[1028] Dating Tips For Boys, Part 2 Of 4
└ posted on Monday, 8 October 2018, by Novil
- Ethan: Hannah is so pretty! She’s totally out of my league, though! I’d rather ask Julia to go to the dance with me.
- Cloud: And that’s where you’re wrong, Ethan!
- Cloud: Because, you see, Julia has read too many Cosmo articles and therefore has impossibly high standards.
- Julia: Too short. Too thin. Too dull. Too nerdy.
- Cloud: Hannah, on the other hand, has very modest expectations of her boyfriend.
- Hannah: My boyfriend must come to all my tournaments and cheer for me!
- Ethan: But didn’t you just say to avoid horse girls at all–
- Ethan’s penis: Shut up!
- Cloud’s penis: Ha ha! That dweeb really thinks he’s in charge here!
- Ethan: All right, I guess Hannah could be an exception…
- Caption: Of course Hannah was no exception…! Ethan works as a horse butcher today. Out of pure passion.
![[1028] Dating Tips For Boys, Part 2 Of 4](/comics/2018-10-08-1028-dating-tips-for-boys-part-2-of-4.png "[1028] Dating Tips For Boys, Part 2 Of 4")
@ SlugFiller:
Are you going to site this ‘scientific study’? Any referencing style to this peer reviewed paper would by nice.
But are you so sure that boys are not as picky as girls? If you were looking for someone you would spend the rest of your life with, wouldn’t you look for someone whom really g’s with you? Or maybe you’re right and as a result of men settling with women they don’t really like because they’re not picky, men are thus the overwhelming majority of domestic abuse offenders?
SlugFiller wrote:
Are you suggesting something?
@ Kevin:
If surrealism isn’t your forte, then Sandra&Woo might not be the webcomic for you…
Brijeka Vervix wrote:
Wrong, domestic abuse is more or less a 50-50 thing. As far as physical consequences go, women have a disadvantage, so logically suffer more. But domestic abuse isn’t just black eyes and busted lips. Unfortunately, you can’t sell beautification products to men by speaking about domestic abuse, so men are never the target demographic for charitable campaigns.
Female attraction is typically thought to be correlated with the social status of the man. For example, female university graduates typically want other university graduates as partners, which is a problem in a society where most of the university graduates are female. If that widely-accepted view is correct, it practically means that women are picky. Men are simpler creatures in comparison. But, well, it’s a really good idea to be picky, instead of sticking it in whatever vag is available.
Rather blue, but funny.
erejnion wrote:
Do you have anything to back that up? According to a page referencing government statistics, women are 3 times as likely as men to receive abuse from their partners (http://www.domesticviolence.com.au/pages/domestic-violence-statistics.php).
Again, you’re gonna have to back that up. Besides, I don’t see why it is a problem. I don’t want to live out my life with an uneducated baboon. Especially when our current society seems to want that uneducated baboon to be the master of the household… (although there does seem to be a push back against this at least)
@ captainvenoms:
Surrealism is fine. Great even! Inject it into charged topics, though, and you shouldn’t be surprised when people start wondering what’s going on and making up their own minds about what the authors are trying to say. But somehow the authors ARE surprised by this, and react badly.
@ Brijeka Vervix:
It’s a problem for the women, because they are more than their viable partners. If for every three women there are only two men, it promotes promiscuity in the men and competition for male attention in the women. And one of the women is going to have to become less picky or to settle for cats 🙂
Also university education isn’t the be-all and end-all of intelligence, so there are plenty of men who are not uneducated baboons, yet still fail to make the “university graduate” category. Who am I to speak, though, when my girlfriend is smarter than me 🙂
As for the domestic violence research, there’s an aptly named site domesticviolenceresearch.org
As far as I know, it has to do with the founder of the first ever women’s shelter, so I’ve more or less trusted it blindly. Correct me if I was wrong to do so.
Did the Text of the enndig just change?
someguy wrote:
Wow. You slam men for standing up for themselves… by comparing them to girls as though it’s an insult? Do you even SEE your own hypocrisy?
