Are there any good women's / gender studies books...

How are being dumb or ugly not disadvantages?

Do men suffer disadvatnges for being male?

They are, but they're categorically different. Being black, for instance, is an inherent trait. You're black no matter where you are in the world, and you can't do much of anything about it. Same with being female.

"Ugly" is culturally subjective and modifiable. You can always improve your looks (to a degree) and how people judge you depends on who they are and what culture you're within. As such you can't really concretely quantify it the same way. Same as "dumb". You can become more knowledgeable through learning, education, and practice.

They DO effect your life, they're just not the same category of disadvantage.

>attractiveness
have sex

Being dumb or ugly is not really subjective, there are many people who could simply never be a university prof and who nobody finds attractive

I suppose that would depend on culture. I'm from the USA, so here that would be "no", but a quick google search turns up things like:
>the Mosuo—a society in southwestern China
as extremely matriarchal, so perhaps within a culture like that, males do? I'm no expert on those cultures though, so I could only really guess.

>I'm from the USA, so here that would be "no",
Men are more likely to be homeless, be violently assaulted, they have lower life expectancy, higher suicide rates, and many fewer government programs dedicated to them, among other things. Are these not disadvantages?

>who nobody finds attractive
This is a common fallacy and is generally representative, I'm told, of an external locus of control present in much younger children.

Basically it's an excuse to blame other people for your own short comings rather than take responsibility for your position in life and admit that you have the power to change it.

Fact is:
>There are people that can never learn skills and who no one will ever find attractive
are simply lies / cop outs of the lazy and pathetic.

if pic related can find companionship, love, and marriage (because someone else finds them to possess attractive qualities) then anyone can.

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>"Ugly" is culturally subjective and modifiable. You can always improve your looks (to a degree) and how people judge you depends on who they are and what culture you're within. As such you can't really concretely quantify it the same way.

But you could say the exact same thing about being black or female. That it's culturally viewed in different ways.

But those are exceptions, there are rich black women, but most black women are not rich. Same thing with ugly and dumb people

>Are these not disadvantages?
No actually, they're not. Those are effects, not causes. A disadvantage is a cause, and it may result in the effect of being homeless. You seem to be caught up in a confusion between correlation and causation.

Males, in the USA, are perceived as sort of the default experience. There are many complex factors that come into play about why there are varying statistics. Take suicide rates for instance, it's common practice in our culture here to discourage men from seeking help. Women on the other hand are encouraged to seek help because of a perceived fragility. This isn't what is meant by a systemic "disadvantage".

Think of it this way: If you were to walk into a room, and make a demand (hire me for this job, sell me this thing at a discount, etc etc) what would immediately influence people's decision to accommodate you?

Hiring, for instance, is well studied and it's a demonstrable fact that in the USA identical resumes with names like "Steve" or "Thomas" get accepted at significantly hire rates than those with names like "Rebecca" or "Tyrone".

It's "what inherent quality systemically negatively effects your every day life all of the time". Kinda of thing.

>This isn't what is meant by a systemic "disadvantage".
That sounds exactly like a systemic disadvantage. Males are not at always perceived as the default- for example in custody disputes women are the default. Same thing with domestic violence. Many jobs are dominated by women as well, so men arent the default there either.

There are also quotas for women and minorities, another systemic disadvantage for whites and men

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, sorry about that.

Yeah, Black is not _always_ viewed as bad. That's totally true (I assume). My point was that whether or not being black is "bad" you are ALWAYS black. You can't change that.

If you're overweight in the USA, you're perceived as less attractive. This is untrue in other cultures, where heavier people are perceived as more attractive. A heavy person is, however, always heavy (their physical dimensions are what they are).

So in that case:
- Attractiveness is not an inherent concrete trait, and thus isn't in this same category of "disadvantage".
- Weight / Heaviness is an inherent concrete trait and thus is in this category of "disadvantage".

that is ridiculous, you can lose weight, but if your face is disfigured you will always be ugly. It's the other way around, weight is not inherent, ugliness is

Look for one of the highly cited "classics" like Butler or someone (preferably cited outside of gender studies).
I really don't know though, never cared enough to read into it.

>Males are not at always perceived as the default
If that's true where you live, then awesome. They are in the USA though, which is the only country I've lived in long term, so I can only speak to that.

But again, many many complex factors play into the _effects_, of which a systemic disadvantage may sometimes be one contributing cause.

Take:
>Many jobs are dominated by women
Right, because women are filtered into social education and out of STEM fields. The best exmaple of this is as lower education teachers. This is well studied and understood in the USA. This IS an example of a disadvantage for women because these social fields are taken significantly less seriously and compensated at much lower salaries.

