“Men’s Studies” has existed as an academic discipline for several decades now. Not surprisingly, most of those involved in it identify themselves as feminists – as people interested in studying gender tend to do. But not all of them: A couple of years back, a group of mostly anti-feminist academics and popular writers with an interest in gender decided to try to do a sort of end run around the discipline of “Men’s Studies” by conjuring up a whole new, altogether un-feminist discipline called “Male Studies.”
Recently, The University of South Australia announced that it would start offering postgraduate courses in Male Studies sometime in 2014; our old friend Eoghan/Sigil1 brought this earthshattering news to the Men’s Rights subreddit the other day, where it was greeted with … suspicion and hostility.
GotMyFrogHatOn wrote:
Great, now men have the same opportunity as women to waste their time and money on a worthless degree!
Liverotto was even blunter:
YES, because the cure to bullshit is… MORE BULLSHIT! /s
That’s right: Men’s Rights Redditors hate Women’s Studies, and Gender Studies, and apparently every academic discipline with the word “Studies” in it so much that they’ve transferred this hatred to a new academic discipline that could well have been (and sort of was) designed just for them.
But don’t worry, they still hate Women’s Studies the most:
What was I saying the other day about projection?
I never said men weren’t sexy, just that GENERALLY women don’t care to look at them naked like men do women. The sales of Playboy verses Playgirl prove this. Also, the fact that female strippers far outnumber male strippers. We women just don’t get turned on visually the same way men do. They can look at a naked woman and be ready for intercourse. Women aren’t usually ready by simply looking at a naked man. We normally need more than the visual to get stimulated. Face it people, men and women aren’t wired the same. Just because I’m a Feminist, it doesn’t mean I have to deny these differences.
Study Finds Male And Female Brains Respond Differently To Visual Stimuli
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/03/040316072953.htm
Don’t tell me what turns me on.
And don’t tell me the moon is “usually” “normally” “generally” made of green cheese. Baseless, sexist assumptions aren’t okay just because they’re qualified with “exceptions exist.”
Fuck “brain activation.” Women can TALK. You can ASK us about our sexuality.
Super Sciency White-Coated Official methods are great for matters of biology and chemistry, but it’s quackery to try to apply them to subjective human experience.
Study finds that when Austrian rugby team strips after losing to Lithuania that many people male and female respond to visual stimulation!
http://www.break.com/usercontent/2008/5/striptease-of-austrian-rugby-team-498642
Ruby, all you do is speak in bullshit generalizations and post crap articles that can be debunked in two seconds. Seriously, WHY do you come here? You don’t read the debunkings and refuse to engage in discussion, you only throw out more crap.
If being tiresome were a bannable offense…
In your case, you may as well put “feminist” in scare quotes instead of captializing it. With “allies” like you, who needs enemies?
Ruby: You are linking to science news reporting, not the actual study.
FOURTEEN people.
And DIFFERENT levels of response is not the same as ALL MALES X and ALL FEMALES Y.
And again you and this sort of discourse totally wipes out gay, lesbian, and queer people who might just MIGHT react differently.
Plus, FOURTEEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11
That’s a pretty fucking low n.
Also, even “brain activation” is (obviously, if you think about it) culturally influenced. Someone who’s been raised not to express her sexuality the same way men do is going to reflect that in her responses and hence in her brain.
This doesn’t prove it’s all about genetics and cavemen.
Ithiliana, thank you for posting that!
But … but … sales of Playboy vs. Playgirl prove it!
Because that’s totally a controlled research setting.
People reacted differently in the study, but the study did not and cannot be used to identify the factors that *caused* them to react differently.
Sorry, 28 PEOPLE. 14 men and 14 women.
Still fucking low n
Very very few sentences that begin with “a fundamental difference between men and women is…” are going to end feminist.
Feminism is all about finding the SOCIAL differences imposed on men and women, rather than assuming if a difference exists it MUST be EvoCaveScienceTruth.
My wife is much more turned on by visual stimuli than I am, had a substantially bigger porn collection when I met her, and thinks that the “private browsing” option on Safari is one of the greatest inventions since the wheel.
I was always under the impression that she was a woman, and thought that there was a fair amount of supporting evidence, but evidently I’m mistaken.
Fuck you Ruby, for insulting again all women by declaring what we want and like. You don’t get to pretend what you are is what I am. I have never cared about the money people earn, I like to look at people (real people and characters), and pictures of them and films of them. Watching porn rarely does anything for me.* This doesn’t negate the previous points.
And thanks Ithiliana.
*though many other women enjoy it, even despite it is mainly created and marketed toward straights men.
I think at this point we’ve had more than fourteen women *in this thread* have talked about being visually stimulated.
Except there was that whole year-long period when I got wet just by being *near* someone… (he had the prettiest tummy I’d ever seen).
@Ruby:
Did you notice this part of the article?
So one of the purposes of the study was to figure out what the section of the brain actually does. If you don’t know for sure what that area of the brain does, how in the world can you use the study to show differences in how men and women’s brains work? What would those differences be?
Also this:
Just like other people said. The people in this study had differences in what areas lit up in their brain (and if the diffferences were in the “emotion control” area, it’s not a far leap to hypothesize that it’s as Cliff said, a socially-created difference for women to “control” their sexuality). But even then, they reported the same levesl of arousal, which contradicts your claim that women don’t get off on visual images.
@Ithiliana:
I’m actually not too concerned about the sample size. Brain analysis is tough and expensive, so these types of studies always have a small number of people. You’re right, though; that does mean you wouldn’t really be able to generalize the results.
