StrangeSox

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ May 14, 2013 -> 04:52 PM) Im not even going to get into your word nonsense. Gender/Sex it really doesnt matter. They are interchangeable, citing a blog wont change the definition: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender a : sex So I didn't realize how dishonest of a snip this was at first. The rest of the definition: a : sex b : the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex WHO's definition: "Gender" refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women. Pretty much the same thing! I'm back to being done with you in this thread.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ May 14, 2013 -> 05:33 PM) Im not claiming anything, Im not a scientist. Im just saying that there is a wealth of scientific information to suggest that human attractiveness is not some sort of media driven creation, but instead is a result of evolution and biology. if you want to disagree with that, go ahead. But I would expect a little bit more research than you just repeating your opinion. You know, maybe you could provide us with some evidence of your position. The only person who ha actually provided studies has been me. Fancy that. There's a wealth of information on the cultural aspects of sexuality. There's no scientific information to suggest that what we find attractive and appealing is simply a deterministic result of evolution and biology. There's some research that shows symmetry plays a part. That's it. You're making much, much broader claims based on that. Your claims that what we find attractive is pure biology would undermine the whole concept of aesthetics as well as advertising and marketing. I'm repeating my opinion that's formed on at least some background reading on this topic. There's nothing wrong with not having read that stuff because it doesn't interest you, but you're immediately rejecting any new concepts without really knowing the first thing about them. Why should I provide you with some studies? You've already dismissed WHO out-of-hand as a blog and an opinion advocacy group. You haven't displayed the least bit of openness to understanding (even if ultimately disagreeing with) different concepts in this thread. This isn't a legal battle where you need to try to undermine your opponent's position as much as possible while bolstering your own and papering over any weaknesses. If you want some references to gender-as-a-social-construct, here: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&am...14&as_sdtp= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constr...nder_difference

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ May 14, 2013 -> 05:28 PM) The article you cited is an opinion piece. No, it was a definitional page from the World Health Organization. It wasn't a "blog" and it wasn't an "opinion piece" any more than anything else on their site is. WHO is not exactly an ideological advocacy group, either. How it's used in law and how it's used in everyday language or defined by dictionaries doesn't actually define the concept. It's commonly used interchangeably, but they represent two distinct things. Nor is it WHO who is trying to "change" the word. It's a concept that's been discussed and studied for decades in the literature. You're rejecting a pretty core part of social science out-of-hand, something you apparently weren't even aware of before this afternoon. And then citing dictionary definitions which include the definition WHO uses. I'm also not sure how you square your beliefs that men and women truly are equal (and I believe you're earnest) while rejecting the concept of gender-as-social-construct. For example, gender in this society means stereotypically girls play with dolls and play "house" and are interested in barbie and other "girly" things while boys play with army men and get muddy. Unless there's some biological reason that girls would prefer dresses and dolls (there's not), then it must be an outcome of the cultural expectations they were raised with. That is what is meant by gender, and I don't see any reason other than that I'm arguing against you for you to just reject the whole idea.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ May 14, 2013 -> 05:12 PM) Yet science agrees with me. Strange. Maybe its because your video proved nothing, and the men who were selected were likely more "symmetrical" and thus actually proving my point. But that would require you to actually do the research and learn about biology/evolution, instead of just telling me about how no one ever judges men, and then posting a video of women judging men. Science is bad! So now you claim that the entirety of human sexual attraction can by boiled down to symmetry? Given that you can't stop making false claims about what others are saying (women never judge men!), i think I'm done. When you're willing to be honest, let me know.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ May 14, 2013 -> 05:08 PM) You just seemingly havent done enough research into this subject. Most scientists would agree that symmetry is preferred. You are arguing that fat/thin etc make beauty, which they dont. Symmetry does. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...y-symmetry.html You just keep parroting that men arent judged by sexuality. What world do you live in? But what do all these scientists know, you can properly spell, so you must be smarter than all of them. OMG science, voodoo voodoo. lol I haven't argued against there being some biological aspect, I've pointed out that there is a significant cultural aspect. Why is natgeo a reliable source but not WHO

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ May 14, 2013 -> 05:02 PM) Well, I learned that if you disagree with SS, or don't find a particular issue as important as he does, you don't "get it" because you're a moron that lacks comprehension skills. That's not my thesis but you are helping to prove it

