2. Your reading comprehension has failed you. Several different people at Facebook offered to do her inside special favors and she chose to decline that because she doesn't like that kind of thing either.

And yes, if you want, you could say that, well, trans people just shouldn't use Facebook, but given the position Facebook occupies in our society in practice, that's quite a statement.

Just as important, in cases like this, the damage has already been done -- potentially quite serious -- be the time the user might choose to abandon Facebook over the problem.

Forcing trans people to provide a bunch of ID to use the site, outing them to the world, and then saying whoops, sorry, but you can quit the site if you don't like it -- that's not ok.

And your basic attitude seems to be that trans people's own fault for being different from most people, so of course they should expect to see problems or to just stay off of common services if they don't like those problems. This attitude is part of the problem -- basic human empathy seems like it would require a more considerate attitude than that.

Facebook is a bad force in society. It's known how anti privacy they are. So you choose to deal with them at your own risk.

I certainly would love for Facebook to be slapped down, somehow: I only desire bad things for that company. They should certainly be forced to change their policies and I enjoy seeing any pressure on them for that reason. And perhaps one day there can be a law somehow, though it probably makes more sense to allow people get to get a birth certificate with their new name as that'd be more general.

Meanwhile, if your ID docs contain such info, then perhaps maybe don't share them, maybe? Or just Photoshop your birth cert? I don't know anyone that'd give up their ID to Facebook in the first place, let alone if it was high-risk.

Why is that not okay?

I mean, if people want to change their names for whatever reason then that's fine, but that doesn't mean that everybody is obliged to pretend that your old name never existed.

If I were Hitler, living under an assumed name in Argentina, and somebody outed me as actually being Hitler, would that be okay? (Pick a non-Hitler but still criminal example if you prefer.)

This is a company we're talking about. And the person in question doesn't seem to be a criminal. The name certainly wasn't outed because that person was a criminal.

I'm shocked by the atrocious quality of the comments in this thread. There's plenty to say about real name policies, yet all that people are coming up with are ridiculous strawmen. Disturbing.

Edit: Scratch that last paragraph, I didn't realize most of the nasty comments in the thread are in fact coming from you. You seem like a very unpleasant person to deal with.

I have a lot of trans friends. Just hearing someone use their deadname (a common term in the community) can cause serious emotional pain. Having it broadcast to all their Facebook friends would absolutely be traumatic.

Look, if you don't like trans people or you think it's unreasonable to do them the "special favor" of calling them by their actual name, it's a free country and you are just as entitled to that point of view as you are to hold racist views.

I'm pretty sure that Facebook, on the other hand, would not consider it a positive to be widely known as transphobic. So if they are operating in a way that is hostile to trans people, the obvious options are for them to fix it or for trans people and trans allies to keep publicizing it until it completely blows up in Facebook's face. They would be smarter to just try to fix the problem.

At best, it's a mismatch between what Facebook thinks it is and what users are led to believe.

Though, in practise, it's doubtful that it's actually company policy to do this. It's most likely the result of crappy support departments, overloaded with tons of requests. (Users are mostly idiots, so most tickets are of poor quality, and it leads to being aggressive in "resolving" tickets, even when the user is fine and in the right.)

Depending on what you want to do, any of these points on the spectrum can be perfectly valid. Even the bread machine can have you making bread out of scratch ingredients yourself using a recipe you control instead of just buying a loaf of bread at the store.

But "only used for music you don't own" isn't the same the same thing as "dead".

Netflix doesn't let you keep the movies you watch either.

Both are DRMed because thats how the company keeps you subscribing to their services.

Many thousands of titles on a nice portable device I can take with me anywhere? Yes, please.

Yes, actually there is. Too big to fail means that when an institution fails, its default will cause a cascade failure of other institutions relying on it -- and still other institutions relying on those -- including otherwise healthy ones whose only mistake was being integrated with the world economy.

This can ripple through the whole economy and work in tandem with the Paradox of Deleveraging to effectively cause a GDP death spiral. (See also: Great Depression.)

* [Or The #### Will Really Hit The Fan]

http://www.amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/

You may disagree with the analysis behind the list's construction, but I see little if anything on that list that obviously gets crossed off the list by virtue of being a geek.

Social justice theorists also talk about different kinds of privileges, so the idea that geeks have male privilege does not exclude the possibility that there is another form of privilege that they lack that others have. Some other types of privilege that are sometimes considered are white privilege, class privilege, heterosexual privilege, etc. You can have male privilege but not white privilege, etc.

In other words, privilege isn't simply a binary have/don't have thing such that geeks have it and women don't.

You could make an argument that there is some sort of gender-stereotypical privilege that, say, football players share in but geeks do not. Is that where you were going?

"Weakness" in females signals a socialized response to reach out and support. "Weakness" in males signals a socialized response to stigmatize. Because after all you are privileged, why don't you just "man-up"?

"Social justice theorists also talk about different kinds of privileges, so the idea that geeks have male privilege does not exclude the possibility that there is another form of privilege that they lack that others have."

That's my point. When is the last time you read an article about leveling the field of female privilege? In theory the idea of privilege is inclusive but in practice it's not.

When we talk about privilege in a social justice setting you want to think about the privilege of being the default. Ignore every other privilege and think about that one in particular. You point out all the downsides of that privilege in your post, which are all true and valid, which is why calling whiteness and maleness a privilege breaks our brains a bit. It's not unadulterated good, there are a lot of bad things that come about due to the default of maleness and masculinity.

Lets look at the idea that you put forward about Weakness, how in women it's ok, and in males it's not ok.

In males it's not ok because it violates the default maleness that is expected (a negative aspect of the default maleness), and in females it is ok because it goes along with the !default of femaleness.

When you start thinking of privilege not as things that you get for being male, but about expectations of the world, what we view the default as, and what we view the other as, the idea that male privilege could be bad for males and females makes more sense. In a lot of ways the word privilege is a crappy way to put it, because it makes us think about things that are privileges in our lives, not the privilege of being the default.

They're not on a male privilege checklist. A catalog of gender differences would be a different list.

> When is the last time you read an article about leveling the field of female privilege? In theory the idea of privilege is inclusive but in practice it's not.

I think most feminists would discount the idea of "female privilege" per se as a false equivalence similar to a hypothetical "black privilege".

> "Weakness" in females signals a socialized response to reach out and support. "Weakness" in males signals a socialized response to stigmatize.

