Yes! I agree completely. I'm glad I'm not the only one. I'm currently getting flamed over on the other thread for saying the same kinds of things you've just said.

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I am an idiot, who didn't realise there was a second page of comments! (I'm always rubbish at spotting that...) I'm reading them now :-)

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And if I was a man and I'd written this post (like several of the comments nearly do) I would be about to be told that as I wasn't a member of the oppressed group I couldn't define sexism

...because men are never, ever discriminated against. Oh yes. "Positive" discrimination is still called discrimination for a reason...

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I don't think anyone has argued that men aren't discrimnated against. I've got a discussion going on in my journal specifically so men can talk about how they're discriminated against.

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If you're running down the street and someone says "watch out for the flood" 'tis cool, and if they talk about the weather at you 'tis British. If they wolf whistle and yell NICE TITS then - no, not OK. I think strangers much more commonly yell sexual things at women than at men who are walking/jogging/cycling along minding their own business.

Also I think that not only men can be sexist - women can act in sexist ways too (because our culture has so much ingrained sexism) so I think that when you say "women do that to" you miss the point - the question as to whether it is sexist is whether it is *done to men* with the same frequency by people of the same level of stranger-ness (do people grope strange men in the clubs where libellum is being groped?).

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No one's disputing that "nice tits" is sexist. We're disputing whether "smile" or "I bet that sandwich was tasty" or a comment such as perhaps "go on, faster!" to a jogger is sexist.

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I have to say, when I was living as female I didn't notice much overt sexist behaviour towards me. Since embarking on transition, though, I have noticed that certain things have changed in the way people behave towards me, in ways I find agreeable, and I am able to look back and reanalyse how I used to be treated before! (E.g. in a restaurant with another man, I'm as likely to be invited to taste the wine or handed the bill as he is; in a pub, bar staff no longer check whether I really want a whole pint.)

Conversely, in a recent conversation with S, she said that she had begun noticing all sorts of unwelcome changes in people's behaviour to her since her transition (in the opposite direction to mine) which make her feel unsafe and less welcome in public spaces than before (e.g. strange men staring at her body or asking personal questions).

I don't really have a clear point to draw from these anecdotes, just thought they might be relevant in some way!

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That's interesting.

I guess I'm not saying sexism doesn't exist, and I'm not saying the "little sexisms" don't matter. But if we're trying to explain the problem to people, there are lots of examples that are clearer than the ones Libellum used (I think I agree that wine and bill and pints are clearly sexist things, in a way I'm not sure about on smiles and sandwiches and joggers) And by using difficult and borderline examples and going on about them as though they're important "we" (well, feminists / people who want to get rid of sexism) look more like we're making things up and over-reacting. Which doesn't help.

*is still confused*

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I think there's a massive difference between what you're saying here and the responses there've been from some men in the post. You're saying "I don't get it", whereas they're saying "you're wrong". And what's more, you're saying you don't get it based on your own experience, whereas they're saying we're wrong about our own experience.

I think the latter three aren't obviously sexism in the same way that the Bluetooth thing is - the acts aren't inherently sexist. It's just that along with all the other things (and it's not just the stuff in the original post - there are a lot more examples in the comments) that tell us that we exist more for men's amusement than anything else it feels like more same old same old.

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Well, I think "I don't get this" and "I think this is wrong" and "you're wrong" are just a continuum of ways of voicing the same feeling. Some are more provocative and some less provocative, and some are probably more likely to lead to useful debate than others. But I think that's a communication thing - it took me years to learn that things like saying "the times you don't hang the laundry up make me feel unloved" is better than "you never hang the laundry up because you don't love me". So I don't think the men commenting on Helen's post are trying to say anything vastly different to what I'm saying. They just might not be saying it very well. I've spent a long time reading some very interesting feminist thoughts from a lot of people I consider highly intelligent and respect a lot, and I've therefore spent a fair amount of time saying "I don't get it" in unhelpful ways. I guess I've just had more practise than them ;-)

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*sticks hand up* Also with you.

