Three Kinds of Chauvinists

VEDANTAM: She says she divided the men who had stereotypes about her into three categories. DUKE: One was the flirting chauvinists, and that person was really viewing me in a way that was sexual. VEDANTAM: With the guys who were like that, Annie could make nice. DUKE: I never did go out on a date with any of them, but you know, it was kind of flirtatious at the table. And I could use that to my advantage. VEDANTAM: And then there was the disrespecting chauvinist. Annie says these players ...

 How Gender Bias Impacts Men

Men—I would like to take this opportunity to extend your formal invitation. Gender equality is your issue too. Because to date, I’ve seen my father’s role as a parent being valued less by society despite my needing his presence as a child as much as my mother’s. I’ve seen young men suffering from mental illness unable to ask for help for fear it would make them look less “macho”—in fact in the UK suicide is the biggest killer of men between 20-49 years of age; eclipsing road...

 'Yo' as a Gender-Neutral Pronoun

Margaret Troyer, a former Baltimore-area teacher, published the first paper showing that "yo" is being used to replace "he" and "she." Troyer first noticed it while she was teaching middle-school kids in the area. "Some examples would be 'yo wearing a jacket,' " Troyer says, referring to her research. "Another example from the paper is, 'Yo threw a thumbtack at me,' which is a typical middle school example." So Troyer began to study her students. She gave them blank cartoons and asked them ...

 Gender is Not Binary

he gender binary is the artificial division of the world into things that are "masculine" or "for men" and things that are "feminine" or "for women". One of the starkest ways to think of this is to consider the phrase "opposite sexes/genders" (as opposed to "different sexes/genders"), when both men and women are human beings with fundamentally many more commonalities than differences. The division is artificial in several ways: much of it is very clearly socially constructed. For example,...

 Sexual Selection in the Wodaabe Tribe

Perhaps human aesthetics emerged through runaway sexual selection, with aesthetic tastes evolving as part of female mate choice. In this view, some female hominids just happened to have certain tastes concerning male ornaments. The artists best able to fulfill these tastes inseminated more aesthetic groupies and sired more offspring, who inherited both their artistic talent and their mothers' aesthetic tastes. Something like this still happens among the Wodaabe people (also known as the Boro...