the whole shipwrecked man

vortex sucks down shipwrecked men

Some fishermen hauled up a half-eaten
man, caught in a net full of flounder —
wept-for remains of a lost voyage.

Rather than profit from ruin,
they buried the man and the fish in shallow
sand.

Land, here you have the whole shipwrecked man
though, in place of the rest of his flesh,
you have those that ate it.

{ Ἐξ ἁλὸς ἡμίβρωτον ἀνηνέγκαντο σαγηνεῖς
ἄνδρα, πολύκλαυτον ναυτιλίης σκύβαλον·

κέρδεα δ᾿ οὐκ ἐδίωξαν ἃ μὴ θέμις· ἀλλὰ σὺν αὐτοῖς
ἰχθύσι τῇδ᾿ ὀλίγῃ θῆκαν ὑπὸ ψαμάθῳ.

ὦ χθών, τὸν ναυηγὸν ἔχεις ὅλον· ἀντὶ δὲ λοιπῆς
σαρκὸς τοὺς σαρκῶν γευσαμένους ἐπέχεις. }

This epigram, attributed to Hegesippus, was written in Greek probably in the mid-third century BGC.  The last line could be funny.  The context, however, is mournful.  The fishermen have an ethical sense beyond profit as much as you can.  By burying the man and the fish in shallow sand, they enable both to be, with time, washed out into the sea.  The whole shipwrecked man, “wept-for remains of a lost voyage,” will move again from the land to the sea.  The half-eaten man and the fish caught in the net are the whole shipwrecked man, the continually transforming body in an unanchored world.

Latter-day Greeks, are we not dead
and only seem to be alive,
having fallen on hard times,
mistaking a dream for existence?
Or are we alive,
while our way of life has perished?

{ Ἄρα μὴ θανόντες τῷ δοκεῖν ζῶμεν μόνον,
Ἕλληνες ἄνδρες, συμφορᾷ πεπτωκότες
ὄνειρον εἰκάζοντες εἶναι τὸν βίον;
ἢ ζῶμεν ἡμεῖς, τοῦ βίου τεθνηκότος }

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Notes:

First epigram — Greek text from Paton (1920), English translation from Wolfe (2013) p. 91.  On the dating of the epigrammist Hegesippus, about whom little is known, id. p. 175.  Id. describes this and the subsequent epigram as epitaphs.  They probably weren’t actually inscribed on tombs.  Epitaphs typically weren’t highly poetic.  In the above epigram translation, I’ve replaced “earth” with “land” for better poetic sense.  The epigram is GA 7.276.  The prose translation there uses “land” rather than “earth.”  The word “man” above shouldn’t be only understood as indicating a human being.  Men in ancient Greece faced a much higher risk of death on the sea because men predominated among long-distance commercial travelers and warriors.  Men today continue to face a much higher risk of accidental death than do women.

Second epigram — Greek text from Paton (1920), English translation from Wolfe (2013) p. 151.  The epigram also appears in GA 10.82.  It is attributed to Palladas of Alexandria, who lived in the fourth-century GC.  On the dating of Palladas work, Wilkinson (2009).  Palladas continued to follow traditional Greek religion after Constantine converted to Christianity.  Alexandria was a leading center of early Christianity.  Palladas lamented the new dominance of Christians.

References:

GA: Paton, W.R. 1920. The Greek Anthology with an English Translation. London: William Heinemann (vol. I, bks. 1-6; vol. II, bks. 7-8; vol. III, bk. 9; vol IV, bks. 10-12; vol. V, bks. 13-16). (epigrams indicated GA {bk}.{epigram # within bk})

Wilkinson, Kevin W. 2009. “Palladas and the Age of Constantine.” The Journal of Roman Studies. 36: 36-60.

