"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

Not "a" woman, Goosefoot, but women as a group because it was women's domain, like weaving was women's work

BjornAgain81

Of course the high rate of femicide is a major factor. You can't make many scientific discoveries when you're dead

I don't recall hearing the idea that women are stupid as I was growing up. And I wasn't surrounded by progressive feminists either. But I agree that the historical achievements of women are overlooked.

These days it feels like people have higher academic expectations of girls than boys. Which is damaging to boys.

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.

Rosalind Franklin had died by the time Crick, Watson and Wilkins got the Nobel prize and it can't be awarded posthumously, it can only be split between 3 people so it would have been interesting to see who would have got it if she was still alive, the Nobel committee ignored Dorothy Hodgkin's achievements for years so who knows. Franklin didn't have a good working relationship with Wilkins but whether that was misogyny, antisemitism or personal antipathy is difficult to say, she got on well with Crick and they worked together after the DNA papers were published, Watson is famously a bit of an arrogant arse but it is his book that made her role in the discovery famous among the general public, even if he was rude about her in it. Franklin and Wilkins paper with the famous X-ray crystallography image was in the same edition of Nature as Crick and Watson's paper with the structure so for scientists in the field she was known. And her work with Aaron Klug was what lead him to getting the Nobel Prize a few decades later. Her being ignored is the romantic story but it's way more complicated than that.

It always makes me sad to think of all the female genius that is gobbled up by the porn and prostitution industry. What a complete and utter waste of female talent

Of course the high rate of femicide is a major factor. You can't make many scientific discoveries when you're dead.

But it's not a high rate of femicide. It is a fraction of a percentage of women who get killed and well over 99.9% don't.

I think people confuse this statistic with the statistic that the overwhelming majority of perpetrators are male.

You're almost 50x more likely to die from choking on your food but nobody talks about the 'choking epidemic' because it's not something you can really play the blame game with.

@BjornAgain81 wow, you're going to wonder where my long post has come from but seriously, it is not at all bizarre for women in the west to over identify with the father figure (ie, the masculine) in the quest for ''success''. Especially if their mothers acquiesced to the patriarchal role models.

The model of success that is sold to us is to chase the bitch Goddess of conventional/financial success, at the expense of any creative, artistic, homemaking, nurturing side that may be calling out to us, we ignore our intuition, we sublimate our desire to be fulfilled in a way that is not financial and we ignore it all to be successful with a 'status' that is understood by a patriarchal society.

The Heroine's Journey by Jungian psychologist Maureen Burdock (Murdock or Burdock, hmm) details a common journey from over identification with the masculine side (at the expense of the feminine side) to pursue conventional success even if it brings little fulfilment.

There can be a form of crisis around 40, a descent inwards in an attempt to understand, hopefully re-integration with the feminine, acceptance /forgiveness/ gratitude for The Mother, The Feminine, or simply, one's own mother. It is not an unusual template. If your mother was a strong woman who was confident and happy in her femininity then this over identification with the masculine early in life is less of a pattern.

Re-identification with the feminine means defining your own success. Listening to your inner voices and finally giving them a hearing even if that isn't obviously lucrative (I'm not talking about motherhood here, I mean designing a life that suits you even if your judged for it, even if it's not a conventional or measurable success. Learn to patient. Learn to trust that your own intuition will guide you to what fulfils you most. Don't instantly shelve every plan because it's not guaranteed to bring financial reward or conventional success.

''If women rose rooted'' by sharon blackie is another good book full of mythology interwoven with personal stories of women who have spent the first half of their lives subconsciously denigrating their mother (perhaps her self-sacrifice or lack independence &/or financial success) over identifying with conventional success &/or their father only to reject it all and question how they define success in the second half of their lives.

The world we live in does measure success in a way that comes easier for men who don't have their careers interrupted by pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, biological clocks, gender pay gaps, discrimination etc... I have a full time job btw, but I know now to pace my own progression, listen to my own needs, I'm no longer conscious of what other people may think of my salary/status/choices.

CountFosco

She wasn't "ignored". They literally went on her office and stole her work then took credit for it.

I'm sorry BjornAgain81 but your stats are way off. Karen Ingala Smith's Counting Dead Women is a good place for you to start

Statistically women, on average have higher IQs than men, do better in school and university and live longer! So any man who tries to tell you different is an idiot. Vive la difference!

Woah, 31Rue, that chimes massively with my own experience.

I came from a "girls can do anything" background, but spent the first twenty years of my life chasing a model of "success" that I now realise just is not what I'm about at all.

I didn't chase financial success, but did feel an incredible pressure to be "taken seriously" in my field, which, now I look back, meant adhering to very masculine cultural notions of how one worked and what one did.

I now realise I've probably lost twenty years of living and working the way I needed to.

I think any^ Dead Women is a high rate of femicide. I think every single one killed is missed and needed: every murdered woman is one too many.

How many dead women do we need before we say it's a high rate of femicide? It doesn't bear thinking about

I thinkany Dead Women is a high rate of femicide. I think every single one killed is missed and needed: every murdered woman is one too many?

Of course every one is one too many, but you can't reasonably describe something which happens to an extremely small percentage as an epidemic, even if there are no concrete benchmark figures.

