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Sexism

prejudice or discrimination based on a person’s sex or gender

Sexism or gender discrimination is prejudice or discrimination based on a person's sex or gender. Sexism can affect either gender, but it is particularly documented as affecting women and girls. It has been linked to stereotypes and gender roles, and may include the belief that one sex or gender is intrinsically superior to another. Extreme sexism may foster sexual harassment, rape, and other forms of sexual violence.

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Sexism in media partly involves the portrayal of both men and women in ways that are consistent with prevailing stereotypes. Illustrating this sexism, men are more likely to appear in prime-time programming than women, and when women are shown, they are less likely to be shown working outside the home and more likely to be shown in a romantic relationship (Signorielli, 1989). Lauzen, Dozier, and Horan (2008) similarly found that women were underrepresented in prime-time shows and were more likely to be shown in interpersonal or social roles, while men were more likely to be portrayed in work roles. ~ Stephen Reysen, Iva Katzarska-Miller, Courtney N. Plante, Sharon E. Roberts, Kathleen C. Gerbasi
 
Women have long been props for war-making. Invasions are often justified in part by pointing to the suffering of women in the countries targeted for attack. “Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish,” Laura Bush said when she took over her husband's weekly radio address, in 2001, to urge Americans to support the war in Afghanistan. Like McMaster’s miniskirt photograph, Bush's speech exemplifies the kind of pseudo-feminism sometimes used to justify invasion. The literary theorist and postcolonial feminist Gayatri Spivak calls it “white men saving brown women from brown men,” an imperial logic that ignores sexism at home to fight sexism abroad, and which disregards brown women’s agency and self-understanding. ~ Sarah Sentilles
 
This year, according to statistics published by the advocacy group Women and Hollywood, women comprised just 27 percent of creators, directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and directors of photography working in television. It’s a figure that’s actually fallen since last year. Women account for 40 percent of speaking characters on television, a figure that’s also dropped. ~ Sophie Gilbert
 
The socio-cultural salience of ability versus other components of the gender-math stereotype may impact women pursuing math. ~ Dustin B. Thoman
 
"Oh, come now!" Helena spoke up at this point. "Surely you're not trying to deny that women too have their a part in sin, despite what you've been saying about men being the instigators and causes of all evil and it always being men who put us up to it? For the most part, that's nonsense. To take their part for a moment (for, after all, we are alone here and they can't hear us), what about all those shameless and corrupt women who dishonor our sex publicly, soliciting men openly and selling off their honor to the first bidder? Such women destroy men, stripping them of all their money and often bringing them to the point of death. And men certainly aren't going to let us forget they exist-especially since many of them are upright and virtuous, like Scipio, Xenocrates, Alexander, and the others we read about in history." ~ Moderata Fonte
 
If our stereotype about women today is that women are the moral center of the home, they are the beacon of light that keeps men and women in line ... that idea is actually of relatively recent vintage, that stereotype about women's morality, that actually comes from the late 19th century ... the stereotype about women in the 1600s and 1700s was just the opposite — it held that we were naturally lustful and wanton, we are in need of male guidance ... in order to protect ourselves from our natural inclination and temptation into sin. ~ Katherine Howe
 
The so-called Muslim women’s movement is predicated on the idea that Muslim men, not Islam, have been responsible for the suppression of women’s rights. For this reason, Muslim feminists throughout the world are advocating a return to the society Muhammad originally envisioned for his followers. Despite differences in culture, nationalities, and beliefs, these women believe that the lesson to be learned from Muhammad in Medina is that Islam is above all an egalitarian religion. Their Medina is a society in which Muhammad designated women like Umm Waraqa as spiritual guides for the Ummah; in which the Prophet himself was sometimes publicly rebuked by his wives; in which women prayed and fought alongside the men; in which women like Aisha and Umm Salamah acted not only as religious but also as political—and on at least one occasion military—leaders; and in which the call to gather for prayer, bellowed from the rooftop of Muhammad’s house, brought men and women together to kneel side by side and be blessed as a single undivided community. ~ Reza Aslan
 
No one thought to ask about what would happen next ... nearly an entire generation came of age in a peculiar all-male world where the only concern was the Koran, sharia law and the glorification of jihad. ~ Dina Temple-Raston
 
[Consider] what some women do when people gather with a shaykh to hear [the recitation of] books. At that point women come, too, to hear the readings; the men sit in one place, the women facing them. It even happens at such times that some of the women are carried away by the situation; one will stand up, and sit down, and shout in a loud voice. [Moreover,] her awra will appear; in her house, their exposure would be forbidden — how can it be allowed in a mosque, in the presence of men? ~ Muhammad ibn al-Hajj
 
All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman ... What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours! ~ Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger
 
If I had such a memory as Benwick, I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side of the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say these were all written by men. ~ Jane Austen
 
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. ~ Virginia Woolf
 
Because many manufacturing jobs—such as machinists and craft workers—have long been male-dominated, women who enter the field may lack power or be seen as outsiders, thus making them targets for harassment. ~ Jocelyn Frye
 
Sexism implies inequality, If you want to read any form of sexism in here than [sic] it has to be towards the men they obviously do not have the upper hand here. ~ Fokke de Jong.
 
Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female. ~ Guerilla Girls
  • The notion that ads convey meaning about gender without viewers’ awareness is not new. In his influential Gender Advertisements, Goffman (1979) argued that advertisements symbolically reflect social-cultural constructions of gender through displays of posture, positioning, facial expressions, and social roles: Sitting at a man’s feet (ritualized subordination), gazing off absently (licensed withdrawal), or gently caressing an object (feminine touch) all demonstrate women’s inferior status. According to Goffman, however, we fail to recognize the sexism in these images precisely because they reflect our unexamined assumptions about gender. Nonetheless, these gender displays allegedly perpetuate sexist stereotypes. Despite the complete lack of empirical evidence showing that these images promote sexist beliefs or attitudes, Goffman’s analysis is widely accepted by scholars, who regularly employ his taxonomy of gender displays to establish the prevalence of sexism in the media (e.g., Belknap & Leonard, 1991; Kang, 1997; Krassas, Blauwkamp, & Wesselink, 2003; Lindner, 2004; Millard & Grant, 2006; Plous & Neptune, 1997).
  • In sum, there is clear support for the prediction that ads with latent sexism produce greater acceptance of sexual assault compared with nonsexist ads. There is also evidence that the effects of latent sexism on acceptance of sexual assault and minimization of sexual coercion are distinct from the effects of overt sexism. Yet, because the ads in the latent, overt, and no sexism conditions differed in ways other than the type of sexist content, the internal validity of the ad effects remains a concern.
  • The so-called Muslim women’s movement is predicated on the idea that Muslim men, not Islam, have been responsible for the suppression of women’s rights. For this reason, Muslim feminists throughout the world are advocating a return to the society Muhammad originally envisioned for his followers. Despite differences in culture, nationalities, and beliefs, these women believe that the lesson to be learned from Muhammad in Medina is that Islam is above all an egalitarian religion. Their Medina is a society in which Muhammad designated women like Umm Waraqa as spiritual guides for the Ummah; in which the Prophet himself was sometimes publicly rebuked by his wives; in which women prayed and fought alongside the men; in which women like Aisha and Umm Salamah acted not only as religious but also as political—and on at least one occasion military—leaders; and in which the call to gather for prayer, bellowed from the rooftop of Muhammad’s house, brought men and women together to kneel side by side and be blessed as a single undivided community.
    • Reza Aslan, (2005). No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam., p.136
  • If I had such a memory as Benwick, I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side of the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say these were all written by men.
  • As we know, by and large women's life experience has not been represented. It has been men's life experience that has made up the body of art history. At least, as we know it now; and there are all these categories and words that diminish women's expression. So that if it's done by a man, it's "high art"; if it's done by a woman, it's "decorative". If it's done by a man, it's "art"; if it's done by a woman, it's "political". There's all these words, you know? For example, images by men, of women are "art"; images by women of men are "political". Abstract patterns by men are "art"; abstract patterns by women in fabric are "decorative"; they're called quilts. So there's all these kind of double standards and all these kind of words that prevent women's experience from entering—even when they express it—from entering the mainstream of art.
  • The popular notion of glass ceiling effects implies that gender (or other) disadvantages are stronger at the top of the hierarchy than at lower levels and that these disadvantages become worse later in a person's career.
    • David A. Cotter, Joan M. Hermsen, Seth Ovadia and Reeve Vanneman (2001): "The Glass Ceiling Effect" Social Forces, Vol. 80, No. 2 (Dec., 2001), pp. 655-681 Published by: Oxford University Press.
  • Women in quantitative fields risk being personally reduced to negative stereotypes that allege a sex-based math inability. This situational predicament, termed stereotype threat, can undermine women’s performance and aspirations in all quantitative domains. Gender-stereotypic television commercials were employed in three studies to elicit the female stereotype among both men and women. Study 1 revealed that only women for whom the activated stereotype was self-relevant underperformed on a subsequent math test. Exposure to the stereotypic commercials led women taking an aptitude test in Study 2 to avoid math items in favor of verbal items. In Study 3, women who viewed the stereotypic commercials indicated less interest in educational/vocational options in which they were susceptible to stereotype threat (i.e., quantitative domains) and more interest in fields in which they were immune to stereotype threat (i.e., verbal domains).
  • Exposing participants to gender-stereotypic TV commercials designed to elicit the female stereotype, the present research explored whether vulnerability to stereotype threat could persuade women to avoid leadership roles in favor of nonthreatening subordinate roles. Study 1 confirmed that exposure to the stereotypic commercials undermined women's aspirations on a subsequent leadership task. Study 2 established that varying the identity safety of the leadership task moderated whether activation of the female stereotype mediated the effect of the commercials on women's aspirations. Creating an identity-safe environment eliminated vulnerability to stereotype threat despite exposure to threatening situational cues that primed stigmatized social identities and their corresponding stereotypes.
  • Tens of thousands of American servicemen enjoyed their first exotic port of call, too, this time at Olongapo City. The 20 or so R&R sites in the late 1950's had swelled to 1,567 in Olongapo and another 615 in Angeles city by the late 1980's.