@Kirbywarp: I don’t know the standards in this field, so am willing to accept that what little I know about sample size in other fields might not apply.
But just as people are questioning the ‘universality’ of results in psychology derived from decades of studying undergraduates in US universities, so the issue of the make up of the sample has to be considered — especially if all the participants identified as straight.
And I’m not as concerned about researchers universalizing (I need to read the study to know if they did or not), but the way people like Ruby always take very limited results, usually over or badly reported, and use them to smack people around with “see science proves me right.”
I am fascinated by and follow some of the neuroscience on reading issues–and what I get overall is that this is a very new science, and we’re just fumbling around to get a basic understanding of things, and we don’t really know fuckall yet despite some of the mainstream media coverage. But I could be wrong!
Ruby two days ago — “Having looked at those pictures of that naked man, I agree with Elaine from Seinfeld. Nudity is not a great look for men. Sorry guys.”
Ruby a few hours ago — “I never said men weren’t sexy…”
Ruby, I suggest you learn, and use, the phrase “in my opinion”.
Not to derail this down a neuroscience rabbithole, but wtf fMRI activation actually means is an open question afaik — the difference could well be something like the amygdala in men does more talking to itself while the amygdala in women does more talking to other parts of the brain (internal signals produce stronger activation signals). Could be that women’s brains are doing more checking with other brain bits than men’s (eg wtf Cliff and kirbywrap said about socialization).
Seconding kirbywrap’s “I’m actually not too concerned about the sample size.” and adding some serious annoyance at the cis gendered heterosexual assumption of the data (I know all neurosci does it, but it annoys me!)
Ruby reminds me of two women I used to share a house with (one owned the house and was divorced and was renting out rooms to make house payments). They were a few years older than I, but not much, and both were divorced. They decided that they absolutely had to get A Man. So they joined this sort of singles newspaper club thing (this was pre-internet days–1986 if memory serves). And they decided I absolutely had to do it. I got nagged for several weeks. So I joined (unfortunately the only ads that interested me were by other women, and the club wouldn’t allow same sex connections–this was in Boise, Idaho–and the few men who were interested in my ad (written very much in my bulldyke persona) were……not interesting to me (one thought “wiccan” meant I collected wicker furniture; the other wanted to lecture me on the most important feminist job which was forcing deadbeat dads to pay child support because he paid his damnit but all the women with kids he dated didn’t get child support). The whole thing reminded me a bit of the first year dorms I was in (required by university) (single sex of course) where women who were dating men or wanted to date men desperately needed everybody else to date men or want to date men, and my room mate and I got accused of being lesbians because we didn’t want to date men (actually we were sleeping with some men at the time, which meant we also got accused of having men in the hall overnight!). (Things were confusing in Idaho in the 1970s. I was confused in Idaho then too–looking back, I was mostly sleeping with the men because that’s what my room mate wanted to do and I was totally in love with her, and well……later on she realized that we’d be the perfect couple if only she wasn’t so totes straight, sigh).
Anyway, tmi, long anecdote: basically, it’s that Ruby comes across to me as behaving exactly like these women who I see as so insecure about what they actually want or desire that if anybody else wants something different, it’s an attack on them. I was very happy to get out of the situations where the GROUP tried to enforce certain social behaviors.
I doubt anybody would mind (as much) about what Ruby says if she used “I” instead of “we women” or “all women”–that’s what seems to irritate quite a few posters.
So, Ruby, what about it? Can you talk about your own desires in first person? Do you notice that there are a whole lot of people here who are very different from each other, but (as far as I have noticed) that while there are disagreements on general principles and issues, sometimes, it’s rare (and usually only for a troll, I think, but I don’t trust my memory, and even then, people defend their right to their own story and their interpretation of their own experiences) for any major arguments when people are in first person? (Not sure this is clear, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about here–and one reason I so enjoy this site.)
Ruby, please read IthilIana’s last paragraph just above VERY carefully.
Wiccan meaning someone who likes wicker furniture, I LOLd.
This discussion reminds me of what I was taught at church camp when I was little girl. A youth minister told me not to wear sleeveless sundresses, because men are “visually oriented” and bare shoulders might make them “stumble”. I had to put a sweater on over my dress on a hot July day, which was miserable. When I got older, I was confused because I liked the sight of handsome men, and women are supposed to be “mentally oriented”, not “visually oriented”. Then I wondered how gays, lesbians, and bisexuals fit into the worldview of women=visual stimuli and men=admirers of visual stimuli. Knowing that my own experience didn’t fit, as well as seeing other people whose experiences didn’t fit, made me decide the youth minister was full of crap.
While we’re on the subject of what all women apparently do/don’t like, I’m asexual and aromantic. And I love looking at pictures of hot guys/girls. Have a study to explain that, Ruby?
What about men and women being wired differently is so bothersome? You guys do realize that men and women’s brains are different, right? Or is that highly offensive to you?
@Kendra: For years I wore jeans and long sleeved shirts in Idaho summers because omg fat girls and women in shorts and sleeveless–TEH HORROR.
*shudders*
Now, I flaunts it (plus TEXAS summers much hotter than Idaho).
The one time my brother and I were going to go to the youth camp for our local Presbyterian church, our parents pulled us out because that was the year the Presbyterian Church came out in support of Angela Davis (so OMG COMMUNISTS).
I was disappointed only because I had such a crush on the minister’s wife who was the choir leader. . .it was hilarious to stumble across all the stuff by and about Angela Davis for my dissertation decades later and realize holy shit that was what that was about. (It wasn’t really clear to me at the time).