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ May 14, 2013 -> 04:56 PM) Im not sure you understand the argument anymore. What you just showed is evidence that people judge regardless of media, etc. That it is natural for humans to judge our mates. I swear to god one of the captions was "That man is handsome" Which just proves looks matter, no matter how Disney dresses up a princess. (edit) Yep minute 1:21 "That man is really handsome" Yes, that was a mating gathering. I posted it to show that your claims that culture doesn't determine what us found to be attractive are nonsense.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ May 14, 2013 -> 04:52 PM) You keep presuming cultural, when likely at the time it was biological. Before the agricultural revolution, the idea mate would be a lot different than the ideal mate today. Plumpness has been considered a sign of wealth, because at certain points in human history, you had to have money to be fat. Biology doesn't change that quickly, which is exactly why it's entirely cultural. Yes, your personal preferences are heavily influenced by the culture you grew up in and live in. Unless you can cite some research to backup your "biology determines everything, oh and can also change very quickly based on changing cultural human conditions," please stop saying it as if it's established fact. That's not word nonsense, and that "blog" is the World Health Organization. Gender and sex are not the same thing. You are not familiar with the basic terminology of the conversation, and yet you're so damn sure that you're just arguing "rationally" and we're talking nonsense. You are always taking a hyper-individualistic approach, which is why you're missing the forest from the trees. Culturally, in the media and in many everyday contexts, women are judged on sexuality where men aren't. You keep ignoring this very obvious and demonstrated fact by references to you and your friends who do not comprise the entirety of our culture. Yes, smash gender roles, smash gender essentialism. Right there with you. Society is largely run by males still.

Here's a pretty good example of our particular culture's sexual ideals and mores not being some genetic trait

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ May 14, 2013 -> 04:23 PM) No the whole problem is you keep thinking that Im somehow talking about WOMEN, when Im talking about HUMANS. I cant control that I am an animal that evolved over millions of years. I can not control that I am biologically designed to prefer certain traits in females, some of them being aesthetics. Even though I am educated, even though I am fully conscious of these things, when I see a potential mate, my brain is making decisions based on biology. To some extent, yes. Culture also plays a substantial role. If this wasn't true, what is deemed sexually attractive would be universal across human societies and time. In reality, it's incredibly and hugely varied across place and even across time for a given population. Even in our lifetimes the ideals change. Gender is cultural, not biological. Sex is biological. "Norm" is the social expectations, e.g. girls play with dolls and wear pink and like to play "house" while boys like to play with action figures and wear blue and play "army." A boy who plays with "girl" toys or a girl who is a "tomboy" are breaking gender norms. Women are judged constantly in our culture by sexuality. Men aren't. To whatever extent that it's all about "sex and mating" (that's an incredibly reductionist view, citation needed!), women have ended up being judged on that criteria much more than men. Stop with these lame straw men. Nobody has said anything like that. What's been said repeatedly is that our society treats men and women differently.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ May 14, 2013 -> 03:58 PM) AKA Try and reinvent evolution. Oh Darwin, who knew that it would be so simple to entirely change how basically every single animal chooses a mate. Not to mention, it really doesnt matter. Whether its beauty, brains, strength, etc, there will always be haves and have nots in society. You're making pretty broad biological claims here to support one particular culture in one pretty limited range of human history. You're also going back to turning everything feminine into something about sex or mating, which is really the whole problem. edit: I really hope you weren't saying gender norms are biological because that would be pretty damn lol-worthy Where is anyone saying people are forced to buy Disney things? Where are they saying that Disney shouldn't be able to change a character? People are responding to something they don't like, something that's part of a broader cultural issue. If Disney decided to bring back the full-fledged racist version of Song of the South for a new movie, should the only response be individual boycotts, or would it be right to make a PR campaign against that sort of thing?

I'm missing where this is actually warrantless surveillance. They subpoenaed the phone records, not actual phone call transcripts. They may or may not have done so with a typical warrant, we don't know at this point. If they did it with the warrantless process, that's bulls***, that entire practice shouldn't exist. If they did it with a warrant in a typical process for a criminal investigation (determining the source of a leak, so not even actually going after one of the 20 people in the AP they got the records for), then I really don't see anything wrong at all. Phone records are frequently subpoenaed in criminal investigations. edit: liberal legal blogger Scott Lemuix with some thoughts:

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ May 14, 2013 -> 03:47 PM) 10 little girls are playing Disney Princess dress up. Which one of them gets told they are Merida and then made fun of? She doesnt have to be an outcast, but children are cruel and mean, they will take advantage of any difference. Smash gender norms, don't reinforce them.

Phones weren't hacked, phone records were subpoenaed. I miss people knowing things.

Soxbadger do you watch/read GoT? Imagine Arya suddenly changing from her personality to Sansha's from one book to the next. It would make no sense.

So it turns out the leaked #BENGHAZI #neverforget White House emails that allegedly showed someone from the state department wanting to remove a bit of CIA "we told you so!" language that was the EXPLOSIVE BOMBSHELL last week were intentionally edited to tell this particular story. http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2013/05/14/cn...benghazi-leaks/