    Hawaii and the Philippines were only two of the many places where military sexism found its logical expression. Soldiers viewed girls and women there through lenses of compliant Asian femininity but referred to them derogatorily as “slant eyes”. The “little brown sex machines” referred to T-shirts in Okinawa, Japan, morphed quickly into “little brown fucking machines powered by rice” in displays of militarized misogyny. Following six months of service, soldiers tired of drinking and playing billiards and video games could fly cheaply to Thailand, Hong Kong, Okinawa, or South Korea for more of the same, where structurally similar R&R venues had been set up for them. The 500,000 American soldiers in and near Saigon during the Vietnam war were matched in number by women and girls in prostitution, many in a kind of licensing system approved by the U.S. military.
  • Two studies investigated gender stereotyping in American magazine photos. Study 1 compares cover photos of men and women on face-ism, an index of the degree to which a photo focuses on the face versus the body. Photos of women are found to focus more on their bodies and photos of men on their faces, a finding consistent with previous research. This finding is strongly mediated by other variables, however, particularly the social role of the cover person. Study 2 compares the facial expressions, specifically the mouth positions, of men and women in advertisements from several popular magazines. Women are significantly more likely than men to be photographed with their mouths open, presumably portraying less serious expressions.
  • Kugtár ni kabaián, ilot ni kalantangan.
    • The kick of a female carabao, the massage of the male. (Women can't hurt men physically)
    • Filipino proverbs, "PHILIPPINE PROVERBS", Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University.
  • Looking at almost 6,000 children's books published between 1900 and 2000, the study, led by Janice McCabe, a professor of sociology at Florida State University, found that males are central characters in 57% of children's books published each year, with just 31% having female central characters. Male animals are central characters in 23% of books per year, the study found, while female animals star in only 7.5%.
  • Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men – or about women – is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident.”
    • Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, p.76
  • "Oh, come now!" Helena spoke up at this point. "Surely you're not trying to deny that women too have their a part in sin, despite what you've been saying about men being the instigators and causes of all evil and it always being men who put us up to it? For the most part, that's nonsense. To take their part for a moment (for, after all, we are alone here and they can't hear us), what about all those shameless and corrupt women who dishonor our sex publicly, soliciting men openly and selling off their honor to the first bidder? Such women destroy men, stripping them of all their money and often bringing them to the point of death. And men certainly aren;t going to let us forget they exist-especially since many of them are upright and virtuous, like Scipio, Xenocrates, Alexander, and the others we read about in history."
    "Well that last point is true as far as it goes," replied Cornelia. "But you aren't going to find men like that often: they are like patterns of virtue that God sends into the world for others to imitate (though few manage to get anywhere near the mark), and that's the reason why historians pick them out for special mention, as something remarkable, outlandish, and memorable, like those amazing comets that appear once in the course of many years. By contrast, there have been endless good and virtuous women. But where shameless women are concerned-and I am not trying to deny that such women exist (would that they didn't!)-I repeat what I said earlier, that the source and the true cause of this terrible evil lies in the men who trapped, tempted, solicited, and lured on these women while they still had their honor, leading the naive and easygoing of them to fall head-over-heels to their ruin. But for all that, these women, wretched as they are, preserve a little more dignity than the men they consort with, because at least they aren't the ones the men; whereas men fall into their traps like animals and pay for them, however corrupt, vile, and wretched they are. Which is something that wouldn't happen if they kept their heads and showed some of that modesty and virtue we find in women. Just tell me: have you ever come across the case of a young girl, a virgin, so bold and shameless as to tempt a man into vice? It cannot be doubted that when a virgin loses her honor, it can be blamed entirely on a man who has shamelessly flattered and solicited her in all the ways he can find: eventually, as I say, he takes advantage of her naivete and gradually strips her of all her natural feminine dignity and power until she is finally reduced to prostitution, either because he ahs abandoned her, as often happens, or because some other hardship forces her into it. And once the wretched creatures are reduced to this state, knowing as they do that men, with their tricks and relentless pestering, have been responsible for their downfall, they decide to get something back for the great harm they have suffered and resolve never to love a man again, since they have been so deceived by them, but rather to give them a taste of their own medicine and, just as men once preyed on their honor, they prey on men's purses; they pretend to love them and if, by some chance, a man falls in love with one of them (for it does happen sometimes that men get more involved with these women than with decent women, because these women have become like men and share their propensity to vice)-if that happens, I can tell you, he's had it, because they will drain him to the last penny, just as he deserves.
    "And besides all this, those poor women have only one sin (and that one caused by men, as I have said), whereas most men have endless vices. So why should so much blame be heaped on our sex? I'm not denying that it is a most shocking and shameful thing, but it is unfair that all women should be blames for the transgressions of a few, or that their vice should reflect on women in general. Though even those few do not deserve to get all the blame while men stand by smugly congratulating themselves, because I have not come across any divine law that absolves men of this sin and punishes women alone.
    • Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, p.89