>domestic violence
is another one that's simply a heuristic. Women are abused at 5x the rate that men are. They're also significantly more at risk when abuse does happen (a full grown man hitting a full grown woman is much more likely to do more harm than the reverse). This isn't because someone sees the name "Steve" and thinks "aw shit, he's probably abusive". In the USA you can see the disadvantage present due to how lightly men are punished for this sort of thing. example in pic related.

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>that is ridiculous, you can lose weight
Hmm at this point I feel like I'm being very clear. Perhaps your reading comprehension is the problem.

If you are 6'0" and 210 lbs, you are:
>6'0" and 210 lbs in the USA
>6'0" and 210 lbs in England
>6'0" and 210 lbs in China
>6'0" and 210 lbs in Australia

If you have a scar on your face, you are
>perceived as unattractive by some people
>perceived as attractive / hard / cool by other people

I feel like at this point the difference is extremely clear, and only a stubborn refusal to accept the truth would prevent you from understanding. Sorry if that's the case!

>Right, because women are filtered into social education and out of STEM fields.
Women could be filtered into brickaying too, the jobs they have are not even remotely the worst ones out there. It's also not at all proven that women are filtered out of STEM they might just not like or be good at it.

How do you know that women are abused at 5X the rates when the man is almost always arrested instead of the women? Isnt that going to completely fuck up your statistics? You didnt address the custody issue either.

I would also point out that saying that things like sucide and homeless dont count just because is ridiculous. If women had those kinds of suicide or job injury or homelessness rates there would be national uproar about it. brushing it aside as 'that's not a real disadvantage' is ludicrous

There are people who are simply not attractive, nobody finds them attractive at all. Fat on the other hand can be changed, it's not inherent in the least.

>There are people who are simply not attractive, nobody finds them attractive at all.
At this point, it just sounds like you need to get off r/redpill (or however the hell reddit formats their addresses) and start growing up. A good beginning spot is:
psychcentral.com/encyclopedia/internal-locus-of-control/

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I wouldn't reccommend it as your first forray into gender /women's studies books, but if you read a couple of the more canon third-wave feminists that any GWSS101 course would at least mention (Foucault History of Sexuality / excerpts of Butler's Gender Trouble), I HIGHLY recommend Wendy Brown's States of Injury. She takes most of the basic assumptions of third-wave intersectionailty to their logical conclusion: a race to the bottom where authenticity is determined by how much one has been injured by the powers that be. This does not bode well for any sort of equitable transfer of power, just guilty consciouses. That may do enough to get the general population to become more attentive in the short term to the plight of the uniquely downtrodden but it does not proscribe and changes for society and ultimately will be forgotten. She argues intersectionality has its value but it must be accompanied by a more wholesale description and critique of power. That's a massive simplification of her thesis of course but it's a message I think people who generally roll their eyes whenever someone mentions "queer theory" or "intersectionality" can more easily glean and better understand the larger project of third-wave feminism.

>Women could be filtered into brickaying too
Could be hypothetically, but aren't.

>It's also not at all proven that women are filtered out of STEM they might just not like or be good at it.
Actually is unanimously accepted among credible developmental specialists (which I only know because my brother has a PhD in the field. I don't necessarily blame others for not having any insight into modern sciences).

>I would also point out that saying that things like sucide and homeless dont count just because is ridiculous
Again, it really just sounds like you can't separate between "This is a cause that results in certain outcomes" and "This is an outcome influenced by certain factors".

You really need to be able to evaluate the two separately if you have any hope of participating in conversations about complex subjects. This is Yea Forums though, so maybe with some more reading you'll be ready soon enough! Sorry I don't have too many specific recommendations without crawling through my library. Almost everything I've been reading recently is Antebellum US History, so that's not going to be super helpful.

Oh look, pic related is a horribly deformed woman that was found perfectly attractive enough to settle down, get married, and have a family.

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>unanimously accepted among credible developmental specialists
The standard of evidence they require is abysmal and they are extremely biased. Women are encouraged at every step of the way to go into these subjects.

It does not matter in the least if it's an 'outcome' or 'cause'(this is a simplistic way of viewing what are in fact feedback loops anyway), the fact of the matter is they are real and very serious problems faced by men. You have also just asserted that they are outcomes without any evidence or argument.

Imagine if I posted Oprah as an argument for why black women were rich. Do you seriously think there arent serious negative imapcts to being that ugly?

