Response to Flash Foxy & Outside Magazine Article

Geez. we should fix this sexism issue so ladies feel safe to remain in the gym and everyone else can stay climbing outside. Yep, I'm going to be me at the crags outside. Somewhat crass, somewhat vulgar, & somewhat aiming for fun and inspired. Not too concerned about other peoples feeling of equality.

Mitchelle Kelly wrote:Searches for flashfoxy spiked after everyone got their underwear of choice in a bunch over it. so props to them for getting lots of attention i guess.

upswing in searches for flashyfoxy

Foxy thanks U

Stich wrote:

Ummm, Stich, jeez, 10 pages of this thread and you have learned NOTHING! Look at the photo you chose to represent flashfoxy

1. The placement of the female against a white background makes salient the imagery of women being photographed outside awards shows, a context which only values the looks of the female.
2. It reinforces the notion that women only are valuable or beautiful if wearing makeup.
3. The slight "teasing" smile makes it seem the woman is only good for showing interest in men and thereafter is to be used as a sex object. How dare we show a photo of a female actually looking truly happy (like a full smile), or confident (with a neutral look).
4. The spikey nature of her attire suggests that she is may have a "hands off" personality, suggesting that women are cold hearted, hard to get to know, and thus are only to be used for their body.
5. Black is a color that when worn on the body, makes the body look more petite. This invokes imagery of the ideal woman needing to be petite to math our culture's beauty standards.
6. Furthermore, the black dress implies that women are indeed small, small compared to men that is. I'll bet if you chose a picture of a man he would be in a white tuxedo, Stich, you sexist bastard.
7. The outfit covers most of the woman's body, indicating that she herself is to be wrapped up, by men, who shall not allow her to express herself or embrace her femininity through non-conservative dress.
8. At no point in this photo is she demonstrating safe climbing practices (she isn't even wearing a helmet), reinforcing the notion that women are "unsafe," "wild," and not trustworthy.
9. By captioning the photo "Thanks, MP!" you clearly state your belief that women can accomplish nothing on their own and thus their fame could only be the result of a bunch of men on an internet forum making her famous.
10. She embodies all of these negative stereotypes and then you surround her with cash, need I now make another top ten list of prostitution themes that you have invoked?

You MPers will never learn!

throwaway5000 wrote: I'll bet if you chose a picture of a man he would be in a white tuxedo, Stich, you sexist bastard.

Oh, really?

Trolllllllllll acct. made today

Case in point that women aren't taken seriously as climbers.

Borrowed from the neighboring $800 Sweater thread:

"So we took three premier climbers and a couple of cute friends weekend warrioring"

I'll let you guess which ones were the men and which ones were the women.

ITS BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE THE CLIMBING COMMUNITY WASN'T PASSIONATE, ACTIVE AND UNIFIED AS NOW.

ClimbLikeAGirl wrote:Case in point that women aren't taken seriously as climbers. Borrowed from the neighboring $800 Sweater thread: "So we took three premier climbers and a couple of cute friends weekend warrioring" I'll let you guess which ones were the men and which ones were the women.

The women in the article weren't even climbers! Besides, this was taken from a GQ article about rock climbing, which I wouldn't exactly consider a voice representative of the climbing community.

I spent over an hour watching a guy work on a 5.13+ project the other day when I finished climbing. Based on this thread he must have thought I was into him... wish I knew his number so I could call and say sorry.

Thanks Tim Lutz for illustrating my point. I was literally going to post some of the same photos, but you beat me to the punch. I would also like to add this quote from Alex Johnson:

"The annual bouldering competition was fun as always. It was also unbearably hot, as the desert usually is in August, and the scantily clad girls were out in full force. I understand how dreadful the summer heat can be, but some of the outfits are beginning to cross the line. It’s out of respect for my fellow female competitors, and the respect that I hope they have for themselves, that I wish for the provocative attire to be taken down a notch."

found here: climbingnarc.com/2010/08/cl…

I only brought it up because it's mentioned in the first paragraph of the article of interest: "...someone sprays you down with beta while staring at your sports bra." Please note that staring happens to males as well. I was at the a regular gym the other day and there was 1. a dude wearing something similar to yoga pants and 2. a dude wearing extremely short short-shorts.
I kept staring at both of them because there was a lot of details revealed by their clothing (or lack thereof) that I am not accustomed to witnessing. My point is that if you dress for attention, you have to be prepared to accept the negative attention that comes with the positive attention. It's like being a celebrity: you can't expect purely positive press.