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ May 14, 2013 -> 01:49 PM) Let's be fair though - the woman of Hollywood aren't anorexic. They're healthy women who are probably skinnier than their average counterpart, but not unhealthy looking. Recently, maybe, though I'm skeptical. Models? Probably a lot of eating disorders there.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ May 14, 2013 -> 01:47 PM) When women doll themselves up for sex/dating, what are they trying to look like" Those shrek-like characters from Disney? Or the princesses? Oh wait, that's because men prefer that?! OMG! Yes, but what men prefer is influenced by culture, but also that's not responsive to my question. Because women try to match a cultural sexual ideal at times doesn't mean that it's impossible not to sexualize them always. Also depends on the woman, of course. Why promote this fake and unrealistic standard of beauty at all? It's damaging to both men and women in that they both are going after some unattainable ideal that literally no one will ever have but our culture tells us over and over again we should. They slimmed her up and gave her a low-cut princess-like dress instead of the frumpy stuff she wore before. Why do that? What other reason would there be to make these changes to this pretty recent character? You're still looking at this solely from a Western European standard of beauty (for both men and women!) which isn't universal. You're also making a biologically determinitive argument that a very specific type of attractiveness is hard-wired and unchangeable when it clearly historically is not. Again, it's all cyclical. Younger (ok, biological argument there possibly), thin-ish women were made into stars, then even thinner, and thinner and now we've got literally impossibly thin women. Sure they do. Feminist writing covers this from both male and female perspectives.

QUOTE (iamshack @ May 14, 2013 -> 01:36 PM) And even that isn't sustainable over the long-term...I remember the main model for Men's Health said he had to work out 3-4 hours a day to be in that kind of shape. Tell me that is more attainable than staying thin. Depends on the person. I could stay size-0 thin by sitting on my ass all day. If I wanted to weigh 200 lbs, I'd need to eat a ridiculous amount of calories and work out several hours a day. Pretty much picture Brandon McCarthy but a little bit lighter because I'm not a pro-athlete. On the other hand, Adam Dunn could never look like me without developing a series eating disorder. Bo Jackson was pretty much naturally a freak of nature and not a gym rat.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ May 14, 2013 -> 01:34 PM) That's my point. Everyone knows she is Renee Zellweger, deliberately gaining weight or trying to look unattractive. (She was Jennifer Lawrence before Jennifer Lawrence was...haha....there's another girl who was knocked by the media for not being a size 0 or even 2) It's not the same thing. Beneath her appearance, everyone knows she is quite pretty, or, at the very least, cute. I can't access IMDB here in China, but I assume it's Bridget Jones and Jerry Maguire. Charlize Theron in Monster

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ May 14, 2013 -> 01:24 PM) But you can't have it both ways and that's your backtrack. It's impossible to view women sexually in some contexts (like sex! and dating!) but not in others (like work! or politics!)? The way women are portrayed on magazine covers and in movies is part of the problem in that it creates unrealistic beauty standards. Things targeted towards young girls (the 5-10 yo range you state for Brave) probably shouldn't be sexualized at all because they're pre-pubescent children. That doesn't mean nothing else can be sexualized. But what's considered "hot" is influenced by culture. Our modern standards of beauty aren't universal across all cultures and times. What gets put on magazines and in movies and on billboards reinforces this. It's all circular. Put more and more "shrek girls" and gender-norm-breaking women out there and less anorexic airbrushed models and the culture shifts. We're not hard-wired as a species to like one universal standard of beauty. No, it doesn't. There's still some ultra-radical anti-sex, "all penetration is rape" feminists out there, but much of the current generation is very sex-positive, even endorsing women choosing to strip or work as call girls(context dependent, usually prostitution is hugely exploitative and not really much of a 'choice,' think more of the Ashley Madison type). The answer can be "don't turn children's cartoons into sex icons, don't primarily celebrate women for their appearance and not for their abilities and accomplishments, don't make a woman's looks a legitimate part of a conversation on them being a CEO or running for office or winning a game, don't create literally impossible beauty standards, embrace a culture that doesn't judge people so damn much in general."

QUOTE (iamshack @ May 14, 2013 -> 01:14 PM) I agree with you on a lot of things, I just don't agree with your response to them much of the time. I think sometimes we've got to pick our battles. If we try to save the entire world at once, we're most likely not going to win any of them. You should see all the stuff I choose not to post! More seriously, I agree that you can't and shouldn't get worked up into an outrage over everything. I didn't care for the comments about that woman in the NBA thread, but I saw no reason to go start making a bunch of posts in there about it. My initial reaction to this story was "wow that's dumb, why is Disney doing that?" and then I dropped a post about women being sexualized and why this is seen as a problem. I got worked up over a series of responses that weren't critical of my comments but that completely misunderstood them while being dismissive of the entire concept as well. That's when I can get into sarcastic-ass mode instead of WoT response mode (these are my only two options).

StrangeSoxClaufield

The applications other than the 9 they were mistakenly given could be obtained by anyone. The 6 they published with scrubbed info were more news-worthy than the rest. They also said that they asked for a range of applications, not just conservative ones. Like I said, I'm all for an investigation into what happened here, but ProPublica is awesome and you should watch their stuff with Frontline.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ May 14, 2013 -> 01:10 PM) And that wouldn't have anything to do with men being more sexual by nature, would it? I'm gonna need a cite for that. Gender norms and gender essentialism is also pretty much just another offshoot of a given culture.