The fact that there is a societal preference toward masculinity, which underlies many of your points, is definitely a topic that gets brought up in feminist/gender studies circles. This is why it's comparatively okay for women to be tomboys and such, and highly frowned upon for men to be effeminate or show what are considered feminine traits.

Many feminists call this general societal enforcement of gender roles part of patriarchy, and seek to remove the stigma associated with violating these roles. So if that's something you're interested in, there's no reason you can't find common cause.

That's my point.

"The fact that there is a societal preference toward masculinity, which underlies many of your points, is definitely a topic that gets brought up in feminine circles. This is why it's comparatively okay for women to be tomboys and such, and highly frowned upon for men to be effeminate or show what are considered feminine traits."

My point is that's not a fact. I mean look at what you're saying. You're saying that the fact a gay male is more likely to experience stigma, have less support, more likely to be a victim of hate crime, and more likely to kill himself than his gay female counterpart is an offense against the feminine. The determining factor for these injustices is being biologically male.

"Many feminists call this general societal enforcement of gender roles part of patriarchy, and seek to remove the stigma associated with violating these roles. So if that's something you're interested in, there's no reason you can't find common cause."

In theory there is no reason why there can't be common cause. Gender analysis is gender analysis. In practice it usually doesn't work out that way.

This is like saying that black people have the privilege of talking about race in the US, but whites don't. That might have some truth to it, but overall it's a point-missing half-truth, since black people who talk about that kind of thing are often treated as "angry blacks" or "to ideological" or whatever, and the broader context makes "feeling mildly uncomfortable about race discussions" a comparatively trivial complaint.

(I feel secure in saying this, as a white male)

When I was just out of college, I was (as a male) the victim of some pretty intense domestic violence several times a week for about six months. It was a very hellish situaiton, but one thing that made it a lot worse was the sense that if I went to the authorities, I would be blamed for the attacks against me. Yet I was assaulted with lethal weapons (knives mostly) several times a week.

Nobody can tell me that there aren't key areas where female privilege doesn't exist. The problem is that it is as invisible to females as male privilege is to males.

Of course, this doesn't just affect men; female victims of violently abusive women get similar treatment. There was a lovely incident where a really major feminist blogger wrote a post [1] which talked about her experience of domestic violence and attributed it to the fact that the abuser was male, just completely erasing victims who'd been treated in the same way by a women. Another women had actually experienced this from a female abuser and was quite distressed by being erased in this way, leading to a long discussion[2] in which said big-name feminist claimed without any sense of irony that not allowing her to treat other victims' experiences as impossible was somehow an attack on her and an attempt to erase her experiences as impossible, before going on to further erase the other victim's experiences and call her irrational.

As far as I can tell there's pretty much no real movement towards gender equality anywhere, and most of the anti-domestic violence organisations are actually anti-violence against women (but only if it's by men). Sady Doyle is still a respectable member of the online feminist community, the moderators of that blog went against their stated goals and the interests of their commenters to side with her, and I don't think anyone else cared.

[1] http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/10/08/the-percentages-a-biogra... [2] http://noseriouslywhatabouttehmenz.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/...

Of course, this doesn't change the fact that most resources for rape and domestic violence are geared toward women. This is a problem not only for straight men, for for gay men and transgender people as well. There's a lot more work that has to be done in this area, and if you feel strongly abut it, I would strongly encourage you to get involved.

When we talk about trying to get rid of "heterosexism" (I prefer the term heteronormative because it's purely descriptive but also a lot broader), I don't think that still leaves room at the table for heterosexual male victims of DV. We are still well outside a problem that is mainstream to talk about.

> The problem is that talking about gender privilege has taken place entirely in a discussion about sexism rather than a discussion about society in general.

I agree. Because the first waves of gender studies were "women's studies", it made it much harder to discuss topics outside the basic men-oppress-women dynamic of sexism. And even as gay and lesbian studies became more prominent, there wasn't nearly as much work being done on gender roles as they apply to heterosexual males. Most of the work I've seen that's really applicable to the problem is being done either (to a lesser degree) in studying masculinity and femininity in the context of butch and femme lesbian roles, or from a trans* point of view. Some trans men, in particular, claim the right to be considered men and still be feminine or androgynous, and they can approach the topic without the stigma attached to either gay or straight cis men when they broach the topic outside of narrow venues like drag performances. Hopefully this will be the precursor to constructively reconsidering the entire topic and a general fight against that stigma.

I don't see this changing right away in any fundamental manner but you are correct that there are slow positive steps in the right direction.

See, men also may find support in some quarters, and ridicule or worse in other quarters. One of those quarters they may encounter "or worse" happens to be workplace environments where overzealous HR departments can end careers.

A claim of victim hood by a male violates this norm. There is little established protocol for this situation and is basically taboo. So even outside of a politically fragile context there's already a power differential as far as talking frankly or seeking empathy goes.

This isn't an example of privilege, it's patronization - it was a male-dominated society who declared that women weren't fit/suitable for war (and other occupations) and therefore should be protected from the horrors of war. Until recently it was men who wanted to keep women out of combat roles (now the split is about even, with the majority supporting combat roles for women).

B)The Equal Rights Amendment which would have required drafting for both sexes was defeated by a woman organization(STOP ERA).

Actually, there are quite a lot of people who seek true equity. Google "kyriarchy" and you'll find a lot of these discussions.

However, the reason you won't find many articles like you want is that a) the historical gender bias is undeniably pro-male, so people have focused on the bigger problem and b) the argument has become stigmatized because every time people try to talk about anti-female sexism some guy immediately jumps up and cries "what about meeeeeeeee". Not because his lot is particularly rough, but because he as the privileged party is used to thinking about his experience first, and ignoring that of the non-dominant group.

So if you want people to start noticing the way the current system of gender biases also hurts men, then a) don't hijack discussions of male privilege, and b) help solve the giant historical inequity.

>the historical gender bias is undeniably pro-male, so people have focused on the bigger problem

You're comparing apples to oranges. What's worse having a 5-15% risk of sexual assault or having 15% of your gender die like Soviet men in WWII? Trying to turn this into a pissing contest isn't a logically valid way to approach this topic. Both genders face hazards that are qualitatively unrankable.

This is a common pattern when someone "disrupts" a discussion of women's issues. Sometimes it's a discussion of women being raped as the only kind of rape. Maybe someone's arguing that domestic violence is something that happens to women because they're women - of course, then all the many male victims couldn't exist.

