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Social Problems 23. The Problem When Sexism Sounds So Darn Friendly 1. Benevolent Sexism: a set of interrelated attitudes toward women that are sexist in terms of viewing women stereo typically and in restricted roles but that are subjectively positive in feeling tone and also tend to elicit behaviors categorized as pro social or intimacy seeking. 1. A subjectively positive orientation of protection, idealization, and affection directed toward women that, like hostile sexism, serves to justify women’s subordinate status to men. 2. Like the belief that women are “delicate flowers”who need to be protected by men, or the notion that women have the special gift of being more “more kind and caring” than their male counterparts. 3. It might sound as a compliment, but it is still sexism. 4. If a woman’s accomplishments must be accompanied by a reassurance that she really was a “good mom”, but a man’s accomplishments are allowed to stand on their own, that’s a problem.

2. Why is Benevolent Sexism a Problem 1. The statements end up implying that women are weak thus creating a damaging stereotype. 2. The man as a provider and a woman as his dependent 3. The comments may not sound benevolent to the receiver. e.g “cute" 3. Glick and Fiske: 1. 15,000 men and women across 19 different countries endorse both hostile and benevolently sexist statements. 2. Hostile and Benevolent sexism tend to correlate highly across nations. 3. Those who endorsed benevolent sexism admitted that they held explicit, hostile attitudes towards women, although they don’t have to endorse these hostile sexism. 4. Benevolent sexism was a significant predictor of nationwide gender inequality, independent of the effects of the effects of hostile sexism 5. In countries where men endorsed benevolent sexism lived longer, were more educated, had higher literacy rates, made more money, and actively participated in the political and economic affairs of the country than their female counterparts. 6. Benevolent sexism comes at a cost of gender equality. 4. Indigenous nature of benevolent sexism: 1. Julia Becker and Steven Wright 1. Women were in an experiment and exposed to benevolent statements and hostile statements as well. 1. Women exposed to benevolent sexism were less willing to engage in anti-sexist activism. 2. System Justification: a process by which people justify the status quo and believe that there are no longer problems facing

disadvantaged groups such as women in modern day society. 3. Women exposed to hostile sexism were more engaged in collective action against sexism. 4. If women are told by their counterparts that they are kind, caring and good for stay at home, they may be reluctant to fight against a policy that will disfavor their employment. 5. Is Sexism still a problem today? 1. While old fashioned forms of sexism have ceased more benevolent forms of sexism have progressed. 2. Feeling good when exposed to benevolent sexism is worse because it hides under the guise of compliments, it's easy to use benevolent sexism to demotivate people against collective action or convince people that there is no longer need to fight for equality. 3. Benevolent sexism may seem harmless to many people but that doesn't mean that it isn't insidiously dangerous; consider a man discovering that his company doesn't give paternal leaves because it assumes his wife is good at staying at home. 4. Example of Elise Andrew, creator of the wildly popular I love science. The fans were shocked that she was a female. 24.

Men are stuck in gender roles. 1. Brent Kroeger is a house husband and is afraid that the public will see less of a man in him. 2. While women have broken into fields once dominated by men- business, medicine, and law, men have been slower to pursue nursing, teach preschool, or take jhobs as administrative assistants. 3. Men remain rare in stereo typically feminine positions 4. Stay at home fathers exist in only 1% of married couples with kids under the age 15 . 5. 51% said that children were better off with their mothers at home 6. Only 8% said the same about their fathers 7. Getting a time off is even harder for men. The Florida survey found students that wanted flexible schedules to be less masculine. 8. 32% said the same about giving trucks or cars to girls at a young age; bending stereotypes is tied to worse anxiety for men than women. 9. If a girl runs in a baseball field, people say that she is a strong girl, but when a boy runs in a dress, then there is a problem., 10. In college, more historically male dominated majors went to women, but few men moved into education, arts 11. Less than 2% of preschool and kindergarten teachers were men. Men have not said, "we are kind, gentle, and compassionate and nurturing." 12. Boys stick to male toys much more than girls stick to theirs. Biologically male children who defy norms are referred to doctors while girl children do not. 13. Even the criteria for diagnosing gender dysphoria occurred more for effeminate

14. 15. 16. 17. 25.

boys than masculine boys. Masculinity is valued more than femininity. So there's less worry about girls than boys. People in Los Angeles said that stay at home dads were just as good as stay at home moms, but "nothing will change until men are willing to act" Some expert say that economic barriers have stopped men from moving further into feminized fields. Jobs held by women tend to pay less, an assumption that women are not the breadwinners, if men made the switch they'd lose the money. "If men are not free to do women's jobs, then women are not really free."

