HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: Will Steeves <goid@zooid.guild.org>
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: excerpts from a new  (1)
Date: 12 Sep 1992 16:07:43 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu
Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu

Muffy writes...  (re: child custody determinations)
WS> [Moderator's note: a reference about disputed custody cases was sent to
WS> Mr. Steeves.  There are few single fathers because few custody cases
WS> *are* disputed.  We will not post further discussion on this subject
WS> unless someone comes up with new references/information. - MB]


Eureka!  I believe that I have some information which might clear this up.

As it turns out, Chesler is only "half right" in saying that "70% of fathers
who want custody, get it".  The actual situation is that 85+% of custody
decisions do in fact go to the mother, but 15% of these decisions are
*appealed*, and a high percentage of the *appeals* have reversed such custody
decisions.  So she *was* right, but only in regards to the issue of appeals.

Even so, 85% of 15% of all the custody cases, is *not* a lot.  This explains
the absence of legions of single fathers...

As for the reference (my numbers are a bit off the exact figures, but I'll
get them reconfirmed exactly, upon request), it is In Search Of Justice.  I
grant that some of you will say "They're a men's rights group ; they must be
biased," but to anyone who *does* say this, I ask : Do you take the books of
*your* own side as gospel, yet condemn the "other side's" books for being
biased?

---
Will Steeves, goid@zooid.guild.org                      "Neil Hull is GOiD"
ZOOiD BBS, Toronto, Ontario - The Zoo Of Ids            "GOiDS Rule"
(416) 322-7876
---
 * SLMR 2.1a * Few people have the imagination for reality.


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From: alubiw@maytag.uwaterloo.ca (Anna Lubiw)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Lipstick
Date: 8 Sep 1992 18:27:21 GMT
Organization: University of Waterloo
Distribution: world
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I recently visited the home a 2-year old girl, who was playing with 
a lipstick her mother had given her, and offered that I should put some on.  
After I declined a couple of times, she looked at me in puzzlement 
and suspicion, and asked, "Are you a lady or a man?"



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From: Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu (Albert Lunde)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: male/female joy of sex
Followup-To: soc.feminism
Date: 8 Sep 1992 02:57:20 GMT
Organization: Ministry of Silly Walks
Distribution: world
Reply-To: Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu (Albert Lunde)
NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu
Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu

In article <1992Sep2.014607.24748@tamsun.tamu.edu> sharring@cs.tamu.EDU (Steven L Harrington) writes:
>In article <9208311801.AA06257@mica.berkeley.edu> muffy@mica.berkeley.EDU (Muffy Barkocy) writes:
>>My contention is still that many (most?)  women do *not* actually
>>enjoy sex, even though they are generally physically capable of doing
>>so.
>
>I'm getting in on this discussion rather late, and don't have much
>substantive to say about it; however, I cannot let this statement
>ride. _Please_ tell me where you got this information. Is it merely
>opinion? If so, what brought you to it? I haven't heard a statement
>that struck me as absurd as this in quite some time. I make no claims
>to being an expert in the field, but my "contention" is 180 degrees
>in the other direction.

I've got no idea if this is what Muffy has in mind, but relevant information
can be found in "The Hite Report".  It has been criticized for its
sampling bias and the author's interpretation, but IMHO this is all
pretty much out in the open when you read the book and you can judge for
yourself.  It is fairly specific about ways/reasons whomen do and don't
enjoy sex.  In particular it exposes the problems with too narrow an
idea of sex as penis/vaginal intercourse alone.

-- 
 Albert Lunde         | Interfaith  |     *Y*Y*      "A branch on the
 Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu |  Bisexual   |      *Y*        tree of life"
 alunde@nuacvm.bitnet |  Feminist   |.......|.........................


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From: Cindy Blank-Edelman <uunet!mailrus!gatech!meshugge.media.mit.edu!cindy@ncar.UCAR.EDU>
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Lipstick
Date: 8 Sep 1992 14:29:11 GMT
Organization: M.I.T. Media Laboratory
Distribution: world
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Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu

Lenore Levine writes:

[excerpt from pro-Lipstick article deleted]

> This woman isn't just saying that she enjoys wearing lipstick, or
> explaining how to use it. She's saying that if you're over a certain
> age, your face is going to be pretty disgusting ("dull, dilapidated
> and drab") without it. And implying, very strongly, that if you're
> over that age, you're not going to see a person you want on the other
> side of the bed in the morning -- unless you wear lipstick.  *Thank
> you,* Bonnie, for sharing this with us...

