No, I’m serious, if women all got together and went into electrical engineering or automotive repair en masse, then ten years later people would be talking about how it was a “soft field” and it would pay proportionately less than other fields.
Likewise, if men moved en masse to bedeck themselves in sparkles and make-up, then suddenly you’d get a bunch of editorials talking about how classy they look.
None of these things are inherently masculine or feminine; none of these things inherently elevate you or drag you down. But whatever women are seen to do is automatically seen as being inherently more frivolous than anything men do. And shaming women for not pigeonholing themselves into a narrow range of acceptable “masculine” behaviours is just going to result in the goalposts getting moved once again.
This is literally what happened to basically every field women have entered. The opposite happens when men enter. Computers used to be a “woman thing” until the guys who did it got really mad about how badly their job was viewed and realized they could fix it by forcing out women.
Also happened/ is happening with the fields of biology and psychology….
I honestly wonder how much of the backlash against public education in the last generation has been due to teaching becoming a woman-dominated profession.
Fashion used to be a men’s thing. Then women got involved in the late 17/1800’s, so men went the other way because it came to be seen as “frivolous” and “anti-intellectual” to care about how you looked. Add in the homophobia that arose around that time, bam, staid bland dress. Ditto leggings/tights, that are now called attention-whoring when on men they were required to show you cared about your figure and had the money to pay for such a fitted item.
People want to say misogyny doesn’t exist, that male privilege doesn’t exist. Look beyond “living memory” and you’ll find that’s what drives the “inexplicable reversals” society seems to make on many things. Hell, just look beyond your own society, and you’ll find out that what’s considered “for men” elsewhere is held in high esteem while here it’s scoffed at purely because it’s “for women”:
Skinny jeans are the height of masculinity in several east Asian societies, rather than being seen as “gay” in the USA because of their association with femininity.
Medical fields in Russia are valued like kindergarten teachers are here, because it’s women who are the doctors instead of men.
Love and romance are highly valued in eastern countries, because men are interested in it too—of course they would be, surely you want to share your life with someone? Here, it’s strictly a women’s subject.
The field of anthropology as a whole illustrates this.
Significantly higher proportions of females compared to males are currently entering the fields of archaeology and biological anthropology, and as this occurs, the prestige, funding, acceptance as valid kinds of science, etc, are fading quickly.
This has already occurred with linguistic anthropology and cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology in particular went VERY quickly from being seen as a manly, scientific discipline (e.g., Franz Boas, Bronisław Malinowski) to being seen as a touchy-feely female thing.
What I get from this is that we should equally distribute ourselves among all fields until we’ve ruined absolutely everything.
Cooking as well; Men moved into the field and now we hear things like “women belong in the kitchen” when we talk about marriage and domestic life, but cooking shows full of “do you think you can keep up with the guys in the kitchen” simultaneously.
Wherever there is prestige and money, women are forced out.
The majority of english majors are female yet we’re studying a literary canon made up of stories about men written by men.
there has been a petition signed by over 300,000 british people to ban donald trump from britain and because it’s so popular they’re having to seriously consider debating it in the house of commons. it’s the best news i’ve heard all week.
I’ll be honest, whenever a work of speculative fiction (fanmade or otherwise) goes out of its way to describe an intelligent species with bizarre and complicated reproductive biology, the first question that invariably pops into my head is: “How do these critters masturbate?”
what if masturbation was uniquely a human experience though
Okay, I know that you meant “what if humans are the only intelligent species that’s anatomically capable of masturbating?”, but now I’m picturing a universe where humans are the only ones that ever thought to try it.
Human masturbation specialists traveling the galaxy to offer our gift, undertaking rigorous study and enormous personal risk to teach weird-ass aliens how to rub one out.
Calculating the exact harmonic frequencies to allow ancient, vacuum-dwelling crystalline intelligences to self-stimulate.
Descending into the crushing atmospheres of gas giants in specially constructed aerostats to design sex toys for the vast, jellyfish-like super-predators that prowl the hurricane slipstreams.
Wanking is our genius. Our legacy.
That last addition is possibly my favourite thing Tumblr has ever done for the world.