Brijeka Vervix wrote:
http://www.saveservices.org/2012/02/cdc-study-more-men-than-women-victims-of-partner-abuse/
“According to a 2010 national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Department of Justice, in the last 12 months more men than women were victims of intimate partner physical violence and over 40% of severe physical violence was directed at men. Men were also more often the victim of psychological aggression and control over sexual or reproductive health.
…
More men than women were victims of intimate partner physical violence within the past year, according to a national study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and U.S. Department of Justice. According to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (hereinafter NISVS) released in December, 2011, within the last 12 months an estimated 5,365,000 men and 4,741,000 women were victims of intimate partner physical violence. (Black, M.C. et al., 2011, Tables 4.1 and 4.2)”
Will that do?
And to set the record straight, I am not male nor straight and am mixed race… so no axe to grind. I also don’t like SJWs getting all butt-hurt “on my behalf” for any perceived grievance against my race, gender, or orientation. Most of them are prissy, rich, spoiled white kids that have no calluses on their hands from ever doing a real day’s work in their lives.
As for the horse-girl thing… yeah it’s a thing. But then most girls so afflicted have never had to try shoveling horse excrement for 6 hours every day after school like I did growing up on my grandparents’ horse ranch. (that’ll suck the joy of horses out of ANY girl)
I think these strips are hilarious. As a lesbian I see many of these stereotypes as hazards for us as much for men. (though the snippy-snippy ones are actually much more common and not as much a danger to us, they can still be a handful and more trouble than they’re worth in the long run) About the only thing that you would add to these as a danger for lesbians would be to include the ones with their bags packed to move in after the first date… which is NO stereotype… that stuff is REAL!
As for comments about stereotypes being toxic to the oppressed… STUFF IT! I have news for you… EVERYONE is oppressed by SOMEBODY. White people have to walk on egg shells when discussing race and have their every word critiqued for any sign of racism. (and are crucified if anything they’ve ever said could possibly even unintentionally be considered racist) Men have to suppress their natural attitudes in the workplace for fear of being fired for even the slightest hint of harassment. Straight people are expected to not only accept the entire LGBT movement, but are shamed if they don’t do enough to go out of their way to support it actively.
Stereotypes exist for a reason… we as humans recognize patterns. The human brain is in fact DESIGNED to find patterns in information. (it’s why we see faces in gibberish) To fault people for actually mentioning the patterns they see and that others see in certain groups of people (or even to say that certain groups of people don’t even exist as a group) is both ignorant of human behavior and history and being a liar for not admitting they see the patterns too.
I mean, we ALL know the Drama Queen who denies it. How many Drama Kings do you know? (besides gay men who are more like women anyway) Reality check: Women are much more inclined to wallow in drama than men are. Men just don’t care that much about little things. To say otherwise is to ignore reality in favor of some fantasy where everyone is inherently equal on all facets.
Shocking News! Some people are better at math than others. More Shocking News! Men are generally better at it than women and have a much higher propensity for finding math interesting. Myself being an exception to that rule… I worked in Statistical Data Analysis… and I can GUARANTEE that 90% of my co-workers in the field were men… and most women I have known think Statistics is boring and would NEVER willingly study it, let alone pursue a career in it. But you know what? That’s OK. Shocker #3! Men and women are DIFFERENT! True stuff! We think differently, we behave differently, we like different things, we see the same things in different ways, and NEITHER ONE is more right than the other.
So everyone quit being all butt-hurt on behalf of others. It’s actually REALLY degrading to have some rich privileged white man stand up to defend me… as though I’m incapable of speaking for myself.
(sorry about the soap box moment… but I just got REALLY irritated by certain comments white-knighting for us “poor oppressed people”)
Aha! So that was the horse girl!
RobertaME wrote:
That’s in direct conflict with more recent findings produced by my government with 1.6 million (17% of) females having suffered violence from an intimate partner since the age of 15 compared to 547,600 (6.1% of) males. Further, 480,200 (5.1% of) women had experienced sexual violence by their partner compared to only 53,000 +-50% (~0.6% of) men. (http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/4906.0)
Could it be that this heavy skew towards female victims is localised to my country, or for some reason it’s less skewed in the US? Because that just seems really strange and contrasting literally everything I have ever seen on the matter.
@ erejnion:
By my own calculations, the ratio of female uni graduates to male uni graduates (in the US of A) is 2.1 females to 2 males given that female graduates were at 34.6% and males were at 33.7% of the population so you’re dire predictions don’t seem very accurate.
