Sexism and the Internet (Pt 1 of 3)

Before you do anything, go read this: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps.html. Did that make you as angry as it made me? Probably not. After reading this I sat here for five minutes feeling like I was having a heart attack. I'm not kidding, I was nearly in tears. I was speechless. I couldn't understand how, in 2012 , we could be so racists. Aren't we supposed to be better than that as a society? The answer, no. Before I explain my theory on the internet you have to first understand...

We're Not as Progressive as We Think.

We think that with every year we get closer to becoming the Star Trek utopia that we all want. The problem with this thinking is that we're looking forward into a future that we won't achieve for a while. No, I'm not talking 10-20 years, I'm talking about another 300 maybe even 400+ years. So what's stopping us from becoming that utopia so soon? Well, go look at these...

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/14/on-equal-pay-day-everything-you-...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2015/03/26/new-data-on-just-how-bad-the-g...

... I think you'll find them nice and short.

If you're incapable of clicking links on the device you're using (or just have an attention span of a squirrel) the two sources say that, even though the gender pay gap is getting smaller, women are still making 2/3 of what their male counterparts make as long as the two have equal jobs and education.

The article from Forbes brought up an interesting point saying that woman who have graduate degrees make 69% of what men with graduate degrees make while women with bachelor degrees make just 71% of what men with a lower degree make, showing that women need to be more educated than men to get the same job. This, to clarify, is a study on white men versus white women. The gap for women of color is even worse.

We as a whole have created a society where women are still expect to hold down the home while the men make the money. Go ahead, argue with me all you want. But at the end of the day I can still pull up more articles showing how sexist America is than you can about “Men’s Privilege” or whatever you call sexism now. This brings me to my first of two points (the second I’ll explain next week) that leads up to my theory on the internet (and before you ask, no. I’m not going to tell you my theory because that’s called suspense and it’s good writing.)

The point being that we as a society have not gotten around to fixing sexism yet. Don’t get me wrong, we’re getting closer, we’re just not there yet. Go onto any forum you want and if you look in the right spot, you’ll find something that’s sexist. It’s because society is still so resistant to change, we don’t want to work towards bettering our treatment towards others because if we do then we might lose some of those advantages ourselves.

To piggyback on this point my next article will be about racism and the internet. Until then, try not to get to made at that first article I posted. Bye!