Fun thread, and on one of my favorite topics, too. I hope no one minds if I delurk momentarily at this late date.
Tamayo wrote:
Women's attitudes of their own societal positions constitute a reason for their own social inferiority. Thinman made that point above, and I concurred. I do not accept the "by and large" however...
I do, though this may be the result of my environment rather than of any kind of objective appraisal. The following is personal opinion and should not be expected to conform to strict standards of logical rigor; nonetheless, you may find it entertaining and/or instructive.
For context: I live, work, study, and prosecute essentially all of my social life in and around Santa Cruz, California, a hotbed of feminism if there ever was one. Men around here have two courses of action if they don't want to be (metaphorically, of course) stoned to death: to accept feminism as it is preached to them (admittedly rather more radical than feminism as a whole tends to be, as the average feminist doesn't feel the urge to preach), or to keep their opinions on the subject to themselves. This is all pursuant to the main point, which follows:
Around here, sexism as espoused by men towards women essentially does not exist. You still get flashes of it occasionally, such as in the farthest-right publications you can think of, but those are usually couched in other issues (abortion being the canonical example) and fairly well hidden. Yet you still get all the usual female stereotypes. What gives?
I think the answer is deeper than simple sexism, and the relatively female portions of our culture seem to be the best place to look for it. Yes, there's pornography (and I include such drek as
Maxim and
FHM within the auspices of 'pornography', for reasons that should be clear to anyone that's picked such a magazine up), but, as you say (and inconsequential issues aside), not many women read that kind of thing, so the answer must lie elsewhere. The men I have spoken to on the subject are either genuinely attracted to 'empowered' (I hate that term, as empowerment implies an external empowerer, but will use it for the sake of conciseness) women or do a fairly good job of pretending to be, so it's not an issue of
actual sexual attractiveness. The feminist movement, whatever its faults, has done a pretty good job of eliminating institutional forms of sexism. And I know far too many aggressive women to buy the biological argument.
That pretty much exhausts the usual scapegoats. My best guess is that this apparent stereotyping of women is mostly thanks to upbringing. I can hear triumphant noises from the peanut gallery, but hold your I-told-you-sos; consider that children tend (stereotypically, at least, and it is stereotypes, after all, that we are dealing with here) to receive moral instruction from the parent of the same sex, and that most mid-childhood development takes place in a de-facto sex-segregated environment. Sometimes this is formalized (as in boys' or girls' schools, or variations on the theme), sometimes not, but either way most children draw their friends, mentors and role models from the same sex. Female-targeted entertainment likewise tends to be produced, or at least created, by women.
So what do female children get from this part of their education? Many things, of course, but most applicable to this argument is a lot of instruction on what constitutes proper behavior for a woman. Some of this is valid (viz. earlier comments on deserted parking lots, though I can't help suspecting a certain degree of sexual paranoia), but most, as far as I can tell, is not. Nowadays, a lot of noises about empowerment seem to be mixed in with the indoctrination, but, in the terminology of media and pop psychology, 'empowerment' tends to boil down to 'be yourself'... and what is that self being molded into? Why, the stereotypical bubblegum-pink princess, of course.
I'm not at all sure that 'sexism' is the proper term for the phenomenon, for reasons which I have already explained, but I do consider it an avowedly bad thing. So, what can we do about it? I think the most specific thing men can do is to make their intentions clear, in hopes of dispelling the aura of
perceived sexual attractiveness that so much of the culture is predicated upon; more generally, it's a good idea to treat women, not better (in fact, in many cases this reduces to 'worse'), but less in line with the expectations set upon them. Women have a more difficult task, but also a simpler one: to work towards less artificial standards of behavior in their own culture. To blame men entirely, or even largely, would be to confuse cause and effect.
Incidentally, I study engineering with a heavy emphasis on mathematics (set and number theory, mostly), and about a third of my professors have been women. They tend to do a better job than the male professors I've had, too... perhaps because they have to.