>Could be hypothetically, but aren't.
yes that's the point, men are the ones who are filtered into many of the worst and most dangerous jobs not women.

Shockingly high IQ takes from a board that desperately needs to have sex. OP, the ur-text of modern feminism is Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex." It's the bedrock; everything that came after it either affirms its arguments, challenges them, or reinterprets them entirely. She didn't invent feminism whole cloth (duh) but she's the first "modern" feminist. You're going to find that academic feminism isn't bluehaired lesbians screeching about manspreading, but is a genuinely strenuous field rife with conflict, disagreement, tension, thought, etc. Have fun OP I mean that genuinely but if you're male it's going to be extremely uncomfortable at first - push through it

>t's going to be extremely uncomfortable at first
like when women try to do something without men

We know women are abused more because they report higher rates of sexual abuse or assault. That isn't dictated by who the police decide to arrest when they respond to a dispute. You could make a convincing argument that men are disadvantaged because they don't report higher rates of abuse due to shame and stigma arising from toxic masculinities that ask men to disregard their emotional responses to perceived slights and in turn fight it. But that doesn't mean women aren't abused less.

As for suicide, loads more women attempt suicide then men, men just generally have higher success rates. This would indicate both genders experience intense psychological stress which therapy has been found to be helpful with in managing. There are major PSA campaigns to cajole men into talking with therpists and other healthcare providers, maybe not as much mainstream press coverage, but still encouragement from state entities (at least in U.S.) to seek help. It's also generally not a great argument to say 'oh there would be national uproar" if this happened, without clearly defining what an uproar would entail. Does an uproar mean all media outlets talking about female suicide non-stop or does it mean you'd see more Jezebel clickbait on the topic coming on your facebook feed? Difficult to tell. And do either of these scenarios mean more public money spent on services to alleviate these issues? They are certainly real disadvantages but are more symptomatic of masculine ideals that push men into more dangerous, taxing work.

I don't have any response for homelessness, I would suppose though that women are generally more at risk of violence from men while experiencing homelessness though.

Like what

give birth

>They are certainly real disadvantages but are more symptomatic of masculine ideals that push men into more dangerous, taxing work.
They might just be symptomatic of a society that cares more about women's suffering than men's.

How do you know men act this way because of toxic masculinity instead of just because both women and men dont care about them?

Lol, thanks user

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>men are the ones who are filtered into many of the worst and most dangerous jobs not women.
Missing the point again, user. Men aren't filtered anywhere. Men have the whole breadth of professional options available to them in the USA. Women are actively filtered out of high esteem / high paying professions because our culture here still champions men as the primary providers, and perceives women as being unable to perform in these roles. I mean this user here: demonstrates this bias with the statement:
> they might just not like or be good at it.
That's patently retarded from anyone that understands what a normal distribution is, but that doesn't matter because it's not the _truth_ of the statement that matters. In the USA we make up excuses that are unsubstantiated, pretend they're true, and use them to discriminate against specific categories of people (black and female being two).

Again, I can't speak about where you're from, only how things are here in the USA, so if your culture is different then it's totally possible that some of what I'm saying may not apply.

The manipulated man by Vilar
Gender trouble by Butler
Congrats you can now disregard all arguments about sex and gender and start dividing people up into the categories of attractive/repulsive and assholes/nonassholes. Dressing as a polar bear optional.

>they might just be symptomatic of a society that cares more about women's suffering than men's.
They just might be! You're not giving any reasoning to believe the contrary, though.

>instead of just because both women and men don't care about them?
I'm afraid I don't quite understand your question, friend. Do you mean men when you say "them"? If so, I don't think it really works to make broad generalizations like all women and all men don't care about the plight of men at large. I think you are making the argument that governments don't care because they don't offer enough social services to alleviate the problems men see higher rates of. I might be wrong, but I'd agree for the most part. If you don't mean government, I think it's just a point about personal morality and that we should be kinder and better to men, and I guess I also agree with that. But that's such a broad statement and I don't see how it is a better explanation for the current situation than what we know about toxic masculinity. I understand its a buzzword that's been memed to death, but i think it better gets at larger societal pressures hoisted upon men than just the general idea that people are too hard on men.

Good point! I guess anti-natalists were the true feminists this whole time.

>Men aren't filtered anywhere. Men have the whole breadth of professional options available to them in the USA.
If this were true men wouldnt pick a lot of the shit tier jobs they end up in. Some women-dominated fields are not unpleasant at all and pay around the median salary.

How do you know that women are capable of fulfilling the roles anyway, if we're talking about STEM jobs. Their normal distribution could be shfted to the left, andor have smaller variation, in either IQ or disposition.