  • [Consider] what some women do when people gather with a shaykh to hear [the recitation of] books. At that point women come, too, to hear the readings; the men sit in one place, the women facing them. It even happens at such times that some of the women are carried away by the situation; one will stand up, and sit down, and shout in a loud voice. [Moreover,] her awra will appear; in her house, their exposure would be forbidden — how can it be allowed in a mosque, in the presence of men?
  • In the average American household, the television is turned "on" for almost seven hours each day, and the typical adult or child watches two to three hours of television per day. It is estimated that the average child sees 360,000 advertisements by the age of eighteen (Harris, 1989). Due to this extensive exposure to mass media depictions, the media's influence on gender role attitudes has become an area of considerable interest and concern in the past quarter century. Analyses of gender portrayals have found predominantly stereotypic portrayals of dominant males nurturant females within the contexts of advertisements (print and television), magazines fiction, newspapers, child-oriented print media, textbooks, literature, film, and popular music (Busby, 1975; DurMn, 1985a; Leppard, Ogletree, & Wallen, 1993; Lovdal, 1989; Pearson, Turner, & Todd-Mancillas, 1991; Rudmann & Verdi, 1993; Signorielli & Lears, 1992). Most of the research to date on the effects of gender-role images in the media has focused primarily on the female gender role. A review of research on men in the media suggests that, except for film literature, the topic of masculinity has not been addressed adequately (Fejes, 1989). Indeed, as J. Kate (1995) recently noted, "there is a glaring absence of a thorough body of research into the power of cultural images of masculinity" (p. 133). Kate suggests that studying the impact of advertising represents a useful place to begin addressing this lacuna.
  • This study suggests that sex stereotypes implicitly enacted, but never explicitly articulated, in TV commercials may inhibit women's achievement aspirations. Advertising is often the soft porn of the mainstream, but it is porn nonetheless. It objectifies women, reduces them to body parts, and promotes the idea that women are here to be looked at, used, and consumed. Men and women (N=180) viewed locally produced replicas of four current, sex-stereotyped commercials, or four replicas that were identical except that the sex roles were reversed, or (control) named their favorite TV programs. All subjects then wrote an essay imagining their lives “10 years from now.” The essays were coded for achievement and homemaking themes. Women who viewed traditional commercials deemphasized achievement in favor of homemaking, compared to men and compared to women who had seen reversed role commercials. The reversed role commercials eliminated the sex difference in net achievement focus. Control subjects were indistinguishable from their same-sex counterparts in the traditional condition. The results identified some social changes needed to make “equality of opportunity” a social reality for women as well as men.
  • This year, according to statistics published by the advocacy group Women and Hollywood, women comprised just 27 percent of creators, directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and directors of photography working in television. It’s a figure that’s actually fallen since last year. Women account for 40 percent of speaking characters on television, a figure that’s also dropped.
  • At the same time, though, studio heads and producers have been relatively quick to welcome back actors, directors, and writers who’ve been accused of harassment and assault, particularly when their status makes them seem irreplaceable. It’s a dual-edged message: Don’t abuse your power, but if you do, you’ll still have a career. Part of the confusion comes down to the fact that these men are seen as invaluable because the stories they tell are still understood to have disproportionate worth.
  • According to a report by the Women’s Media Center, television viewers are less likely to see women reporting the news today than just a few years ago. At the Big Three networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—combined, men were responsible for reporting 75 percent of the evening news broadcasts over three months in 2016, while women were responsible for reporting only 25 percent—a drop from 32 percent two years earlier.
  • “Even if it’s unspoken, there is a very clear expectation that you will maintain a certain appearance if you’re a woman,” the former CNN anchor and NBC News White House correspondent Campbell Brown told me. “The ability to maintain that appearance flies out the window when you get pregnant.”
  • The practice of using first names for individuals from a profession that is predominantly female occurs in health care. Physicians are typically referred to using their last name, but nurses are referred to, even by physicians they do not know, by their first name. According to Suzanne Gordon, a typical conversation between a physician and a nurse is: "Hello Jane. I'm Dr. Smith. Would you hand me the patient's chart?"
    • Suzanne Gordon (2006). Nursing Against the Odds: How Health Care Cost Cutting, Media Stereotypes, and Medical Hubris Undermine Nurses and Patient Care. Cornell University Press. p. 34.
  • Research on women in print advertisements has shown that pictures of women's bodies and body parts ("body-isms") appear more often than pictures of men's bodies. Men's faces ("face-isms") are photographed more often than their bodies. This present study is the first to confirm this finding for television commercials. Results showed that men appear twice as often as women in beer commercials. The body-isms of women significantly outnumbered the body-isms of men. Women also appeared in swimwear more often than men, thus increasing the photo opportunities for body-isms. This study raises concerns about the dehuman&ing influence of these images in beer commercials, and their association with alcohol use and the violence in the televised sporting events during which beer commercials are frequently aired.
