Yes, Patriarchy Is Dead; the Feminists Prove It

[thucythucy]

47. I'd have to see the raw figures

as opposed to percentages.

It looks as though, reading all the links you've sent me, that there has been a fairly sizable uptick in raw numbers of both men and women attending college. Which means, proportionally speaking, it's possible to have a larger gap in numbers, but have it still be a smaller issue overall. And since the percentage of men attending college has remained basically the same (while population has increased steadily), and the numbers of men attending college is at an all time high, and the numbers of women attending has jumped substantially, you can probably reasonably assume that the raw numbers of people attending college has indeed risen in the past four or five decades.

SAT scores (for which men have SLIGHTLY better scores on average than women) is only one of the criteria colleges use for admission. Among others are grades (and you say males generally get worse grades than females), school activities, essays, other exams, recommedations, various extracurricular accomplishments, etc. A young woman who scores 1200 on her SATs, but has good grades, multiple recommendations, and has founded a homeless shelter or organized a youth voter registation drive would I imagine be preferred over a male who scores 1203 but has poorer grades, no extracurricular activities, and no recommendations. It's not some vast conspiracy against males on the part of college admissions officers.

Besides which, again, and I'm saying this now for the second or third time, the number of males attending and graduating from college is at an all time high, according to the link you posted. The percentage of men attending is roughly the same as it's been, except for a dip in the eighties, for the past four or five decades, according to the link you posted. The gender gap among younger students attending is minimal, except for African American males; the gap is in large part because older women are going back to college at greater rates than older men, according to the link you posted. You don't address any of those points, but simply repeat the same argument from the same single critic of the report. Which is getting to be a little frustrating.

As for your last paragraph, I'm sorry but you do seem to have this strange axe to grind with feminists. At the beginning of this exchange you cited this single feminist, from a hundred years ago, as a flaming example of hypocrisy in the context of the opening of World War I. To my mind this is just bizarre, considering the magnitude of the catastrophe and the role that political leaders such as Kaiser Wilhelm, Czar Nicholas, etc. played--leaders who were, according to my reading of history, all men. So, why, in the context of such a world-shattering cataclysm, in which millions died, did you feel a need to cite for me this one feminist who--like almost everyone else of the era--was swept up by nationalist hysteria? It's missing a continent-sized forest while singling out a single tree.

I've always tried to be civil in my exchanges on DU--with an occasional lapse--but both my time and patience are limited. As I said early on, we can go round and round on this. If you want to insist that there is some great "crisis" in higher education for young males--even while more young males are attending college than ever before, and at the same proportion of overall male population as before--simply because women have now caught up and surpassed them in raw numbers--then to me that's a non-starter. It's basically saying that any gain women make is at the direct expense of men, that somehow women succeeding by definition means men are failing. Not to mention your insinuation that the preponderance of male suicides is somehow the fault of women school teachers. All this comes uncomfortably close to some of the men's rights bunkum I've seen elsewhere.

As for a reading list, I'll get to work on it.

Best wishes, and happy new year