[5189] in Central_America
Re: New quotes for Fri Nov 19
nosaj@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (nosaj@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sun Nov 21 18:59:56 1993
just one thing to think about: before you (this isn't intended
to be for anyone in particular) talk about abstract groups like
"men" and "women" and "blacks", try thinking about individual
cases of this.
I'll admit that people like advertising agents who have to come up
with an "image" for a particular group often do it in negative ways.
Ads that show "beautiful women" concentrate on certain characteristics
that portray images of sexiness. Sexy != beautiful, in general; nor
do I think that even when ads do try to show "beauty", they coincide
with the ideas of beauty of even a small percentage of men. And I'm
just talking about physical beauty here. (the above comment in parentheses
applies only to that paragraph, by the way. the rest of this is just my
response to some things that have been said.)
I don't know about other men, but makeup tends to turn me off (in
a similar way, I can't understand why some people have cars with
fluorescent lights underneath---these are both attention-getters,
but so what?), I don't prefer blondes, I don't think high heels make
women look better, I abhor 99% of what these so-called "fashion designers"
produce, and I'll bet a large number of men feel the same way in at
least some of these points. I can't help it if someone looks beautiful
or not beautiful to me, but that doesn't affect whether I respect them
or not (except if they're being ostentatious, which has a bearing
on the way I judge someone's character). I take people seriously
by what they say and the way they say it, not by who they are (for the
most part).
I'm not going to deny that there are a lot of jerks out there, and that
the stereotypical man's behavior toward women doesn't occur, and that
there definitely is a "how-women-should-be image", but what about individual
cases? Are individual women told by individual men over and over again
the same things that society is telling women via advertisements & things?
I don't know.
Generalizations are necessary in some sense (we need to "sum up" our
essential ideas on a subject in order to use them) but listening to them
isn't mandatory. My generalization of feminism is that part of it tries
to say something like "Women shouldn't listen to these generalizations"
and the other part of it tries to say something like "We should fight
back at the people who caused these generations", and that the first part
is probably good and the second part is probably bad (or at least,
it strikes me as an odd way of solving a problem), and that lately,
a lot more has been heard on this second part. (oops, I meant generalizations,
not generations, a few lines back) It's good that things are said
on either topic, but from what I've seen, men will accept that first
kind of feminism much easier than the second kind, and it may be
counterproductive to a large extent to yell at us (to put it bluntly)
when the men who aren't guilty of disrespect towards women look around
and say, "Who, me?", only to think that the people doing the yelling
are kind of weird, and the men who are guilty of disrespect don't give a shit.
To agree with Calvin, I personally can't do much about it. I would
like to yell at a lot of people, both men and women, and tell them to
get some common sense and think about what they're saying and doing
to each other.
Granted, the people I have been around for the past 3 years haven't
been representative of the population as a whole, but even in my normal,
public high school, it seemed to me that relations between men and women
(boys and girls, whatever) weren't that bad, and probably not much worse
than they are here. I don't know; I don't feel qualified to judge the
state of the world except through my eyes.
But it's pretty much true that if you put any two groups in the same
room and get them to interact with each other individually, and then
you suddenly get groups A and B to argue back and forth about each
other, then their opinions of each other will drop like a rock. There's
been a lot of yelling recently, between whites and blacks and men and
women and homosexuals and heterosexuals and others, and it's drowning
out a lot of the talking that's going on.
blarg.
(p.s. this thread should probably go elsewhere....)