  • A central tenet of modern feminist thought has been the assertion that "all women are oppressed." This assertion implies that women share a common lot, that factors like class, race, religion, sexual preference, etc. do not create a diversity of experience that determines the extent to which sexism will be an oppressive force in the lives of individual women. Sexism as a system of domination is institutionalized but it has never determined in an absolute way the fate of all women in this society. Being oppressed means the absence of choices. It is the primary point of contact between the oppressed and the oppressor. Many women in this society do have choices, (as inadequate as they are) therefore exploitation and discrimination are words that more accurately describe the lot of women collectively in the United States. Many women do not join organized resistance against sexism precisely because sexism has not meant an absolute lack of choices. They may know they are discriminated against on the basis of sex, but they do not equate this with oppression. Under capitalism, patriarchy is structured so that sexism restricts women's behavior in some realms even as freedom from limitations is allowed in other spheres. The absence of extreme restrictions leads many women to ignore the areas in which they are exploited or discriminated against; it may even lead them to imagine that no women are oppressed. There are oppressed women in the United States, and it is both appropriate and necessary that we speak against such oppression.
  • For the next few months, I kept noticing ads that demeaned women in popular magazines as well as in The Lancet. Many of them ended up on my refrigerator. Some of them were outrageous. ("My boyfriend told me he loved me for my mind. I was never so insulted in my life," said a woman with a cigarette.) Many were demeaning, such as the adfor a "feminine hygiene" spray that said, "You don't sleep with teddy bears any more," implying that, although our teddy bears don't mind how we women smell, our boyfriends do. Somewere shockingly violent.
    I began to notice patterns and categories. I saw that women's bodies were often dismembered in ads-just legs or breasts or torsos were featured. Breasts are the most visible symbol of femininity in advertising. The breast, more than any other part of the female body, is emphasized and sexualized, and it becomes an object of desire. This objectification reduces women to mere body parts and reinforces an unrealistic standard of beauty.I saw that women were often infantilized and that little girls were sexualized. ("You're a Halston woman from the very beginning," said a shampoo ad, featuring a girl of about five.) I bought a macrolens for my camera and turned the ads into slides. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with them. I had begun my life's work.
  • Our said happiness is but the excuse of our exclusion. Whenever I hear a man talking of the advantages of our ill-used sex, I look upon it as the prelude to some new act of authority.
  • The present study extends existing research showing a link between images of women in advertisements and sexual attitudes. Advertising encourages the idea that sex is something casual, impersonal, and disconnected from real relationships. Women are often portrayed as passive objects to be consumed, and sex becomes a commodity, devoid of emotional connection or intimacy. We examined also the impact of seeing sex image and progressive advertisements on attitudes toward feminism and the women's movement. Ninety-two undergraduate academic and technology white middle-class students were assigned to one of two conditions: rating either sex image or progressive advertisements. All participants then completed four subscales of M. R. Burt's [(1980) "Cultural Myths and Supports for Rape," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 38, pp. 217-230] Sexual Attitudes Survey and R. E. Fassinger's [(1994) "Development and Testing of the Attitudes Toward Feminism and the Women's Movement (FWM) Scale," Psychology of Women Quarterly, Vol. 18, pp. 389-402] Feminism and Women's Movement Scale. Major findings include replication of previous data showing a relation between viewing sex image advertisements and reporting attitudes supportive of sexual aggression. Those seeing sex image advertisements also showed lower acceptance of feminism. It is suggested that continuous presentation of such advertisements undermines women's striving for equality.
  • Over the past five decades, gender-role portrayals in advertisements have changed in accord with the changing roles of women in society. In 1953, only 23.4% of women were in the labor force. At that time, advertisements typically portrayed women as objects of sexual gratification, or as spouses, homemakers, and mothers whose characteristics were passivity and dependence (Courtney & Lockeretz, 1971 in Belknap & Leonard 11, 1991) Four decades later, women's participation had doubled, to 60.7%. (Basset, 1994; Hughes, 1995). Women not only were gaining ground in marketplace participation, but also were filling positions once held primarily by men. As women began to enter the workforce, the image of the ideal woman began to be transformed. Changing demographic, economic and social patterns, encouraged a resurgence of feminist groups who focused public attention on the portrayal of women in media (Sullivan & O'Connor, 1988). Women in advertisements became central characters (Belknap & Leonard, 1991); they were portrayed as working outside the home, in nontraditional, progressive occupations. In contemporary advertisements, increasingly women are presented in professional roles requiring decision making on items and topics other than household, hygiene or beauty products, and sometimes they are portrayed as autonomous and equal to their male counterparts.
    Coinciding with this reduction in the portrayal of women in traditional homemaker and mother roles, has been a 60% increase in advertisements in which women are portrayed in purely decorative roles (Sullivan & O'Connor, 1982).
  • All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman ... What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours!
  • Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche as quoted by Joseph Goebbels as reported by Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will, Men Women and Rape, (1975) note 3, at 48. the original statement was attributed to Nietzsche.; as quoted in War Crimes Against Women: Prosecution in International War Crimes Tribunals, Kelly Dawn Askin, (1997), p.49.
  • We know that women gamers face harassment and stalking and threats of violence from other players. When they speak out about their experiences, they're attacked on Twitter and other social media outlets, even threatened in their homes. And what's brought these issues to light is that there are a lot of women out there, especially young women, who are speaking out bravely about their experiences, even when they know they'll be attacked for it.