Wolfe, Michael. 2013. Cut these words into my stone: ancient Greek epitaphs. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

scholars declare demonic male species and gynocentrism

gibbons ponder scholarship declaring our demonic male species

A prize-winning anthropologist at a leading U.S. university has explored how to tame what he describes as “our demonic male species.”  In a book, he and his co-author considered how to bring about a revolution in human social organization such as that imagined in Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s 1915 novel, Herland. The setting for that novel is an isolated society in which, long ago, all the males had been fortuitously killed.  The women subsequently engender only females through asexual reproduction.  The anthropology professor and his co-author recognized the implausibility of perfectly implementing this move toward an ideal society:

Like Gauguin and Melville and Mead, Charlotte Perkins Gilman eliminated male violence from her portrait of an ideal society simply by eliminating males; and we cannot perfectly paste this story’s lesson onto an ordinary two-sex society.[1]

They recognized, however, that prisons could make an important contribution to this program:

Persuading the more violent men to abandon hopes of fatherhood would doubtless keep prison builders happy and, in the end, probably engender revolution. But even if the most aggressive, potentially violent men could be persuaded to step aside for the sake of future generations, what about the women? [2]

Men are currently incarcerated for having consensual sex and not being able to make court-ordered monthly payments for the next eighteen years.  Should efforts to incarcerate men be expanded further?  Of course, the more important question is: what about the women?

Long-before tiresome recent books such as Are Men Necessary? and The End of Men and the Rise of Women, a leading biological anthropologist wrote a scholarly book with a chapter entitled, “The Pros and Cons of Males.” She briefly discussed Herland, which she described as a “marvelous 1915 utopian novel.”  She also described Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto as providing a “refuge from and defense against” the belief that women are “devoid of political instincts.”[3]  The SCUM Manifesto has obvious importance to elite anthropology.  The SCUM Manifesto declares:

the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples. [4]

The SCUM Manifesto describes “rational men”:

Rational men want to be squashed, stepped on, crushed and crunched, treated as the curs, the filth that they are, have their repulsiveness confirmed.

This work of elite anthropological scholarship lamented, “This doctrine of female inferiority has disfigured several ostensibly impartial realms, particularly the study of human evolution.”[5]  That’s the same scholarly logic that drives sexist studies of sexism.

Scholars have now recognized that females play a central role in determining primate social organization.  Some scholars once believed that the Industrial Revolution led to patriarchy.  Under patriarchy theory, men deprived women of economic resources and confined them within the (single-family, suburban, dull, and dehumanizing) home.  Other scholars, however, have traced the origins of patriarchy back to the beginning of agriculture.  That’s when men’s plows first started penetrating the earth, and men began placing seeds into the fertile ground.  In the evocative description of a highly regarded anthropologist, it was “The Plow: Death Knell for Women.”[6]  However, scholarly competition and innovation has pushed patriarchy even further back into evolutionary history:

Human patriarchy has its beginnings in the forest ape social world, a system based on males’ social dominance and coercion of females.  We can speculate that it was elaborated subsequently, perhaps in the woodland ape era, perhaps much later, by the development of sexual attachments with the same essential dynamic as gorilla bonds.…  Men, following the evolutionary logic that benefits those who make the laws, would create legal systems that so often defined adultery as a crime for women, not for men – a social world that makes men freer than women.[7]

Key to this intellectual development was directing attention to female-bonded primate groups:

If FB {female-bonded} groups have evolved as modeled, they support the view that male strategies are ultimately a result of female distribution, i.e. males compete for access to given clumps of females in a system of “female defense polygyny” {references omitted}.  Consequently the number of females per group and the number of males per female are considered to depend ultimately on the strategies of females [8]

Gynocentrism rapidly achieved dominance in scholarly deliberation in anthropology and primatology.  As a scholar of primate social organization noted in a scholarly article published in 2002:

For much of the last twenty years, females have occupied center stage in theoretical and empirical analyses of primate social organization. [9]

Women have dominated social life (gynocentrism) for as long as humanity has existed.  For humans and other primates, males’ strategies depend on female behavior.  Sociality evolved in primates because it enhanced females’ access to resources.[10]  Consistent with general patterns of primate life, elite men and women today compete to establish social rules that most effectively transfer resources from men to women.

*  *  *  *  *

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Notes:

[1] Wrangham & Peterson (1996) p. 238.  Richard Wrangham is the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology and Wing Chair at Harvard University.  He won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987. Wrangham and Peterson describe Timothy McVeigh as an “all-American male” and Arnold Schwarzenegger as offering a “comic book caricature of the demonic male physique and persona.”  They lament, “As men, we have probably inadvertently neglected issues that women writers would have raised.” Id. pp. 247, 240, 242.  Compared to eliminating all men, gynocentrism has the advantage of exploiting men’s material productivity and using men to fight other men.

