I’m sorry, but if Ms. Davis wants to really impact the TV industry and have more shows on for girls, then she should get together with other women and create her own production company so that she and other women can bring said stories to life with said female characters, instead of an organization that’s just nothing more than inducing creation by proxy.
Just sayin’.
(Also, if and when she does create said series, please don’t make one about a girl going to school and going through the same things ordinary kids do-this is now getting to be tiresome, and kids want to rest after a hard day’s work at school, not be reminded of that.)
The difference in my mind, is being PC is an actual term.
Sure it is, but it’s also a completely meaningless one at this point, used to derail debate by attaching negative signifiers to particular ideas, like the idea that conventional gender norms are stifling and mostly socially constructed. People who lob it around are unintentionally revealing their own narrow brand of “political correctness” rather than demonstrating their capacity for critical thinking and open minded debate. The use of PC in an argument is a really handy heuristic for dismissing it as a poor one, so if you want to make a good case for your point of view, avoid words that have been semantically obliterated in the comments sections of every news site.
I really disagree with this. The free market incents one relevant thing here: Already having a lot of money. Making it when you don’t have a lot to start with is a gamble, making it when you are already rich is a sure thing.
If someone made a lot of money by having an idea (market separately to the sexes) then it was largely by chance since success is largely a matter of chance. Then because he/she/it made a lot of money his/her/its ideas became influential and others parroted them. Some people had success by doing it and other people failed. The trick is that we were then more likely to blame the failures on not following the original idea enough than we were on the fact that the original idea wasn’t necessarily that great.
If something has been successful for a long time, that only tells you it is entrenched, not that it is right.
I agree to some extent but I think the distinction is nonetheless valid and useful. Consider the following two situations:
A) There is a lack of positive role models in STEM fields due to the free choice of women not to enter those fields.
B) There is a tendency for people in STEM fields to actively discourage women from entering those fields.
Both might constitute “inequality of opportunity” but (B) would seem to be more unequal and more morally fraught than (A). They’re not mutually exclusive, of course; I suspect both contribute to the inequality of outcomes represented by the greater representation of men in STEM fields. However, while I agree that we might point to (B) as an instance of sexism and try to discourage (B) as a result, I would not agree that we could point to (A) as an instance of sexism and I certainly don’t think we should discourage women from choosing what they want (or don’t want) to do.
In the case of (A), all you can do is encourage more women to enter the field and if they don’t want to then what are you going to do? Accuse women of sexism against other women for not choosing a field that doesn’t appeal to them?
I disagree that Summers’ explanation is “sexist”. As I already pointed out, all he did was to point out that the male IQ distribution has fatter tails than the female IQ distribution. There’s nothing at all sexist about pointing at a discrepancy that actually exists in the data (otherwise feminists would be in real trouble for pointing out all those male/female discrepancies in occupation, income, etc.).
I tend to agree with you that IQ is largely determined by the environment rather than by physiology but Summers might very well reasonably disagree with that conclusion. There’s nothing inherently wrong or immoral or evil about disagreeing on a matter that is not clearly decided either way.
But let’s be clear that the IQ data doesn’t show “men are smarter than women” or anything like that. In fact, it shows that on average they’re pretty much the same. What the IQ data does show is that the very lowest IQ individuals tend to be male and that the very highest IQ individuals tend to be male. Perhaps there’s some cultural explanation for this distribution but in this case I think a physiological/genetic explanation is at least possible. Acknowledging that possibility will not bring all of feminism tumbling down.
