Simon E. wrote:Nah. Its about control.
Keep 'em chained to the kitchen, or stick 'em on a pedestal.
Anything but standing face to face.
Just as a matter of interest..anyone know what proportion of regular posters to this forum are women ?
You won't hear me argue. Among the regular active posters, being a woman here can often feel pretttttttty lonesome (I say as a frequent returner among a handful of women who get 'in it' with the boys... Some days it's like... really?! BACK TO THIS? - but hey, you get used to it).
Fruitzilla wrote:Since internet forum buddhism is a much more violent activity than "real life" buddhism", you'll see most women will either be not interested in it from the start, or lose interest very quickly, imho.
I disagree with online Buddhism being more violent, honestly. I don't think it's that at all. I do think that with too much testosterone on a page, many women who read don't even bother replying and turn away. Here is why I think this happens, this is purely my (female) opinion.
Men LOVE to argue about the objects (the this law, the that rule, the this point alone), they nitpick at the objects, obsess about the objects. They want to be right about the object itself, so don't
necessarily view it within its relational context. (YOU SAID XYZ, YOU CALLED ME xyz. You say this is this thing, but it's actually that thing.----> BOOOOOOORING to a woman - they tune it out.)
Most women --
once the object is described and established -- are done with the actual morphology of the object itself and want to move onto the
interesting part -- the relationships
between the objects. What is their interaction, what is their direct application, how does it look like when you shift this or that variable. The 'good bits' are in the morphology of the "relationship between principles" - NOT necessarily the principle itself. That was so first paragraph... moving on.
From what I've observed and researched, there is simply a tendency to prioritize data differently in the male and female brain. Nothing wrong with it, we all have strong and weak points in our respective genders. IT WOULD be nice, from a selfish point of view, to have more women posting who feel like they have a place here too... Often I know that they lurk and read, but don't GET IN IT. And as far as women go, I'm pretty hardy in terms of forum culture... we can go at it, I'm game, but I also have no problem with standing my ground in debates. I am not necessarily a typical woman in this respect either, statistically speaking. So I often know how it is to feel more shy, not wanting my head chomped off just by having a different way of formulating my opinions.
Women are not typically fighters, verbally on forums. They like the relationships between objects, including in their social interactions to be harmonious. You would think in a Buddhist environment, that WOULD be favored and given respect...
nope, some willy-waver will inevitably have to be right.
just saying it bluntly... Yeah. I said it.
How can we say really discuss sex's vulgarity if the context it's presented and discussed in is mostly male? We kind of need the OTHER part of sex too, no? Maybe the thread should be:
Is sex considered vulgar to MALE buddhists? Then we're getting closer to this thread's contents.. But has anyone even asked if we are even talking about the same thing?
SEX - the meaning of the word itself is different in how our male and female brains associate it. Let's do a round in the class,
what is sex anyway?
To many a woman, it's a complex series of emotional states and relationships
within the self between desire, love, need, security/insecurity, self-image, etc. before we ever even get to the act of the genitals meeting in the act of copulation. It's not just DOING it.
"A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love." a profound insight of all-time poet Leonard Cohen who writes from a man's view
To many a man, sex is directly the copulation itself, and associated objects: visual objects, the sperm, the body parts, the sensory input, the male virility itself, etc. There's the urge, there's the doing, there's the done. The objects.
Feel free to tear it apart, but that's my 2 cents on women not chiming in and this thread being about male sex in Buddhism. Women would want to talk about things differently, and get too easily shot down by a male majority. That's all.