jmsellens@watmath.UUCP (John M Sellens) (11/07/85)
In <928@abnji.UUCP> in net.singles nyssa@abnji.UUCP (nyssa of traken) writes: >The current membership totals in the personals mailing lists are: > >men -> men 6 >men -> women 15 >women -> men 57 >women -> women 2 > >In the last month there have been four personals mailed, all men->women. I'm surprised no one has commented on these stats. When I first read them, a couple of things struck me (No, Mom, please don't hit me again!! :-) ) - The distribution of poeple on the lists wasn't particularly surprising. It seemed (to me) to follow certain traditional/historical expectatations. I mean, women seem to have been encouraged to "wait for the right man" to come along. - And look - there are 80 people on the lists, and exactly *8*!! are on the same sex lists (one would suspect/guess that these people are gay). This seems to be the same 10% of the population that is widely reported to be gay. (Wow - reality imitates statistics) - The small number of messages were all from men to women, consistent with the traditional "man the aggressor" idea. So, it seems to me that the people that said net.personals was a bad idea were right. An aisde about the 10% rule: I have met relatively few ( < 10? ) people that I knew were gay. Sure, in downtown Toronto there seemed to be large numbers of stereotyped gay men (you know, short hair, bushy moustaches, tight jeans, bobmer jackets), but I think, for me, that the thing that most ably demonstrated that gay men and women were not unusual, and were just ordinary folks was this: Next time you're in a group of people, say at a meeting or something, count them out (to yourself) like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, gay, 1, 2, 3, 4 ... (Obviously the accuracy of this depends on where you start counting :-) :-) and some gatherings *may* be skewed one way or the other - it *may* be that there will be more gay people at creative (or computer-related?) functions. Notice that I said *may* - meaning that I have no valid indicators either way.) I guess I got a little off topic. Probably any further discussion should be directed to only one of singles and motss, depending on the subject matter. John
quint@caip.RUTGERS.EDU (Amqueue) (11/18/85)
I think I might have misunderstood something here, but in my excerpted quote it seems that jmsellens is saying that the statistics prove that men are being more aggressive.... In article <17135@watmath.UUCP> jmsellens@watmath.UUCP (John M Sellens) writes: >In <928@abnji.UUCP> in net.singles nyssa@abnji.UUCP (nyssa of traken) writes: >>The current membership totals in the personals mailing lists are: >> >>men -> men 6 >>men -> women 15 >>women -> men 57 >>women -> women 2 >> >>In the last month there have been four personals mailed, all men->women. > >I'm surprised no one has commented on these stats. When I first read them, >a couple of things struck me (No, Mom, please don't hit me again!! :-) ) > >- The distribution of poeple on the lists wasn't particularly surprising. > It seemed (to me) to follow certain traditional/historical expectatations. > I mean, women seem to have been encouraged to "wait for the right man" > to come along. >- The small number of messages were all from men to women, consistent with > the traditional "man the aggressor" idea. >John Looking at the numbers, 59 articles were generated by women, 57 of them to men. 31 of the articles were generated by men, 15 to women. Women sent *more* messages, and a higher percentage of them were to men. How is this consistent with women waiting for the right man, and men being the aggressor? Im confused /amqueue