    • Barack Obama, (March 16, 2016). Remarks by the President at Reception in Honor of Women's History Month (Speech). Washington, DC. Archived from the original on March 18, 2016. Retrieved March 20, 2016.
  • [In] many countries, labour market discrimination—i.e. the unequal treatment of equally productive individuals only because they belong to a specific group—is still a crucial factor inflating disparities in employment and the quality of job opportunities [...] Evidence presented in this edition of the Employment Outlook suggests that about 8 percent of the variation in gender employment gaps and 30 percent of the variation in gender wage gaps across OECD countries can be explained by discriminatory practices in the labour market.
    • Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD Employment Outlook - 2008 Edition Summary in English. OECD, Paris, 2008, p. 3-4.
  • As for some characters being dead and then alive again -- that happens to both genders in comics. Look at Wonder Man. The thing that, to my mind, separates the male and female characters are the sex crimes. Only the female characters are victims of sex crimes; male characters are never subjected to that. (There may be one or two exceptions when the male character was sexually abused as a child, but that's about it.) It is the number and frequency of THAT which troubles me. (...) A female soldier in battle may suffer wounds; that's different than a woman being stalked, kidnapped, and having violence done to her in civilian life. The former incurs the physical damage because of her occupation; the latter, strictly because of her gender. A female cop may be shot because she is a cop, not because she is a female. That, to me, is part of the difference.
  • Before suing, I’d consulted other women who had sued big, powerful companies over harassment and discrimination, and they all gave me pretty much the same advice: "Don’t do it." One woman told me, "It’s a complete mismatch of resources. They don’t fight fair. Even if you win, it will destroy your reputation."
  • I reject the argument that I wasn’t the right person to bring suit. I was one of the only people who had the resources and the position to do so. I believed I had an obligation to speak out about what I’d seen.
  • Prostitution is the use of a woman's body by a man for his own satisfaction. There is no desire or satisfaction on the part of the prostitute. Prostitution is not mutual, pleasurable exchange of the use of bodies, but the unilateral use of a woman's body by a man in exchange for money
  • Sexism in media partly involves the portrayal of both men and women in ways that are consistent with prevailing stereotypes. Illustrating this sexism, men are more likely to appear in prime-time programming than women, and when women are shown, they are less likely to be shown working outside the home and more likely to be shown in a romantic relationship (Signorielli, 1989). Lauzen, Dozier, and Horan (2008) similarly found that women were underrepresented in prime-time shows and were more likely to be shown in interpersonal or social roles, while men were more likely to be portrayed in work roles. This underrepresentation of women even pervades television commercials, where women not only appear less, but are also more likely to be portrayed as secondary characters supporting a male character when they are present (Ganahl, Prinsen, & Netzley, 2003). The same trend holds true for video games, where female characters are less likely to be heroes or main characters and, when they are included, they tend to dress in a manner consistent with stereotypes (Dietz, 1998). Female (vs. male) video game characters are also more likely to be sexualized and scantily dressed, while male characters tend to be hypermasculine and violent (Dill & Thill, 2007). And, consistent with research on other media effects, sexist content does affect consumers in a content-consistent manner. For example, media consumption in general (Swami et al., 2010) and frequency of playing sexist video games specifically are both associated with greater benevolent sexism (Stermer & Burkley, 2015). In another study, greater video game playing over one's lifetime was found to correlate with hostile sexism (Fox & Potocki, 2016). Together, the research shows that the way gender roles are portrayed in media can influence consumers’ own attitudes.
  • This study examines the way female and male models are portrayed in magazine advertisements. Specifically. we focus on differences in sex role stereotyping, sexual display of the body, and violent imagery. Data were collected from a stratitied random sample of magazines displaying fashion and fitness advertisements (N = 254). Findings from he analysis show that females are more likely than males to be placed in submissive positions, sexually displayed, and subjects of violent imagery. Sexual display and violent imagery measures are the strongest predictors of subjective level of exploitation.
  • Women have long been props for war-making. Invasions are often justified in part by pointing to the suffering of women in the countries targeted for attack. “Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish,” Laura Bush said when she took over her husband’s weekly radio address, in 2001, to urge Americans to support the war in Afghanistan. Like McMaster’s miniskirt photograph, Bush’s speech exemplifies the kind of pseudo-feminism sometimes used to justify invasion. The literary theorist and postcolonial feminist Gayatri Spivak calls it “white men saving brown women from brown men,” an imperial logic that ignores sexism at home to fight sexism abroad, and which disregards brown women’s agency and self-understanding. How women make sense of the situations in which they live—whether, for instance, they see the veil as oppressive or as a symbol of resistance or simply as an important religious practice—is irrelevant. Instead, imperialism is presented as a necessary act of deliverance. They don’t know how to treat their women; our job—really, our moral obligation—is liberation.
