[quote FMSucks]@pigsDOfly - obviously “they’re lost (poor babies)” is being sarcastic! I thought the “poor babies” in brackets would have been enough for people to realise I wasn’t empathising with men!
Yes I’m 46 so no spring chicken and it’s most certainly been in every single generation and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere unfortunately.
You’re absolutely correct that they all believe they’re “God’s gift” it does make me laugh at their deluded sense of self![/quote]
My mum had a book that discussed this. As a research project, admin staff were asked not to smile or positively reflect back in interactions with men - not be rude, just be neutral. It was astonishing how angry this made some men - they were just accustomed to admin women being subtly flattering, as a professional thing, and became aggressive and enraged when it didn't happen. Teachers recorded their lessons, and found that when they consciously tried to devote more attention to girls, and thought that they had, they were still spending the majority of time on boys. It was a litany of this sort of thing - what Virginia Woolf described as a mirror, reflecting men back to themselves at twice their actual size.
We see it in the way women are met with towering rage for not being prepared to allow changing rooms to become mixed sex, for example, and certainly the howling rage aimed at JK Rowling for pointing out that women as female people have rights and needs of our own, and that it's not okay to expect women to be instantly silent on those needs, or even silently surrender the language we use to describe ourselves as a group and the things we are discussing in this whole thread, just as soon as someone from the male sex class finds them in any way upsetting.
Then there was the guy who thought he was just much better at his job than his girlfriend, and then they swapped emails and he suddenly discovered that a very capable woman was treated as an idiot, disbelieved and challenged, in a way he was never - he couldn't believe how much more challenging his work suddenly was, just as she couldn't believe how much easier. Far from pronouns in the workplace email system, personally I think we should all move to initial and surname - that way, nobody would know who a random was other than their job title!
Sexism is invisible in the same way racism is. We're all so used to it, it only hits us hard when we notice, personally, by some especially awful set of events. And quite often we're jeeringly asked what we do about Afghanistan or Saudi, as if unions in this country should be ashamed to advocate for their workers when modern slavery exists.