[2] Id. p. 239.

[3] Hrdy (1981) p. 11.  In 2001, Hrdy won the W.W. Howell Prize for outstanding contribution to biological anthropology.

[4] Solanas (1968) p. 1.  The subsequent quote is from id. p. 16.  Shortly after writing the SCUM Manifesto, Solanas shot and critically wounded one man, shot but missed another man, and attempted to shoot a third man.  For these acts, she served about three years in prison.  While the SCUM Manifesto has an honored place in elite scholarship, masterpieces of literature like Boccaccio’s Corbaccio are condemned to oblivion.

[5] Hrdy (1981) p. 11.  Discussion of claims of female inferiority function as an aspect of gynocentrism.

[6] Fisher (1999) p. 173.

[7] Wrangham & Peterson (1996) pp. 241-2. Other ambitious scholars have successfully traced males’ exploitation of females back to anisogamy.  The small sperm contributes less weight to the embryo than does the large egg.  This alleged exploitation started about 1.2 billion years ago when the first sexually reproducing organisms evolved.  Knowledge, capability, and interest in denouncing such sexual exploitation developed about 50 years ago.  Patriarchy has long imposed grotesquely unjust paternity laws on men and treated men as disposable persons.

[8] Wrangham (1980) pp. 287-8.

[9] Silk (2002) p. 85, describing the influential model of Wrangham (1980).

[10] Id.

[image] pair of Gibbons.  Thanks to MatthiasKabel and Wikipedia.

References:

Fisher, Helen E. 1999. The first sex: the natural talents of women and how they are changing the world. New York: Random House.

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. 1981. The woman that never evolved. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

Silk, Joan B. 2002. “Females, Food, Family, and Friendship.” Evolutionary Anthropology 11: 85-87.

Solanas, Valerie. 1968. SCUM manifesto: Society for Cutting Up Men. New York: Olympia Press.

Wrangham, Richard W. 1980. “An ecological model of the evolution of female-bonded groups of primates.” Behaviour 75: 262-300.

Wrangham, Richard W. and Dale Peterson. 1996. Demonic males: apes and the origins of human violence. Boston, Houghton Mifflin.

classical Arabic buttocks in medieval European context

In classical Arabic literature, a figure of feminine beauty was a narrow waist and large buttocks.  An Arabic song from the seventh century lovingly effused:

Her buttocks quiver when she walks; her back
is like a willow branch, her waist is slim. [1]

An Arabic ode from the early eighth century marveled:

Her rump is like a dune that towers, where
the sprinkling rains have shaped firm hillocks. [2]

The larger the buttocks, the bigger the blessing to an admiring man in the ancient Islamic world.  But only within reason.  In a Syrian author’s eleventh-century Arabic story, a shaykh found himself in Paradise:

The shaykh takes a quince, or a pomegranate, or an apple, or whatever fruit God wills, and breaks it open.  A girl with black, lustrous eyes whose beauty dazzles the other damsels of the Paradisical gardens, emerges. [3]

The shaykh is overjoyed and prostrates himself to God for this blessing.  While praising God he retained his good sense in classical Arabic literature:

It occurs to him, while he is still prostrate, that the girl, though beautiful, is rather skinny.  He raises his head and instantly she has a behind that rivals the hills of ʻĀlij, the dunes of al-Dahnāʼ, and the sands of Yabrīn and Banū Saʻd.  Awed by the omnipotence of the Kind and Knowing God, he says, “Thou who givest rays to the shining sun, Thou who fulfillest the desires of everyone, Thou whose awe-inspiring deeds make us feel impotent, and summon to wisdom the ignorant: I ask Thee to reduce the bum of this damsel to one square mile, for Thou hast surpassed my expectations with Thy measure!” [4]

The shaykh’s prayer revised the initial impulse of desire that God apparently perceived in his heart and granted to his eyes.  God responded mercifully to the shaykh’s praise of divine bounty and to his feeling of impotence upon seeing the enormous size of the girl’s buttocks:

An answer is heard: “You may choose: the shape of the girl will be as you wish.”
And the desired reduction is effected.

