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[Kansa]

I'm glad to see some things are improving.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalěs]

How so? What do you see improving?

(I'm not any less torn about what to do, what gender I am, if gender is even a thing, etc. I'm just distracting myself with pondering, speculation, analysis, and discussion.)

[Kansa]

I meant the boy scouts and the girls scouts accepting transgender people, it's just a good sign that it's becoming a bit more acceptable even if it's just a little.

And yeah I know the feeling, I'm still in the same situation too in that area.

[Rolan7]

Oh huh, that is good news.  Pleasantly surprised, but I guess I have a grudge against the Boy Scouts.
Mainly because it was so important to me growing up, then they denied me Eagle over atheism...  Not even the gay issue, which was a big deal for them then.  I was in denial, but it didn't win them any favors later.

I'm really glad they've improved so much.  It's heartening, and it's a really good program for the most part.

[Neonivek]

I meant the boy scouts and the girls scouts accepting transgender people, it's just a good sign that it's becoming a bit more acceptable even if it's just a little.

And yeah I know the feeling, I'm still in the same situation too in that area.

Well given that Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are drastically different groups... it is more surprising to me that the Boy Scouts caved given their... leanings.

Then again there are two major "Male Scout" groups...

[Rolan7]

What's the other one?

[Reelya]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larissafaw/2012/12/05/why-are-so-many-professional-millennial-women-unable-to-find-dateable-men/#4e33872e7801

It's an interesting point about how the changing demographics may leave a bunch of people, male or female out in the cold in various ways. I think that for a few decades the "women can have it all" mantra has been akin to technological "boosterism", i.e. the idea that anyone with doubts about a big change is a luddite. But I'm more inclined to the "you can't make an omelete without breaking a few eggs" philosophy. Radically changing anything is going to break things for a significant minority of people, and you can't really pre-assume who is going to be winners and losers. While I'm certainly not a conservative in any sense, I think what we lack is a clear analysis of the actual pros and cons of every policy that's out there. We normally hear from the booster side, and any caveats or questions are drowned out by labeling the questioner as racist/sexist etc.

For one, it’s not as if we are holding out for Jake Gyllenhaal, but we do have certain non-negotiable expectations for potential mates that include college degrees and white-collar jobs. Life has always gone according to our plans, so why wouldn’t we land a man with these (reasonable) requirements?

Well you'd better start negotiating that damn quick, because 60% of college graduates are now women. Any imbalance is in fact a problem for both genders, there are no losers and winners here. Women often have the expectation to "marry up" (i.e. "me or me+") whereas men don't see a problem "marrying down". This exacerbates the problem. e.g. 60 female college grads are chasing 40 male college grads (3 women chasing 2 men), but the 40 male college grads are willing to consider 60 other women who aren't college grads as well, so to the man, they see 3 potential mates per 1 competing man, not 1.5 per 1.

Also the imbalance starts in early education. Basically there are ton of well-funded girl-booster programs now, but almost zero boy-booster programs, and in fact boys hear quite a lot of reinforcement that they are the bad-gender now from an early age. I could google around for that but there are tons of resources about this. I'd argue that this is in fact harming (hetero) women themselves later in life. This is why anyone caring about actually improvements for women need to care about nurturing both genders right from the start rather than just boosting one over the other.

[Neonivek]

And thus we are getting into why Straight Dating seems like the worst thing imaginable.

Though to admit this is one of the few times I've seen ANYTHING actually blame women for anything (that wasn't trying to be... incredibly sexist at least)

[Reelya]

Actually it's a good thing for geek guys however. With the raw shortage of male medicine and law graduates, women who want a "college grad" man might have to settle for stinky engineers or comp. sci graduates, where there are at least a few men left. Actually, let's think about "geek chic" that's been the rage recently. Perhaps it has actually been because of some of these same imbalances. And when *I* went to college, people really did despise anyone who studies "computers" back then. This was pre dotcom.

For example, in the UK now, I read that 85% of medical students are now women, in an area that used to be almost 100% men. So the "marry a doctor" trope is completely dead now - each male medical student has 5-6 doctor babes to himself. Basically each male doctor now has an ultra-brainy-chick harem to pick between.

But "geek chic" is the cool thing in mainstream media and even women-targeted media. Which would be surprising since the proportion of women studying comp. sci has actually fallen, but comp. sci graduates are now a lucrative dating market for college graduate women who don't have the traditional dating pools (law, medicine & finance bros).

[Neonivek]

I mean more in the "LIE LIE LIKE MAD!!! DATES ARE SUPPOSED TO BE SUPER FAKE!" sense.

You just have to read between the lines a bit there

[Dozebôm Lolumzalěs]

So I recently "learned" that since women make up most graduates in some field or another, men are a minority, just like black people and the gays.

What.

[Criptfeind]

Well. They'd be minorities within that field or area. Yeah?

[Arx]

That is, in fact, how a statistical minority is defined, yes.

[Reelya]

The label "minority" attached to women never made a whole lot of sense to start with. It was intended for races, because those races were in fact smaller than 50% of the population. In fact, it's going to cease being useful pretty soon, as they're predicting that the non-hispanic white population will drop below 50% by the middle of this century, meaning white people are strictly speaking a minority of the population as well.

Majority and minority have pretty well defined meanings and attempts to redefine "minority" to include women (who make up 51% of the population) based on "privilege" is in fact just poisonous to the language itself in the long run. As the cognitive dissonance over a group who are less of the population being called a "minority" shows. There are less men that women in total.

Women are in fact the majority of the US population. So women are both the majority and a minority. What does that make men then? They're neither the majority and we're not allowed to call them a minority, so we have no label for them in that system.

[Reelya]

IDK, Asians have college degrees at almost twice the general rate - 49% vs 28%.

According to the data in that article they only make up 5% of the population but would make up 40% of college admissions if things weren't skewed towards other races a bit. Basically, the SATS are biased towards blacks the most, then whites, then asians. So in other words they're not "disadvantaged" at all - they've implicitly capped how many places they can take to give everyone else a fighting chance at those degrees.

And to be honest it's probably not because they're asian, it's because they favored female applicants and the asian cultures are more pushy of their boys to go to college than white families are. Whites send a 40/60 male/female split to college admissions. Asians would be much closer to 50/50, meaning a pro-female applicant bias would be anti-Asian purely by accident.