First of all, there isn't enough evidence to say whether that's because of privilege or because women are naturally more intelligent than men.
Second, we can sure talk about specific environments. Talk to any white kid who grew up in a black neighborhood, they sure don't feel like they're better off for being white. And, yeah, that's bad. We should be doing something to help that kid. But his bad experience doesn't change the reality that when he leaves his neighborhood, when he goes to a job interview or to court or really just about, he is better off for being white.
So, sure. Girls are doing better than boys in school. The last entering freshmen class at my school was almost 2:1 female. Am I worried? Not really. Men still run the world.
We should be talking about how to help boys do better in school. We should also make sure we don't forget that women are an oppressed class, and that any solutions we try aren't contributing to the overall oppression of women.
Which probably means we should get women to do it.
>First of all, there isn't enough evidence to say whether that's because of privilege or because women are naturally more intelligent than men.
I'm amused. Does it matter which is true if men aren't getting the education they need?
>Men still run the world.
Also an old, old statement that reveals why we need to get rid of gender as a real concept. How many men run the world? Not most of them. In what sense does it carry to include the homeless and the destitute who are men in the same group as those who rule?
>We should also make sure we don't forget that women are an oppressed class
HERE. Here it is. This is the error in your thinking.
All people are oppressed.
But when you start categorizing people into those who are Allowed To Be Recognized As Oppressed and those who are Oppressors By Association: They Have A Dick, you're making arbitrary distinctions that are inflexible and rigid.
There is not a single person on this earth who does not experience oppression. A person who does not belong to any of your protected classes will still be oppressed by your exclusion: or what, did you think it didn't count if _you_ oppressed someone based on what sort of person they were?
Have I said something to make you think we shouldn't be fighting all oppression? No doubt the elephant in the room is class — in fact fixing class might just fix everything else automatically — but that doesn't mean we should ignore racism, sexism, homo- or Islamophobia.
But I have to say, at this point I'm not sure what you want from me. I'm advocating for the rights of other people according to my personal idea of what's right. That women are outperforming men in school is worrying from an educational standpoint, but I haven't seen any evidence that it's the result of endemic, institutional sexism against men— unlike that which evidence suggests still exists towards women, which, while very much improved in the last decades, is still real and dangerous. If someone thinks that it's gone because of one metric in which women have surpassed men, then I'm going to speak out against that. I'm going to speak out against that pretty loudly.
I'd be saying the same thing if someone thought that Obama being President means that no one ever gets stopped and searched for DWB, or that gay marriage in New York means no one in high school is going to call someone else a faggot until they kill themselves. We've come a long, long way. We're not done.
(For productivity reasons, this'll be my last comment on the subject, but I'll read your response if there's one— Just wanted to say I dug the civil exchange of ideas. Stay cool.)
> but I haven't seen any evidence that it's the result of
> endemic, institutional sexism
You don't consider girls being encouraged to succeed by their teachers and society at large while boys are not (a common situation in schools today, and a stark contrast to as recently as 10-15 years ago) as "endemic, institutional sexism"?
Or you haven't seen any evidence that this difference in societal attitudes is causative in better female school performance?
I can accept the latter, though there is in fact experimental data that suggests that boys do better with more encouragement...
I think my point is that there _isn't_ a way to fight all oppression. Pretty women get objectified, but they also get status. Jocks get power/whatever, but they're also trapped with value systems that actually don't make them that happy.
Even the people holding the strings are puppets.
>I haven't seen any evidence that it's the result of endemic, institutional sexism against men
Apathy is its own form of sexism, which is to say: if selecting based on sex indicates educational disparity, then sexism must exist somewhere in the system.
>(For productivity reasons, this'll be my last comment on the subject, but I'll read your response if there's one— Just wanted to say I dug the civil exchange of ideas. Stay cool.)
Same here--thanks to you as well! I especially appreciate that you qualify this as civil; I know I go for the throat sometimes, and sometimes I think HN wants us to be more polite than effective, if you follow.
Second, we can sure talk about specific environments. Talk to any white kid who grew up in a black neighborhood, they sure don't feel like they're better off for being white. And, yeah, that's bad. We should be doing something to help that kid. But his bad experience doesn't change the reality that when he leaves his neighborhood, when he goes to a job interview or to court or really just about, he is better off for being white.
So, sure. Girls are doing better than boys in school. The last entering freshmen class at my school was almost 2:1 female. Am I worried? Not really. Men still run the world.
We should be talking about how to help boys do better in school. We should also make sure we don't forget that women are an oppressed class, and that any solutions we try aren't contributing to the overall oppression of women.
Which probably means we should get women to do it.