  • When retailers in Western Europe produce these sorts of garments (i. e., the “burkini”) they are not “helping” women. They are pandering to the whims of male ultra-conservative religious leaders, and in so doing are tacitly endorsing the misogyny contained in all such religious edicts on female clothing. Like the well-meaning fools who rushed out to don a hijab in a show of solidarity (and lack of neural activity), it betrays those Muslim women in the community who do not wish to conform to whatever the most conservative and parochial voices of self-appointed leaders have ordained acceptable. These acts endorse and promote the worldview of those who suggest that women are to be treated like children or possessions. It severely undermines the voices of women who wish to live as authors of their own lives.
  • Most patients who visit the doctor are female. Most patients who report being in pain are female. "The epidemiology is clear, women are up to 70 percent of all pain patients" says Jeffrey Mogil, a neuroscientist at McGill University and author of a new commentary in Nature arguing for greater diversity in lab animals.
    A growing body of evidence—including a 2012 analysis of 11,000 patient records—indicates that women are more sensitive to pain. In fact, they may be hardwired to feel pain differently. Last year, Magil and a plethora of co-authors published a study showing that female lab mice actually used different cells to transmit pain signals through their spinal cord. And while no one has confirmed that this is also the case in human females (paging the ethics committee...), Magil says evidence in animals is both compelling and growing stronger.
    "This is not news for those of us who have worked in this field for a long time," says William Schmidt, president of NorthStar Consulting, a pain research company. "It’s still a struggle to get some very traditional investigators to understand the importance of gender in preclinical and clinical pain research." In 2015, just 4 percent of all the rodent-based papers published in the journal Pain used both males and females, says Mogil. That's roughly the same as it has been for a decade
    Mogil says this inertia comes partly from scientists who believe female rodents aren't reliable model organisms. And true, there is research that indicates their hormonal fluctuations (female rodents have oestrous cycle that is roughly analogous to the human menstrual cycle) do affect the data. "The problem is if you look at those studies, their results are going in different directions," says Mogil. In some studies rats are more sensitive, in others less. Overall, it averages out, he says.
  • Across all the countries examined, females were underrepresented in the film workforce compared to their actual percentages globally. Discrepancy scores were calculated to determine the degree to which on-screen depictions of occupations differ from real-world values (see Table 6). The scores were grouped into three categories based on the size of the discrepancy: small (5-9.9), moderate (10-19.9), and large (20+). India was the only country in which female film jobs revealed a small difference from the real world. Five countries (Japan, Brazil, U.K., China, Korea) showed moderate differences between movie and actual workforce percentages and five countries (France, Russia, U.S., Australia, Germany) showed large differences. Once again, women are underrepresented on screen. This time they comprise less than a quarter of the workforce in international films, which is well below their share in the real world of work. Given that movies can set an agenda for the next generation entering the workforce, the lack of females in the labor market is a concern. Perhaps even more troubling is the types of occupations women are shown possessing, the topic of the next section.
  • The socio-cultural salience of ability versus other components of the gender-math stereotype may impact women pursuing math.
    • Dustin B. Thoman; Paul H. White; Niwako Yamawaki; Hirofumi Koishi, (2008). "Variations of Gender–math Stereotype Content Affect Women's Vulnerability to Stereotype Threat". Sex Roles. 58 (9–10): 702–12. doi:10.1007/s11199-008-9390-x.
  • Over the past decade, anti-women communities on the internet — ranging from “Men's rights movement” forums and incels to “pickup artists” — have grown exponentially. While these movements differ in small ways, what they have in common is an organized hatred of women; the animus is so pronounced that the hate-watch group Southern Poverty Law Center tracks their actions.
    The other dangerous idea that connects these men is their shared belief that women — good-looking women, in particular — owe them sexual attention. The incel community that Mr. Minassian paid homage to, for example, was banned from Reddit last year because, among other issues, some adherents advocated rape as a means to end their celibacy.
  • Feminists have been warning against these online hate groups and their propensity for real-life violence for over a decade. I know because I’m one of the people who has been issuing increasingly dire warnings. After I started a feminist blog in 2004, I became a target of men’s-rights groups who were angry with women about everything from custody battles to the false notion that most women lie about rape. In 2011, I had to flee my house with my young daughter on the advice of law enforcement, because one of these groups put me on a “registry” of women to target.
  • Not every attack is preventable, but the misogyny that drives them is. To stop all of this, we must trust women when they point out that receiving streams of death threats on Twitter is not normal and that online communities strategizing about how to rape women are much more than just idle chatter. There is no reason another massacre should happen.
  • Two matched series of TV commercials served as stimuli in a study with 52 female undergraduates. One series consisted of 4 replicas of current network commercials. The other series consisted of the same 4 commercials, identical in every respect except that each of the roles in the scenario was portrayed by a person of the opposite sex. Ss viewed either the traditional or reversed-role series. Those exposed to the nontraditional versions showed more independence of judgment in an Asch-type conformity test and displayed greater self-confidence when delivering a speech, thus supporting the hypothesis that commercials function as social cues to trigger and reinforce sex role stereotypes. Findings suggest that repeated exposure to nonstereotypic commercials might help produce positive and lasting behavioral changes in women.
  • A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.
  • The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Valerie Solanas, SCUM manifesto, (1967)

