Brickset ForumShopping at LEGO or Amazon?
Please use our links: LEGO.com • Amazon
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Please use our links: LEGO.com • Amazon
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Women of NASA - Can of Worms
Shopping at LEGO.com or Amazon?
Please use our links: LEGO.com • Amazon
Recent discussions • Categories • Privacy Policy • Brickset.com
Howdy, Stranger!
Categories
- All Categories
- 16.2K General
- 3 Announcements
- 3.1K Collecting
- 3.7K Everything else LEGO
- 1.7K Building and Techniques
- 2.3K Brickset
- 14 Ambassador
- 1K Introduce yourself
- 385 The Database
- 438 Brickset.com
- 316 Forum Operation
- 15 FAQs
- 13.9K Shopping
- 1.7K Shopping USA/Canada
- 337 Shopping Elsewhere
- 11K Marketplace
- 1.2K Other
- 571 Community and Events
- 262 Photography/Video
Brickset.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, the Amazon.com.ca, Inc. Associates Program and the Amazon EU Associates Programme, which are affiliate advertising programs designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Comments
If such a character were to join an online forum I'm pretty sure every single member in that forum would call him out straightaway, and admin would ban him in a single beat. In real life, though, there will be more opportunities for interactions and discussions (at least with those close to him) and as time goes by you'll understand more of him.
We have to face the fact that there are people among us that just aren't good in sugar coating what they wanted to say. If only everyone had more patience, more understanding and be accomodating then I think the world will be a better place to live in, virtual or otherwise.
Something that I think gets a bit lost in these discussions is that confronting the ways that sexism negatively impacts men and the ways it negatively impacts women aren't in any way mutually exclusive. In a case like this, the stereotype that women are better than men at childcare hurts men because they're not trusted to take care of children as well as women, and hurts women by expecting them to care for children at the expense of any other pursuits because "who else will?" So fighting that stereotype benefits parents of both genders by accepting that it's ultimately up to each individual family to decide what role each parent should play in their children's upbringing. There are a lot of cases like this where the same societal gender stereotypes negatively impact different demographics in different ways, and these are all worth confronting.
But choosing your battles is OK too. And that's what this set and the Research Institute did — tried to confront one particular instance of inequality (women in the sciences being underrepresented/underacknowledged) that mattered a lot to the people proposing them. As long as you keep it kid-appropriate — sets involving suicide awareness might be too morbid for a LEGO kit, but other stuff may still be on the table if you present it tastefully — you can totally propose sets that try to confront stereotypes and stigmas that negatively impact men.
Yeah, I was just using some of my experiences as an example, but I do not take it the wrong way most of the time.
Not sure if it's a mare or a stallion though... discuss?
/wanders away baffled
something else. :)
Well, I'm off to design an Ideas vignette on suicide awareness.
Thanks for the brain storming session, guys!
Reading this thread you would think we were still living in a time of suffrage. Yes in some places in the world but 7 pages in and I am the one person who has mentioned how bad things are elsewhere. Everyone else is too worried if a kind intentioned stranger once... well I don't even know what to call it.
There comes a point where to move forward we need to see how far we have come. Woman have broken so many barriers and helped create a world where girls can do what ever they want to but I feel like we are denying their achievement by claiming that things are worse than there are.
As this thread has proved things like this set are divisive, it is them and us rather than being about all of us. It seem to be a competition about who has it worse when no one is arguing that its anything other than women. But what has been denied is that men have anything to complain about.
I was asked to provide facts and when I did no ones was interested in them. The idea of male discrimination is so alien that many wont even consider it. But I was careful not to overstate it, I said "was" because thing have improved and this was jump upon. But to overstate things, or to blame the other side creates division and that is what is happening here.
My point is and always was, this set is bad for women. I don't care about not having five men to go alongside it. I care that people still think that women need special treatment to be equal (they already are).
We had the story of the lady who felt patronised by someone saying "well done". Is that not what this set is doing. "Oh look women who are in science who would have thought it" They are seeing women, equality like justice should be blind!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage
Not sure which country you are from but I am in the UK where not only can women vote but we also have a women prime minister (not for the first time).
Or do I have it ass about tit, do we refer to the time after women got the vote as suffrage or the time before.
Someone educate me.
Thanks @Pitfall69 not everyone would have put it so tactfully.
Apologies @mountebank if that's what you meant.
I know voting can be a pain, you do get long queues sometime and the choice of candidates isn't always great but I would hardly call it suffrage :)
I will add, of course there can be sexism against men. This is an entire article I found two days back that discusses examples... https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/05/when-men-experience-sexism/276355/
The problem is it has the potential to be a bit of a squirrel statement, though. When folks state that women experience sexism and/or misogyny, that does not discount or take away from the fact that men may experience sexism. Often, though, in such discussions, such examples are raised as a counter to the minority group that is experiencing the bulk of sexism, racism, discrimination, etc. as a way to minimize that group's experience, as opposed to listening to the issues of the aggrieved group. ( Not saying that did or did not happen here, just that I have seen this happen in other conversations outside this group. Someone says there is racism against people of color finding a job, and the next thing someone find it imperative to discuss how Caucasian people can have a similar issue. ).
Sexism against men is an issue, but there is magnitude of difference with the daily experience many women have with this. Both are sexism, though, and both need resolution.
Yes, Pitfall's example is something that can be taken as a case of sexism. It is someone making an assumption based on his gender. (That men can not care for children) Did the person mean anything negative by it? No. Was the person trying to make a friendly compliment? Probably. Would this same statement in the same situation have been made to a woman out with her kids? Most likely not. Making a sexist statement does not necessarily mean a person thinks negatively of the other gender, or that the person is a bad person. In the case, the person was giving a perceived compliment.