Not just because I don't really get it with her points - though I am very unobservant and don't go clubbing or revealing clothes, so I don't really have much experience of what she's talking about. But also because of the $large_number pay gap, the $very_large_number % of women who get fired when they get pregnant, the $debatable number of women who don't get pretigious jobs in the first place because they might want to get pregnant, the fact that honour killings and forced marriages happen in this country, the fact that global literacy rates are %scarily_much lower for women than they are for men, and the fact that more than 140 million (I know a number! Go me!) women in the world suffer FGM...

...so I think maybe we have more pertinent things to make a fuss about.

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Yeah, that's what I was trying to say here, but I think you put it better.

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I think I agree.

Plus, I don't understand the mentality of, if someone sends you a picture of their cock, being significantly upset about it but not reporting it to the police.

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Hmm, that seems obvious to me. Reporting things to the police is time and effort, and they're really not going to do anything about it, so what's the point?

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I'm very confused by the descriptions of "flaming" and "very angry people" commenters here have described, because I've seen none of that in libellum's post. Can someone point me to where they see that?

I think things don't have to be directly/overtly sexist to still be a product of a sexist perspective, and not be immediately apparent as such.

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When I said "flaming" I meant comments like "Before you start to tell me you know better than decades of scholars, you should probably think about familiarising yourself with the fundamentals." in this post. It's fairly mild flaming, but I think I'd still call it flaming.

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For any form of discrimination (be it sexism or otherwise), the recipients often can't easily tell whether any given experience is a consequence of the discrimination or would have happened anyway. So (whether or not the particular examples in question are mis-identifications), mis-identifications are to be expected.

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Sorry to be a voice of dissent but I disagree with you and agree with Helen. My mother on hearing that I'm out at night always says "be careful" or "are you sure you're okay". That's sexist even though it comes from a woman. One day something may happen to me and she will see it as inevitable and some people may be pleased with themselves that they don't walk around London alone at silly o'clock. I like my life, and I accept the risk and I'm trying to slowly change people's attitudes about where girls can go and when. It doesn't mean the meme isn't sexist though.

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If it's true that women are more likely to have bad stuff happen to them at night then why is it sexist to warn them of that?

It's bad that we have a world which is more dangerous for women, but I don't see how it's bad to warn women about the way the world is.

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The reason for my post on the subject was because of a conversation I was having the same day about the kinds of small acts of sexism we do experience on a day to day basis, and basically I want to force myself to open my eyes and look. I might well not experience the things libellum has; we live very different lives. That said, taking the idea of being aware, of recording things - it's important in starting the dialogue.

I also think the use of the word sexism isn't terribly helpful, the more I read. I'm not quite sure what the correct word would be. I think it might be something that expressed that feminism was still necessary because certain inappropriate behaviours are accepted towards a female subject that wouldn't be towards a male subject, and such behaviours (both large and small) need to be documented to point out that they do still happen, and still need to be combated.

My engagement with this is coming out of a space in which I wish to grow my own feminism, and part of that is being more aware of my experience and how I am perceived as a subject. That is something no one else (regardless of gender) can construct for me. I don't think it's necessarily men being told they can't define sexism, just that they can't construct the experience as they've never had it, and shouldn't try to define male discrimination against women in terms of the male experience. Now, totally agreed, that means (turn and turn about) women shouldn't try to define female discrimination against men in terms of the female experience - and part of feminism is finding the way to start that dialogue and break down those conventions too. However, first we need to start the process of raising awareness of both ingrained habits - which is what I want to do.

Actually, now I witter, there would be no reason that men shouldn't pick up the Every Little Helps tag too, and record experiences where they are treated in a way that demeans their identity as subjects because of their gender. Perhaps then we might start having a discussion about the patterns that emerge on both sides, and what really constitutes a violation of personhood.

That got long and wittering. Hopefully some of it made sense.