As for the viability of non-uni educated men as romantic partners, I have not yet met one such person whom I would want to marry (unless you include people who are still in the process of getting a degree, a point which would be moot in a couple of years). The overwhelming majority are either too young or plain dumb (srsly, I met this one dude who claimed Russia could take over the world based on that one Call of Duty where they invade America. Like, go back to primary school mr!)
Brijeka Vervix wrote:
have you considered an option that in different parts of the world ratios might be somewhat different?
for example amount of abused males by females in Saudi Arabia will likely be quite small given the cultural setting there.
Factor in please notion that what is applicable in one country is not applicable elsewhere.
However the study often only focuses on physical abuse – which well – I admit we men are more biologicaly fitted to exert (on average).
Psychological abuse and such – much harder to actually prove – is considered vice of women.
For example in my country currently lot of females use claims of sexual abuse from fathers to get sole control of kids.
In 80 percent or so of cases police and courts cant find any proof of such, usually they find even kids get coached how to answer about it by mother, grandmother, aunt, even often social services women (its solely feminized service)…
yet its scarcely ever convicted as abuse, or even false testimony. As its virtually impossible to prove intent.
Paeris Kiran wrote:
If you read everything I wrote you will see that I did consider that. Further, if you followed my link, you will see that that study does indeed record emotional abuse by partners in which 23% of women have experienced compared to 16% of men. The numbers don’t lie (unless they were falsified in which case there would be a serious problem with my country’s government) indicating that my original statement that started this argument is hence justified 😛
I found that last strip way more offesive than this one. The only Thing that might be offesive is that he critisises the one Girl for beeing too picky and that media sets unrealistic standarts for people, yourself and others, is basically feminism 101.
Novil wrote:
This was cruel. Just kill the guy already, he was better dead.
@ Brijeka Vervix:
That’s overall, I guess? Current graduating class is more like 65% women to 45% men, if I’m navigating the oecd site correctly. As we both are older (forgive me if I assume incorrectly), the ratio for our generation is closer to 1:1. Anyway, I wanted to play the devil’s advocate and point out that you are probably biased in favor of university graduates. I most probably have the same bias; you are not alone in this, and for women in general it seems to lie in some biologically encoded predisposition. Of course, that’s just broad statistics, which can’t tell us anything about individual cases. And, of course, I see nothing inherently wrong in this. It’s just that we as society will need to try to get more men in universities.
But we got really side-tracked. I just noticed the new punchline! It works way better than the previous one, nice!
@ RobertaME:
Technically speaking, “meninist” IS an insult, used to mean an SJW that thinks men are oppressed by the women. You know, instead of the other types of SJWs, who think women are oppressed by men, or the aryans are oppressed by the Jews, or the working class is oppressed by the bourgeois, and so on. MRA is the accepted term for the activists you are thinking of.
@ erejnion:
Hmmm in that sense it sounds more worrying but not in regards to dating and so on although having just read some newspaper article on the matter, most of the reasons they propose that these men aren’t going to university seem to correspond with traits I don’t really favour in terms of finding an ideal partner (they’re unmotivated, lacking imagination, lazy, not thinking ahead very far and so on).
I liked the glue factory one better (was that actually put up or just a comment?). It was more subtle.
Brijeka Vervix wrote:
If we want to be generous and not imply that a program funded to help women would want to continue receiving funding, it’s most likely difference of methodology. Nobody can argue the hospitalization rates for example. Women end up with severe injuries much more often than men. If a study shows men receiving equal or greater levels of domestic abuse, it necessarily has a more broader definition of domestic abuse.
@ Brijeka Vervix:
If I was a men’s rights activist, I’d now respond by saying that the education system is discriminating against boys, which in turn makes them grow up unmotivated and so on. As I’ve never experienced compulsory education in a western country (hooray for the ultra-corrupt ex-communist Europe), I wouldn’t dare to claim all of this, of course. I’d just say the American high schools are shit and nothing can surprise me.