The thing is sexism has degrees, until it moves into the realm of misogeny.
It can range from something like the compliment above, to an employer making statements and assumptions about a female worker that impacts that employees career.
My own experience is generally to let cases like Pitfall's examples go, although not always, simply because there are far more items up the scale that women experience within the US on a daily basis.
Nobody is saying the world is not worse, but that does not discount problems and inequalities women have here.
I have had it great compared to many women I know IRL, but
- cat-called
- spied on with a video camera while disparaging sexual remarks were made by a group of men
- talked to like a kid because I happened to go into an electronics or repair store (I will say, though, this is FAR better now compared to when I was a teen)
- From a career standpoint, overall The sexism was non-existent to mild until I became pregnant.... quite shocking to see how it reared its head then.
Sadly, some of the items I experience were found to be the norm. The company asked me back to be interviewed a year after I left as part of them determining/investigating why they were losing senior women. When I explained some of the experiences I had had and detailed why I left, I was told that they had heard very similar stories across the company. What I experienced was not an isolated case.
Yes, women should be equal, but no... they are daily not treated that way in a wide range of ways.
The set is a cheap Lego set. If for some they see it as raising awareness of some of the accomplishments of women in science, that is not a bad thing. One can disagree, and place their money on the many many many other Lego sets being sold.
Honestly, I'm trying to keep track of your argument SMC, but I'm having a really hard time following it. Not to mention an even harder time connecting it back to the LEGO set that was (supposed to be) the main topic of this thread.
lol I'll get my coat, (I should play my dyslexic card, but even I should know better).
I am going to be honest here:
I always thought the derivation (meaning) of 'suffrage' was suffering rather than coming from Latin suffragium, meaning "vote", "political support", and the right to vote.
So I assumed suffrage was not being able to vote. And we know when you assume you just make an ASS of yourself (is that the saying).
I am now wondering at the age of 34 and having been taught about suffrage and having seen documentaries about it how I didn't know this.
Anyway its good to learn new thing, although I could have doe with knowing this a couple of hours ago.
I acknowledge that your examples of problems that disproportionately affect men are valid. But this is not a zero-sum game. Feminism isn't about making sure that inequalities balance out, it's about rooting out the causes of those inequalities so as to eliminate them entirely.
For comparison's sake, imagine a mining town and a fishing town. People in the mining town disproportionately die of black lung, people in the fishing town disproportionately die of drowning. Somebody who lives in the mining town runs an ad campaign trying to raise awareness of the danger black lung poses to miners, in hopes that it will inspire better working conditions. Would you call that a divisive campaign? Of course not. Because there's nothing about solving the problems in the mining town that inherently creates new problems or stops people from solving the existing problems in the fishing town.
It's the same here. Creating a set that raises awareness of female contributions in spaceflight doesn't in any way diminish awareness of male contributions, let alone diminish awareness of entirely unrelated issues that affect men. The only way this discussion becomes us vs. them is if people keep making the faulty assumption that anything that benefits one group of people must hurt another group of people at the same time.
I don't think this thread proves sets like this are uniquely divisive, either. Because what set or theme ISN'T, in some way, divisive? The Ninjago theme is divisive, the Minecraft theme is divisive, the Friends theme is divisive, the City theme is divisive, even the Star Wars theme is divisive. I can't think of a single LEGO product or theme that isn't, in some way, divisive, because everybody enjoys LEGO in different ways and for different reasons, and a set that's the bees' knees to one person might be anywhere from mediocre to downright repugnant to another person. There's no need to pretend that divisiveness proves something is uniquely faulty or political about a set itself or some category it belongs to.
I totally disagree about this set being bad for women, but frankly as a man it's not my place to determine that, any more than it's yours. If we believe men and women are equal, we can't pretend that we as men know what's best for women better than they know what's best for themselves. And of course, beyond this set's potential to educate, it's worth noting that it's still a toy, and its core purpose is to make people happy. If it makes thousands of women and girls happy, which it IS judging from reactions on other sites, then it's doing at least that part of its job fairly well.
^ I think this set is a counterbalance, trying to correct a wrong (with another wrong, maybe). I would prefer if new sets tried to have a balance, a NASA set with both males and females or a CMF series with a male babysitter and a female Spy. You might not agree with me but cant you see my point of view?
This set is well intentioned for sure but for me its not progressive.
My only concern about this set is whether they improve the playability of the vignettes in the final product.
^ Yes but Neil, Buzz and the other one will be in the set because they went to the moon not because they are men.
OK maybe they went to the moon in part because they are men but we shouldn't try and rewrite history, as has been pointed out there are many unsung heroes in NASA not all of them women.
There is nothing wrong with it unless you want equality, this set doesn't treat men and women the same, does it?
STILL trying to work out how a thread about a crap set that firmly falls outside LEGOs own requirements for Ideas approval has become an issue of gender politics...
Celebrating women at NASA is not a bad thing. It is not at the expense of men, notable animals, building materials or mathematic theory. If it were at the expense of another group - that would be objectionable. 'Why Women at NASA are Better than Men' set would be something I would object to.
There was a German National Team CMF series. It celebrated the German Men's Football team. As long as it is not at the expense of another group, nobody gave it a second thought. Nobody is positing goofy scattershot incoherent straw-grabing examples to justify an untenable position.
Good grief, not everything is a political conspiracy or social agenda. It's just a set of plastic figures honoring women at NASA.