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Sally - I think that this comment is a good example of why we think some of this behaviour is motivated by sexism. If this attitude is coming from someone on your f'list, who I assume is at least more likely to be reasonably exposed to liberalism than many people, it doesn't seem too unlikely that it's also about in the population at large.

Edited at 2008-05-15 05:38 pm (UTC)

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Isn't that just a clumsy way of talking about the same thing I was wondering about in the icecream vendor story, that for some people randomly talking to / being talked at by other people in a flirtatious way is a good thing, and for some people they find it offensive? I mean, I think that comment is phrased provocatively and unhelpfully, but (eg) if in the food example half the world is going to start a random slightly-nice bit of small talk, and half the world is going to feel offended and upset, how do we come up with socially acceptable behaviour? I'm not sure we should steer clear of anything that offends somebody... and I do think that the world would be a sadder place if I could only interact in those sort of ways with "safe" people or "safe" places...

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Hi

Sorry, am trawling friends of friends, a bad habit. I completely agree with you, and felt inhibited from commenting to that effect on Libellum's post because to do so would attract flaming.

I'm a woman. I jog. People say stuff. Most of it isn't oppressive, its either positive stuff like "Keep going" or incredibly banal stuff like "Ooh don't drop your water bottle". The former I interpret as people being nice. I tend to assume they are runners too and know the feeling of I just have to get one more k under my belt before I stop. The latter I assume are people who feel the need to comment on someone doing something different but aren't especially quickwitted (for the record saying 'lovely weather isn't it' falls between the two, I'd interpret it as someone saying somethng because they could but choosing to make a joke which is a positive thing to do, and no I wouldn't take offence!).

Less often people say spiteful things, generally about my appearance. These comments seem to come from women, typically young women, more than anyone else. I interpret these as meaning the person is insecure and I ignore them because what can you do eh?

My husband gets waaaay more comments in public than me, though I think this is probably because he rides a unicycle everywhere he goes (!) so its a poor comparison. But this does tend to confirm the view that people comment because they feel the need to acknowledge someone doing something different. It is noticeable that he attracts both extremely positive and extremely negative responses to a far greater degree than I do. Some of the negative stuff is both offensive and highly threatening, but neither men or women seem to be above being unpleasant.

I do sympathise with the behaviour like groping and bluetooth flashing which Libellum found entirely unacceptable. But I think the context is significant. I think all of this could be understood as people intimidating and bullying other people in a setting simply because they can. Some people like to intimidate others and get off on that kind of thing.

Leaving anecdata aside, I am sure that there are significant differences of this intimidation when analysed on gender lines, but if we interpret these events as inherently sexist then we may be blinded to alternative explanations of what is going on. And that is a problem, because I suspect men experience significant levels of intimidating and threatening behaviour in public too. Young men aged 16-24 are vastly more likely to be victims of violent crime than any other group (British Crime Survey Report 2007, p. 60) and it isn't acceptable to just assume that is because they are getting in to fights, a lot of them are being deliberately victimised. Both men and women might be supported to feel safer if the problem was identified as non-gendered. A gender based analysis identifies the cause of female experiences of intimidation primarily in terms of male abuse of privilege and this may well be partially right. But there are other causal explanations like the fragmented communities we live in, the possibilities for acting anonymously, and the possibility that more and more of us feel a moral disconnect between how we interact when our identity is concealed (online or via Bluetooth for example) and our actual moral identity which is what we choose to present to the world. Calling it as you see it is important, but men need to feel empowered to challenge the intimidation they feel too, and if we deliberately set out to define their experience as different to our own we risk being part of the problem and not the solution.

My apologies for the length of this comment.
Penny

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Don't apologise - that's a really interesting comment!