Obviously not every female (note that I use the term female because I'm sure any other term would result in someone jumping up my ass and cries of sexism) in the gym does this, but maybe those that do are making it worse for the other females. Thus, in this regard, maybe we are demonizing the wrong group.

Climblikeagirl asked the following:
~ How many times have you been roofied?
~ How many times have you been unwillingly groped (in public or otherwise)
~ Are you ever concerned about being in proximity of another man or men while otherwise alone?
~ How many times have you been catcalled?
~ How many times have you been followed or stalked?

Aside from being roofied, I have literally had all of these things happen to me (some of them many times). While I'm on that subject, I would also like to point out that I have been a victim of sexism and sexual harassment far more than I've been a perpetrator (I would like to think that I've never been the perpetrator, but I can't guarantee that something I've said/done has never been interpreted as such). I don't claim that this has happened to me equal to or more than women, but my point is that it is not purely one-sided.

Additional comments:

As many have pointed out thus far, the data are complete garbage (if you can even call it data). For the same data set, we could just as easily conclude that females are 2.5x more likely to complain about the opposite sex.

I have several other problems with the article in question. It basically conveys this idea that there is an epidemic of sexism in the climbing gym because females are experiencing "microaggressions" and so forth at a much higher rate. This may indeed be true, but this may also be the same principle of car accidents wherein 20% of the people cause 80% of the accidents. In this case, it may be a few individuals in the gym responsible for all of the "microaggressions". For all we know, all the 1038 (68.7 % of 1512 repondants) females in the survey could have been harassed by the same three douchebags. In this case, it's a problem with a couple people, not the implied epidemic. However, the article presents it in such a way that it is a problem with males in general, when we can't actually draw that conclusion from the data at hand. Thus, this article is in essence "crying wolf" and thus not useful in furthering the cause... aside from the discussion it generated here. Note that I'm scared to even speak to women in the gym because of articles like this because I'm scared they will think I have some kind of ulterior motive. I've been in a fantastic relationship for the past seven years and have no interest in picking up females, but I'm scared to talk to them because of "literature" like the article in question. The result then, is that we've both lost out on a belay.

Yesterday I helped a homeless African American lady feed a parking meter so her car/home wouldn't get towed while she went to court. Was it a microaggression that she called me baby, that she put coins in my hand without my "consent" and asked me to feed the meter for her because she was nervous, was it a microaggression because she touched my arm and started twerking when she told me she was about to take a bird bath in the public restroom and look real good?

Better yet, if she had been a he and I was a she, would you think differently about whether it was a microaggression? Would it matter whether she intended me to be uncomfortable? Does it matter whether I felt uncomfortable regardless of her intent? These are the questions that matter. Anyone can choose to be offended by anyone at anytime - that doesn't mean the other person was wrong.

disclaimer: of course real crimes and discrimination and harassment occur and should be condemned and I don't mean to trivialize them. But wearing a sports bra and having a guy look at your chest is not an act of microagression! Happens at work, at bars, anywhere. Men are just more visually stimulated in general, so naturally men are going to get criticized more often for staring a second too long. You can argue this point, or you can open your eyes to all available evidence from the start of time until now.

PS - the world was literally so much cooler before cell phones and message boards. We used to talk to each other in person and hack this shit out and come up with solutions. This is just wailing into the void and completely useless. Ironic that I am typing it, but this is the form. Sadly. Ever youtube a concert from the 80s or 90s? People used to scream, yell, dance, mosh, high-five and LOSE themselves at shows because there was nothing else but the show. Now it's just a bunch of dorks with their phones out trying to capture something they can post to prove they were there.

PPS -viperscale, all these posts are public and someday you may need a job, a wife, a reference, and those posts aren't going to look good, regardless of what you "really think."

ViperScale wrote:I spent over an hour watching a guy work on a 5.13+ project the other day when I finished climbing. Based on this thread he must have thought I was into him... wish I knew his number so I could call and say sorry.

10 pages and none of it has made any impact on your aggressive refusal to understand.

bryans wrote:But wearing a sports bra and having a guy look at your chest is not an act of microagression!

You're still missing the point - *you* don't get to decide.

Did you ever consider why they're called microagressions? Small, and often/usually from the male perspective, theoretically insignificant. For you it's a one-off; for the women, how many per gym session? Per day? Don't you think it just might be different if it was something you had to constantly deal with? To the point where it makes you feel unsafe?

bryans wrote:Men are just more visually stimulated in general, so naturally...

