Re: [atlarge-discuss] FYI: New Pew Report on the digitaldivide in the U.S.

[Sotiris Sotiropoulos <sotiris@hermesnetwork.com>]

I will be succint in my responses so pay attention:

espresso@e-scape.net wrote:

> <snip>
> Begging your pardon, Sotiris, but data does exist showing that
> women do indeed make more use of e-mail for personal correspondence
> with friends and family, still write most of the e-mailed business
> correspondence out there, spend proportionally more of their
> online time looking for health information than men, etc. while
> men *in general* spend more time in multi-player game and gambling
> sites than women, and so on.

First of all, I fail to see the relevance of your original posting to the
matters of concern here on this list.

Secondly, there are studies to prove just about anything you want to prove
and if not, there soon will be.  Depending on the questions one asks, you
can pretty much achieve whatever results you want.  Anyone with a shred of
sense ought to disregard all attempts at relative or absolute statements of
the kind you are making about humans and their online habits by gender
differentiation.  What is the purpose of such studies anyway?

Thirdly, the number of men online is probably double (if not more) than
women, so your proportionality figure is bound to be skewed I'm afraid.
Think about it.

Fourthly, let us not forget that *men* invented the Internet.

> Frankly, I don't know what "program" you mean and I worry about
> the psychological health of any man who thinks it's "emasculating"
> that women correspond more with relatives than men by e-mail
> (just as they did when it all went by snail-mail) or spend more
> time helping their kids with term papers, or generally don't
> gamble as much. Good grief!

I have not been committed yet, so thanks for your concern, but I think I've
still got all my marbles.  In case you haven't noticed, there is an awful
lot of man-bashing or MISANDRY going on in the media in general these
days.  Here's an excerpt from an article at:
http://www.popmatters.com/tv/features/030109-male-bashing.shtml for all of
us to consider:

"Perhaps a little comedy will make the work more  bearable, you think, so
you turn on CBS's Monday   night comedies: King of Queens, Yes, Dear,
Everybody Loves Raymond, and Still Standing.  Over the next two hours, you
see four male leadcharacters who are nothing like you. These men are
selfish and lazy, inconsiderate husbands and poor parents.

And the commercials in between aren't any better.  Among them: A feminine
hygiene ad: Two women   are traveling down a lovely country road,
laughing   and having a great time. But wait. One of them needs  to check
the freshness of her mini-pad, and,  apparently, the next rest area is six
states away. A  woman's voice-over interjects, "It's obvious that the
interstate system was designed by men."

A digital camera ad: A young husband walks  through a grocery store, trying
to match photos in  his hand with items on the shelves. Cut to his wife in
the kitchen, snapping digital pictures of all the items in the pantry so
that hubby won't  screw up the shopping.

A family game ad: A dorky guy and beautiful woman are playing Trivial
Pursuit. He asks  her, "How much does the average man's brain weigh?" Her
answer: "Not much."

A wine ad: A group of women are sitting around the patio of a beach house,
drinking a  blush wine. Their boyfriends approach, but are denied
refreshment until they have"earned" it by building a sand statue of David.

Welcome to the new comic image of men on tv: incompetence at its worst.
Where television used to feature wise and wonderful fathers and husbands,
today's comedies and ads often feature bumbling husbands and inept,
uninvolved fathers. On Still Standing, Bill (Mark Addy) embarrasses his
wife Judy (Jamie Gertz) so badly in front of her reading group, that she is
dropped from the group. On Everybody Loves Raymond, Raymond (Ray Romano)
must choose between bathing the twin boys or helping his daughter with her
homework. He begrudgingly agrees to assist hisdaughter, for whom he is no
help whatsoever.

CBS is not the only guilty party. ABC's My Wife and Kids and According to
Jim, Fox's  The Bernie Mac Show, The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle, and
(the recently cancelled) Titus, and the WB's Reba also feature women who
are better organized and  possess better relational skills than their male
counterparts. While most television  dramas tend to avoid gender
stereotypes, as these undermine "realism," comic  portrayals of men have
become increasingly negative. The trend is so noticeable that it  has been
criticized by men's rights groups and some television critics.

It has also been studied by academicians Dr. Katherine Young and Paul
Nathanson in their book, Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for
Men in Popular Culture. Young and Nathanson argue that in addition to being
portrayed as generally unintelligent, men are ridiculed, rejected, and
physically abused in the media. Such  behavior, they suggest, "would never
be acceptable if directed at women." Evidence of this pattern is found in a
2001 survey of 1,000 adults conducted by the Advertising  Standards
Association in Great Britain, which found that 2/3 of respondents thought
that women featured in advertisements were "intelligent, assertive, and
caring," while  the men were "pathetic and silly." The number of
respondents who thought men were depicted as "intelligent" was a paltry
14%. (While these figures apply to the United Kingdom, comparable
advertisements air in the U.S.)"
----------------------

So, as you can see, it's not a secret anymore Judyth, plenty of people are
waking up to the reality of misandry.  In case you'd like some more info:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books&field-keywords=misandry&search-type=ss&bq=1/002-2889815-1104851



> Please, take it from a woman who's old enough to be your mother
> if not quite your granny that these statistics are not some
> vicious conspiracy to make men feel bad about their online
> habits or make women feel good about theirs. People gather
> empirical data on how different categories of people --
> teenagers versus seniors, working people versus the unemployed,
> men versus women -- use the Internet because they want to
> understand human behaviour, because they want to encourage
> e-commerce or Internet use in general, because they want to
> know who likes what on Web sites, etc., not as part of a
> plot against men.

Once again, your "empirical data" is another's junk data.  Studies can be
produced to prove anything one like these days.  Frankly, I think you ought
to consider our little email list here as an indicative sampling of men and
women online, rather than some anonymous study whose conditions and
author(s) we know NOTHING about.  So thanks for the patronizing answer, but
next time just know that this kind of junk will not go unremarked on this
list.

> Women were much less likely than men to be online ten years ago;
> that has changed already in the developed world, and the women
> have (naturally enough) still behaved somewhat differently from
> men while online even as they still behave somewhat differently
> from men in the real world. Where you may see some horrible
> feminist conspiracy to castrate men, what most of us see is
> the normal conduct of the social sciences in an effort to
> determine what people do when, how and why.

Let me offer a correction.  You so-called study is not about "people" and
what they do online, it's about stereotyping a segment of the population
because it happens to be what the test conditions for some anonymous study
will bear.

> Once again amazed,

Speaking out against misandry is amazing, no doubt, especially in light of
effeminate, sterilized, political correctness.  But don't be too amazed,
more and more people (including women) are starting to see it for what it
is.  You may be somewhat out of touch with the reality of the situation due
to your age, but if you look a little more critically at the popular media
you'll begin to see what I'm talking about.

Sincerely,

Sotiris Sotiropoulos


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