(Sadly my brain is debated out at the moment so my only response is "Wow, unicycles, cool!" Maybe I will have more brain tomorrow :-) )

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In a society where most people wearing explosives and shouting "Allah Akbar" then proceed to explode[1], it seems reasonable to expect that behaving in a similar manner will scare people even if you don't intend to blow up. When I was growing up, most things that were shouted at me in the street were insults. Nowadays it's usually "You just dropped something", but I still have the associated "Am I about to be attacked" reflex before I work out what's going on.[2]

If female joggers are used to having men make loud comments about their bodies then the initial response to any shouted comment is probably going to be to perceive it as a threat, even if said comment is actually rationally innocuous. While I think this is a shame and would like to live in a universe where anyone can make harmless comments without context fucking everything up, I also think that behaving as if that context isn't there is a problem. Men should be aware that shouting things at women will often make them feel threatened. Since men don't generally have the same cultural background of being treated as objects, having a woman shout at them doesn't trigger the same reaction. Yes, saying that it's sexism if men do it to women but not if women do it to men is asymmetric - but so is the underlying cause.

[1] Yes, this is a deliberately excessive example
[2] This is a somewhat different case, because I don't expect everyone to magically know everything that happened to me in the past. If I did tell someone the context, I'd then be somewhat offended if they started shouting at me randomly in the street.

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You win the naath prize for getting-it-and-finding-words (those were the words I wanted and couldn't find under the pain).

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Hmmm, the original post seems a lot fairer than I was expecting from this post and the comments. Still, I can't help feeling that the choice of examples is a bit, well, mixed, and the post would have been a whole lot more effective if points 1 and 4 had been left out, or at any rate the conclusion that these were instances of sexism should have been hedged. I think, when presenting a case, a mixture of strong and weak arguments (especially weak arguments presented as stronger arguments) speaks less for the case than just the strong arguments on their own, as the weak arguments are liable to undermine the arguer. This, I think, is especially true when you are bringing accusations, even against people that the person you are trying to persuade has never met and never will.

There are two things which make points 1 and 4 sound weak to me. First, conversations in the street with people that are just "trying to be nice", where you put on a smiley face and think inside, "will you please just go away and stop bothering me" happen to me too, and I'm only very rarely - and briefly - mistaken for female.[1]

Secondly, people seem - at least to me - to be notoriously bad at judging other people's motivations, and then presenting their judgements as fact (rather than hedging their conclusions appropriately). I know I've done it quite a lot and try hard to avoid jumping to unwarranted conclusions about people's motives. I don't wish to say that this is especially common in the case of sexist motives, I don't want to say that there is any particular guilt from the feminist community on this front, any more than anyone else on any front, I don't doubt that there are a lot of times when sexist motives cause trouble and are correctly diagnosed, I just think that saying that sexism is there every time - or even some of the times - it might well be there is a poor way to advance your cause. Which is a great shame because examples like point 2 show that it is a cause that really does need advancing!

[1] Very occasionally when people see me from behind they make assumptions based on long hair. Their reaction can be quite amusing when I turn to face them.

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> make assumptions based on long hair

kaet's hair and my curves mean we are often subject to drive-by heckling.

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Let me put it this way. I am English ad was raised in London. In Southern England an London in particular there is a social norm of not speaking to strangers. Furthermore, avoiding conversation and eye contact with strangers is a way of showing them respect within this social system.

Now, there are some friendly people, often Northerners, who talk to strangers in London becaue they want to genuinely make a friendly connection with them in a nice way. But there are also people who now about the social norm and break it as a way of asserting their dominance over you by invading your boundaries. The most obvious example of people doing this is when mouthy teenagers try to assert themselves by asking strangers sarcastic questions about their appearance. Normally you can tell the difference between a nice person and a person tring to dominate you by their tone and manner. In addition, once someone who appears hostile has broken the social norm, the person being spoken to is left unsure what other social norms they will break, particularly whether they may be violent. As the meaning of the encounter is due to the tone of the person speaking, it's deniable so if the woman responds with overt hostility, the man who initiated the encounter can claim that she is unreasonable.

