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[Vector]

Right.

I mean, honestly, I probably would have put my foot on the back of one and the pipe on the back of the other once they were down, or asked customers to help me pin them, or something, if I really needed to keep them on the floor.  But I wouldn't have done this business with beating them repeatedly.  Not fucking cool.

[Virex]

Virex, you're making assumptions that the woman in question would inherently be weaker than the men.

No, I was arguing that the idea that there is a gender gap when it comes to persecution of self-defense based violence comes from a difference in the conviction rates for different genders. However, there may well be a different reason for this discrepancy. Since society doesn't take kind of strong women, there are on average less strong women. Society also doesn't teach women how to defend themselves properly (on the contrary actually). This all contributes to a situation where it is not unthinkable that a completely unbiased judge would convict men more often than women for self-defense based violence.
If that is the case, then the assertion made by some here that the gender has any effect on the persecution rates is completely unfounded.

[SalmonGod]

Fine reasoning.  Just not supported by my personal experience.  Men are expected to be stronger than women, so when they get attacked by one, they're not supposed to actually react to it as a threat or admit to it if they do get hurt.  This is not a "men have it worse" sort of claim.  It's just something I recognize as one of sexism's many facets.

Also, I am not supporting ECrown's claim regarding this video.  I don't think the gender bias is that extreme.

[Leafsnail]

So basically you've linked a news story and then arbitrarily made an assumption about a theoretical different situation... I mean, what's the point of linking the news story?  It doesn't back up your point at all.

[Virex]

It's probably one of the instinctive knee-jerk reactions similar to those described in this post (also, rereading that post makes me realize that I'm a hypocrite for posting that, as over the last few days I've been racking up far more posts than all female contributers in this thread combines)

[Vector]

This video on Disney is well-worth watching.

Don't read the comments.

[GlyphGryph]

Eh, I'm not so sure it makes a convincing argument. For men, at least, Disney films in my experience tend to actually tend to portray a variety of male roles, especially considering much of the source material. Maybe this is due to the fact that most of the supporting cast tends to be male, but I don't think, say, the lion king portrays Pumbaa and Timoon as "less men". Less heroic, maybe, but I'm not sure if "heroism" can really be hooked directly to "masculinity" like that.

The biggest problem is that while it may be true despite my misgivings, the movie itself did a really poor job of convincing me (I was less receptive to its proposal by the end than I was on the beginning). For one thing, it seemed to focus mostly on two characters: Gaston, and Hercules. Gaston is explicitly NOT a rolemodel - what he is is a stereotype of what a person shouldn't want to be. He may be "a" definition of masculinity, but the movie as a whole seems to take the note that truly great men AREN'T assholes. I don't know, maybe I'm misunderstanding it's argument.

[SalmonGod]

I agree with the sentiment... but am disappointed that the video focused on really bad examples...

[Vector]

Hmm... yeah, I think maybe my old panning of HonD might have made a better argument >_>

Still, I was linked to it elsewhere and it seemed interesting, so I am spraying it here.

[Pnx]

Disney is pretty bad at giving good rolemodels. Mulan was pretty good, but a lot of others... not so much. Beauty and the Beast fell flat on it's face trying to convey the whole, "beauty /= good" thing.

[SalmonGod]

If you really want to rip Disney apart, try some of their tv shows.....

[G-Flex]

Disney is pretty bad at giving good rolemodels. Mulan was pretty good, but a lot of others... not so much. Beauty and the Beast fell flat on it's face trying to convey the whole, "beauty /= good" thing.

Even Mulan is explicitly treated as a "Disney princess". Whoops.

The ethnocentrism is pretty stark as well. I mean, "Hercules" was basically entirely Judeo-Christian but with Greek names. Disney has this thing where they'll try to portray another culture, except everything will be in name only, and it just comes off as incredibly tacky. The thing is, I don't even understand why this is remotely necessary. It's intended for kids, and kids are used to being introduced to new ideas. Judeo-Christian theology/mythology is almost as alien to an eight-year-old as any other thing you could throw at them. Is this just writers being lazy, writers being ignorant, or what? Personally, I think people who make art for children have a tendency to "pass the narrative" without really thinking about it, taking on the responsibility of filling the kids' heads with whatever the popular narrative is concerning the subject matter, without really considering that they are doing so.


I know they're not necessarily the most progressive either, but I'd rather my kids watch Hayao Miyazaki movies than Disney movies, in terms of messages sent and received. Princess Mononoke alone has better/more respectable/more realistic role models in it than pretty much all Disney films I can think of combined.

[SalmonGod]

Princess Mononoke is one of my favorite movies though (was my #1 for a very long time), mostly due to its wisdom.  Perhaps not a fair standard of expectation 

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I know they're not necessarily the most progressive either, but I'd rather my kids watch Hayao Miyazaki movies than Disney movies, in terms of messages sent and received. Princess Mononoke alone has better/more respectable/more realistic role models in it than pretty much all Disney films I can think of combined.

How is Miyazaki not progressive? Hell, Princess Mononoke is about humans and nature living in balance, that's a fairly progressive message.

[G-Flex]

"How is X not Y?" is not made irrelevant by saying "this one part of X is Y".

From what I can tell, Miyazaki still has certain views on, say, where women belong in society and what their strengths/weaknesses are compared to men. I certainly wouldn't consider him regressive, but he's no Progressive Messiah either. This is no surprise; he's a 70-year-old man from a very patriarchal nation. In several ways he really does set the bar high, and there's really no aspect that's super-regressive about his work, but I wouldn't really hold him up as a paragon of social progress either, particularly when it comes to gender. He certainly appreciates female characters and creates very good examples of what they can be, and they do tend to go against the grain, but he still has strong apparent notions of what characteristic qualities of women are compared to those of men. Again, I shouldn't overstate this though, as he does a hell of a better job about it than most movies I've seen, especially those for children.