Brijeka Vervix wrote:
Well, this small-scale study shows the imbalance through Tinder:
https://tmblr.co/Z1ZThr1glsoMi
This more comprehensive study, also from Tinder:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.01952.pdf
There’s this old data article from OKCupid (Had to use webarchive, because, I dunno, probably politics):
https://web.archive.org/web/20180304005047/https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0f1561e
Here’s another one by OKCupid that’s supposed to be about race. But they have separate charts for reply rates with a male or female sender, and let’s just say that the numerical difference is obvious:
http://web.archive.org/web/20180304005044/https://theblog.okcupid.com/how-your-race-affects-the-messages-you-get-39c68771b99e
Interestingly, it does show that being a black woman is a disadvantage, but still better than being a man of any color.
This one uses speed dating, and suggests that the difference is in who rotates and who remains seated, rather than gender:
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/504114b1e4b0b97fe5a520af/t/5365af85e4b08a77bcea394b/1399172997168/FinkelEastwick2009PS.pdf
There’s also common citations to a book called “Psychology”, but I’d rather not buy a book just to look at its bibliography.
erejnion wrote:
Well quality of our schools in “eastern block” has also seriously deteriorated… in 1990s Czech schools were among best on the world… just 16 years ago I have been running an entry test to grammar school which included same “calculations” nowadays graduates of grammar schools failed to achieve…
you know – when worst “unified” thing to calculate is:
1) A linear equasion in fraction with 1 unknown
2) a set of hexagons attached to another where one has to notice that even and odd have different parametres and that alone answers 3/4 of the question
3) set of 3 linear equasions with 3 unknowns of which one is trivial…
and still 20 percent of people fail outright, and 10 percent of grammar schools? Seriously I could calculate any of that before grammar school.
education here turns to shi,…
Is it too late to inject some humor into the conversation and say “Ride him Horse Girl ride him.(or if you live in the Western US, Cowgirl) Add the obvious double entendres.
RobertaME wrote:
I’m going to be straight honest here, this wording has all sorts of red flags for being cherry picked data. So let’s fact check it with the actual CDC report!
https://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a.pdf
So lets see here, page 38, physical violence, the numbers check out… wait…
It doesn’t include rape?
No, rape is a separated category, here. It’s 686,000 women rather glaringly omitted from your cited source. Unless we’re making the argument that rape isn’t physical violence.
The fact is this isn’t a contest. The numbers on both sides are horrible. But you can’t just cherry pick data, sheesh.
Am I really the only one who noticed the lack of any tags on this strip?
erejnion wrote:
Makes sense. Men are unlikely to end up with severe injuries even after hard abuse, and even if they would, they wouldn’t admit it to doctor.
@ SlugFiller:
You know that’s only sampling people who use online dating websites.
HKMaly wrote:
Do you mean to suggest that hitting a man in the face with a baseball bat won’t ruin his day?
The NISVS has that data too, summarized on pg 55:
MarqFJA87 wrote:
Yeah, that’s kind of odd
@ Brett Bellmore:
I call myself a “feminine equalist.” But I’m also a guy, so if you get an opinion from a feminist (but not feminine supremacist) woman, that’s probably your better choice.
@ MidoriLuna:
I just wanted to say thank you Luna, for actually going through the report. Much appreciated.
Okay I’m going to say this about the abuse issue and you can take it as fact because it is fact. A lot of abuse whether sexual, physical or emotional goes unreported. This includes all types of interactions. Everything from child abuse to full-on torture is kept quiet. Consider the Catholic church had 1000 victims in one state alone. And that was just one religious sect. How many victims must there be even if the church has double the rate of occurence than outside. There must be millions of unreported cases. And while abusers are likely more than half male, females aren’t that far behind. Woman have been serial killers and terrorists so it’s not like men are more evil or less empathetic. Look at the killer moms. True men are far more likely to use a gun to kill but those guys generally saw a gun as part of their masculinity.
Arent wrote:
I think trying to paint feminists as any single cause is either a rhetorical device (usually to attack them) or, more charitably, a waste of time. There are billions of women, and most of them who call themselves feminists differ on countless axes.
Given that the ideas of equality held by many who call themselves feminist are also shared by many who don’t, trying to pigeon-hole the term is a lost cause. Feminism is whatever the person one is talking to at the moment thinks feminism is.