In fact, almost every time I've seen someone tell a man that they're disrupting a discussion of women's problems by talking about men, they were making a statement about what men experience in the first place and using it to shut out contradictory evidence.

As far as I can tell, this is just the same disruptive tactic as I've called out elsewhere.

There can be some things in society that do not appeal to women. There are certainly things that women find appealing that most men are not at all interested in.

I always kind of thought that young geeks used comic books to escape their reality. This is just a guess, but could it be that some geeks are awkward around women because females weren't nice to them during their adolescence? Sex hormone levels peak at around age 17 for men, senior year of high school. Is it really that unexpected that men that get no positive female attention during their sexual prime don't embrace women exploring geek hobbies?

Perhaps the focus of all these stupid gender articles should be on encouraging young women not to alienate a large subset of people. I would be willing to bet that if geeks were more accepted at an earlier age, many of the perceived gender issues would disappear.

Sure. My girlfriend can randomly go up to random people and play with their babies, while my doing so is likely to get me arrested. A mother has the presumption of getting custody in a contentious divorce, etc. Nobody would take a sexual harassment complaint against a woman seriously.

But you know what? In pure economic terms, I'd take male privilege over female privilege any day of the week. I can't remember the last time a woman was sexually harassing me but nobody at work would take me seriously. Negotiating salaries, gunning for promotions, making trade-offs between career and family--these are things with huge economic impact that affects everyone and women have a disadvantage in these areas because of perceptions.

In pure economic terms, what price do we put on "forced to feel like a moral leper"?

Yes:

http://www.the-niceguy.com/articles/Checklist.html

http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2008/06/08/female-privil...

http://mensresistance.wordpress.com/female-privilege-checkli...

(Note: I don't necessarily agree with or endorse everything on every one of these lists, but the point is very much made.)

It appears that I really never think about gender bias.

Murder is an incredibly rare occurrence in most countries and social environments. On the other hand, women are a huge majority among rape victims, and this is not exceptional: 5 to 10% of all women are sexually abused at some point (depends upon the country, again).

> Perhaps the focus of all these stupid gender articles should be on encouraging young women not to alienate a large subset of people.

Perhaps the focus of people like you should be to think about your attitude, just like this article conveniently talked about? Your arrogance and close-mindedness are astounding. Oh, before you ask, I'm a white, straight male too.

Rape makes up only 6% of violent crimes, and men are much more commonly the victim of violent crimes than women. In fact, excluding rape, as the severity of violent crimes increase, so does the probability that the victim is male.

And couldn't I also say that, while rape is relatively rare, men are over twice as likely to be the victim of severe physical domestic violence (the ratio of murder to rape and rape to severe physical domestic violence is the same). Or that perpetration rates for physical violence as a whole are significantly higher for women than men.

I personally think that these are all bogus arguments because they trivialize rape. At the same time, trivializing murder is no better than trivializing rape, unless you believe that men are expendable.

Perhaps the focus of people like you should be to think about your attitude, just like this article conveniently talked about? Your arrogance and close-mindedness are astounding. Oh, before you ask, I'm a white, straight male too.

Nice ad hominem.

Most victims of violent crimes are known offenders or their relatives. An overwhelming majority of offenders are male (see the proportion of male vs female in jail).

> Nice ad hominem.

It's ad personam if you want. You go straight to the usual tactic of pretending that it's the victim fault. Take some time to imagine yourself in the situations represented before being a judgemental jerk.

See this post for a good explanation: http://hugoboy.typepad.com/hugo_schwyzer/2004/09/guilty_unti...

First of all, the obvious point is that women's intuition, while not entirely the stuff of myth, is not so powerful that it can automatically separate "good guys" from the bad. No woman can walk down the street and as she passes a man, know with certainty that he isn't a threat. Given the high incidence of rape and assault and harassment and other forms of mistreatment, a woman would be a fool to leave herself continually vulnerable. The old adage "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" seems to apply here. When a simple smile is so frequently misunderstood and construed as a sexual invitation, American women generally do have to operate on the assumption that men are guilty until proven innocent.

Is this really an acceptable story that somehow illustrates your point? It seems like it could trivially be rewritten into something incredibly racist. If that is the case, than isn't this actually very sexist. But really, why would anyone expect random women to smile at them?

And how are women the victim? Because some products are not designed for them, but are instead designed to appeal to teenage boys? What if I feel bad because the quizzes in Seventeen magazine do not appeal to me, and instead give teenage girls ideas about the way men should be that I disagree with. Do you think this quiz (http://www.seventeen.com/fun/quizzes/celebrity/summer-movie-...) is sexist?

No one is even going to listen to a man complaining he has been raped, so I very highly doubt the validity of those numbers.

The wage gap is also curious because these days it results mostly from men and women doing different kinds of work, and campaigners demand totally different solutions for high-status jobs than they do for low-status ones. For stuff like tech industry startups there are lots of campaigns to include more women. On the other hand, if you take street-side trash collection (another job which is also largely male) instead there are campaigns for women to get the same pay for doing "equivalent" jobs like office cleaning.

Now, trash collection of this kind is an awful lot more dangerous than cleaning offices and this is both why it's better paid and why there are few women doing it; for various reasons people get more upset about a woman dying in a horrific industrial accident than a man so employers have an incentive to discourage women, and there's not so much social pressure for them to get dangerous jobs. Equality would require making people care more about men dying or less about women, both of which benefit men rather than women, so feminists go for the unequal option of paying women for doing less than men instead.

Edit: For example, if you play video games take a close look at the gender of the mooks that you kill en-masse. That's just one of the subtle messages saying that men are disposable in mass media.

If 90% of the males in a population die, it takes 1 generation to recover. If 90% of the females in a population die, it takes 5 generations to recover. Meanwhile, they are easy pickings for other competing populations.

Changing thinking requires someone to show that things CAN be different. Only then can the majority follower population even consider the possibility. This is why the constant complaints about how "things aren't the way they should be" result in no action, and we end up right back here with accusations flying and nothing getting done.

Most privilege comes from unconscious bias. Pointing out unfair situations and calling out biases drive hidden assumptions and reactions into the open, allowing us to consider and change them.

Of course, a lot of people would like to go right back to sleep: change is uncomfortable, especially when you realize that the change will remove an advantage you have.