So the object of the encounter is left knowing that she has been disrespected, scared that a reactio to te disrespect may lead to violence and frustrated that she has no response availble to her which would not lead to her being seen as the unreasonable one.

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*giggles at the icon*

Yes, I hear what you're saying, and it's probably a helpful way for me to think about it.

Still, I think there is lots of scope for confusion about people's motives, especially from people who are expecting people to be hostile to them*. And that even if in a given incident someone really was being cruel and hostile, there is a lot of scope for confusion in reporting the incident (eg this entire debate - "well, surely it's OK to say 'mmm, nice sandwich'") and if you can't relate it in a way that people will understand and take on board all the extra context you're talking about in this comment it will just make the point look weak and slightly confusing.

* cf a cute story I saw on my friends page the other week:
Failed to recognise that trendy London-accented teenage girls at service station were admiring my hair because my default reaction to girls like that smiling near me is that they must be mocking me. Thus blanked them. Then realised that what one girl had said was a genuine (though shy) compliment "love your colour". Then felt like a heel.

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I agreed with you entirely, and now I wonder if it's just because I am tall, broad-shouldered, short-haired and not conventionally attractive, so everyone treats me like a man anyway. ;)

Interestingly, when I'm out with Bjoern, I nearly always get the restaurant bills handed to me. I think that's because I come across as very decisive, and am usually the one who gestures to the waiter and says what kind of wine we want. So I do wonder if there's an element of body language.

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I don't know how you dress so -
do people respond to you differently if you wear a skirt? Because I have noticed some difference, though rather more if I add a girly hat*. I had thought that it was a response to the skirt** but a couple of incidents lately have made me wonder if in fact trousered-person-on-bike is default-male (or neutral) and the reaction is merely to "female" rather than "nicely dressed female" ("nicely dressed" might be an overstatement). I think some of it must be body language or something because I'm sometimes baffled by a series of unexpected reactions. Like the day when I went for a walk (trousered, with a hippyish bag) and several men leaned out of their cars to ask if I was "looking for business".

(didn't you report some unexpected reactions in, er, Switzerland somewhere, sometime?)

* as in, I start noticing people making comments
** not a short skirt, but equivalent to the way people expect more comments if they wear short skirts and high heels

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I think the common thread in these incidents is the ideology - mostly unconscious or unstated - that womens' bodies are in some sense 'common property' - that in particular they are there for the admiration and delectation - or criticism - of men. That, in our society, women are instrumentalised. (Yes, women do the criticising of other women too. Women can be sexist too - but mostly against women! They are not free from the influence of this sexst ideology that pervades society.)

A friendly 'O that looks tasty' or 'Nice weather for it' is not in the same category, although it might be considered these days as un-British, or at least un-Southern. (No bad thing.) What libellum is talking about is comments which had a sense of passing judgement - because womens' bodies and physicality are the legitimate subject of judgement, according to the ideology.

Of course 'smile' or 'cheer up' can be said in different ways and with different intentions and with all sorts of mixtures of intentions, but I think it is not a coincidence that this seems to happen much more to women than to men.

It would be easy to say "No-one believes that ideology anymore", or at least very few - but it was only really when I read libellum's post that I actually was able to give form to that idea, realise just how deeply embedded it is in our culture and thought patterns, and how much I'm influenced by it, though I like to consider myself a good pro-Feminist.

Apologies if this is repeating stuff that twenty others have covered, didn't really have time to read 105 comments!

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It seems to me there's always a bit of a danger asserting that people are motivated by an unconscious ideology. They can't contradict you, because how could they possibly know? But then, how do you know? The examples libellum gives illustrate the point, but she interprets those things as treating her body as common property largely because she expects people to do that. As is clear from the comments here, other people who have similar experiences, interpret them differently.