I would say both men and women, as well as the government, care significantly less about the average male suffering. I don't think this is socialized either, I think it's innate.

I can understand the concept of toxic masculinity, but I don't think it's the only or even primary thing going on there. Toxic masculinity and the lack of empathy for men would serve as mutually reinforcing factors in any case.

>How do you know that women are capable of fulfilling the roles anyway, if we're talking about STEM jobs.

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Yeah but do they want them? That's why I said disposition. the curve is also not the same shape for the two.

I'd agree that toxic masculinity isn't the only thing negatively affecting the outcomes of men's lives, but I am curious as to why less care for the average male's suffering would be innate? Even if you go by the most biologically deterministic arguments about sex and gender, evolution would still require both a man and woman for procreation, mandating their survival as equally important. Maybe men typically being on average bigger and stronger makes them less sympathetic in dangerous physical situations than a woman, but that still wouldn't mean we'd have an innate reason to shrug off male suffering wholesale. Do you have any studies to cite that make this point?

I apologize for assuming you are making a biological/evolutionary psych argument, I just don't get what fields outside of those would see lessened caring for men as 'innate'

>Yeah but do they want them?
Third world women do because they're the only jobs that pay decent money
Lotsa women engineers in Russia, China and India

if you're good faith, why are you asking Yea Forums lol? go ask /r/askfeminism or /r/gendercynical for good intros to theory. they'll use some outgroup words and call you a bitch or whatever, sure, but if you mention your sceptical background in a constructive way you'll get answers and be able to actually steelman gender studies.

people here, however intelligent, clearly are not going to point you to the strongest arguments.

>;_; I'm suffering nobody cares about me
Why do you suffer, man?
>I can't get a gf
Well let me see your interactions with women... oh shit nigger what are you doing, why are attacking women why would any woman be with someone who's hostile to her and treats her like shit like you do
>But *insert entitled whining from man that kills all sympathy for this guy, he only cares about himself he doesn't give a shit how she's feeling at his behavior* waaaaaaah
Fuck off niggers, best you suffer because if you ain't suffering you're only making someone else suffer instead.

I am making an evopsych argument and it's because of the asymmetry in reproductive value of men and women, and a host of assorted consequences. It is much better to lose half your men than half your women, because of how pregnancy works, but that's really the tip of the iceberg. Feel free to not accept it since evopsych is highly speculative, though it's not like the sociology that talks about socializing gender roles is very rigorous either.

Yeah, I guess this is where we'd have to part ways. I just don't know hardly anything about evopsych. Do you have any recommendations?

>implying intersectjonalists aren’t the exact kind of people who would deny the existence of objectively definable races.

>Yeah but do they want them?
What ISN'T clear about how a distribution curve works?

And why does it matter that certain qualities are more subjective than others? Is it not the perception alone that has relevance?

Well any textbook about evolution really will have a section on behavior. Sociobiology(wilson) is specifically about it.

It's basically the antithesis to your worldview though so I dont know if you even want to bother. Im not even saying that in a dismissive way, it's possible that the sociologists you're talking about are right and Im wrong, but there is almost zero common ground between evopsych and people who talk about toxic masculinity.

You're fucking stupid

Sort of, but the ones that are subjective are necessarily not systemic. "Attractiveness" for instance, may stifle you in one situation, but won't in another because the second person might find you attractive. It's a term that's therefore impossible to define in a broad sense. You can't line up 600 people, and ask "which ones are the unattractive ones" and get 1000 people to give you unanimously consistent answers.

"Female" on the other hand is concrete. You can look at 600 men / women and pick the women out 100% of the time, with 100% consistency. It's thus a more realistically addressable metric and the disadvantage that group suffers because of that metric has been quantitatively demonstrated (In the USA. I make sure to preface all my statements with that bit).

Rachel Ray has some good books for women

Your whole line of reasoning is unbelievably disordered, so I'll just pick this particular post to ask: why is it that in the first group you present "what is", and in the second you present "what is perceived"? I mean, I understand the distinction between being objective and subjective, but this is a sleight of hand. If we are not concerning ourselves with what is perceived, then you've said little more besides that a man standing six feet tall is indeed a man standing six feet tall.

And yes, you can't easily group something so nebulous like "attractive" people together. This presents a problem for these kinds of studies which are concerned with little more than classifying people. If anything, this fact should shine forth at you, that you may see how dehumanizing the whole thing is. They are not insects. Underneath the statistics, studies, and journals lies Man, and it is a shame that you think you can measure his suffering.