Also, women are actively punished for asking for more money, or being aggressive: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07... That has nothing to do with dangerous jobs, and that's a legitimate form of sexism that feminism has every right to address.

Do you have any figures for the "men are paid more because they take on more dangerous jobs" assertion? From the AMAs I've seen on Reddit, trash collection is not dangerous--just a low-status job, albeit a high-paying one with short hours.

Also, yes, I play vido games. I have not played Assassin's Creed, but my understanding is that historically, monks were men, so if you're going to assassinate the pope, he's going to be surrounded by men. I have, though, slaughtered a lot of male and female citizens of Vault City while playing Fallout 2.

The vibe I'm getting from your post is, "feminism isn't doing enough to eliminate the negative implications of gender roles for men, and it is therefore invalid." Or maybe it's something more like, "hey, men suffer a lot too, why are you spending so much time paying attention to women?" In which case, the simple reply is that while gender roles can negatively affect both genders, women seem to have the worst of it.

I mean, black men have this reputation for having gigantic dicks and being able to dance, which reflects badly on white men in comparison, but you'd have to be insane to prefer being a black man to a white man in America. I hear Eminem has a hard time being a white rapper in a black man's world, but it would be silly to feel sorry for him. And in a similar vein, I don't feel nearly as sorry for men as I do for women.

A quick Google turns up information like this: http://earth911.com/news/2011/08/26/dangerous-jobs-garbage-c...

It involves working amongst traffic on a regular basis and operating dangerous machinery with very little in the way of safeguards, so the danger level shouldn't be terribly surprising.

Unless mommy divorces them and takes their kids away, at which point they can have their career, and they can pay for the kids, but they can't actually spend much time with them.

Most feminists don't focus explicitly on making it easier for men to intrude into traditional female-dominated activities like childrearing, but hopefully, as it becomes more normal for women to enter the same spheres as men, the reverse will hold true too, and the courts will be more likely to see men as equal and not inferior caregivers. So even if feminism isn't explicitly about helping men, I think it's still on their side.

That's false.

A) It is a woman's choice to have children.

B) The "Best Interest Clause" creates a power differential over the children. If she wants to work full-time she can, If she wants to be a house-wife she can. So what choice does the father have in this situation? If this works its way to family court the father will be legally bound to the "provider" role due to the "best interest".

C) Women in general are still seeking out men that have the potential to be providers. They have the choice to seek out men that will be house-dads and that is not happening.

Women by law and cultural norms have the choice to balance home life and career in ways that a man does not.

All the evidence points that women in general seek out a balanced lifestyle in ways that men do not have the freedom to.

However, if you would like the elimination of sexism to continue and solve some of the things that bug you personally, I think your tactics are poor. Right now you look like yet another guy clinging on to his male privilege. If you are interested in eliminating sexism on both sides, then I think you'll get better results jumping on the bandwagon of the last century or so.

Not even if it involves an underage rape victim paying child support to his rapist to raise their kids. Not even if it means keeping the father of some kids away from them long enough for their mother to brutally murder them, ignoring the warning signs she was showing and just choosing the "safe" option of assuming their father is dangerous based on his gender. (Not hypothetical examples by the way.)

The historical bias against women is giant and undeniable. Feminists, male and female, have had to fight vigorously to make it as far as we have. Women still face substantial sexism today.

It is also true that men face some sexism. One could argue (very wrongly in my opinion) that we have finally reached the point where harm due to sexism is about the same for men and women.

Regardless, if you leap into a discussion of anti-female sexism and male privilege by only talking about how gosh darned hard it is for men, you look like an ass. By not acknowledging the many decades of struggle, or all of the existing anti-female behavior, you give the impression that you don't care about it. People will assume you're of a piece with the people who've been acting similarly for the last 150 years.

That's entirely alienating, so you're insane to think that the people who have been busily fighting for equality for most of their lives are going to be moved by comments like yours.

A woman can either have just kids, or just a career.

A man can have just kids, just a career, or a career and kids.

Who has more options?

Your assumption that women "choose" to always be the stay at home parent is questionable, too. As if the husband, and society in general, have no expectations that women are the best caretakers and should therefore be the ones to stay at home, and no additional influence on her choice.

Men don't earn more money for being men (not any more at least, if it was ever true):

> according to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group. http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00....

Which means that this is definitely not evidence that evidence that women get paid the same as men when all else is equal.

http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20...

http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_detai...

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E6DD1531F...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190345450457648...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVvaQ0xxni8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwogDPh-Sow

They say that they couldn't account for 24-35% of the wage gap. And the portions they could account for were due to:

* more women work part time * more women take time off to care for children and the elderly * women value 'family-friendly' workplaces more

The first one isn't really an explanation; it says nothing about why that's the case. The second is at least partly due to societal policing of gender roles: talk to any couple where the guy stays home with the kid and you'll hear both partners complain about how they're treated. The man is unmanly; the woman, unwomanly. It's also self-reinforcing; the wage gap means that guys make more, so there's economic incentive for women to stay home. The third could be similar: ceteris paribus, it should be parents who value family-friendly workplaces more.

So I think this study confirms that there is a salary gap, and that a good portion of the reason for it is exactly what Zasz says: women "being expected to give up your career to be the one to raise the kids".

The study also suggests that what gap-closing has happened is due to changes in human capital. That is, women being more educated and more experienced in jobs typically held by men. That demonstrates to me that sexism was indeed a major problem in the past, that historical "women are just different" arguments are bunk, and that there's no particular reason to think that December 2011 is the month where we've solved the problems that come from millennia of oppression of women.

Female genital mutilation happens as well in some countries. And the majority of cases it's much worse than the male equivalent. FGM often results in all or part of the clitoris being removed. That would be like all or part of the glans of a penis being removed. (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_genital_mutilation#Class...)

(As an aside, I think male genital mutilation happens more in the USA. Men in Europe of christian ethnicity don't usually get this done. Tis an odd the cultural practices)

As a circumcised male, I generally believe that FGM is much worse than the male equivalent, even though it is much more rare in developed countries. At the same time, I wonder if the facts that most circumcised men have no basis for comparison, and that the procedure is so common, colors that bias. The foreskin has over 20,000 nerve endings whereas the clitoris only has about 8,000. Men that have undergone foreskin restorations sometimes report vastly improved sexual sensitivity and much more intense orgasms.

