Thanks for the thoughtful reply, RoS.

I agree that there is some merit in your point about the "stop sign"; in fact, before I had any real understanding of feminism myself (not that I consider myself to have a massive amount now), that was my general response to this sort of thing too. I thought the stance I'm taking now was rather whiney, self-centred and, as you think, obstructive with regards to dialogue and argument. But I've come to see that engaging with feminism rather than seizing this opportunity to dismiss it actually makes a lot more sense.

I do, of course, agree that there are very many negative stereotypes around about men, and they're as unhelpful and undesireable as the ones about women. And obviously, there are positive stereotypes about women as well as about men (more about this below). But as you go on to say, the situation is far from balanced: men are, by and large, the ones with the power. Do you disagree that this situation, which has been the case forever, means that there's an imbalance in the effects that stereotyping, exclusion etc. directed towards women as opposed to men can have? (By the way, perhaps this is different political perspectives talking, but I don't understand your point about redistribution of wealth. Is it okay for certain groups to have less political power as long as they reap the benefits of others paying taxes? I can see that argument working where the group in question is children, and perhaps the severely mentally disabled (maybe that's controversial?), but otherwise I see no justification for it whatsoever.)

I didn't actually mean to assert that I could understand men's experiences better than they can understand women's -- I was simply working with people's assertions that, in fact, the reversed situation wouldn't bother them -- but it happens that some schools of thought do believe that to be the case: that women do actually have a better handle on how men see the world than vice versa. That's because the male stance is the dominant or default one, and therefore culture tends to be filtered through the male lens before it gets to women; the same doesn't happen in reverse. I've seen it illustrated with a Venn diagram: women's and men's experiences largely overlapping, but with some area of non-overlap on both sides; but while culture provides women with a lot of insight into the non-overlapping part of the men's section, it provides men with very little about the non-overlapping part of the women's section. I'm not sure to what extent I personally buy into this, but it strikes me that the example we're looking at here could be a rather typical instance of it: it seems quite unlikely to me that a woman, knowing she was writing to a mixed audience, would throw in a line like "men will always be alluring" without adding some concession to different viewpoints. Perhaps I'm wrong about that.

Your "women are on hair-trigger alert" argument is certainly one that I've heard before, extremely often, and I'm afraid I don't buy it, for the simple reason that if we were on hair-trigger alert, many of us would never get through a day with all its quagmire of gender-related crap without going insane. There really is that much of it.

I'd also like to add one more thing about the positive stereotypes mentioned above. Being neither American nor a TV-watcher, I can't speak for American TV, but I can speak for many other aspects of culture, and it seems to me that what people see as "positive" stereotypes can be just as harmful as the negative ones. Women are more emotional, more touchy-feely, more in tune with nature, better with kids, more verbally adept, more empathetic, more arty, and so on and so on and so on. All those are, on the face of it, positive attitudes towards women, but they also all buy into views of women that contribute towards keeping the balance of power and so on skewed towards men. For this reason, I think we should beware of simply making lists of male and female stereotypes and declaring that, just because the positive and negative numbers balance out, there's no problem in society with marginalising women.

I only wish academia were immune to this sort of nonsense. I actually feel as though I've noticed an increase in my experience of it since coming to university.

No, certainly nothing distracting from the point like the alluring women statement. I slid past it without much of a specific reaction at all, as I imagine most people would. I'm not sure I see the connection here -- what am I missing?

Hi phaedrus,

I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're getting at. As Alicorn pointed out, when I called that phrase disparaging, I didn't mean to imply that all women would be offended by it -- just that it's very dismissive (and for that matter not really very rationally sound) to make sweeping generalisations about the way 50% of the population talk. (I'm honestly not quite sure what the original poster of that comment, which has since been deleted, even meant by it.) I'd certainly be opposed to sweeping, dismissive generalisations about people without a sense of touch as well, though I'm not sure I've ever come across one.

It seems to me that you might be conflating two different arguments here:

1. We should avoid using language that excludes a group of the population when there exists a straightforward alternative.

2. We should avoid making generalisations about people based on their membership in a group sharing a single feature.

I think 2 is a pretty solid, sensible rule in general, but 1 obviously carries more weight when a) the group in question is a particularly large or contextually-salient one, and b) the point can be made just as easily without marginalising people. Both a) and b) apply to the original example in the post that was being discussed. Neither are quite so readily applicable to the "no sense of touch" example that you mentioned, so personally I'd be a lot more inclined to leave that one as it is.