American Women

i actually don't know whether or not the stats are all adult-based -- i didn't read the study all that recently, to be honest, and just popped back there for some numbers for this discussion because i recalled feeling it was fairly authoritative. my thought was that if you asked someone if they'd ever been raped, that's always a yes, whereas if you asked an adult if they've ever been in a fight they're likely to discount youthful activities. i'm not sure on the prison side of things -- my guess is that if they're represented, it's probably based on a sampling of those who have been released. i've never tracked down stats on the prison rates, but they're certainly epidemic.

no disagreement whatsoever on the junk study issue -- it's one of my pet peeves. i agree with you on [url=http://isgprohibitedwords.info?CodeWord=CodeWord123][CodeWord123][/url] incidence in the third world -- that was part of my point about reliability of police stats.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Dickhead
[i]47% of all men have never been in a single fight in their lifetimes? Quite frankly I don't believe that either. [/i][/QUOTE]

The 1 in 6 figure sounds right to me. But, I worked a crisis line while in college, so I may be biased in view as well. :(

I gotta agree with the 47% of men being in a fight in their entire life sounding completely ridiculous. That has to have some odd restriction because kids on playgrounds are an unruly bunch, and I'd figure that number has to be in the 90% unless you exclude certain types of fights or certain age groups.

Just to be perfectly clear on this -- the study said that 53% of men reported being hit or slapped -- it didn't say anything about a fight. Other categories included being shoved, hit with objects, having weapons pointed or used against them, etc., all of which could obviously happen in the context of a tussle. So extrapolating from that number to a figure of how many men have been in a fight is in all likelihood not accurate.

okay, i looked at joe's link. i read the whole thing. it was a telephone survey, which is bad. but, they did not just interview whomever answered the phone, which is good. they identified residents at the phone number randomly dialed and if there was more than one over 18 years old, they selected the one with the most recent birthday. that is good. they did not adjust for the possibility (probability in my opinion) that women were more likely to be home than men and why that might be. that is bad, but i don't know what you could really do about it. the survey considered equal numbers of male and female respondents (800 of each). that is good. but, it doesn't completely offset the possibility that women are more likely to be home than men, because i think you get different characteristics if you interview someone who was not the person who answered the phone (in your pursuit of an equal number of male and female respondents).

however and inexplicably, women were always interviewed by women while men were interviewed by an equal proportion of men and women. wtf??? is all i can say about that. ridiculous and indicative of inherent bias by the surveyors imo. both of the authors of the survey were women and they conducted the analysis and designed the survey. possible bias there.

the conclusion that women were more likely to be injured in an assault is certainly intuitive, but since women are physically weaker, a given amount of force is more likely to injure a woman than a man. sorry about that. perhaps men and women have inherently different internal definitions of assault. i mean, my wife pushed me a few times but i didn't consider it assault. i wonder why. i'm quite sure she would have considered it assault if i had ever pushed her!

the authors say they used "state of the art techniques to protect confidentiality." yet, they don't say what these techniques were. i deem that to be suspect. they ask people if they were ever "beat up." that should be "beaten up," of course, but it is vague and subjective.

but the main thing is, and this is unavoidable with a telephone survey, is that the whole thing is biased by the differing probabilities of people (or more precisely, due to the methodology, entire households) with differing socioeconomic traits to be home to answer the phone. this is the major element of bias in the survey; i contend that lower socioeconomic groups travel less, go out less, and are thus more likely to have participated in the survey. and, i also submit that these groups are, unfortunately, more likely to have experienced [url=http://isgprohibitedwords.info?CodeWord=CodeWord123][CodeWord123][/url] and violence. so, i think all the results are overstated as compared to a true random sample of the entire population, which i admit is hard to come by; other methods such as mail surveys or street polls have other biases.

this is my analysis. take it for whatever you think it is worth. again, i stress that i am in no way minimizing the seriousness of this problem but only questioning the proportion of people who have experienced it. i think the study has some fairly obvious and identifiable weaknesses.

castrate all [url=http://isgprohibitedwords.info?CodeWord=CodeWord127][CodeWord127][/url]. beat up all pimps. support your right to have sex with the consenting adult of your choice, including situations where both parties agree that money should change hands. [url=http://isgprohibitedwords.info?CodeWord=CodeWord140][CodeWord140][/url] on all politicians and religious zealots who think that your sex life is their concern.