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I've read a fair proportion of the comments here and on the original - but there is too much to read everything in one evening. My reaction to what I have taken in so far is that there are and will continue to be differences in the way men treat women and women treat men. Some of those differences will be due to conscious or unconscious disregard, malice, whatever other bad reason. Others will be an inevitable result of life, the universe, and everything. Around the margins it will be difficult to distinguish between the two, but my personal impression is that the avowedly expert feminists will be able to give plausible reasons why most or all such asymmetries are sexist and cause women to be treated unreasonably.

There obviously are inequities, but they are not all one way. Are women as a subset treated worse, on average? I don't know, but by feeling is that that was the case in years and decades gone by, and if it is true now, then it is to a considerably smaller extent. In individual interactions, women may sometimes be treated in ways that one would not wish women (or men) to be treated. On the other side are the privileges that women have in practice in terms of legal protection.

For example, years back, the local council had to redund some employees. Last in first out, which was the first thing considered, would have resulted in a higher proportion of women being dismissed than their proportion in the workforce, maybe partly because working towards employing more women had been a historically recent factor. Other criteria considered would have dismissed too many people of one race or another, so in the end a criterion that happened to result in almost all the redundant employees being white males was chosen, on the basis that that left the council least open to legal challenge. (None of this was public knowledge then, of course.)

In a story that I vaguely remember reading in a business publication years ago,someone had to take early maternity leave because the job she was doing, for a small business, could not safely be done by a pregnant women. The business owner advertised for a temporarily employee, and stated in the advert that the job was unsafe for a pregnant woman. I don't think it is legal to ask whether a woman is pregnant in a job interview - whatever, he ended up temporarily employing someone who told him, after a week or two, that she was pregnant and had known that before the interview. He tried dismissing her because she couldn't actually do the job - and in the end the legal costs and compensation closed the business.

I would doubt that the more firmly feminist writers on Libellum's journal would wish to change the situation in such cases. It is this sort of counterbalance to the comments made by Libellum that lead me to doubt, unless proved otherwise, that there is a big overall inequity to the disadvantage of women. Two opposite wrongs don't make anything right, but do show you a different view of the problem. My impression is that, on Libellum's journal, some of the posters are making a bigger case than reality justifies.

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Very few jobs are impossible to do whilst pregnant - I do think that if the job is not *possible* to do whilst pregnant then you shouldn't take it; I also think that you need to have a period at the start of an employment where the employer gets to fire you on short notice (and you get to quit on short notice) if it doesn't work out.

World wide I think that it's obvious that women, on average, get the short end of the stick; although I do agree that in some circumstances men also get screwed I would contest that in a lot of cases it is sexist thoughts about women that are at the root of the problem. For instance maybe fathers would get custody more often if women weren't viewed as being 'innately' better parents, maybe if employers weren't anti-women in their hiring practices then the laws about hiring and firing women wouldn't be so torturous (and full of screwed up side-effects). Also it is unfortunately the case that as we move from a male-dominated world to a more equal world men will have to *loose power* - and if that power existed through dominating women then, really, tough shit.

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All this brouhaha, and a whole pile of similar ones on Usenet recently, have just left me terminally convinced that I don't understand people *at all* and should just go and find a nice quiet place with no people around and become a hermit :-/

(In other words, all this talk of privilege and That Guy-ism doesn't make any sense when there's layer upon layer of it and who's to say who's Privileged and who's playing the That Guy card at any one time).

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Yeah, it can be difficult to know whether personal experiences are examples of sexism or not, but I agree when you say:

whether or not it's technically sexism, I completely understand* how this is awful and hurtful and worrying and upsetting.

I think it can be useful to highlight things that don't seem to affect men, because many of them simply may be unaware that these things happen to women, and raising awareness is good. OTOH, if it turns out that men are aware or are affected themselves by a particular thing, that doesn't stop it from being a bad thing. Telling men to stop doing such behaviours does run the risk that men who do it will ignore it, whilst other men will think that they're being told to stop any smalltalk/flirting/etc.