So maybe these executives should try shopping, as a girl, for toys in serieses where there are lots of boy characters and a few girls. The selection of figures for female characters is usually abymsal, the quality is lower, and they’re usually not included in the more exciting playsets or features. Someone’s already mentioned Sailor Moon here - did you see the American Sailor Moon toys in the original 1996 run? We didn’t get action figures, we got dolls with real clothes and brushable hair because girls don’t want fighting toys! They want dressup dolls! With changeable clothes! That you will never sell alternate outfits for anyway! The nice plastic figures Japan got in addition to the brushable-hair dolls never came over except as knockoffs. And there was some stupid piece of crap called the Moon Cycle which never appeared in the show and was a terrible… thing. It was hard as heck to find good merchandise for Sailor Moon. I had to search everywhere, even for the crappy stuff there was. And then it got cancelled because of lack of merch sales. Why wasn’t it selling? Because it was CRAP!
Later USA and then Cartoon network picked it up again, and Hot Topic brought in a huge merchandise resurgence (this was while MixxZine was doing the manga too, so that helped) of actual quality goods. Sales did really, really well. The only reason Sailor Moon went off the airwaves after that is because the japanese licensors pulled the license from Pioneer/Geneon early because the original manga author wasn’t getting her fair share of royalties and they had to pull the licenses she was disagreeing with.
…That went off-topic, sorry. Anyway, the first run of Sailor Moon had shitty merchandise, then it got cancelled. The second run had much better merchandise, and the show stuck around until licensors made it impossible to keep. (And now a new iteration of the anime’s coming out early next year and the manga’s been rereleased and we are seeing even more awesome merch. Cute merch that looks like it’s worth spending money on. LOTS of it. Every time they have another go at Sailor Moon over here, they take it more seriously, and it keeps paying off.)
I don’t think the distinction is wholly without merit, just that it’s not particularly useful in practice. The two examples you provide illustrate this, and you admit they’re not mutually exclusive, because they’re not actually separable in reality. The lack of positive role models is almost entirely because of scenario B and it can’t be determined what the natural rate of women in STEM would be until B is dealt with (I suspect it would be near parity). Until then, A is a hypothetical contrasted with the concrete reality of B, in an attempt to demonstrate that the distinction between outcome and opportunity has practical validity in explaining real world things. Plus, neither scenario addresses how we would exactly determine when unequal outcomes are no longer the result of unequal opportunity. Hasn’t every society claimed it represents some sort of natural state of justice right up until it was overthrown?
That’s not what he said entirely. Yes he did point out what the IQ scores show, which is not sexist, but he went on to suggest this pattern was the primary factor in why women are underrepresented in STEM. Ignoring that IQ scores are not demonstrated to be scientifically reliable, making Summers’ disagreement kind of unreasonable, the discrepancy in scores doesn’t actually offer much explanation as to why women are underrepresented in STEM. It just suggests men have a higher range. The accusations of sexism were because Summers was drawing unwarranted conclusions (which sounded an awful lot like ancient stereotypes of women) from unreliable data, not for pointing out what’s in the data itself. Plus Summers’ long advocacy of financial deregulation suggests he might be more fond of ideological conclusions as a opposed to empirical ones.
Legend of Korra, which I, a straight white adult, watch with an adult gay roommate, and an adult woman. It is almost as if you stop focusing so fucking hard appeasing a boy stereotype your audience suddenly gets larger… Crazy, I know.
I live next to Portland, Oregon, which is considered by many to be one of the most if not the most liberal city in America. From my experience, I can safely tell you two things:
Portlandia is 100% factually correct, but only for a subset of the population
I have never run into anyone in the “PC Crowd” although I have heard some baffling ideas out of the migrant hipsters who come here to stay.
The boogeyman “PC Crowd” seems to only exist online, mainly in the furthest reaches of Tumblr. Then again, I expect declaring death to half the population would put you at odds with quite more than half the population. Since most people are generally reasonable, it stands that most arguments about perceived or real sexism end up being a lot more caustic simply because of our poor ability to communicate, rather than anyone being an out and out lunatic who wants the death/subjugation/enslavement/what have you of half of our entire species. I think if people were better at communicating logically, we’d have fewer arguments. Sometimes people even have arguments while agreeing!