your humble servant,

dickhead

well, there are ways to increase the reliability of telephone surveys, depending on whether they're quota-based or random, and to minimize the problems of getting representative samples. most of the surveys i've been part of that are not work-related have been conducted in the evenings to try to minimize the "who's at home" aspects. in point of fact, the economically lower classes and younger, single-parent families are more likely to be among that percentage of people who do not [i]have[/i] phones and are thereby not included, so i'd argue with your premise on that end of things to some extent.

this sounds more like a quota-based survey, (or a randomized survey using a quota-based approach) and as such faces the same issues of reliability as ftf field surveys. there are studies suggesting both that people are more and less truthful over the phone than they are face to face, especially when responding on sensitive issues, so the jury's out on that. i'd agree that the issue of men being interviewed by women and men is problematic, but i'd argue that would be more likely to affect the reliability of the men's results than the women's. i think it's a reasonable assumption that women would be more comfortable responding affirmatively to a woman on questions about [url=http://isgprohibitedwords.info?CodeWord=CodeWord123][CodeWord123][/url], given that that is the same presumption used by law enforcement and counseling centers, though i'm not sure at all what men would find more comfortable in that case.

i'm hardly holding this up as the be-all and end-all of surveys, as i've not done an exhaustive reading of the field, but its conclusions and numbers do track with other information on the subject, and the numbers are, in many cases, lower. it was clearly better than several others i saw whose questions i found more clearly biased and leading. i'm much more comfortable with the crime numbers from the un that i cited elsewhere, since those come from police reports and court documents, but they didn't break things down in terms of rate the same way. still, i've gotta believe that something with the department of justice imprimatur is at least more likely to be scrutinized for reliability than something some social scientist at random university cooks up, though i am generally not terribly impressed with social science research overall in any event. if anyone can point to something better i'd love to look at it.

i thought about pointing out the bias aspect of the fact that some people don't have phones at all, but i thought i might be splitting hairs since i recently read somewhere i think it was 98% of all (us) households have phones. but now that i think about it more, it raises two issues. number one, unlisted phones obviously weren't contacted, and those might (probably would, imo) tend to be people in higher socioeconomic brackets. number two, the study said it excluded businesses, which would presumably included hotels and motels. that might (probably would, imo) tend to be lower socioeconomic brackets. that makes me wonder if the 98% figure for people with phones includes those living in "monthly type" hotels/motels. i bet it does.

as a researcher, i think i would characterize this survey as both random and quota based. did you read the part about how they randomized the phone numbers and tried to get population proportions consistent with the geographic census distribution? i thought that was good. but the 800 men and 800 women seemed low given the duration of the survey. either they had very few surveyers (callers) or they threw out a lot of responses. they talked about how they threw out five male responses due to "excessive ambiguity" but then they also had these "screening questions." that bothers me, especially in light of the deal about women only being interviewed by women and men being interviewed by both men and women (suspicious of "selective screening").

now to this:

"but i'd argue that would be more likely to affect the reliability of the men's results than the women's. i think it's a reasonable assumption that women would be more comfortable responding affirmatively to a woman on questions about [url=http://isgprohibitedwords.info?CodeWord=CodeWord123][CodeWord123][/url], given that that is the same presumption used by law enforcement and counseling centers, though i'm not sure at all what men would find more comfortable in that case"

sure, maybe they would be "more comfortable responding affirmatively," but does that make it more accurate? or might they be telling the interviewers what they perceived the interviewer wanted to hear? i mean, the surveyers (callers) work for the researchers and i have been in academia long enought to know how that works!

really, i'd be less interested in being "right," and less interested in whether it is 1 in 2 women or 1 in 6 or 1 in 10 or 1 in 100 than i would be interested in how to get it to 1 in 1,000,000,000. i like a good fight like any mick but i never have and never will understand [url=http://isgprohibitedwords.info?CodeWord=CodeWord123][CodeWord123][/url] or wife beating, and i have studied it quite a bit.

but 1 in 4 is still too high. gives guys a bad name.

Hah, ok, now we really risk devolving into research weenies (like saying the actual US phone percentage is closer to 95%), so I'm just gonna hold my fingers away from the keys, even though I want to go further on methodology other than to say that...

I'll simply agree with your final sentiments, which I think are the most important side of the equation in any event -- my definition of a man has nothing whatsoever to do with getting your way by laying a hand on a woman or posing enough of a threat that she simply desists out of fear. That's not being a man -- that's being an asshole who deserves a good stomping.

http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/

Pretty sad. The content of this site would probably be best discussed under the 'Morality' thread, but I think that the people behind the site, San Francisco Women's Centers, are a good example of the negativity and myopic attitude of American women. Though, by name, the site should be an open minded forum for discussion and theorizing, it is actually just an all out attack on sex work. Pretty sad.

