Inequality now!
Opinions ahead. Your chance to bail out!
I was reading an article on whether or not there's a disparity in author and protagonist sexes in YA literature. (Here, you can read it.)
And though the current number of female authors in their sample is 56%, I was seeing it as sort of balanced. In fact, if men had been down to 41% and women up to 59%, I still would have seen it as sort of balanced. Not like, oh, 51 and 49, but still.
Yet if it were the opposite-41% women and 59% men-I would not have seen it as balanced. I would, in fact, have decried the inequality.
So why the difference?
Well, because men have been the dominant force for so long. I feel like it's okay if there's some payback.
But I don't feel that way if men continue to dominate.
Now, I think this kind of averaging is reprehensible if you're doing a scientific study, and in fact psychological experiments have shown that we frequently introduce bias to make the data confirm to our beliefs.
In this case, I suspect that means that my belief is that women should be equal. Let them be the dominant force for thirty or forty years and then we can worry about bringing the proportions back to 50-50.
But why? Why am I willing to shift one way and not the other? (And, in fact, it's more than gender-I talk the talk about racial equality as well, though as a privileged white male, I haven't actually been forced to face sexism or racism except in my favour.[1])
Well, we not only have to make this a balanced world, we have to make it look like a balanced world. Sometimes that involves creating the opposite inequality, kind of like how certain Greek columns bulged out ever so slightly in the middle so they'd look straight.
When kids growing up actually look at things and see that they're equal, when you don't have to explain about the possibility of sampling errors or founder effect, then maybe we can start putting behind us the totally justifiable rage about inequality.
It should only take a couple of lifetimes, and then we can strive for actual equality.
[1] Okay, I get some second-hand racism because my son is black, but that's rare[2], and frankly, I more often get the "you must be a saint" racism. Uh, no: we wanted a kid, I grew up with an adopted sibling so that seemed fine, and rightly or wrongly we didn't care about colour.
[2] Actually, it just occurs to me that the most common racism I deal with is my son parroting what acquaintances at school tell him, that he must be good at basketball or rhythm because he's black. So that's kind of a third-hand racism.
Posted on DreamWidth at http://doc-lemming.dreamwidth.org/202613.html. Try this link to reply over there.
I was reading an article on whether or not there's a disparity in author and protagonist sexes in YA literature. (Here, you can read it.)
And though the current number of female authors in their sample is 56%, I was seeing it as sort of balanced. In fact, if men had been down to 41% and women up to 59%, I still would have seen it as sort of balanced. Not like, oh, 51 and 49, but still.
Yet if it were the opposite-41% women and 59% men-I would not have seen it as balanced. I would, in fact, have decried the inequality.
So why the difference?
Well, because men have been the dominant force for so long. I feel like it's okay if there's some payback.
But I don't feel that way if men continue to dominate.
Now, I think this kind of averaging is reprehensible if you're doing a scientific study, and in fact psychological experiments have shown that we frequently introduce bias to make the data confirm to our beliefs.
In this case, I suspect that means that my belief is that women should be equal. Let them be the dominant force for thirty or forty years and then we can worry about bringing the proportions back to 50-50.
But why? Why am I willing to shift one way and not the other? (And, in fact, it's more than gender-I talk the talk about racial equality as well, though as a privileged white male, I haven't actually been forced to face sexism or racism except in my favour.[1])
Well, we not only have to make this a balanced world, we have to make it look like a balanced world. Sometimes that involves creating the opposite inequality, kind of like how certain Greek columns bulged out ever so slightly in the middle so they'd look straight.
When kids growing up actually look at things and see that they're equal, when you don't have to explain about the possibility of sampling errors or founder effect, then maybe we can start putting behind us the totally justifiable rage about inequality.
It should only take a couple of lifetimes, and then we can strive for actual equality.
[1] Okay, I get some second-hand racism because my son is black, but that's rare[2], and frankly, I more often get the "you must be a saint" racism. Uh, no: we wanted a kid, I grew up with an adopted sibling so that seemed fine, and rightly or wrongly we didn't care about colour.
[2] Actually, it just occurs to me that the most common racism I deal with is my son parroting what acquaintances at school tell him, that he must be good at basketball or rhythm because he's black. So that's kind of a third-hand racism.
Posted on DreamWidth at http://doc-lemming.dreamwidth.org/202613.html. Try this link to reply over there.