No Females in text books

shabbatiscoming

Tue, Nov 29 2016, 6:07 am

groovy1224 wrote:

Why is this shocking? Clearly stick figures= [filth]. Not appropriate for young minds. I mean, what's next? First it's stick figures, next it's looking at pictures of mom, grandma...

Dangerous road. Very dangerous.

both

and

are unfortunately fitting responses to your post.

chanchy123

Tue, Nov 29 2016, 7:26 am

etky wrote:

Same. Never, ever encountered a textbook belonging to one of my kids that didn't refer to girls too.
This whole thing has gotten so out of hand in some communities.
Good thing they can't censor tanach for references to women. Or can they? shock

I've heard stories on here telling how many tanach stories are simply not taught in schools in certain communities. So no, I would not be surprised if they stop telling the stories of the imahot.

DrMom

Tue, Nov 29 2016, 7:42 am

groovy1224 wrote:

It could lead to mixed stick-figure dancing.

geulah papyrus

Tue, Nov 29 2016, 7:49 am

What's scary is that as we watch this normalization of leaving women out of the picture (literally and figuratively,) we start to see a trend towards leaving us out of community life, decision-making, etc. depending on which communities we're in. Scarier still is when we start to internalize extreme gender separation and our own invisibility and we stop questioning and instead, start enforcing it on those around us.

watergirl

Tue, Nov 29 2016, 8:56 am

geulah papyrus wrote:

And then we pay men more money for the same work. I know a number of jewish shops that pay young buchrim more than women.

tigerwife

Tue, Nov 29 2016, 5:34 pm

geulah papyrus wrote:

I agree that a lot of this censoring borders on ridiculous, yet I don't see your prediction happening since it seems like the opposite has occurred over the past century. Women today (including Frum women!) have more equality than they ever have had. Can you think of an example where censoring printed images of women had an impact on real live women?

I'm not arguing; I just never understood this line of thought. I don't see it tying into the oversexualization of men either (I.e. Seeing a picture of a stick figure with a triangle skirt will lead to chalilah...)

sushilover

Tue, Nov 29 2016, 6:44 pm

tigerwife wrote:

Agree!
Seeing a picture of a girl will lead to bad thought which will lead to sinning is a slippery slope fallacy and , like you say, ridiculous.
But what people on here are implying is that not putting pictures of girls will lead to women being marginalized which will lead to internalized self-hatred... is a slippery slope fallacy too, and almost as ridiculous.

amother

Floralwhite

Wed, Nov 30 2016, 1:13 am

tigerwife wrote:

If you've ever had to ride on the back of a bus, you've seen the impact. If you have ever seen women served after men, or shoved aside so men can get though, you've seen the impact.

If it's not about sexualization, why censor in the first place? After all, no one limits pictures of men.

DrMom

Wed, Nov 30 2016, 1:15 am

shabbatiscoming wrote:

wait, was this what you meant all along? Thats not stick figures. Also, are the faces really covered or you just did that?

I am also confused. Those are photos, not stick figures. This is a stick figure:

And in the photo of the textbook, the *boys'* faces are covered (??).

This book definitely seems odd (what is this page trying to teach? why is the text sideways?), but it does not at all match the problem description as stated by the OP.

Can you clarify, OP?

Were you just trying to show how silly it looks when the principle is applied in reverse?

5mom

Wed, Nov 30 2016, 1:47 am

I assume the boys' faces were blurred out by the op for privacy because they are students in the class. It would be hard to have a girl in the book because there aren't any in the class. That's no excuse, though. Since the world is populated with both men and women, the teacher should have used female models as well.

DrMom

Wed, Nov 30 2016, 2:20 am

5mom wrote:

Why would you assume that the photos in the textbook are of students from the class which is using the textbook?

Scratching Head

5mom

Wed, Nov 30 2016, 2:27 am

DrMom wrote:

Why would you assume that the photos in the textbook are of students from the class which is using the textbook?

Scratching Head

My kids had some workbooks like that in school. It was exciting for them to see pictures of themselves.

moonstone

Wed, Nov 30 2016, 4:12 am

ora_43 wrote:

They might be ignorant and inconsiderate, not fanatics. I can't think of a Jewish group that at would go so far as to erase female stick figures, but would be teaching Hebrew grammar. (unless maybe there's no modern Hebrew)

I can think of many textbooks that erase women without even noticing. The first time I remember seeing an example using "she" in a math textbook was last year, in a book published in 2010.

I disagree. I call the erasure of women fanaticism. This goes way beyond being inconsiderate or ignorant.

amother

Tangerine

Wed, Nov 30 2016, 8:41 am

The book had some stick figures and some pictures of real people with their faces blurred. It was not from my class. I just happened to take a photo of a page that boys were working off in a different class.
This is not a text book made up from my school . It is from a well known publisher.
I don't live in NY/Lakewood and the school I work for is far from chassidish. I live in Chicago.
My point was that this is scary that this is a mainstream textbook that is being ordered for boys schools.

ora_43

Wed, Nov 30 2016, 9:41 am

moonstone wrote:

I disagree. I call the erasure of women fanaticism. This goes way beyond being inconsiderate or ignorant.

I think maybe I wasn't clear. I'm saying maybe it wasn't deliberate. "Fanatic" implies a deliberate decision to do things a certain way.

Sometimes men ignore women on purpose. And way more often, men just don't notice that they are talking over women or not including pictures of women or giving women harder performance reviews or whatever else. Eg the publisher could have just hired his nephew and friends to pose for a few pictures, without even thinking once "I wonder if this will be weird for female students."

I think it would be mistaken to the point of dangerous to assume that if women were excluded, it must be those crazy fanatic Jews being fanatics again. If we want to fight sexism we need to recognize that unintentional bigotry is also an option - and unlike deliberately leaving out photos of women, it's not limited to "those" Jews, it's a problem in even the most liberal circles.

Tablepoetry I wasn't saying textbooks erased women for religious reasons. I'm talking about advanced math textbooks, in English, meant for use in (regular, non-religious) universities around the world. They don't have many examples using characters in general so the under-representation of women was very subtle - but it was there.