Yeah, while some of the things they have on the site might have some validity, it's completely impossible to give credence to any of it because their agenda so heavily invades everything. Trumpeting articles by Andrea Dworkin and having half of the research on the side coming from the organization's director (not to mention one look at their factsheet) says it all.

Okay. I guess I have too much time on my hands today, but the Dallas/Portland game has become boring and I can't pay much attention to it. So, here's an interesting stat from [url]http://www.bayswan.org/stats.html[/url]

[QUOTE][i]The National Task Force on Prostitution suggests that over one million people in the US have worked as prostitutes in the United States, or about 1% of American women[/i][/QUOTE]

Remember Fast Times At Ridgemont High when one of the characters says something like "If you put the vibe out to a hundred women something's bound to happen." Now we know that's a truism :)

Okay, here is a good article I showed a couple of foreigners who laughed at how American women can act and never endlessly, surprise us.

Now the question, is the American woman involved a poor, love sick and confused girl who misses her boyfriend or just some neurotic, self-centered b!tch?!?

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/West/04/29/crime.cruise.reut/index.html

HONOLULU, Hawaii (Reuters) -- A young woman who wanted to leave a cruise ship to return to her boyfriend in California spent Monday night in a federal detention center here, charged with threatening to kill everyone aboard the ship to cut the cruise short, authorities said

[QUOTE]Originally posted by incaroca
[i]Hi!!

I'm a guy from Barcelona (Spain), so, my level of english isnt the best...excuse me for that.

Well, I write here because Im very surprised with most of the mails that you have sended, about the shitty AW!
I explain you why I have this impression.
When I studied at the University, every year existed a colaboration between Universities of all Europe, and USA also. So, every new course you found a lot of people from diverent countries. We (well, I and a lot of men) waited with emotion how many american women were there! Why? For the simple reason that american girls were the easiest to convince to fuck!! Sure! Every girl maybe fucked 5 o more boys during the year (2 of them were my rates). They loved sex, well....maybe to stay with the most number of cool latinos, I dont know, and when they returned to USA, explain it to their friends!
So, thats the reason for my surprise! Maybe AW when they are out of their ultraconservativ country changed their mind, and want to be happy and feel free!!
AW even they were more sexual opened than nordic girls (Sweden, Danmark, for ex.).
Every year whe are fooled looking for american pussy!!! [/i][/QUOTE]

There’s a nice Onion article which has some interesting commentary on this phenomenon in their Point-Counterpoint series:
[url=http://www.theonion.com/onion3510/european_romantic.html/]
European men are so much more romantic than American Men vs American women studying in Europe are unbelievably easy[/url]

It’s archived so it should be accessible.

Angus, Incaroca, this is good observation.
At some extend these articles are correct.
Once I was in night club where were about 20 Philippines girls
They had birthday party.
I came to their table introduced myself and spend the whole evening with them.
They were shy but very friendly and clearly they had interests to men.
The biggest my surprise was that NO ONE Canadian man who were in nightclub didn’t come to their table during whole evening! And this nightclub was considered
one of the best places to pick up women in the city.
All these nice Philippines girls went home alone!
Can somebody tell me does such nonsense could happened in Europe?
Russian and Brazilian women who are living here tell me also that they had to make first step because AM too shy.
It is understandable, DH and others posters shows that it is not very pleasant experience to do first move here in North America. Everybody can become chronically shy if he faced so lot of hate from AW.
On another hand, The American women themselves is changing a lot then they go to other countries. I had seen how two AW became more and more exiting when the airplane
came closer to Cuba. After few days I had seen them with bunch of local guys kissing and hugging.
Seems AW know very well what they are doing. They know that they cannot full Foreign men playing stupid games. They come back here and play another games.
And average American Man accept it silently and help them to destroy himself.

Well, I certainly haven't become "chronically shy" by any means!

Lenin:

Good points. It's fascinating that both American men & women behave so differently when they travel beyond American borders.

While I surely don't speak for everyone in America, it's been my observation that the camps are divided thus:

AMERICAN MAN: "American women have too much mental baggage from womens' liberation & a politically-correct, litigous society. Might as well kiss a cobra."

AMERICAN WOMAN: "All American men are abusive pigs or passionless wimps. They don't listen, they're not honest, blah blah blah..."

This is a fantastic recipe for sexual repression. And this is one of the primary reasons I'm looking to go live in another country for a while. I need to catch up on lost youth and give my sexual self-esteem a real workout, haha! :D