Men and women across cultures and history typically find most attractive women with waist-to-hip ratios about 0.7.[5]  But, irrespective of evolutionary psychology, classical Arabic literature and God could construct enormous buttocks.

Bustle dress from mid-1880s exaggerates buttocks

The classical Arabic ideal of large buttocks apparently moved European culture.  The ancient Greek ideal of buttocks, at least as represented by the Aphrodite Kallipygos, isn’t impressive in size. A thirteenth-century Old French romance tells of a woman’s beauty from her hair down to her feet. It then adds:

In her was nothing in which one might find fault,
nothing that was not beautiful and appealing.
Riches that God had placed
under her dress or her underfrock,
courtesy forbids me
that I name them directly.
They should be praised much more
than all that you have heard.
I believe that they were, let it not be hidden,
white and smooth and roundly full.

{ En li n’a riens qu’on tiengne a let,
Qui ne soit bel et avenant,
Et s’il a en li remenant
Ne richesse que Dieux ait mise,
Soubz la pelice ou la chemise,
Que courtoisie me deffent
Que je ne nomme appertement,
Louer assez plus le devez
Que trestout ce qu’oÿ avez:
Je croy qu’il soit, n’y soit celé,
Blanc et poli et potelé. }[6]

The poet apparently was referring to the woman’s beautiful buttocks. “Full” might be somewhat less than “large.” However, an important early fifteenth-century Spanish work in the literature of men’s sexed protests registers a meaningful objection to what would now be termed sexual harassment:

She looks at her hands all covered with rings, and chews her lips to make them red, casting her eyes about, looking sideways, wriggling her bottom like mad … And if she is at home clad only in a wrapper, she will lean over and pick up something from the floor, to show her shanks proudly and a great expanse of buttocks, this to attract the attention of whoever is looking at her, or of the one she would be desired by.

{ Míranse las manos con tantas sortijas y vanse los bezos mordiendo por tornarlos bermejos, haciendo de los ojos desgaires, mirando de través, colleando como locas … Si por casa anda en saya, hace que se abaja a tomar de tierra alguna cosa por mostrar los zancajos y gran forma de nalgas con lozanía y orgullo, por ser deseada de aquel de quien es mirada, o a quien tal muestra hace. }[7]

An Italian work of men’s sexed protests from the fourteenth century explicitly connects a woman’s large buttocks to the Arabic world:

She wanted her cheeks nicely puffed and red, her buttocks ample and protruding (having heard perhaps that these things were most highly prized in Alexandria and for that reason were a very great part of the beauty of a lady), above all else she strove to make these two features abundantly conspicuous in herself.  … And fully did she succeed in becoming plump-cheeked and big-bottomed.

{ costei estimando che l’avere bene le gote gonfiate e vermiglie, e grosse e sospinte in fuori le natiche (avendo forse udito che queste sommamente piacciono in Alessandria, e perciò fossono grandissima parte di belleza in una donna), in niuna cosa studiava tanto quanto in fare che queste due cose in lei fossono vedute pienamente … E pienamente di divenire paffuta e naticuta le venne fatto. }[8]

The man’s protest focused on the expensive food that his wife ate in order to swell her buttocks:

About the milk-fed veal, the partridges, the fat thrushes, the turtledoves, the Lombard soups, the lasagne cooked in broth, the elderberry fritters, the white chestnut cakes, and the blancmanges of which she had the same bellyfulls as peasants do of figs, cherries, or melons when they are placed before them, I do not care to tell you.

{ Le vitelle di latte, le starne, i fagiani, i tordi grassi, le tortole, le suppe lombarde, le lasagne maritate, le frittellette sambucate, i migliacci bianchi, i bramangieri, de’ quali ella faceva non altre corpacciate che facciano di fichi o di ciriege o di poponi i villani quando ad essi s’avvengono, non curo di dirti. }

This rhetorically sophisticated protest would gain additional weight if the narrator and most medieval European men did not favor big-bottomed women.  Given the prestige of Arabic science and literature in medieval Europe, large buttocks may have been recognized as an ideal of womanly beauty irrespective of most medieval European men’s actual preferences.