It is interesting, also, that the suggestion to wear lipstick was made
to Bonnie by a man.  I think that women's attitudes towards make-up
(and appearance, in general) are largely shaped by our perceptions of
what men find attractive.  One example:

In the summer of 1989, I was on an educational program for women in
the Catskills in New York.  There was a separate program for men,
which we had only occasional contact with.  The program lasted six
weeks.  For the first week or so, most of the women on the program
wore make-up.  Gradually, they stopped wearing make-up on a regular
basis, and wore it only when they got "dressed up" for special
occasions.  So in classes, at meals, etc., nobody (or at least almost
nobody) wore make-up.

Towards the end of the six weeks, we had a program with the men (which
was not a dressy occasion).  How amazed I was to emerge from my room
to find that almost every woman was wearing make-up!  

This was one of the defining incidents for me that prompted my
decision to throw away all of my make-up.  I never wear it now -- not
even when social pressure is at its peak (my wedding, job interviews,
etc.).  When people (usually my mother!) ask why I don't wear make-up,
I just answer, "Why would I want to?"  When they say "to look good", I
say that I look good "au naturel".  (I should also say that I am one
of those women who people always thought looked "better" with make-up
on.  I used to think so, too.)

And, by the way, I've saved a lot of money!

--Cindy Blank-Edelman


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From: enigma@netcom.com (Enigma)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Lipstick
Date: 14 Sep 92 04:53:33 GMT
	<18oq3vINNml1@agate.berkeley.edu> <190a5mINNs2n@agate.berkeley.edu>
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Service
NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu
Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu

In article <190a5mINNs2n@agate.berkeley.edu> gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:

> The reason I think this is a feminist issue is that I see in
> feminism not only an effort to "expand the field of choices
> for women" but an effort to recover the possibility of the
> feminine in both sexes.  Where males are so stringently 
> required to avoid a practice which has been assigned to the
> feminine, something is going on which I think is not
> favorable to either of the feminist enterprises.  But I'm
> not sure what it is.  Why shouldn't men wear makeup if they
> feel like it?  What does the severity of force used to
> suppress such a practice say about our culture and 
> especially about our politics?

This reminds me of something I've been thinking about lately:
there appears to be a lot of social pressure on both men and
women to look as different as possible from each other.  When
I was in high school, everyone wore blue jeans, and there wasn't
that much difference between the way the sexes dressed (does
anybody remember "unisex"?).  Now men and women dress very 
differently, even when they're not at work.  Guys don't wear
leggings.  Women don't wear baggies (or whatever those pants
are called).  Skirts are back.  Does anybody besides me see a 
pattern in all this?
-- 
Holly McGrath   <enigma@netcom.com> 
1803 Mission Street, #339          
Santa Cruz, CA 95060              
(408) 479-4072  (voice mail)     


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From: danoc@earlybird.Eng.Sun.COM (Dan O'Connell [CONTRACTOR])
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: pin-ups
Date: 10 Sep 1992 00:59:22 GMT
Organization: Subvert the Dominant Paradigm, Inc.
Distribution: world
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Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu

(M. Bickis) writes:

 But pin-ups aren't really pictures of women, they're pictures of "ghorrls".
 (The correct pronunciation of this word involves a certain amount of
 drooling. :-))  Seriously, a woman's best defence against such
 harassment is to refuse to identify herself with the subjects of such
 pictures. 

IMO, this allows any offensive material to be displayed
with the injunction, don't look if it offends you. This
in turn seems to say that there is no inherent value or
value judgment associated with anything put up for public
display. This may make sense in a metaphysical sense but
not in a real-world sense.

If we agree that words and other symbology have power,
e.g, "fighting words", then a response whether positive
or negative also has power, and it becomes a valid issue
over what is permissible in the worplace/public, etc.

Speculation as to why something offensive is displayed
is beside the point; otherwise, something generally
deemed offensive could be displayed as long as the 
displayer had "valid reasons". This kind of logic would
excuse almost any sort of behavior.

 Although I take a dim view of pinups in the workplace, I don't think
 anyone has the right to ban them.  I think people should be free to
 put up whatever decor they like in their private space.  Public places,
 of course, are a different matter, and any employer has the right to
 insist that all displays are consistent with their corporate image.

