"Women are stupid"

[sakura184]

There was a recent scandal in Japan where it was discovered that the top medical university there had been faking test scores. Basically women had been outperforming men in the tests for years but the university had been altering women's scores so that men received university places instead of women.

Anyway, I was just reading up about another case where 5 Japanese students attacked a female student and the justification of one of the attackers was that "women are stupid"

One of the accused said in court that he had looked down on women because they are “stupid.”

www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/07/02/national/social-issues/japans-gender-problem-human-disaster-says-award-winning-scholar-chizuko-ueno/#.XSZ-bCUo_Dt

I've had a lot of experience of being treated like I was stupid, by both men and women, but mainly by men. It's like I go through life being seen as "a stupid person". But I loved university, because I loved not feeling stupid when I got essay or test results back.
Anyway this idea that women are stupid has definitely affected me.
Only after i discovered feminism did I learn how amazingly unstupid women actually are and how deep of a lie it is to say women are stupid

Sakura, I suspect I am older than you, but I grew up surrounded by people (apart from my mother and aunt) who insisted that men were more intelligent than women. I believed it. The teachers at school repeatedly said there must have been something in the water when we were born because that was the only way to explain how the girls always came top in exams. Oh yes, women might have a sort of soft wisdom, but it was worldly and not logical and possibly even a bit woo so didn’t count. It wasn’t until long after I got my degree, having met some astonishingly bright women along the way, that it dawned on me that all this ‘men are more intelligent than women’ schtick was actually bullshit.
Meanwhile, the 'women are stupid' doctrine had done untold damage to countless
other people, and I don't think I escaped unscathed even now.

Indeed. It's supposed to be feminine to be stupid.

My mother read "Gone with the Wind" and was impressed by how the Southern Belles had to act stupid while behind the scenes they had huge responsabilities (albeit immoral responsabilities).

I should add, because it's important, that I ignored my mother and aunt because I believed the doctrine that women are stupid. It took me years to come round to appreciating what they had to teach me.
(Yeah, I guess I was stupid. Or the doctrine made me stupid.)

I have never heard that women are stupid. I don’t know if this is cultural, coming from a long line of strong women.

@Chickenish same here. And surrounded by men who respect women. But am really noticing the increase in younger men who talk down to women and the younger women who tolerate it and keep saying how intelligent such a such guy is when they are just ordinary.

I'm 49. When I was a child I was told that women were less intelligent than men because our brains were smaller. Also that boring jobs should be done by women rather than men, because women had a higher boredom threshold. And there were no female comedians because women couldn't tell jokes.

I know isn't true but when you're young you believe what adults say, and it took me a long time to break free from childhood conditioning.

I was raised to believe I was not as intelligent and pretty worthless for being female. My mother was/is anti feminism and still insists that my younger brother is more intelligent than me despite considerable evidence to the contrary. My dad has always had more belief in me.

I'm in my 60s and think it's getting better. When I left junior school having won a scholarship for a local girl's grammar a female teacher wrote in my autograph album 'be good sweet maid & let who will be clever'. That wouldn't happen now. Small steps maybe but steps nonetheless.

Wow that is incredibly recent!
I'm 40 and am lucky enough to have been brought up to believe I could do what I wanted and was one of the most intelligent in my class. The fact I was a girl wasn't relevant. This was by parents, grandparents and teachers. It took until I was applying for a job for me to experience this sort of sexism.

I don't suppose it matters if men think we're stupid, but it matters a lot what we think about ourselves and about each other

Yes exactly, Sakura. It really bothers me when I meet women who have internalized all that bs. One of my oldest friends is like that, actually. She can't help it, but it's as if she wants to drag us all down with her. And why? I mean, it's right there in front of her eyes: competent, successful, brave women. How can she harbour these strange theories about women being inferior when she grew up watching the same adults I did? It's so weird. I think there was relentless misogyny in her house though. And yes, it seems much worse than when men think it.

My dad had been doing a meccano project with DD when she was younger and there was a bit missing which he said he'd find.
I was shopping later with ds and DD and he called my phone and asked to speak to "the engineer" - ie DD. I do think these tiny cumulative things have an effect.

Positive or negative I mean

I don't know how common this really is. My sense in pop culture is that men are presented as buffoons, and women as clever. It seems a really common trope on kids cartoons as well which has made me somewhat uncomfortable.

I've known plenty of families as well where the family culture was that women were the ones capable of being in charge and knowing what's what. My own family, which is extremely combative, didn't differentiate as far back as I can remember.

My son, who is a boy with three sisters, asked me one day why girls were smarter than boys, as if this was just a thing everyone expected. It made me a little sad.

The Guardian but still:

www.theguardian.com/education/2017/jan/26/girls-believe-brilliance-is-a-male-trait-research-into-gender-stereotypes-shows

My age 6, girls believe only boys can be geniuses.

Haven’t looked into methodology, though.

Only after i discovered feminism did I learn how amazingly unstupid women actually are and how deep of a lie it is to say women are stupid.

So you thought women were stupid until a feminist told you otherwise? That does seem a bit bizarre if I'm honest.

No born I never thought women were stupid, but after feminism I learned just how many scientific discoveries women had made. I learned only yesterday that a black woman discovered the technology we use for GPS satellite navigation. I learned women invented beer. The list of what women have done is literally endless. Lots of women's work has been stolen by and passed off as men's work like the woman who was down out of the Nobel peace prize because her male colleagues literally sneaked in her office and took it.
So what I'm saying is, I vastly over estimated men's intelligence before I discovered feminism
That women have managed to do what they have done under conditions of such oppression ( 2 of us getting killed every week, millions of girls aborted around the world ) makes women all the more amazing

It's like biscuitgate. Politicians come on here and women ask them pertinent questions and what then goes and gets reported in the newspapers is that the "mums" just wanted to know what his favorite biscuit was.

I never thought women were stupid, nor was I ever encouraged to do so. My grandmother was certainly as intelligent as my grandfather and my mother as my father. Both parents encouraged me and my sister academically and supported us in aiming high. We went to a girls' grammar school full of bright girls who got top grades in science and maths as well as the other subjects. And then to a top university where there was no expectation that men would out-perform women. As a teacher, I most often see girls out-performing boys.

I see men using women's work all the Time and passing it off as their own without referencing the original ideas that came decades earlier. I thought you were supposed to reference when you wrote a book

When I was young my DF praised my intelligence and told me I could do anything. It was my DM who used the "be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever" quote. Weird, really, as she was a HCP who went back to work as a married woman in the 70s when it was unusual.

That women have managed to do what they have done under conditions of such oppression ( 2 of us getting killed every week, millions of girls aborted around the world ) makes women all the more amazing.

I certainly believe that the lack of opportunity given to women (barred from education in the past etc) has likely skewed the statistics and wasted much opportunity. However, I'm not sure that two out of 32 million women being killed weekly is a factor in this if I'm honest. I think they're separate issues.

Interesting...

I've never gone across this at all, and I wonder if it is something to do with growing up in a northern ex-industrial town where women worked in the mills and factories, both as single and married women, starting as far back as the late 18th century.

It's very hard to have a culture where women are perceived as stupid when you've a mill floor full of females operating complex weaving machinery.

Never come across this.

A woman invented beer is rather misleading. No one knows who invented beer, if you can even put a pin in it as it was likely rather more of an organic development. But it isn't possible to rule out a man being the "inventor".

Women used to do the baking, and the brewing that was an extension of that. It was all part of traditional women's work.