*  *  *  *  *

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Notes:

[1] Attributed to Qays ibn Dharīh in Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, al-Aghānī, from Arabic trans. van Gelder (2013) p. 142.

[2] Dhū l-Rummah, qasīdah “To Mayyah’s Two Abodes, a Greeting,” from Arabic trans van Gelder (2013) p. 23.

[3] Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, Risālat al-ghufrān, from Arabic trans. van Gelder (2013) p. 269.  I’ve added a comma after gardens.

[4] Id. (including subsequent quote).  In classical Arabic love poetry, large buttocks were admired in both women and boys: “the standard poetic simile is that of a sand hill or dune.” Id. p. 405, n. 801.

[5] Kościński (2013), Singh (2002).  With respect to body-mass index, relatively wealthy, urban men and women find most attractive skinny women.  Kościński (2013).

[6] Jean Renaut, Galeran of Brittany {Galeran de Bretagne} vv. 1302-12, Old French text from Foulet (1925), my English translation, benefiting from that Beston (2008). The beautiful woman was Galeron’s beloved Fresne.

[7] Alonso Martínez de Toledo, Archpriest of Talavera, II.8, Spanish text from the online presentation by Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes of the edition of Gerli (1979), English trans. Simpson (1959) p. 140.

[8] Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Corbaccio, 218, 222, Italian text from Padoan (1994) via Decameron Web, English trans. Cassell (1993) pp. 40-1. The subsequent quote is similarly from Corbaccio 220.  Id. p. 123, n. 188, observes that Alexandria was the site of a “notorious Egyptian slave market.” Boccaccio spent part of his youth in Angevin Naples and probably was familiar with at least some Arabic literature.  Kirkham & Menocal (1987).

The fourteenth-century Spanish work Libro de buen amor, which was a culturally hybrid Arabic-European work, described as desirable “widish” hips.  The Arabic folk tale La historia de la doncella Teodor, translated into twelfth-century Castilian, described as beautiful “wide” hips. Da Soller (2005) pp. 88-9, 99.

Desired buttocks in medieval European literature seem otherwise to be smaller than the ideal buttocks of classical Arabic literature.  In twelfth-century French literature, feminine beauty was “small waist; moderately full hips.”  In English literature from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, feminine beauty was typically “small waist; … not too broad or round hips.” Da Soller (2005) pp. 44-6, 73-4. Cf. Le Ménagier de Paris 2.3.20 (c. 1393), which suggests that desirable characteristics of a maiden are “a handsome mane, a beautiful chest, fine-looking loins, and large buttocks.” From French trans. Greco & Rose (2009) p. 224.

[image] Dress from the 1880s with bustle exaggerating the buttocks.  Thanks to Wikipedia.

References:

Beston, John, trans. 2008. An English Translation of Jean Renaut’s Galeran de Bretagne, a Thirteenth-Century French Romance. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.

Cassell, Anthony K. trans. 1993. Giovanni Boccaccio. The Corbaccio, or, The Labyrinth of Love. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies.

Da Soller, Claudio. 2005. The beautiful woman in medieval Iberia: rhetoric, cosmetics, and evolution. Ph.D. Thesis. University of Missouri-Columbia.

Foulet, Lucien, ed. 1925. Jean Renaut. Galeran de Bretagne: Roman du XIIIe Siècle. Paris: É. Champion. Alternate source.

Gelder, Geert Jan van. 2013. Classical Arabic Literature: a library of Arabic literature anthology. New York: New York University Press.

Gerli, Michael, ed. 1979. Alfonso Martínez de Toledo. Arcipreste de Talavera o Corbacho. Madrid: Cátedra.

Greco, Gina L., and Christine M. Rose, ed. and trans. 2009. The Good Wife’s Guide; Le ménagier de Paris: a medieval household book. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Kirkham, Victoria, and Maria Rosa Menocal. 1987.  “Reflections on the ‘Arabic’ world: Boccaccio’s ninth stories.” Stanford Italian Review VII, pp. 95-110.