I don't see how sentence (2) jibes with sentence (3): they
sound contradictory.

If a space is indeed private, than there is no one to view
offensive material unless invited in, and of course they may
leave; this is not true of the workplace.

Dano


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From: mvwjf@mvgpf.att.COM (William J Fallon)
Subject: Re: Anyone noticed the new mudflaps?
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Organization: AT&T
Date: 15 Sep 92 20:06:03 GMT

In article <195c0vINN1h4@agate.berkeley.edu> dan@cubmol.bio.columbia.edu (Daniel Zabetakis) writes:
>In article <193c5iINNdkp@agate.berkeley.edu> mahadeva@point.cs.uwm.edu (Aruna Mahadevan) writes:
>> I was driving on I-5 in California a few days ago, and noticed
>>this mudflap on a truck.  It has the silhouette of naked women on it.
>>Is there anything anyone can do to stop this
>>before it becomes a very common thing?
>
>   I think the public nudity issue is one of the more interesting
>conflicts relating to feminism. Some women say (as this person) that
>pictures (or silhouttes, even) of naked women are demeaning and
>offensive, while other women say that they have a right to go topless
>in public. Both under the banner of feminism.

Just thought of something interesting (to me at least). I have some
photos of a woman I know taken at the beach which show her with no top
on. She knows I have them (and I'm sure let me take them only because
she trusts me not to show them to someone else) and she's an adult so
I don't see anything wrong with my having them.

At any rate it's probably true that I could take the pictures and
display them on my mud flap and not get arrested since pictures of
adult women with bare breasts are not obscene but if a police officer
had happened by and seen her on a public, albeit isolated,
Massachusetts beach with no top on SHE might have been arrested,
especially if the officer came as a result of someone complaining.
Odd, methinks.


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From: levine@symcom.math.uiuc.edu (Lenore Levine)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Lipstick
Date: 14 Sep 1992 14:21:22 GMT
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Distribution: world
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bickis@skmath3.pa.dec.com (M. Bickis) writes:

...Discussion about what it would be like if men had to wear
fake moustaches and beards.

>What you have described sounds much like the situation with wigs (for
>both men and women), in the 17th & 18th centuries.  The practice
>persists in British courts of law.  Is it a fair comparison between a
>receptionist who refuses to wear make-up and a judge who refuses to wear
>a wig?

No. Because the receptionist's use of makeup: 

1) Requires expertise and physical coordination.
2) Takes a lot of time.
3) Is a significant expense on her salary.

The judge's use of a wig is not, as far as I know (British readers?)
likely to involve any of these factors. 

I would not be that uncomfortable about employers requiring makeup if
they were requiring only a *symbolic* gesture -- like the judge's wig.

Lenore Levine


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Xref: sparky soc.feminism:2131 news.answers:2832
From: mvwjf@mvgpf.att.COM (William J Fallon)
Subject: Re: Anyone noticed the new mudflaps?
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Organization: AT&T
Date: 15 Sep 92 20:05:34 GMT

!In article <195c0vINN1h4@agate.berkeley.edu> dan@cubmol.bio.columbia.edu (Daniel Zabetakis) writes:
!>In article <193c5iINNdkp@agate.berkeley.edu> mahadeva@point.cs.uwm.edu (Aruna Mahadevan) writes:
!>> I was driving on I-5 in California a few days ago, and noticed
!>>this mudflap on a truck.  It has the silhouette of naked women on it.
!>>Is there anything anyone can do to stop this
!>>before it becomes a very common thing?
!>
!>   I think the public nudity issue is one of the more interesting
!>conflicts relating to feminism. Some women say (as this person) that
!>pictures (or silhouttes, even) of naked women are demeaning and
!>offensive, while other women say that they have a right to go
!>topless in public. Both under the banner of feminism.
!>   Is there a way to reconcile these points of view? I can't think
!>is a train of thought that would allow women to go topless, and at
!>the same time prohibits diplays such as the mudflaps described here.

Tell us again you can't see a difference between a man displaying
a nude picture of an anonymous woman and a woman deciding to bare
part of her own body where she controls the circumstances.