By groping, I'm not sure if you're talking about randomly groping without warning/consent, or strangers groping in general? I mean, knowing exactly when it's okay to grope/snog someone you've just met can be a difficult thing, and sometimes people get it wrong which shouldn't be a problem in itself, nor is it sexism. But I think she means more the assumption that any woman wearing revealing clothes is fair game for groping?

The smalltalk from strangers issue is difficult. I've had odd comments or hassle from strangers for no apparent reason, though my suspicion is that women are likely to get more of it than men. I recall one night where I was wearing a short skirt etc, and I was walking with a girl[*], and a guy walking towards us greeted with a "Hello ladies"[**]. It's a confusing issue - there shouldn't be inherently anything wrong with strangers greeting each other, and I'm sure lots of people wish that happened more. But I know damn well that I never get that (from either men or women) as a boy. I'm not sure that I would mind if strangers did greet me like that, but nonetheless there was something that irked me about it, as if I'm hearing him actually say "Hello ladies dressed in revealing clothes, I would like to stick my penis inside of you".

(I don't think there's nothing wrong with straight men being more likely to make smalltalk with women, but I guess it's a question of context - are these men expecting to chat up a woman randomly walking by along the street?)

I think mjg59 makes a good point on this issue.

[*] I originally wrote "another girl" - genders are confusing.
[**] I can be sure he did see me as a girl at that point, because I only saw the inevitable flash of confusion on his face as he got closer, after he'd said that.

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I read your post and the comments and, to be honest, I am too disheartened to say anything remotely constructive. I can deal with honest 'I don't experience this' but I'm hearing an awful lot of 'they must be making it up', 'I don't give a shit' and 'they're ranting about nothing'. Which is really bloody depressing.

(Note: this is how I *feel* on reaching the bottom of this page. It is possible that none of these statements are actually present here but that is how the whole discussion has left me feeling, okay, and that's what I'm commenting on.)

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actually, is the laundry-on-the-floor thing part of what is going on?

(Some) Women: I see behaviour X and I feel [Y: patronised, objectified, $badthing] and this upsets me.***
(Some) ("Nice"*) Men: but X is only intended to help, or at worst is thoughtlessness. You should not be upset.
(Some) Women: but we _are_ upset. You cannot deny our emotions. If you continue to X you are denying our emotions**. *become more upset*.

another issue is that some women are so angry about their cumulative experiences that, well, I tried to write an analogy of a body part being bruised, and someone approaching looking as though they might hug you - you would wince in anticipation of the sore body part. If you know that someone is bruised you should take care to remember, and avoid that body part, ie treat them _differently_, and the people who say "but I would say that to a man" aren't taking into account that they are tossing something at an already sore area. I don't know if that's "sexist" or not, but it might come across that way if women are more sensitive to the potential soreness and therefore men are more likely to not-realise and be unintentially hurtful.

[I wrote a lot more waffle, but LJ said it was too long]

* Men who respect women, consciously try not to behave in sexist ways, etc.
** Or at least deciding that Y is more important to you than those emotions.
*** even, that's more or less what they 'should' say, but if they don't manage that and say "I see behaviour and X and it is Y!" then that irritates the situation even more...

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I agree on all of your points.

I have a question too - do you think sexism is as big a problem now as libellum's post implied, but that it is represented by different things than (some of) those she specified, or that sexism is less of a problem than libellum makes out? I'm asking entirely out of interest, not because I want to accuse you of anything![1]

[1] I'm pretty absent from the feminist cause because I've never felt it very relevant to me. *shrug* Being a female, I suppose I can say I have a right to feel this way!

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I'm not sure how big a problem I think sexism is. I think I'm not very good at generalising, so I wonder about how big a problem individual things are, and don't synthesize them well into a whole. So I think the huge discrepancies between female literacy rates and male literacy rates around the globe are a huge problem, and I think that women never being given the bill in restaurants isn't much of a problem at all. Although I can see how the latter would grate. I'm still very open about the question of how much the little things lead to or from the big things

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