RobertaME wrote:
You are quite correct – EXCEPT humans (and most other mammals) OVER pattern identify. We see something present 20% of the time, and assume it’s 50%. We see something 50% of the time, and build a society that insists that this is how all must be and those who aren’t are deviants who must be expelled or destroyed.
It takes ridiculously little data to create a pattern, and our brains does everything it can to reinforce the pattern (confirmation bias, etc.) and ignore data that contradicts the pattern.
You put your finger on *exactly* why stereotypes are so dangerous and have to be vigorously counter-acted. They are the lie that are brain have been programmed to work overtime to have us believe and act upon. And there are millions tragically dead to prove it.
(Not quite true – rather than working overtime, it’s more like it saves a few calories by not actually having to think about individuals. Far easier (and more natural) to take a quick look, see a small correlation, and call it law. Our brain is often not a friend to rationality and will fight it all the way down.)
So I looked around for that study about women and men rating each other, because I’ve heard that thrown around too. From what I can gather, Okcupid released a study/experiment where they had people on their site rate each other, and found women rated ~80 percent of men “below average” when it came to physical attractiveness. Needless to say, it’s kind of questionable how that study would relate to the general population, but it’s certainly interesting. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the actual article that kept getting cited on forums like reddit—it appears to have been deleted. All the other articles I found were secondary sources, and had pretty clickbait titles. You can see the google results here: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en-us&ei=W5a9W5idKKyb_Qb1vwo&ins=false&q=women+80+percent+of+men+less+attractive&oq=women+80+percent+of+men+less+attractive&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-serp.3…2881.14639..14920…1.0..0.205.4110.24j15j1……0….1………0i71j35i39.tn_-Az20oc4
I will say it does kind of make sense. Evolutionarily, women have to be choosier. When a man has sex, he’s giving up about half and hour. When a woman has ex (at least before effective contraception), she’s quite possibly going to end up pregnant and committed to child rearing for the next decade and a half. The best chance a man has of passing on his genes is to spread his genetic material amongst as many partners as he can (which would explain why harems in the ancient world were almost always one man and multiple women). A woman’s best chance is to find one committed, desirable partner and raise as many children with them as safely as possible. Of course, social structures changed all this when monogamy became widespread (and I could talk all night about my layman theories about why that happened) but I’d wager for the majority of human history thats how sexual relationships worked. It would make sense then that women with higher than normal standards passed down their genes more reliably, and men who were more promiscuous did the same.
Ok, I’m done waxing philosophical for tonight. Off to bed.
well, the amount of triggered comments in this makes me cringe. Thx Murika for creating one of the most cancerous topics on the internet. I mean everyone gets the issue but why make it so goddamn toxic?! Every time where is a world issue worth anyone attention uneducated Murikans masses start throwing theirs entitled sh*t everywhere. Before trying to go for gender equality issue try to solve some more close to your home for example: Why you got more deaths amongst students then within your active military personnel? OR how is possible that BEST! COUNTRY! EVER! (a.k.a. country with the fattest pile of nukes in the world) can elect giant orange turd as a president?
@ Titan:
Sarcasm? I’ve never seen an argument for that which wasn’t explicitly homophobic and really trying to push heteronormativity.
@ Paeris Kiran:
Yep. We have the exact same situation here in Bulgaria.
@ Meh:
Come on, every single country has elected a pile of shit at some point or another. It happens as an overreaction to a toxic style of politics. Not that the orange turd conducts different policies than Obama or HRC, but the public perception is the opposite.
@ Meh:
Are you getting even more triggered on purpose?
@ BT:
I don’t think that that study is really very reliable given that firstly, it was from OkCupid and presumably restricted to just people who used that website and secondly, it has been deleted.
@ Tom West:
Maybe you need to look at the recent research in “stereotype accuracy”. It turns out that most stereotypes are actually well grounded in objective fact. You might, non-pejoratively, call them “statistical generalizations”, and they get used the way any rational person would use a statistical generalization: Only until you have individualized information about somebody.
https://psyarxiv.com/beaq3/
Now, continuing to apply a stereotype AFTER you have individualized information about somebody, that’s bigotry. But that’s simply not how most people employ stereotypes.