Phrases have meaning and a 'high rate' isn't the same as a 'low rate'.

I'm sorry BjornAgain81 but your stats are way off. Karen Ingala Smith's Counting Dead Women is a good place for you to start.

I thought the accepted figure was two a week. What percentage of 32 million women is two?

I still hear far too many women giggling about being rubbish at maths.

@PackingSoapAndWater, reading the book ''the heroine's journey'' was a real page-turner for me. I devoured it. I had just been sacked from a job I hated anyway and there I was turning myself inside out to get another job ASAP. I do have a job now but it's a different field.

I do try to encourage my daughter to follow her heart wherever that leads her and to value her time! If you value your own time then you won't waste it. My mother just wanted me to be a secretary. All of her advice was borne out of fear. She was afraid of sexism I suppose but she herself had a very traditional role. She wanted more for me, I guess, but hadn't let go of any of the internalised patriarchy iyswim. So every idea I ever had, she shot it down with a load of fear based prophecies of gloom, so I drowned out and derided my intuition and my creativity to be a ''robot'' with a finance type job and I had no time. Time is very precious. I know we all need money, I'm not naive, but security and time is enough for me. I make no apology for not racing up the pole (again).

31RueCambon

You make some really interesting points and I'd be interested to read some of the literature you mention, not least because I had to read a fair bit of Jung, Lacan, Foucalt, etc for my degree and have been meaning for years to get back into that side of things.

I don't know where to start in replying, but I'm a bit conflicted about the below paragraph:

The model of success that is sold to us is to chase the bitch Goddess of conventional/financial success, at the expense of any creative, artistic, homemaking, nurturing side that may be calling out to us, we ignore our intuition, we sublimate our desire to be fulfilled in a way that is not financial and we ignore it all to be successful with a 'status' that is understood by a patriarchal society.

If anything, I feel it's often feminists who appear to pursue the 'conventional' model of success set by patriarchal society and they seem much more likely to condemn SAHM/homemakers than men do. I rarely see feminists talking about eschewing a career to focus on motherhood as a good thing.

In fact, before I quit the corporate world (after 15 years which I really hated) I really struggled to see how anybody would aspire to this unless money was the ultimate goal or unless they were the entrepreneurial type. However, I also understand that there are few better ways of encouraging people to be interested in something than telling them they can't have it, so I understand the 'proving we can do it' aspect.

Most men I know ultimately find work a drudge that they tolerate to provide for their family, but are just to stoic to admit it.

We're not counting suicides by domestic violence in those stats, medical negligence in childbirth, diseases from pornstitution, and if we want to go worldwide obv stats would be much higher, re sex selective abortions.
But it seems that for some people women just aren't important so that no amount of deaths would be considered femicide

Reading your last post, I can see a lot of parallels with my own situation. I was encouraged into a corporate job by my parents and never for a second thought I'd be happier in a hands on technical role.

I now work in the technical side of the logistics sector (don't want to out myself too much with specifics) and spend my day surrounded by grubby blokes in overalls who have probably only ever worn a tie at a funeral/wedding. I'm the only guy in my whole dept from a middle class background and I think the only one with a degree.

I don't have to think analytically and Iove it! When I was working for FTSE company in a well paid middle management role, I was so mentally tired I couldn't be arsed to read when I got home (didn't read a book for almost 15 years!) and didn't really pursue my hobbies anymore. Nowadays I save my mental energy for the things I enjoy and let others worry about KPIs, spreadsheets, and win strategies.

Was replying to RueCambon.

@coyioacan
That surprised me. For all that's deeply wrong with the narrative, I've always seen Scarlet as an icon. She took men on at their own game and won that's why 'society' didn't like her. She was strong, smart, family orientated and a bit of a bitch. Love her.

We're not counting suicides by domestic violence in those stats, medical negligence in childbirth, diseases from pornstitution, and if we want to go worldwide obv stats would be much higher, re sex selective abortions.

But it seems that for some people women just aren't important so that no amount of deaths would be considered femicide.

You're not making much sense I'm afraid and I won't be silenced by vague insinuations that I believe women aren't important, which seems to be your intention.

Why on earth would you include medical negligence in the statistics for murdered women? It seems like you're shifting the goalposts rather than addressing my points.

You can't just make spurious and defamatory arguments about a whole class consisting of millions of individuals and then not back it up, especially when you are basing your judgement of those millions of men on what circa 100 of them do annually.

It's like saying that Muslims as a class are terrorists because 100 of them are arrested for terrorism charges each year.

I regard all the avoidable female deaths as a sort of brain drain

On another note, I was fascinated to learn that the ever first novel was written by a Japanese woman, The tale of Genji.

I also heard, but this was just by word of mouth, that the first scripted film was produced by a woman, but I'm willing to be corrected on that one as I haven't looked into it. Before that men were just going about filming stuff documentary style

I do agree that we as a society need to consider why the majority of killers are men. However, there's a big difference between saying most killers are men and most men are killers.

I know this is likely the textbook version of NAMALT, but sometimes it needs to be pointed out. I sometimes wish people would also acknowledge the lives that men save as well as those that they take, given that most firefighters, soldiers, policemen, etc are male.