As I said, I believe the female variant is much worse, but it does cause me to pause and consider that this may be caused by female privilege. I cannot help but wonder if my belief that there would be outrage if roles were reversed is valid.

Female genital mutilation is pretty explicitly about controlling female sexuality in a way that makes women more obedient male property.

Circumcision, though, seems to be a religious thing from a very patriarchal culture. The modern justification for which is hygiene and/or health, and sometimes it's definitely medically necessary.

So I'm not seeing how circumcision is evidence of a gender power differential.

It doesn't result from female privilege, it is considered a non-issue and discounted because of female privilege. There is plenty of evidence to support that, including the fact that FGM is considered a larger issue although it has effectively been eliminated in the west.

Consider this, if a father wanted to have his newborn daughters' clitoral hood removed because he didn't like the way it looked, he would be rightly ignored. If a mother wants to have her newborn son circumcised because she doesn't like the way uncut penises look, he will be circumcised. No matter how you want to slice it, both are genital mutilations. The difference is, one is ridiculous, uncommon and illegal, and the other is ridiculous, common, legal, and widespread.

Female genital mutilation is pretty explicitly about controlling female sexuality in a way that makes women more obedient male property.

It does happen almost exclusively in Islamic areas, and some religious leaders do mandate it, so I'm not too sure about that. In any case, religion is a poor reason to justify mutilation. Circumcision was performed on male slaves to make them "less likely to rape white women", so I also am not too sure about the underlying reason for male circumcision. Both practices seem kind of barbaric.

Circumcision, though, seems to be a religious thing from a very patriarchal culture. The modern justification for which is hygiene and/or health, and sometimes it's definitely medically necessary.

The hygiene and health arguments are bogus, and have been proven to be bogus. If women were having parts of sexual organs removed for "hygiene" reasons, it would not continue for a moment.

So I'm not seeing how circumcision is evidence of a gender power differential.

The fact that nobody questions male circumcision which is forced on over 50% of males born in the United States today, while FGM, which is much less widespread largely occurring only in Africa and the middle east, garners considerable attention provides evidence of a power differential. It clearly shows that male health issues are undervalued, even in relation to obscure female issues, reinforcing the matriarchal view that men are inherently less valuable than women.

[...] it is considered a non-issue and discounted because of female privilege.

That is a statement you have not supported. For it to be true, there'd have to be some evidence that women generally were forcing it on men. Historically women couldn't force anything on men, and the people performing the operation were mohels and doctors, almost exclusively male.

I guess it's possible that there could have been some recent reversal in power, with women picking up pressure for circumcision and men slacking off. But I've seen not the slightest bit of evidence for this.

Given that, this seems like a typical "but what about meeeee" male response to a discussion of male privilege.

So in order for something to be privilege it must be forced on the other gender? So lets examine some items on the male privilege checklist against that standard:

2. I can be confident that my co-workers won’t think I got my job because of my sex – even though that might be true.

Did men force women to accept affirmative action which in some cases does give women jobs that they would have not gotten if they were competing on merits alone? Take a look at this, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/science/17comp.html?_r=1&#.... It appears that Carnegie Mellon lowered entrance standards to admit more women into the computer science program. Is a man that isn't admitted obligated to believe that sex has nothing to do with it? Why is it acceptable to reject more-qualified men in favor of less-qualified women? That does not seem very fair.

9. If I choose not to have children, my masculinity will not be called into question.

And men force this onto women? It's not other women? Is it not acceptable to point out that women who don't have children will be the first women in a line of women going back to the dawn of humanity not to have children, or that only about 40% of men ever procreated, versus a significantly hire percentage of women.

10. If I have children but do not provide primary care for them, my masculinity will not be called into question.

Men force women to call other women's femininity into question?

14. My elected representatives are mostly people of my own sex. The more prestigious and powerful the elected position, the more this is true.

Men force women to vote for men, and to not run for office? Women are the majority of the population. Is there some invisible man-field that is preventing them from voting every single elected man out of office within the next 6 years?

15. When I ask to see “the person in charge,” odds are I will face a person of my own sex. The higher-up in the organization the person is, the surer I can be.

Men force women not to form organizations too?

17. As a child, I could choose from an almost infinite variety of children’s media featuring positive, active, non-stereotyped heroes of my own sex. I never had to look for it; male protagonists were (and are) the default.

Men must also force women not to produce their own media.

18. As a child, chances are I got more teacher attention than girls who raised their hands just as often.

The vast majority of teachers are female. Please explain how men force female teachers to pay more attention to male students.

24. Even if I sleep with a lot of women, there is no chance that I will be seriously labeled a “slut,” nor is there any male counterpart to “slut-bashing.”

Men force women to tolerate promiscuous men?

27. The grooming regimen expected of me is relatively cheap and consumes little time.

This is fantastic. I had no idea that I was partly responsible for making women spend a lot of time and money grooming.

31. I can ask for legal protection from violence that happens mostly to men without being seen as a selfish special interest, since that kind of violence is called “crime” and is a general social concern. (Violence that happens mostly to women is usually called “domestic violence” or “acquaintance rape,” and is seen as a special interest issue.)

Isn't this phenomenon actually a female creation? All that stuff was illegal, then feminists demanded extra-special protection, so a whole slew of legislation was passed. Now that protection is because of male privilege?

33. My ability to make important decisions and my capability in general will never be questioned depending on what time of the month it is.

Wow, men force women to have periods. I had no idea. I'll try harder to not do that. Or did men just make up PMS to have an excuse to denigrate women? That doesn't seem as likely since it's been scientifically proven to exist.

36. Every major religion in the world is led primarily by people of my own sex. Even God, in most major religions, is pictured as male.

Men also forced women to be the only gender capable of producing children?

41. Assuming I am heterosexual, magazines, billboards, television, movies, pornography, and virtually all of media is filled with images of scantily-clad women intended to appeal to me sexually. Such images of men exist, but are rarer.

Did those evil men also force women to have less response to visual sexual stimuli? Could that be why romance novels exist, and men don't read them.

43. If I am heterosexual, it’s incredibly unlikely that I’ll ever be beaten up by a spouse or lover.

What a farce. Women commit the majority of domestic violence, and are more likely to use weapons. Twice as many men as women are the victims of severe physical domestic abuse.

It seems that most of the list is an artifact of feminism itself, or has very clear biological or evolutionary origins. Exactly the same could be said of the female privilege associated with not being expendable.

