Glossy photos of girls on bikes!

Is it any surprise that men behave that way when both men and women judge male status in part by the 'trophy girlfriend' they have? I'm not exactly ecstatic that culture is this way, but it's not new and it's not restricted to western or capitalist cultures, and it's unfair to lay the blame for conforming with it exclusively at the door of males.

Oh, I definitely don't blame men exclusively. In fact, I don't think it's worth blaming anyone but society. Phenomena like sexism are endlessly reproduced by the cultures they exist in. Men and women conform to expected norms of behaviour: men learn from peers, advertisements, and observation of society that they are meant to treat women as trophies; women learn in similar ways that they are meant to conform as closely as possible to very restricted notions of beauty, and that they have succeeded if a certain sort of man wants them as his trophy. (And he, effectively, will be hers.)

And this forum is society at work. People learn, by reading its threads, the acceptable way to fit in. (We probably all regret a couple of our newbie posts, made before we'd learned the 'rules'.) And, call me an idealist, but wouldn't it be nice if people noticed these regrettable currents in society, like sexism, and tried to curb them by refusing to go along with it, and refusing to provide yet another tiny nodule of influence that will end up embedding itself in people's subconscious?

Just a bunch of silly boys messin' abaht tho', innit? You've met a lot of us now, Emily, and you know it's all internetzbolloxspeak... I hope... :]

I know, I know, and I know you're all nice guys. :-) But like I said, if people stopped having conversations like this, eventually sexism would die out. It could start somewhere as insignificant as this...