@ someguy:
Well, dating tips for girls was about actual dating, dating tips for boys is so far about some excruciating steps a girl traditionally never takes. Hence the lack of light hearted content.
erejnion wrote:
I rarely respond here, and I’m certainly not in the habit of getting involved in political fights I regard as bizarre and improper considering the nature of what they are ostensibly responses to – a webcomic about a girl and her raccoon. This time, I’m going to make an exception.
You say “not that the orange turd conducts different policies than Obama or HRC, but the public perception is the opposite”. I’ll put it simply and bluntly: that is complete and utter BS.
Even aside from the entirely different *style*, one of habitual lying, verbal aggression, confrontation and the likes, the policies are entirely different. I will name just a few significant examples, but there are many, because Trump represents a fundamentally different direction of American politics entirely, going well beyond traditional policy differences between Republicans and Democrats, which you choose to deny entirely.
So, a few examples: deregulation of polluting industries and rolling back protection on, for instance, clean water sources; isolationist, go-it-alone foreign policy that readily insults, belittles and actually harms allies while disproportionally benefiting ambiguous partners like Saudi Arabia; adversarial and confrontational trade policies, based on an essentially mercantilist view of international trade.
There is much more, but I don’t think this is the place for a five-thousand word essay. As a professional historian with a specific background in American history, it annoys me tremendously not just to see catastrophically inept (not to mention morally reprehensible) policies put into practice, but to see people claim that it’s just business as usual.
It is an outright LIE that there is little or no difference in the policies of the US’ two major parties, and anyone who makes that claim is exposing him or herself as utterly ignorant on the subject. Not only are there numerous and enormous differences in policy, these are perfectly well-documented and fairly easy to read up on.
I find it sad to see you make such a remark, as you are clearly capable of finding and analysing facts.
Caspar wrote:
So, a few examples: deregulation of polluting industries and rolling back protection on, for instance, clean water sources; isolationist, go-it-alone foreign policy that readily insults, belittles and actually harms allies while disproportionally benefiting ambiguous partners like Saudi Arabia; adversarial and confrontational trade policies, based on an essentially mercantilist view of international trade.
Sure, to a professional historian specializing in American history, these might look like a huge turn, but from an European perspective, what exactly has changed? We’ve been mocking USA for decades for:
– their anti-environmental policies (not signing Kyoto for example)
– jingoistic and imperialistic foreign policy (Obama starting wars even though he promised to stop them)
– wars in the Middle East that the partners Turkey and EU took the brunt of the fallout, while Saudi Arabia got more and more weapons and near zero refugees
– fucked up trade policies that actively harm the citizenry (especially concerning IP protection laws)
I understand that to you it might be an earthquake, but for an non-expert outsider, it’s just a slightly different way of getting spit on by the American administration. Nobody is arguing that Trump’s policies are not morally reprehensible, but the problem is that no US president has ever stopped implementing morally reprehensible policies, so it’s hard to appreciate the difference without expert knowledge.
If anything, the hope was that Trump would galvanize the left and elect an actual morally sound liberal during 2020, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead, the establishment seems to be fighting tooth and nail to keep control by paying lip service to the authoritarian regressive left (the antifa and DSA bunch). I really hope I’m wrong in this.
Let us all at least if not agree with then accept that all parties can have rediculous standards for wich they judge their potential partnership on.
THE DICKS HAVE SPOKEN
RobertaME wrote:
First: That phrasing was deliberate sarcasm, I don’t normally use “acting like a girl” as a derogative term. Sorry, I forgot that many internet users are not capable to detect sarcasm unless marked with a winking smiley. 😉
Second: No, I don’t slam men standing up for themselves, I slam whiny conspiracy theorists that post stupid comments on the internet. There is a time and place where it might be reasonable to take position against extreme feminist claims, but social media discussion about pop culture is not that place and the ones I intended to slam as meninists are not those who stand up against extreme positions by presenting reasonable and fact based arguments.
@ SlugFiller:
@ someguy:
I meant to refer to the comments, not the strips themselves.
When did this go from stereotypes to straight politics? The flame war these two comics have triggered seems incredibly out of proportion to any offensive content they might contain.
MidoriLuna wrote:
Now who’s cherry-picking data? There is an 86% overlap of rape and abuse incidents because the vast majority of rape victims are ALSO assaulted… so just adding the numbers double counts MOST of the rape victims.