You obviously aren't trying to have an actual discussion here. This confirms my suspicion that you are not interested in actually reducing sexism (anti-female and anti-male alike) and instead are just derailing the discussion. I'm done.

Sure. And if you do that in the spirit of saying, "gosh, these are also nice problems to fix one day", that's great. But mostly people bring that argument up in the sense of "Gosh, your life is not 100% shitty, so I'm going to go back to pretending everything is fair now."

This argument is so common that it appears on the "Derailing for Dummies" guide: http://derailingfordummies.com/#butbut (Note that they include as an example your false equivalence between circumcision and female genital mutilation.)

Also, that there are reasons somebody might be a sexist jerk does not excuse them being sexist jerks. Suppose there's a correlation between sex hormone levels, lack of female attention, and rape. Do we say, "Gosh, that's not unexpected" and tell women to be more accommodating?

Honestly, your attempt at victim-blaming here is kinda repulsive. There's no particular reason to believe that the sort of sexism described by the article is experienced by the people who failed to be nice enough to (by which you mean: have sex with) the guys who are being jerks. And if they were the same people, then I'm still not seeing any justification: your theory appears to be that guys are somehow entitled to sexual attention just for being guys. Which, hello, is exactly the sort of sexism driven by male privilege the article's author is calling out.

This is really incredible, "Because the removal of a tiny flap of skin is entirely comparable to the crippling mutilation many young girls are subjected to.." Seriously? Why is the removal of a "tiny flap of skin" from a vulva a crippling mutilation, whereas the removal of the foreskin, which has over 2.5 times the number of nerve endings, no big deal? And also, it's not a false equivalency since I did not bring up FGM since it is irrelevant to a discussion that is not centered around third world issues, whereas male genital mutilation is, seeing as how over 50% of males born in the US are still altered. Or are you actually suggesting that any discussion of male genital mutilation is irrelevant because males are not important, or at least not as important as females? Or perhaps that female genital mutilation is so much more important that it is unthinkable to address male genital mutilation at all so long as it is happening to a female somewhere on earth?

And I actually fully believe that the female variant is worse (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3364906), but this language is incredibly inflammatory.

Note that you entirely ignore my actual point, which is that you have taken a discussion about sexism and male privilege and tried to make it about you and your concerns as a guy. And that your behavior is common enough that somebody took the time to include it in a guide of lame responses to discussions of privilege. Do you see what's wrong with that?

Comparing that to male circumcision is an insult to men.

I don't subscribe to the view that bringing female privilege into a discussion about male privilege is somehow off limits. It's the reverse side of the same coin. If women are victims because of male privilege, than men are victims because of female privilege. You cannot examine one without the other. I too can publish a guide saying that anyone that makes obvious arguments against my reasoning is "lame", but that does not make it so. It is simply a tactic to steer the discussion and prevent the other side from ever being explored.

Refusing to examine both sides of an issue is narrow. Shouting down anyone that dares examine the flip side with soft-minded reasoning is pathetic. It is evidence of a weak argument, which is characteristic of feminism. This faulty logic is how we have arrived at female-only health clubs while women were suing and legislating male-only golf clubs out of existence.

For all your bold talk of "both sides of the coin" I haven't seen you give the slightest hint that you even admit the problem or have considered its nature, let alone devoted any energy to solving things.

In the context of sexy females in comic books. Give me a fucking break.

Which is something feminists have had to deal with for more than a hundred years, so it's not surprising they react poorly to it.

If this is the topic feminism must now address, the war is over. It's time to pack up your shit and go home. Feminists are starting to look like Genghis Khan, riding around slaughtering everything. Especially when there are massive actual gender inequalities caused by feminism like the huge advantages that women have in the legal system, the fact that women are given preferential treatment in college admission and hiring processes, and the fact that women earn more money for equal work. Or for example, that female owned businesses are given price preferences, or that women now vastly outnumber men as college graduates, while dominating the education system that is failing men.

For all your bold talk of "both sides of the coin" I haven't seen you give the slightest hint that you even admit the problem or have considered its nature, let alone devoted any energy to solving things.

That's probably because I don't see this as a problem. It is pathetic. I have never read a comic book and have never been in a comic book store, but I see no fundamental difference between comic books and magazines for teenage girls. They are both full of fantasy-land bullshit designed to appeal to young people going through puberty.

What can I do to solve things? I don't know. Perhaps start fighting for men to be able to have financial abortions before a child is born. Or maybe make it a felony to commit paternity fraud. But probably just start calling feminists on their bullshit when they start pontificating.

If you feel there is a market for female-centric comic books, why not develop them, tap a huge market, make something women want, and get rich? If you won't do that, is it because we both know there is not a market for it?

For example:

"41. Assuming I am heterosexual, magazines, billboards, television, movies, pornography, and virtually all of media is filled with images of scantily-clad women intended to appeal to me sexually. Such images of men exist, but are rarer."

The last issue of Playboy that I have seen had more topless men in it than women. Perhaps the author is better at visually tuning out advertisements than I. Of course the same is true of the last... dozen? action movies I've seen.

And then there are the issues of reproductive/child rearing rights, which are currently heavily skewed against men. A woman who has unprotected sex (or for that matter sometimes protected sex) is in a much better position than a man who does the same. In fact, in nearly anything concerning children in the slightest men are decidedly discriminated against.

What is my point here? Real life is more complicated than a list or two might suggest.

"22. If I’m careless with my driving it won’t be attributed to my sex."

Supposing you are caught speeding down the freeway at 110mph on Saturday night. What sex is everyone going to expect you to be?

"25. I do not have to worry about the message my wardrobe sends about my sexual availability."

Compare:

  A woman wearing pants.
  A man wearing a dress.

There are pantsuits designed for women, but no dresses designed for men. Even further than that - a dress is very specific to female anatomy in a way that a suit isn't, to male anatomy.

The real issue, however, is that a woman wearing a suit is perceived in a certain way (as aggressive and, funnily enough, "only imitating men") while a man wearing a dress happens to be an often frequented motif in comedy.

Finally, a man can wear a dress specifically to underline just how male he is, because "even a dress can't take that manliness away".

I was not attempting to be funny at all.

^And anybody wearing a "suit"-anything is just a stiff. The people I consider my peers don't do that either at work or casually.

No. You must be misunderstanding my initial argument if you think that it does. You are definitely missing my point if you don't think that I understand that about jeans...