Kościński, Krzysztof. 2013. “Attractiveness of women’s body: body mass index, waist-hip ratio, and their relative importance.” Behavioral Ecology. 24 (4): 914-925.

Padoan, Giorgio, ed. 1994. Giovanni Boccacio. “Il Corbaccio.” In Carlo Delcorno, ed. Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio. Volume 5, Book 2. Milano: Mondadori.

Simpson, Lesley Byrd Simpson. 1959. Alfonso Martínez de Toledo.  Little Sermons on Sin: the Archpriest of Talavera. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Singh, Devendra. 2002. “Female mate value at a glance: relationship of waist-to-hip ratio to health, fecundity and attractiveness.” Neuro Endocrinology Letters. 23: 81-91.

New Modern Sexism Scale helps to evaluate sexism truly

An influential 1995 scholarly article debuted the Modern Sexism Scale.  That article began ominously in the first sentence of its abstract:

Prejudice and discrimination against women has become increasingly subtle and covert (N. V. Benokraitis & J. R. Feagin, 1986). [1]

Prejudice and discrimination against men, in contrast, is blatant and overt.  Discrimination against men is written explicitly in sexist Selective Service registration rulesInternational measures of gender gaps in lifespan naturalize and explicitly ignore men’s lifespan disadvantages.  Men have no reproductive rights.  Men are imprisoned for nothing more than having consensual sex and being unable to pay government-imposed sex payments (“child support”).  Men face enormous gender disparities and discrimination in child custody awards.

Sexism against men is coded into social-scientific studies of sexism that use only the Modern Sexism Scale.  The Modern Sexism Scale measures three factors of sexism:

  1. denial of continuing discrimination {against women}
  2. antagonism toward women’s demands
  3. resentment about special favors for women [2]

The Modern Sexism Scale is obviously sexist.  It’s completely gynocentric.[3]

To combat sexism, the gynocentric Modern Sexism Scale should be complemented with the New Modern Sexism Scale.  The New Modern Sexism Scale measures sexism along three additional factors:

  1. denial of discrimination against men
  2. antagonism toward men’s demands
  3. resentment about concern for men

The Modern Sexism Scale together with the New Modern Sexism Scale measure sexism without the sexism of the Modern Sexism Scale.  If that doesn’t make sense to you, you’ve identified yourself as maximally sexist and no further scientific measurement is needed.

bull horns: key to understanding sexism research

Sexism is further measured by presenting subjects with statements.  Subjects respond to the statements using with five choices of agreement ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree.  If the statement is essentially sexist, as determined by the credentialed authority administering the examination, then intensity of agreement is coded increasing from 1 to 5.  If the statement is essentially correct-thinking non-sexism, then intensity of disagreement is coded increasing from 1 to 5.  Statements of direct and reverse coding for sexism help to encourage thoughtful responses.  The integer codes for responses are added up to label just how sexist the respondent is.

In the Modern Sexism Scale, eight gynocentric statements measure sexism:

  1. Discrimination against women is no longer a problem in the United States. {more strongly agree is more sexist}
  2. Women often miss out on good jobs due to sexual discrimination. {more strongly disagree is more sexist}
  3. It is rare to see women treated in a sexist manner on television. {more strongly agree is more sexist}
  4. On average, people in our society treat husbands and wives equally. {more strongly agree is more sexist}
  5. Society has reached the point where women and men have equal opportunities for achievement. {more strongly agree is more sexist}
  6. It is easy to understand the anger of women’s groups in America. {more strongly disagree is more sexist}
  7. It is easy to understand why women’s groups are still concerned about societal limitations of women’s opportunities.  {more strongly disagree is more sexist}
  8. Over the past few years, the government and the news media have been showing more concern about the treatment of women than is warranted by women’s actual experiences. {more strongly agree is more sexist} [4]

The New Modern Sexism Scale uses eight androcentric statements to measure sexism:

  1. Discrimination against men has never been a problem in the United States, and if it were a problem women’s groups would be very concerned about that discrimination. {more strongly agree is more sexist}
  2. Men often miss out on time with their children due to gender roles directing men to earn money and sexual discrimination in child custody awards. {more strongly disagree is more sexist}
  3. It is rare to see men treated in a sexist manner on television. {more strongly agree is more sexist}
  4. On average, people in our society treat wives and husbands equally. {more strongly agree is more sexist}
  5. Society has reached the point where men and women have equal opportunities for personal fulfillment. {more strongly agree is more sexist}
  6. It is easy to understand the anger of men’s groups in America, particularly since their existence is rarely acknowledged, and when acknowledged, commonly misrepresented and ridiculed. {more strongly disagree is more sexist}
  7. It is easy to understand why men’s groups are concerned about societal limitations of men’s opportunities.  {more strongly disagree is more sexist}
  8. Over the past few years, the government and the news media have been showing more concern about the treatment of men than is warranted by men’s actual experiences. {more strongly agree is more sexist}

The subject’s scored responses for the eight statements in the Modern Sexism Scale and the eight statements in the New Modern Sexism Scale are separately summed to form dual sexist scores.  These scores are linearly normalized to the 1 to 10 scale widely used for personal evaluation.

Scientifically measured sexism is critical for objectively and authoritatively declaring persons to be sexist.  Extreme values on the Modern Sexism Scale (MSS) and the New Modern Sexism Scale (NMSS) have clear implications:

  • MSS=1 and NMSS=10:  Likely to become a tenured professor.  Incapable of learning.  Will remained mired in sexism against men for the rest of her or his life.
  • MSS=1 and NMSS=1: Shrewd survey respondent.  Recognizes and affirms prejudices implicit in social constructs.  Will successfully rise to the top of egalitarian social elite.
  • MSS=10 and NMSS=1: Outlaw renegade.  Must be suppressed and silenced for the good of the dominant discourse.
  • MSS=10 and NMSS=10: Equally sexist person.  Does not discriminate between women and men.  Urgently needs sexist education to become less sexist.

Intermediate values of MSS-NMSS represent mixed beliefs and attitudes.  When in doubt, declare the person to be sexist and in need of sexist education.  Calling for more research on sexism is also favored among sexism researchers. [5]

The study that set out the Modern Sexism Scale linked sexism and racism.  Racism in the U.S. arose from a history of chattel slavery and pervasive racial segregation.  There is no such history of sexism.  Across all the generation of human beings, men and women have lived together, intimately related, and worked together to raise children.  Being oblivious to that reality, like administering only the Modern Sexism Scale, indicates extreme sexism.

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Notes:

[1] Swim, Aikin, Hall & Hunter (1995) p. 199 (abstract).  The Modern Sexism Scale was influential enough to be included in Baron et al. (2007).

[2] Swim, Aikin, Hall & Hunter (1995) p. 212.

[3] Id. described two studies “validating” the Modern Sexism Scale.  Respondents in the first study:

Respondents were 418 women and 265 men from an introductory psychology course who received extra credit for their participation. Nearly all respondents were European-American.

Id. p. 201. Respondents in the second study:

Four hundred seventy-seven women and 311 men completed the racism and sexism questionnaires for extra credit in their introductory psychology course. Nearly all respondents were European-American.

Id. p. 205.  Women receiving college degrees now outnumber men by about 40%.  In the Modern Sexism Study, female respondents outnumbered male respondents by about 60%.  The greater degree of gender inequality in the Modern Sexism Study reflects large gender inequality in the academic field of psychology.

[4] Id.

[5] Wikipedia lists sixteen different scales to measure to sexism, gender bias, and beliefs about gender.  Many more could be created to satisfy different prejudices of different researchers.  The World Values Survey provides a leading example of a sexist measurement of sexism.

Reference:

Baron, Sherry, Meg A. Bond, Dianne Cazeca, Sivan Daniel, Alketa Kalaja, Pia Markkanen, Laura Punnett, and Lana Tsurikova. 2007. Expanding our understanding of the psychosocial work environment: a compendium of measures of discrimination, harassment and work-family issues.  U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

Swim, Janet K., Kathryn J. Aikin, Wayne S. Hall, and Barbara A. Hunter. 1995. “Sexism and racism: Old-fashioned and modern prejudices.”  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 68 (2): 199-214.