and sundae - this started with me making an internal judgement with a friend and we are both guys, so it doesn't actually make much sense to think I am saying that not doing so characterizes "all guys".

Your issue with dishonesty and ulterior agenda's is being very dishonest with not just me and everyone else but with yourself considering the clear leeway you give your own dishonesty when the agenda for it were your own, but the message of lowering my expectations is well received.

Right, I am now thoroughly confused.

Firstly, the tl;dr - makes no sense. My point had nothing to do with the content of your findings. I have no idea whether 'women' would find that particular set of circumstances uncomfortable. Secondly - I haven't set my observations out as some kind of psych test. I feel no need to apply a scientific method. It's just stray observations of the people I have met over the years and the interactions we've had. You are the one taking stopwatches to dinner parties to see how long it will take to drive your test subjects from the table.

As far as your friend, that resonates with my own experience as well, but that for me is the problem - the fact it took a divorce to get me to the point of having to face the need for judging them on whether they are decent human beings in the first place. The very fact that it was "an innovation" in how to treat or think of women and that it was not viewed or even accepted as part of the norm for guys to do (As you are demonstrating right now

I really don't understand how I am demonstrating this. And I think the fact it took a divorce for you to start judging women as human beings is kind of scary.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by DanaC

So you're conducting your own little psyche experiments, on unwitting groups of people in a social setting, with no set parameters or control and think you've cracked the code of female behaviour.

I suspect that the women leaving in disgust could just as easily indicate that they were not unwitting, and were instead opting out of participating.

[it]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Right, I am now thoroughly confused.

Firstly, the tl;dr - makes no sense. My point had nothing to do with the content of your findings.

Much like screaming and shouting "I don't scream and shout", It doesn't make the point you think it does.

Originally Posted by DanaC

I really don't understand how I am demonstrating this.

Stopping to read what you are actually writing is rarely a bad idea.

Originally Posted by Sundae

See how long your weird attempt to mimic female behaviour takes to p*ss off everyone around you.

Originally Posted by DanaC

Hehehehehehe. Well said.

Originally Posted by DanaC

And I think the fact it took a divorce for you to start judging women as human beings is kind of scary.

It is - not for the reason your fucked up and distorted context loosing paraphrasing suggests, but it still definitely is on it's own right, and scarier is the fact that it's a completely normal and accepted psychological phenomena, for both men and women.

[DanaC]

I was agreeing with Sundae's assessment that you would piss everyone off by conducting psyche experiments on them.

Much like screaming and shouting "I don't scream and shout", It doesn't make the point you think it does.

ok. But you seem to be arguing with a point I never made. I have no opinion on whether there is any validity in the point you were making about female behaviour and responses - I don;t in fact understand what it is you're testing them for - it was quite a confusing explanation.

I am responding more broadly to the idea that you and the other male friends you've encouraged to do this, are conducting ad-hoc pysche experiments on fellow guests in social situations and then extrapolating that out to female and male behaviour more generally.

But hey: if you want to treat the women in your life as test subjects then go right ahead. i'm sure it will work out well for you.

[it]

I've addressed that in the first round - Taking you for your word for what you are arguing for and assuming everything else it happened to expressed was coicndeintal (in the same spirit that giving old men who says "don't have no problem with negro's" the benefit of the doubt would require), even then it comes down to an ideological stance against verifying enecodtal experiences based on some false dicthonomy between "people" and "test subjects" that results in a sense that it's dehumanizing to consciously try and see how people reacts in various situations, even though you readily admit that you yourself do so subconsciously and that's completely fine...
It's like the sort of people who think buying coffee by outright avoiding the thought that it's probably made of beans grown on farm lands stolen from native villages by bribing government officals and then making them work in horrible conditions is somehow ethically superior to doing the exact same thing consciously. It comes down to a high horse in deliberately avoiding awareness. As I said - it's a radically opposite value system to my own, by which willful ignorance is kind of the most disgusting thing people can do.

[DanaC]

Wow. Seriously, you have rendered me speechless. I have no response to that.

[xoxoxoBruce]

That's OK, best to keep the mouth closed when the bullshit gets this deep.

[DanaC]

Ahuh. I feel like we slipped down the k-hole at some point during this discussion.

[sexobon]

Not to worry Dani, I'm sure it's nothing personal and all just part of some experiment.

[DanaC]

hehehehehe