Apologies for the imprecise terminology.

Edit: I have owned up to that. I did not previously consider having cleavage to be an essential requirement for wearing a dress (and for the record, I think such an objection is absurd). However, my point above remains. Were you actually attempting to address the point I was clearly trying to make then a skirt would have been obvious. This discussion is not about individual articles of clothing but rather about gender specific clothing in general. You were narrowing your focus because you were not interested in having a real conversation.

You were being overly pedantic and could not see the forest for the trees. You have to own up to that.

Your downvotes and my upvotes should demonstrate to you that I was not expecting anything unreasonable from you. My point was clear to numerous other people.

Regardless, if you are willing to concede my point when I substitute 'dress' with 'skirt', then you have conceded my point entirely. The specifics of my illustrational example matter little. I think we are done here.

I think this comes down to two problems with your wording (and having English as my second language, I had to rely on taking your words by their default meaning): One, the use of dress vs. skirt that we have cleared up and Two, the difference between "message about sexual availability" and "have their sexuality judged".

That's why I initially thought you were making a joke (I found it quite funny, actually) - the difference between those two is simply too great to be making a point. Women in a skirt are judged for whether or not that dresses them to be attractive. Men in a skirt are judged for whether or not they are men at all. A man wearing pants may be judged for how attractive the specific pair of pants makes him, but a woman in pants is judged for that AND for how much it makes her appear to try to be "more manly".

To sum this up - I think you were wrong implying that women are not being judged, sexually, in pants. Furthermore, the man in a skirt point doesn't hold that much value and has only little to do with that and with what you were originally commenting on - the external judgment of sexual availability.

P.S.: As for the absurdity of a cleavage being essential for a dress - it may be debatable to what extend that point really carries, but it is a fact that a dress (again, very specific, check the wiki) is specifically cut to the female anatomy, allowing for unique features of a woman (narrower hips, cleavage). The same is simply not true for a pair of pants.

That seems of a piece with your theory that the point of topless men in Playboy ads and action movies is to appeal sexually to women.

"A woman who has unprotected sex (or for that matter sometimes protected sex) is in a much better position than a man who does the same."

Men who have unprotected sex are expected to pay a state-determined minimum tax essentially to provide for their children. For men, children are abstracted into a financial problem. A woman who has an unexpected child has much more than finances to worry about.

I remember a discussion on HN where many of the comments have said that the best way to bring women into the industry is to bring women into the industry. Quite true, I definitely agree to it. And so does most of the companies - they all try to maintain a gender ratio that is not too skewed to make the firm look sexist. But, when one tries to bring a category X into a field where X is rare, to bring them in - it results in lowering expectations from them. I just had my placement season on campus (I am a final year student) - the difference was visible. Of course, that makes me look sexist (I possibly am) when I say that the expectations from male students to get a job was higher than female students. Female students are, at least now, rewarded for being rare and because women are required to be brought in the industry. Unfortunately, there are pros and cons to this approach. These steps result in unavoidable animosity because of scarcity of resources - in this case, a lucrative job. My point is that you cannot have the best of both worlds: any corrective action has consequences.

The result is that unless you are absolutely passionate about engineering, the reasonable thing to do is to take a pass on engineering, and go for one of the many other rewarding careers available to you.

If you want to bring women into the industry, you need to make the industry appealing to women. With current discriminatory practices that is just not the case, and until that changes, there won't even be an opportunity to recruit women, because those with anything less than a burning passion for the career are going to look elsewhere.

[1] http://www.glassdoor.com/blog/engineering-pay-gap-glassdoor-... [2] http://www.studyofwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/NSF_Wo... page 27

There has been a lot of efforts to bring women at par with men in terms of returns they gain. And there have also been efforts that aim at increasing their count. Both, are required. You are pointed out at the first category of efforts and I am pointed out the consequences of affirmation actions that belong to the second category. There are two forces at play here - (1) Discriminatory, against women. (2) Affirmative action, for women. Now the second point in the privileges is because affirmative actions have a very obvious but mean side effect. It leads to undermining the potential of those who receive benefit from them because affirmative action is done at an expense of some people who otherwise deserved the benefit if standard parameters of judgement are used. This leads to unrest and hence my refute to privilege (2). While my refute to privilege (1) was the overwhelming of discriminatory forces by affirmative actions in my experience from my point of view. This is as biased an opinion as possible, hence you can choose to ignore it. But if many seem to face a similar experience, that would mean that affirmative action needs to be done at a lower level or be stopped for it has served its purpose.

Sorry to be [citation needed]-guy, but a quick Googling tells me that this is not true. In both medicine (http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2011/02/gender-gap-physician-sal...) and law (http://www.theglasshammer.com/news/2009/02/05/the-wage-gap-p...) the pay gap is substantial, and a quick look says that they're both worse than tech.

From that first link:

Without these adjustments and just looking at a Population Survey from 2007, the New York Times reported that women doctors earn a whopping 40% less than their male colleagues. That is worse than every other profession the Times looked at. Yes, even lawyers.

I don't think wage gap is what's pushing people away...the worst case difference in tech is around 10%, which is not particularly bad compared to most fields, and for recent grads the gap is much smaller, around 4%.

I'd probably look to absolute value of wages instead for an explanation, though that wouldn't explain a difference between men and women's preferences.

If you want to bring women into the industry, you need to make the industry appealing to women. With current discriminatory practices that is just not the case, and until that changes, there won't even be an opportunity to recruit women, because those with anything less than a burning passion for the career are going to look elsewhere.

While I don't really think that discriminatory practices in tech are any worse than the general average across fields (I at least think that's an accusation that requires substantial proof), you bring up an interesting point. Most tech people that I've worked with do have a burning passion for it, and to be good in this field, it's pretty much a prerequisite.

I wonder what is blocking more women from feeling as passionate about tech as men do, especially since such passion usually emerges very early, well before one has opportunity to interact with anyone in the field (this is why I'm always skeptical of claims that teachers, professors, bosses, etc. have anything to do with this, I was programming on my own almost a decade before I ever interacted meaningfully with other programmers). Do girls spend less time with computers at the critical young age, perhaps? I wonder if perhaps the difference could have to do with time spent playing video games, at least for the current generation...

I haven't found much discrimination, but I have noticed that any boss considering to hire me after an internship has asked if/when I plan to have children. This has happened twice, and is the only situation anyone has asked me that question in college. It really is an odd question to ask an 18 year old.

