He’s no Reilly Leo, in fairness.

Gabriel Wikström?

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26 thoughts on “Hurdy Gurdy

    1. John E. Bravo

      God ya. It’s sick that just because there’s no context that makes a comment on a man’s appearance part of a spectrum of large-scale paternalism and sexism in everyday and professional life where men are likely to earn more for doing the same work and are less likely to suffer violent sexual attacks than women, that people feel this kind of thing is okay. I’m glad there are people out there brave enough to stand up for us men in the face of harmless compliments.

      1. cluster

        If your goal is equality between the sexes, then clearly it is worth considering how flipping the gender involved would alter your view of things.

        It is also not strictly true that only women suffer from sexism or outdated gender stereotypes. Sure there is a pay gap (one that starts to fall considerably once you correct for working hours and specialisation) and it is definitely true that women suffer much more from sexual violence and domestic abuse.

        But many men also have such experiences. Men too are seen as more disposable, discriminated against in the family courts, are disproportionately failed by our education system and are more likely to be unemployed or to commit suicide.

        Tldr: you don’t achieve equality by demeaning the formerly dominant gender. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong.

        1. SOMK

          “you don’t achieve equality by demeaning the formerly dominant gender.”

          Er yes you do, because if you believe that inherrently there’s not that much difference between men and women in capability, certainly no difference that would justify the gap between men and women, as an example, did you know that roughly 70% of people who attend art college are female, yet women artists on average earn about 70% less from art sales than men do? Even if some quirk* meant men were better than women at art, they wouldn’t be 70% better! BTW Ireland’s two best living artists IMO are both women (Dorothy Cross and Alice Maher). The gap is in many cases ludicrous and one way to ammend it is by ridiculuing (ie. under mining the power of) the dominant sex, but really what you do is you don’t actually undermine the sex just the culture that allows one to dominate another. Yes men get attacked in the street too, but men generally feel comfortable walking around late at night on their own, men don’t tend to freak out if they hear someone walking close behind them, violence may be sporadic and relatively rare, but the fear is constant and that fear is a power men have over women. Anyway here’s one example of men being ridiculed in a constructive way http://thehawkeyeinitiative.com/ that doesn’t undermine men as much as it undermines a certain culture of depicting women.

          *as I understand it the Y chromosome is more prone to mutation, thus men vary from the mean more, you get more stupid men and more intelligent men, but it isn’t that big a factior, for example if you were to take a random sample of people with IQs in the top 1% 53 would be men and 47 would be women, but that’s without taking into account the effect of education on women, boys out perform girls in maths in every country except Iceland, which is also the country which is generally regarded as having the highest levels of gender equality (girls perform worse at maths in the countries that have most gender inequality, Saudi Arabia et al), so even that small difference could be down to education rather than some innate superiority.

        2. John E. Bravo

          In this case though, if you are to flip the gender, you see what I said above – it is not the admiration of good looks that is the problem, but their role in contributing to a larger context where aesthetic and sexual expectations undermine one gender’s position in society but not the other.

          Handsome men are rarely if ever reduced by or attacked through a concentration on their appearance by heterosexual women; if this does happen, it’s unlikely to be in a routine scenario like a classroom, office or courtroom. While there is no denying that many men suffer terribly in the various situations you describe above, some of which I have direct experience of, none of those problems have at their root a fixation on male appearance by heterosexual women.

          Therein lies the difference and the reason that it’s justifiable to mock the hackles of hypocrisy when a whimsical post commenting on a man’s appearance (in an image that is ironic *because* the successful politician is handsome, unlike the usual run of men in power, and in which it should be noted he exposes no part of his body that he wouldn’t reasonably be expected to show during say a cabinet meeting or a trip to the post office) while reserving the right to be annoyed at (if personally titillated by) the regular streams pictures of glamorous women or underwear models the postings of which form part of a spectrum of constant sexual aggression women are expected to defer and aspire to.

        3. rotide

          Point of order:

          Never , ever allow SOMK and John E. Bravo to disagree about anything. The resulting comments battle would suck up all bandwith for the remainder of time.

    1. ahyeah

      Nope. Not even allowed twerk/grope colleagues during late-night sessions when pretty important stuff is meant to be being debated. Such losers, those Swedes.

    1. Nikkeboentje

      Yes, she is the new Minister for Health in Belgium. I just checked with a Belgian colleague and he was listening to a debate on Belgian radio about her this morning. Unbelievable!

    2. B Hewson

      Ok so the Belgians have a waffle stand in their parliament, we have a bar and the swedes have good looking people. Sounds about right.

  1. Mulch

    Fair play, they managed to elect a healthy individual to the role. The last two for us couldn’t see their own feet without a mirror.

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