No one gets away with statistical data abuse on my watch! I’m a PROFESSIONAL! :^Þ
someguy wrote:
I will say that a lot of the time when people say “That was meant sarcastically” it’s because they’ve been caught being hypocritical and won’t admit it. However, I’m willing to give you the benefit of doubt and just let the whole thing drop.
If it was intended as sarcasm, it was a ‘meh’ on the funny scale anyway. I get it, humor is not a universal language… especially in print where intonation is non-existent, but for me it just doesn’t resonate. (which is why I took it as a serious statement, not humor)
There’s an old saying. “If you have to explain the joke, it wasn’t funny.”
Brett Bellmore wrote:
Brett, I dealt with that in my post. There is often some observational basis for a stereotype. But “stereotype accuracy” is a joke, because people usually act as if a small difference is an immutable law. In essence, our brains, even among the most highly trained, suck at statistics.
Give some a fact like “median men’s score on arbitrary test is 52, women’s is 48”, and I will guarantee that 1/3 of the population will hear “no woman scores higher than any man” and act based on that “information”. Another 1/3 will be intensely surprised and suspicious of any woman that seems to be superior on the test to most men because statistics “proves” they aren’t.
I’ve seen *way* too many women driven out of science fields because they get tired of the significant group of men who simply cannot accept their competence because statistics says it’s so (and these men are theoretically among the most rational among us).
So, no, “stereotypes accuracy” is a myth in anything but the most pedantic of meanings. And using pedantry to defend one of the most reliable tools in bigotry’s arsenal is nothing to strive for.
Tom West wrote:
Having been an expert in the very male-dominated world of statistical data analysis I can put the lie to your claim. In my field, which is ACTUALLY STATISTICS, over 90% of those with professional careers in it are men… specifically men that are OBSESSED with statistics… that dream about very large data sets… that view Excel as the greatest thing invented since the abacus… that see patterns in EVERYTHING. You know how ALL the men treated me and the few other women I worked with?
Statistical anomalies… because we ARE!
Women just don’t groove on very large data sets normally. FACT! Stereotypes are what they are because we see the patterns and enough of us see them that it becomes culturally and generally accepted. But just because people recognize a stereotype doesn’t mean they deny the existence of anomalies when they see one. Most people don’t. (and the ones that do are usually socially repulsive in other ways)
Stereotype: Teenage boys are horny ALL THE TIME. Is it strictly true? No, but it’s true often enough to be a pretty safe bet. So much so that if you meet one that WASN’T horny all the time the first thing most people would ask their parents would be, “Have you taken him to a doctor?” followed by “I don’t believe you!” But once they met the person and learned about them, that they are actually fine but just not into sex because it doesn’t interest them, the VAST majority of people would shrug it off as… an anomaly. (because it is)
Stereotype: Pretty girls are dumber than plain girls. Is it strictly true? No, but more often than not a pretty girl won’t put as much effort into scholastics because they don’t HAVE to… their looks have usually gotten them everything they wanted so it becomes a crutch. Being pretty can actually make you LAZY, which results in less knowledge and the perception of being dumb. But once most people talked to a particular pretty girl and found she was actually quite intelligent they would chalk it up to… an anomaly. (because it is)
You are actually the one stereotyping negatively, and in a much more broad sense. You are making the stereotypical assumption that someone that runs into a person who defies stereotypical norms will automatically dismiss them as not actually being any different than their stereotype would constrain them to be. For example, if I meet a woman who is drop-dead gorgeous and initially assume she’s probably an airhead, you would stereotype me as prejudiced… but in reality I would still talk to her and find out for myself. (and so would the vast majority of people)
I would hate to live in the world you occupy; where you think everyone is a monster just waiting to bash others based on nothing but preconceptions and stereotypes. The vast majority of people are just too busy with their own issues to care enough to bother. (and do actually frown on such behavior when they see it in others)
Not everything is a mountain to be conquered. Getting everybody in the world to publicly shame anyone that uses or recognizes a stereotype is tilting at windmills while screaming about how stereotypical it is to be tilting at windmills. It’s not going to change and you’ll likely just annoy people in the process.