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On statistics

trelas
2008-05-21 02:09 pm UTC (link)

In the name of fairness I guess I should mention at the beginning of this comment that I am a male and a fan of the show. I have not seen the third season yet, as it always takes time for the seasons to reach my faraway homeland, but have basic concept of the season, read way too much, and the characters involved. I stumbled on this a few days late, but have read it with some interest.

Now in the post itself the three links to a statistical approacs is used to validate that during the current season Dean Winchester has been misogynistic. As said, I can not truly comment on that as I have not seen the season in question yet. However, after looking over the statistical evidence provided, I could not help but notice that the evidence provided in them is rather flawed. Yet after having skimmed through the majority of the commentary both here and in those posts I have not seen this addressed or even properly brought up. I'm deeply sorry if I missed someone writing of that. The poster of the statistics also does refer to those problems briefly, but to me it felt more dismissive than actually providing discussion on the matter. As it seems I feeling rather over-analytical today as I wondered once again whetever or not I am a sexist, I decided to present the problems I found with the statistics provided. This is not meant to be insulting or dismissive in turn, simply wanted to bring out these problems for discussion, although I realize the majority of it has already passed.

First of all the words chosen for this count. Even the poster admitted that the inclusion of broad is somewhat questionable, but it was through her feeling that it simply popped up that season in use. The problem here is that at no point is the fact addressed that is broad a sexist or even an insulting term. Personally I've never thought of it as such, although I don't use it myself and don't hear it that often. Also, it's never used by one of the two main characters according to that tally. Secondly, the word slut. This I found myself puzzled of, as it is a very damaging, but then I saw the exact quote, which was according to the post a 'slutty little Yoda'. The problem here is that there is a difference between calling someone a slut and calling someone slutty. Both are insults, true, but the content of the insult is different. In almost all the cases I've seen them used, calling someone slutty usually prefers to their choice of clothing or overtly flirty behaviour whereas calling someone a slut implies sexual behaviour. Now the thing is that even slutty is insulting, but this difference between the terms is not addressed in any way in the numerical posts and instead it just jumps to the term slut. This prevents discussion and examination of what was the true insult there and distorts the comment almost purposefully. This is something that should be avoided in cases where one is trying to present numerical proof for their claim, as it leaves a willful distortion to that evidence and thus weakens it by association. Third, the word whore. Here it came slightly odd, as according to that tally it was used twice by secondary characters. Once by a psychopath bad guy and second time a woman called another woman a whore. Apparantely this happened a third time in the same episode. Considering that the main point of this tally is apparantely to present times when the main characters have used deragotary terms used by the brothers, it is questionable why this word is even inclueded here, as they never used it.

Now at this point we go to the bigger problems of the statistics presented. I'm not talking about the lack of neutrality constantly present in the posts, as I did not get the impression that was even attempted, although it does harm the possibility of discussion and the credibility of the results shown.

Continued in the reply. Too large of a post for a comment.

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Re: On statistics

trelas
2008-05-21 02:10 pm UTC (link)

First of all we are missing overall insult tally, which would include all . Although it might not seen important, for the claim presented it is actually rather crucial. For us to claim that the boys are misogynistic, we should see in overall a greater ratio of insults towards women than towards men, of course taking also in to account the number of persons insulted per genger. Secondly, the dismissal of censorship. Yes, calling someone a bitch or a skank is bad form, but so is calling someone a motherfucker or cocksucker, which are more often used towards men than towards women. The problem is that the latter two words get caught up on censorship, while the first two don't. So what remains is the possibility of a larger number of insults available towards women than towards men due to that censorship. As mentioned, that is problematic on a general level, but not exactly the show's fault. For us to be able to judge this, we would need to see the distribution of general insults towards men and women, which again is not presented. It would also seem rather semantic to discuss is it worse to call someone a bastard or a bitch, so that distribution would also allow us to see are there insults more heavily used against men than towards women and allow us to draw judgements from that. Except it does this with 'son of a bitch', which was used against mainly men during the previous seasons, but during this season less so. Which leads us to the next problem.

Even the writer of those posts admitted that the big recurring villains of the season were women. This of course does increase of insults towards female characters over the season and once again we lack reliable statistics on the general use of insults. Now they had very little interaction with Lilith, so that leaves Bella and Ruby. Bella has been covered and according to the statistics wasn't called by those terms that many times and never to her face. However the poster has a problem with the amount deragotary terms towards Ruby, as the boys according to her should have begun trusting her as she had helped them that many times. However, that is imposing personal judgement on a situation in order to make her argument more valid. It would have been different to make this point using for example Ellen, I hope remembered the name right, but to bring this up with Ruby is to make a decision when the boys should have started to treat her as an ally and used softer terms. Also, Ruby appeared in six episodes according to the Wikipedia count. In order to draw solid conclusions, once again we would need to know the amount of insults used relative to amount of interaction the boys had with her. This in turn needs to be again compared to the general numbers in order for the results to be valid.

I have written a far too long reply already, although there are still a few points that bothered me about the statistics used. My main point wasn't that is Dean or Sam currently misogynistic, it is that the numbers presented in those three posts are too flawed to be used a basis for anything. Also, the posts include numerous points of distortion, which further weakens the case it is trying to claim. And I realize this reply was a giant snore to read, but at least got some practice in writing these. Thank you if you read until here, I'm quite surprised anyone did.