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  • Eaten up with guilt, shame, fears and insecurities and obtaining, if he's lucky, a barely perceptible physical feeling, the male is, nonetheless, obsessed with screwing; he'll swim a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there'll be a friendly pussy awaiting him. He'll screw a woman he despises, any snaggle-toothed hag, and, further, pay for the opportunity. Why? Relieving physical tension isn't the answer, as masturbation suffices for that. It's not ego satisfaction; that doesn't explain screwing corpses and babies.
  • Completely egocentric, unable to relate, empathize or identify and consisting of a vast, pervasive, diffuse sexuality, the male is psychically passive. He hates his passivity, so he projects it onto women, defines the male as active, then sets out to prove that he is ("prove he's a Man"). His main means of attempting to prove it is screwing (Big Man with a Big Dick tearing off a Big Piece). Since he's attempting to prove an error, he must "prove" it again and again. Screwing, then, is a desperate, compulsive attempt to prove he's not passive, not a woman; but he is passive and does want to be a woman.
  • Being an incomplete female, the male spends his life attempting to complete himself, become female. He attempts to do this by constantly seeking out, fraternizing with and trying to live through and fuse with the female and by claiming as his own all female characteristics - emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, coolness, objectivity, assertiveness, courage, integrity, vitality, intensity, depth of character, grooviness, etc. - and projecting onto women all male traits - vanity, frivolity, triviality, weakness, etc. It should be said, though, that the male has one glaring area of superiority over the female - public relations. He has done a brilliant job of convincing millions of women that men are women and women are men.
  • The male is just a bundle of conditioned reflexes, is incapable of a mentally free response, is tied to his early conditioning, is determined completely by his past experiences. His earliest experiences are with his mother, and he is throughout his life tied to her. It never becomes completely clear to the male that he is not part of his mother, that he is him and she is her.
  • His greatest need is to be guided, sheltered, protected and admired by Mama (Men expect women to adore what men shrink from in horror - themselves), and, being completely physical, he yearns to spend his time - that's not spent "out in the world" grimly defending against his passivity - in wallowing in basic animal activities - eating, sleeping, shitting, relaxing and being soothed by Mama. Passive, rattle-headed Daddy's Girl, ever eager for approval, for a pat on the head, for the "respect" of any passing piece of garbage, is easily reduced to Mama, mindless administrator to physical needs, soother of the weary, apey brow, booster of the puny ego, appreciator of the contemptible, a hot water bottle with tits.
  • Our "society" is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units. Desperately insecure, fearing his woman will leave him if she's exposed to other men or to anything remotely resembling life, the male seeks to isolate her from other men and from what little civilization there is, so he moves her out to the suburbs, a collection of self-absorbed couples and their kids. Isolation, further, enables him to try to maintain his pretense of being an individual by being a "rugged individualist", a loner, equating non-co-operation and solitariness with individuality.
  • Although wanting to be an individual, the male is scared of anything about him that's the slightest bit different from other men; it causes him to suspect he's not really a "Man," that he's passive and totally sexual, a highly upsetting suspicion. If other men are A and he's not, he must be not a man; he must be a fag. So he tries to affirm his "Manhood" by being like all the other men. Differentness in other men, as well as in himself, threatens him; it means they're fags, who he must, at all costs, avoid, so he tries to ensure that all other men conform.
  • The male dares to be different to the degree that he accepts his passivity and his desire to be female, his fagginess. The farthest out male is the dragqueen, but he, although different from most men, is exactly like all other dragqueens; like the functionalist, he has an identity - a female; he tries to define all his troubles away - but still no individuality. Not completely convinced that he's a woman, highly insecure about being sufficiently female, he conforms compulsively to the man-made feminine stereotype, ending up as nothing but a bundle of stilted mannerisms.

See also

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