Ha, nice snark. We both want valuable content to proliferate. You just have to target the source of the problem rather than the symptom. Rage all you want against emergent behavior. It won’t change unless you change the rules. Don’t hate the player; hate the game.
You seem to have a strange understanding of “capitalism” and “free market.” What responsibility do for profit producers have to tell good stories or make good content? None. If most of us were in the same position with the same pressures, information, and rules, we would likely do the same, as the majority of people professionally producing content do. After all, the few truly focused on content are constantly battling for survival.
Perhaps you’d rather keep telling yourself that you’re a “better person” than them, and the leaders of banks, oil & power companies, countries/spy agencies, abusive police forces, etc?
It’s quite easy to denigrate someone over the internet; much harder to understand the factors causing the behavior and address them. It’s a worthwhile effort particularly if you want to be a source of positive change.
To be fair, unlike the leaders of banks, oil companies, power companies, spy agencies, and police forces, he very likely hasn’t done things morally questionable or ethically reprehensible.
That, my dear Sir or Madam, depends highly you esteem content, art, and human expression. After all, it is our best window into the human condition.
Joking aside, I agree completely with you, in a strictly practical and quantifiable sense, that this is not our top priority. My key message is that a philosophy of responsibility and positive change that addresses causes rather than symptoms is much superior to one of complaint and blame. (Even if less popular on the internet.)
I actually agree with most of what you’re saying. You have a point, you are just overselling it.
I’ve got two thoughts,
You say none. For the sake of an analogy consider for profit food producers, what responsibility do they have to make good (nutritious, tasty, and safe) food? The idea that they aren’t responsible for the quality of their food, and that making a profit must be the only goal has probably led to the obesity epidemic. The same is true for any company, they need to take responsibility for the effects their actions have on the world. Saying that they are only responsible to their shareholders is entirely missing the point of existing in a society.
Second, that wasn’t snark, it was sincerity. Yes, it is easy for me to say that this situation is ‘wrong’. That’s because it is. Just because there is a hard decision, a screwed up system, or money is on the line, doesn’t mean that it isn’t wrong. I’m not saying that I would perform better than these folks, only that if I made the same choices I would be just as wrong.
We both agree that nuance is important, that this is not a simple situation; but you seem to think that playing a rigged game absolves the players. I don’t see it that way. This is not some sports league, the players here have the power to make changes to the rules.
The professional shoot wasn’t with a large organization, but for a small outfit that was doing commercials and small local productions - the guy had previously owned a tv station but didn’t at the time. So, I was not working for a TV station, just an independent producer. @FoolishOwl@Mister44
Only if we are capitalist for the sake of capitalism. The idea of capitalism is that people want to profit and that doing a good job is a good way to make profit so people will do a good job.
Society creates the rules that allows for profit producers to exist. We do this because we believe that this is a good way to make things work. If the result is that micromanaging money-men with no knowledge of the subject interfere with everything and make crap then we should drop capitalism like a bad habit.
Awesome sounds like we can get along. Mind you, I don’t think I can ever oversell the value of personal responsibility, accountability, and reflection.
From my perspective we are all players, all equally responsible. Imploring those in ‘positions of power’ to make ethical/moral decisions and hating them when they don’t accomplishes little. This is a pervasive issue across our entire society. If we want to change the outcome, we have to change the game.
Free market dog-eat-dog libertarian Randian capitalism is what the founding fathers intended. Give us 23andme even if they ignore the agency we pay to keep us safe for 6 months! Wait, I might be in the wrong thread.
You mean crap like like Horizon, global warming, historical highs of concentrated wealth, Johnson atoll, the US prison system/recidivism rate/police/war/terror culture, spy organizations, copyright that causes us to lose vast swaths of our cultural history, erosion of true liberties/privacy, and bad TV?
Not selling digital music worked out real well for the music companies too.
I wouldn’t overrate the profit motive as an excuse for questionable business practices. The desire for power and control is much more important, or McDonald’s would have always be pushing to raise the minimum wage.