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Xref: sparky soc.feminism:2130 news.answers:2831
From: uunet!heifetz!rphroy!cmsa.gmr.com!LMEANS@ncar.UCAR.EDU
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Lipstick
Date: 14 Sep 1992 20:00:59 GMT
Organization: GM Research Labs
Distribution: world
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Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu

In article <1915sdINN2ng@agate.berkeley.edu>
enigma@netcom.com (Enigma) writes:

>women to look as different as possible from each other.  When
>I was in high school, everyone wore blue jeans, and there wasn't
>that much difference between the way the sexes dressed (does
>anybody remember "unisex"?).  Now men and women dress very
>differently, even when they're not at work.  Guys don't wear
>leggings.  Women don't wear baggies (or whatever those pants
>are called).  Skirts are back.  Does anybody besides me see a
>pattern in all this?

To me, the pattern is a manifestation of Susan Faludi's "backlash":
the threat to male dominance caused by the leveling of male/female
appearances became intolerable, leading to a backlash in which
women met with increasing pressure to feminize/differentiate their
clothing.  Maybe unisex fashions are threatening to men because
they require that people look beyond appearances and judge us
on the basis of something less superficial.  Linda.



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From: "Joy Mundy" <joym@Forsythe.Stanford.EDU>
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Response to thought experiment post
Date: 8 Sep 1992 14:34:38 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Distribution: world
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Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu

Do feminists self-police?  Why, sure.

They (oh, all right, *we*) police other women -- men too -- to
behave more like us.  Surely all of us have asked others not to call
women "girls"?  I wonder if such policing is, perhaps, a defining
characteristic of a society?  The ideal toward which the policing is
directed evolves over time, but perhaps it's that herding instinct
to keep everyone pointed (more or less) in the same direction that
makes a society whole.  Which, obviously, the US is not, right now.

An interesting question is whether women police in a different way
than men do.  Women are stereotypically more catty than men, and
I'll admit to having seen levels of verbal viciousness from women
that I've never seen from men.  Perhaps you do it behind our backs?

I'd be curious to hear how men self-police (assuming they do so).  I
have an anecdote to contribute.  My office, which is generally
pretty professional-looking, dresses casually on Fridays.  A man in
the office thought someone's outfit just a bit *too* casual, brought
his complaint to the CEO, and had casual-friday eliminated.  After,
of course, the obligatory committee on dress code was created,
convened, and ruled on this weighty issue.  My guess is that many
women would have exerted pressure on the "deviant dresser," either
directly or subtly, and solved the problem differently.  (If it was
a problem to begin with, about which there is some debate.)

Could we call this man's response stereotypically male (as
cattiness is stereotypically female)?  Certainly I could go into a
diatribe about patriarchy and appeal to the authority structure, but
I'll spare us all.  I hadn't thought about this anecdote as a
male/female thing before, and simply assumed the man is a weenie.
(He's also vanishingly unlikely to be reading this bboard!)

In response to the question being bandied about, re women in
technical fields generally feeling more comfortable around men, yes
me too.  The absolute worst are gatherings with my husband's
extended family, who are Chicano.  No doubt it's a culture thing as
well as gender, but I have *absolutely nothing* to say to those
women.  Just nothing.  We sit there and stare at each other.
Greusome.  But the last year or so I've been actively seeking out
groups of women.  I think I'm getting better at it (talking to them,
I mean).

-- Joy


To:  FEMINISM@NCAR.UCAR.EDU


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From: News Account <news@scd.hp.com>
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: (none)
Date: 8 Sep 1992 14:57:23 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Distribution: world
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>From: dianem@boi.hp.com (Diane Mathews)
Subject: Re: Lipstick
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Santa Clara Division
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1992 14:51:08 GMT

In article <18id7uINNdrm@agate.berkeley.edu> Dorothy Morse <dmorse@igc.apc.org> writes:
>Aren't there economic pressures to wear lipstick too? Going to apply for
>a job, you are likely to put on some makeup even if you customarily don't
>wear it--because you want to blend in.

YES!!!  On the advice of anyone who has ever known me I wore makeup, even
had my ears pierced, to all of my job interviews.  It was to make me look
more professional and polished.  I look very young, and almost simple.  The
adornments of makeup make me look older, and the ears make me look less simple.
I have no idea if it affected the job that I finally landed.  The point is,
though, that everyone who has seen my face thought that makeup would help me
get a job.



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