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How offensive can something be until it becomes funny? This video holds the answer.

I would love to see what you guys think about Jennifer's essay about sexism. Do you think it's a case of black and white sexism or is there a different explanation? Let me know what you think

I stumbled across an article about a young woman, Brittany Wenger, researching breast cancer that bothered me a little bit. Do I have a right to feel slighted by her message? At the end of the video, she points out the caveat that she is currently only focusing on diagnosing breast cancer, but her technical solution could be extended to "many, or all forms of cancer." Why is she just focusing on breast cancer with Cloud4Cancer? She relates a story of how her cousin got breast cancer, but the odds are she also has a male relative that was diagnosed or will be in the future. In her family picture, she clearly has a father and possibly a younger brother. She makes a point to say that medical research is male dominated field. If that is so, then why are men often considered as an afterthought when it comes to medical funding and research? Why is Brittany's story being used to promote the hash tag, #WomenInspire? https://twitter.com/hashtag/womeninspire http://magazine.good.is/articles/brittany-created-her-own-solution

There is a new trending hashtag out there called #likeagirl. I don't know if it was started by the Always marketing team or they just ran with it, but it's in the name of empowering women. The hashtag refers to taunts like "you throw like a girl!" Here's the video I was alluding to: Many feminists have taken the fact that this phrase exists as proof of sexism against women. In the video one woman claims that this phrase is used to put girls down and humiliate them. Despite a powerful video, I remain unconvinced. Here's what I wrote in response to the video: It may also be the case that "girl" implies being childlike, and being childlike comes with undeveloped coordination and physical abilities. If you had asked them to run like a "woman", I'm guessing that you would have gotten a different response. It's not like males don't get similar and equivalent taunting. To be a boy rather than a man is to be considered weak, out of control and spastic. I would hesitate to chalk this one up so quickly to sexism as people are want to do. To do this justice, you can't vaguely imply sexism and consider it explained. I won't pretend to know what it's like to be a girl, but I would just ask the same humility in return when it comes to the reasons boys say things like "you throw like a girl". Certainly there are boys and girls who are quick to humiliate others, and that's obviously destructive, but this same phrase was often used to tease. That being the way that kids express an interest in each other. And also, to ask to "run like a girl", you are asking that as compared to running like a boy or a man. And there are many studies that show a significant difference between the sexes when it comes to eye-hand coordination and other similar skills in the favor of the males of our species. Natural sex differences are exaggerated in contrast to each other If you asked these same people to clean up after themselves like a boy, or play nice like a boy, you'd get an exaggerated version of these acts. That is, very poorly executed. As a young boy growing up, I was told that my sex was responsible for all the war and suffering in the world. While I was going thru puberty and figuring out who I was and becoming a man, this was a source of a significant amount of conflict for me, as I felt as if I was being asked to apologize for things I had nothing to do with because I was born with a penis. If this is empowering to girls then great. How could I possibly argue with that? But if this is being used to promote the current zeitgeist, that women are uniquely disadvantaged, the one that I have come to resent, I would just like to instill a drop of healthy doubt. This raises some interesting questions for me, though. There are a lot of expectations put on children that they should conform to gender roles. One I remember very vividly was that I would be a sex-obsessed oaf of a man, and I remember girls telling me that I was a pervert for wanting to see women naked. I hesitate to just chalk it all up to sexism, though. I don't understand how it explains anything. It's not in the strictest sense the hatred or fear of men to label us sex obsessed oafs. I wonder how much of these accusations are really repressed fantasies that we have. Do a lot of women want men to be sex obsessed and barely able to contain their lust for them? Is the supposed rape culture really just a repressed desire to experience male domination? This is what JudgyBitch thinks. On the other side of the coin, the accusation that women are entitled or crazy or whatever other things men will sometimes toss out there (and some women too), are those repressed desires of men? Then there are people who own these accusations, like men who say "yea, all we care / think about is sex", or women who say "yea, it's true, women are crazy". Are they just like the most honest people and there are real biological explanations for all of this that we need to come to terms with? Or is it something less noble? Why are expectations about gender so incredibly controversial and fucked up? I really don't get it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWO28IjJPfY