something that i find very tiring.

if some men do the misogyny thing in some form or another, if i dare to call them on it, they pay no attention, or tend to heap loads of ridicule directly on me.

however, if a man says something, then they listen and knock it the hell off.

but then that really IS the nature of the beast, isn't it... where everything i say is of no value because i am a woman. every complaint i make is just "shrill whining" because i am a woman. i can have all my words and my thoughts, and my ideas, and my whole being ignored and ridiculed because i am a woman.

it gets so old. so i've stopped complaining. i just walk away.

http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2008/10/seriously-learn-to-equality.html

"I don't know if men can fully appreciate what it means that so many of them regard being mistaken for a woman as a slight, what it does to a woman to read such indignant protestations—"I am not a woman!"—and feel the slithering creep of memory up the back of her neck, as the first time she ever heard a childhood male companion cry out with disgust, "Eww, I don't want to be a girl!" rings in her ears, recalling that first instance when she began to suspect there was something wrong with her by virtue of what was (and what wasn't) between her legs.

It's a total mindfuck. And it never goes away.

I have played video games with men who refused to play female avatars; I have been with a man who was miffed that I classified his predisposition to copiously pre-cum as being "like a woman"; I have been talking about some female bodily function to a male friend or lover only to have him make a face and inform me he's so glad he's a man; I have heard male coworkers grousing about how "being a woman sucks," because of another male coworker with a groping proclivity; I have been exhorted to "not be such a girl" about things; I have known men who refuse to wear pink; I have been told by men who consider themselves feminists that they won't be raising their daughters "to be girls" but instead raising them "to be people"; I have been told flatly that women are inferior in intellect by virtue of our biology; I have been "complimented" by being told how very much like a man I am in my humor, or rationality, or some other quality; I have listened to men express directly to my face in every way imaginable that they would never want to be a woman.

And most of them have been surprised when I had a problem with that—because, you see, we're all supposed to take it as read that no one would want to be a woman, given the choice, since we all know they're the inferior model.

It's just another indication of how far away from real equality we actually are, that one of the sexes is still largely considered anathema to the other."

so true.

Gender and Mathematical Ability - The Toll of Biological Determinism
by Richard York and Brett Clark

http://www.monthlyreview.org/1107york-clark.htm

excerpts:

Although we do not condemn questions about biologically based differences across human groups—be they genders, races, or other categorizations—as illegitimate as a topic of scientific inquiry, we do question why the search for such differences receives considerable political support and media attention and why the finding of any minuscule, tenuous, and therefore dubious “difference” is so readily held up as a cause (rather than effect) of social inequality.

and:

As the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould has noted, “[R]esurgences of biological determinism correlate with episodes of political retrenchment, particularly with campaigns for reduced government spending on social programs.”5 Given that we are in a period of political retrenchment, it should be no surprise that those in power invoke biology as a justification of social inequality and that this invocation receives considerable public attention. Hence it remains as important as ever to assess the scientific evidence for and the real consequences of biological explanations of social inequality.