"I wonder what is blocking more women from feeling as passionate about tech as men do, especially since such passion usually emerges very early. Do girls spend less time with computers at the critical young age, perhaps?"

Why does someone have to be interested in computers/video games at a young age to pursue software development? I think the attitude that if you didn't play with computers at a young age you can't do tech is rather egotistical. Some girls I met in college didn't pursue an interest in tech until college and by the end of college you wouldn't know the difference.

Isn't that actually illegal to ask as part of a job interview? Assuming you're in the US, I'm pretty sure questions relating to children, child care, or marital status are forbidden, though I'm not an expert so I could be wrong.

In any case, even if technically legal, it's not an acceptable practice, and anyone that interviews job candidates should damn well know this.

Why does someone have to be interested in computers/video games at a young age to pursue software development?

They don't, by any means. I'm merely wondering if perhaps that might be the point where the gender gap starts. It's certainly in full effect by the time people hit high school, so it's got to start pretty early, and it occurs to me that video games are probably the main difference in the way boys and girls interact with computers before that age.

I think the attitude that if you didn't play with computers at a young age you can't do tech is rather egotistical.

I would never support such a statement, I don't at all believe that it's necessary, merely that it's fairly common. Going in to tech requires a great investment of time and effort into difficult coursework, and it's a pretty huge commitment that people tend not to be willing to make unless they're already positive that they like it.

I was never asked about children during a formal job interview, but instead as an intern during a conversation about whether to hire me on a more permanent basis.

I don't know that I'm so sure. Most other professional industries were, at one point, just as lopsidedly male as tech is these days. But as society lifted the more explicit barriers and it became common for women to pursue professional careers, they naturally flowed into all sorts of different roles (the "Jackie Robinson effect", so to speak).

That they haven't showed up in tech (and math and science, though there are slightly more there) means there's something else going on, and I just can't buy the theory that women have stayed away because there are few women, since that has proved to be a relatively small deterrent in so many other cases.

I'm similarly skeptical that sexism in the industry is responsible for this, because it's just as rampant, if not moreso, in most industries (I could tell you some really unbelievable stories about the finance industry, yeegads...). That's not to say that because "everybody else does it" it's right or okay in tech; rather, it's to say that unless there's some clear reason why sexism in tech should push women away more forcefully than it does in other fields (or a shred of non-anecdotal evidence that sexism is more prevalent in tech, which I have never seen, and which I'm skeptical about because if it was true it seems fair to assume that we'd see a greater pay gap than in most other fields, which is not the case), it's hard for me to accept it as the main reason women aren't showing up to the party. And if it's not the real reason that women aren't getting into the field, then we might be missing the actual cause, which perhaps we could do something about.

Or maybe we can't. But we should at least be trying to figure out some better way to find out what's actually going on, rather than just arguing from anecdote and theory (I'm guilty of this, as well).

I love #30: I can be loud with no fear of being called a shrew. I can be aggressive with no fear of being called a bitch.

I've found that I can entertain a much broader range of personality tones than my female friends. You have to be an order of magnitude more aggressive to be an "asshole" than you do to be a "bitch." "Pensive" is a word you might use for a man, "moody" for the equivalent in a woman. I've never had to fight a socialized urge to defer to anyone in conversation, and certainly not to someone of the opposite sex.

Men might be able to be aggressive with no fear of being called a bitch, but that's minor compared to the other consequences that face by being aggressive.

> You have to be an order of magnitude more aggressive to be an "asshole" than you do to be a "bitch."

One caveat being that for men, balancing aggression and restraint tend to be learned early and if there's no reason to challenge the hierarchy there's no reason to be aggressive. Women, on the other hand, who are thrust into male-dominated environments without understanding the rules may fail in a variety of ways. They may fail to use appropriate body language. Their voice might betray too much emotional investment in the outcome. They may persist on unwinnable points where men would back down (iow fail to choose their battles effectively).

If you've dealt with successfully aggressive women, they are rarely called "bitch" unless they are truly hostile or by angry people who have lost control and pick the first insult that comes to mind (see the movie 'Crash' for some excellent examples of this phenomenon as it applies to racism). Typically you will notice that these women are comfortable adopting male body language, probably have a deep and confident voice, and are far more emotionally restrained than average women. They are typically physically intimidating (a saleswoman or CEO). They are capable of aggression and assertiveness without being called a bitch because they have learned to do it in a masculine way.

What women can't do is be aggressive without sacrificing femininity.

> I can be loud with no fear of being called a shrew

Women who are loud in the way that men are loud are never called shrews. They are maybe called unfeminine but usually it's just something like "she's type A." Women who are loud in the sense that they complain constantly about small things and provoke arguments which they try to win by shrieking as loud as possible is the definition of a shrew. I think you'll find that's far rarer for men to behave that way.

I think when we look at these things something more objective and less judgemental (like anthropology) is a better starting point. I.e. it is better to criticize from a standpoint of functional understanding than from functional ignorance (seeing only portions of a dynamic that bother one and not seeing how something benefits the target group).

As far as the checklist, it's fairly rife with definitional problems (sexual harassment has a very narrow legal definition for example but I doubt that's what the blogger means, and even terms like rape are more and more frequently subject of definitional problems, as jurisdictions pass laws saying that drunken sex is rape regardless of how the intoxicant was administered).

Moreover I think one could turn this on it;s head and come up with a female privilege checklist too as unpopular as that would be (particularly important in areas of parenting, child support, and the like).

I think there's a subtle point being lost here. Female characters designed to appeal to women look different than female characters designed to appeal to men. For example, if the characters are designed to appeal to women, you can pretty much guarantee that they will not look like they have had basketballs implanted in their chests.

Likewise, massive male characters built out of a mountain of muscle are designed primarily to appeal to male power fantasies. Relatively few women will find this especially attractive, and male characters designed to appeal to more (straight) women would be built more along the lines of Ryan Gosling or Ryan Reynolds.

I am not a woman.

I live in Southern California.

I see quite a large population of women here who choose to implant what appear to be basketballs in their own chests.

One could debate whether or not this is due to a negative society influence or whatever other factors, but clearly there is a segment of the female population that embraces the "basketballs on the chest" look. Enough so that they choose to participate in the look personally.

So be careful speaking for an entire group, especially when it is as big of a group as "women".