Populist pseudo-scientific, defensive-male bull shit. Not true.

bryans wrote:PPS -viperscale, all these posts are public and someday you may need a job, a wife, a reference, and those posts aren't going to look good, regardless of what you "really think."

Now *that* I agree with 100%

I just want to say that probably THIS comment will get to page 11.

Antonio Caligiuri wrote:lol at white males

^ lol this right here.

Speaking as a white privileged male....

If you're getting butthurt about this article than maybe you need to stop and take a long while to think about why.

Marc801 said:

bryans wrote:
Men are just more visually stimulated in general, so naturally...

Populist pseudo-scientific, defensive-male bull shit. Not true.

Marc801: Please see the following article from Nature neuroscience:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/150…

If you want the full article, I can send it to you.

also Marc801 responded the following:
bryans wrote:
But wearing a sports bra and having a guy look at your chest is not an act of microagression!

You're still missing the point - *you* don't get to decide.

Marc801: What if bryans interpret your comments as sexist, mysogynistic microaggressions? Since that is how he interprets them, does it make it so?

There was a time not too long ago where it was just a fact of the world that a black man walking down the street could be lynched for (being perceived as) looking at a white person the "wrong way". It certainly could be 'safer' for people of color to stay in segregated areas where there was less risk of attracting attention from whites. Knowing that this was a fact of the world, should blacks have accepted the status quo and avoided situations where they could have been vulnerable to lynchings or other racially motivated violence? Are victims of lynchings partially to blame or have some personal responsibility for their victimhood, since they knew the facts of the world made them vulnerable but still decided to put themselves in an unsafe situation?

Looking forward to all the indignant responses about me comparing women wearing tight clothing to lynchings. But before you miss the forest for the trees, just remember: it's really easy to say that people should just accept the status quo if you're not threatened by it. It's what makes this whole rhetoric of "I'm not saying she deserved to be raped, but at the same time, she had to have known that what she was wearing would attract attention" so disgusting. the prevalence of this type of rhetoric on MP is pretty telling about what kind of sexism exists in the climbing community

Dan Austin wrote:There was a time not too long ago where it was just a fact of the world that a black man walking down the street could be lynched for (being perceived as) looking at a white person the "wrong way". It certainly could be 'safer' for people of color to stay in segregated areas where there was less risk of attracting attention from whites. Knowing that this was a fact of the world, should blacks have accepted the status quo and avoided situations where they could have been vulnerable to lynchings or other racially motivated violence? Are victims of lynchings partially to blame or have some personal responsibility for their victimhood, since they knew the facts of the world made them vulnerable but still decided to put themselves in an unsafe situation? Looking forward to all the indignant responses about me comparing women wearing tight clothing to lynchings. But before you miss the forest for the trees, just remember: it's really easy to say that people should just accept the status quo if you're not threatened by it. It's what makes this whole rhetoric of "I'm not saying she deserved to be raped, but at the same time, she had to have known that what she was wearing would attract attention" so disgusting. the prevalence of this type of rhetoric on MP is pretty telling about what kind of sexism exists in the climbing community

Yep.^^^^

Women are drugged, raped, beaten, and murdered far too frequently. By men ("some men"). Sometimes by a stranger, who's advances are rejected. But also by friends, acquaintances, boyfriends, or husbands.

Men don't live with the background fear of being victimized (drugged, raped, beaten, murdered) by women. So that's something to keep in mind. The fear (or concern, or simply awareness) of violence is often overlooked when digging into this topic.

Dan Austin wrote:There was a time ...

Dude, that was completely racist, go to the racist forums this is a gender issue.

NRobl wrote:Marc801 said: bryans wrote: Men are just more visually stimulated in general, so naturally... Populist pseudo-scientific, defensive-male bull shit. Not true. Marc801: Please see the following article from Nature neuroscience: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/150… If you want the full article, I can send it to you.

I was referring to the use of that bit of ancient limbic wiring as a pseudo-scientific excuse to act like an ass ("so naturally...").

NRobl wrote:also Marc801 responded the following: bryans wrote: But wearing a sports bra and having a guy look at your chest is not an act of microagression! You're still missing the point - *you* don't get to decide. Marc801: What if bryans interpret your comments as sexist, mysogynistic microaggressions? Since that is how he interprets them, does it make it so?

In his mind, yes, although he'd have to ignore the definitions of sexist and misogynistic. It's a bit of a strawman argument on your part. We're also using "look", "stare", and a few other terms loosely, but they also defy clear definition. If a woman feels she is being stared at and it makes her uncomfortable then no, the man can't really say "I wasn't staring, just looking".