Normalizing sexual violence: Young women account for Harassment and Abuse 1. Almost half (48%) of the 1965 students surveyed experienced

harassment, but only 9% reported the incident to an authority figure. Girls were more sexually harassed than boys; they were more likely to be pressured for a date, pressured into sexual activity, and verbally harassed. 2. 20 % of girls experience physical and sexual violence from dating partners, and sexual assault accounts for 1/3 of preteen victimization 3. The legal definitions may not be agreed upon. 1. Feminist Perspectives and Hetero-Relational Discourses 1. traditional gender arrangements, beliefs lead women into subordination under men. 2. Heterosexuality is compulsory in that it is an institution that organizes the convention in which men and women relate; it is understood as natural and non-problematic. 3. Hetero normative link females with passivity, vulnerability, and submissiveness, and male sexuality with dominance, aggression, and desire. 4. Young people are socialized into a patriarchal culture that normalizes and often encourages male power and aggression, particular within heterosexual marriages. 5. As men's heterosexual violence is viewed as customary, so is women's endurance of it. 6. Men have a special and overwhelming "urge" or "drive" toward heterosexual intercourse" normalizing men's sexual aggression that "boys are simply being boys" Women on the other hand are taught from an early age that their sexuality is not theirs and that maleness can intrude it at any time. 7. Girls are told to endure aggression because that is part of

men. Coupled with the assumption that women are the gate keepers of male desire. Allowing for men's limited accountability for aggressive harassing and criminal sexual conduct. 2. Discourses about Children, Sexuality, and Sexual abuse 1. Real rape: extreme cases of violence and Little rape- that which is not severe. 3. Findings 1. Girls were harassed at parties, in school, on the playground, on buses and in cars. Young women depicted boys as natural sexual aggressors unable to control their sexual desires. 26.

Sexuality education in the United States: Shared Cultural Ideas across a Political Divide. 1. Prevailing health and risk oriented understanding of youth, sexuality, and education obscure an expansive portrait of youth, sexuality and learning. 2. Policy and instruction is also motivated by another worry: that sexuality education’s lessons are themselves damaging, excercabiting the sexual risks youth and children face. 3. Insisted that obtaining from sexual activity is the only relible way of preventing disease, that abstinence is the best choice for all unmarried people. 4. The liberals suggested condoms, and other contraceptives, ”puberty”, feminism , youth 5. Sexuality is more about how men and women relate to each other in all realms of life 6. Conservatives believe it promotes promiscuity, immorality and social degredation 7. Educating the harmful effects of sexual activity outside marriage. 8. Young people as less able, less intelligent, and less responsible than adults. 9. Young people are at best when sexually innocent. 10. Few girls are assumed capable of the feelings and relationships that legitimate sexual activity. 11. Dutch girls are assumed to be able to fall in love and form steady relationships. 12. The least advantaged students recieved the most restrictive instruction. 13. Images of virgins, pregnant teens, promiscuous girls, predatory boys, suicidal gay students, doomed teens, and confused youth help to clarify and heighten the stakes in debates over curricular goals and social agendas. 1. Conflicting Sexual Talk and Sexual Activity 1. Sexual speech, modern critics contend, provokes and stimulates. It transforms the so-called natural modesty of children into inflamed desires that may be outside the child’s control and thus prompt sexual activity.

2. This framing threatens to render sexuality education an indefensible task: a violation of children and youth’s sexual innocence and yet another assault on the embattled and idealized child-victim. 3. The depravity narratives the pervade US debates about sex and sexuality education- in which teachers seduce, corrupt or otherwise sexually endanger their students- are one sign of this conflation of sexual speech and sexual activity. 4. Every teacher is potentially a pedophie, and learning happens when “the omnipotent, all controlling adult” meets “the powerless, passive child" 5. Sexuality education, resting as it does on talking with youth about sexuality, threatens to become a crime in which “any teacher is a suspect" 6. In this climate, the conflation of sexual speech and sexual acts and the companion panic surrounding sexuality education and the threat of sexual hierarchies in name of protecting youth. Which protecting them from sexuality. 2. Teaching, Learning, Knowing, and Doing 1. The conflct of sexual speech and acts shapes not only public debate but also teaching and learning in the classroom. 2. Comprehensive sexuality education and abstinence only education build on each other and on a shared document touch each other. 3....