What do they learn in a "women's studies" degree? We don't have that kind of degrees in my country

≥I know that's a joke
It isn't. Whether you believe in chivalry or feminism you should agree hurting a woman is something to avoid.

>disagreeing with a person is the same as hurting them

I've taken a few Women Gender and Sexuality classes and a number of my friends are WGSS majors. In my experience it's like any social theory course load. A bunch of aproaching contemporary issues from from a modern feminist framework (in the same way someone doing Marxist studies would aproach issues from a Marxist framework). It's a bunch of reading theory and learning to apply it in different contexts. A lot of feminist literature is critical of other feminist writings, so it is circle jerky but not monolithically so. And it's not really a 'regurgitate my opinions' thing; if you can come up with legitimate arguments against what's taught, to a degree that shows you understand the content and aren't just mad at feminists because you watched a sargon of akkad video, you're usually more than welcome to, at least in the classes i've been in

A sub-session of social studies, just as black studies, native studies and many others. Usually mixing up anthropology and Veeky Forumstory as well.

Funny thing is the people who usually criticizes social studies tends to forget that politics are social studies as well

It all depends on the person in question and how they take it, really. It's up to them to not be an asshole about everything said to them.

Just a scam of the left to have them howling about sexual identity instead of why the corporate bankers funding their movement.

im happy eggman at least tried to get into uni

If it's anything like how philosophy courses are taught, the objective is more to learn what the prominent theories are, and respond to them, rather than the theories themselves being taught as objective facts.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't express disagreement with a woman, just that you shouldn't be a total douchebag about it.

Well, the gender studies course at MIT had the Hunger Games as a recommended reading. It's difficult to not me skeptical, considering there are a lot of classes you can take.

Why do you think something is wrong with that?

>Goal of class is to examine applications of theory in different contexts
>representation in pop culture is one of those contexts
>Hunger Games is an example of pop culture.

It's the same thing as a literature course using The Old Man and the Sea as an example of symbolism.

I mean I actually did the gender studies unit of sociology at uni and it was pretty much SJW the unit.

Bit of a kek I guess. Free 12.5 points though

>The Old Man and the Sea as an example of symbolism.
Sorry what is it meant to symbolise?

I massively enjoyed it actually but I guess I probably saw it as a story of the strength of man and thee ultimate futility of our labours. That he CHOSE to break himself to prove himself to himself or to God.

Who knows. Fantastic and evocative story

I suppose I shouldn't be that cynical about it, but it sures doesn't tingle my intellectual curiosity to pass any of my time reading and analysing that pop garbage. The only thing I get from it is that the word dystopian, and made up words seem to sell. I also have read some essays from these sort of classes on these sort of subjects, and they just seem forced, juvenile and sometimes just plainly retarded. In general, it's just not a course I'm that seems to be created for the upper echelons of academia. I also haven't heard a lot of good reviews from people who have taken the courses voluntarily. They say everything is dumbed down, and that the material doesn't hold up to any proper feminist theory.

>tfw the super rich are in hysterics because they've executed the ultimate divide and conquer, making the entire population hate each other under the guise of institutions of power whilst the real locust of power remains unnoticed and unchallenged

Well, most of the power is in the hands of males, but I get your point.

>people have to be manipulated in order to hate each other and commit vile acts

Rousseau, plz

>you should agree hurting a woman is something to avoid.

Sure, but if my mere opinion causes someone discomfort I am not going to hide the truth for the sake of their sake. I assume they would do the same concerning me.

>He lives in a country that doesn't teach woman's studies.
How's your day in simbabwe going?

>It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here!
>this is an actual quote by a student at fucking Yale
Give it up senpai, the humanities faculty is fucked in USA

You can dismiss it all you want, but Gender Studies has become the leading discipline in American academia, and in short order, will become so for the rest of the world.

All the funding and the best scholarship, will be in Gender Studies. This is the wish of every American progressive. It is the hope of every American posting on Veeky Forums.

What are you talking about? It's a joke here except among the lunatics teaching it.

>there are massive apartment buildings on campus
>at least freshmen students are literally required to live on campus
I mean, I have a tendency toward agreeing with you, that university is just a business whose service you purchase. But universities really do everything they can to blur the line, so I see where that student is coming from.

They are a business, but in the US many colleges have official connections to the government, meaning they are bound by the same legal protections on what the government can and cannot do to you.

I've never actually taken a class in the subject at my university, but I had a part-time job in which my supervisor was a professor in the department.

Among other crazy findings in her research, she found that in the entire first season of Friends, the camera never moved to follow a female character off screen. If the camera did move to follow a character off screen, it was always a male character. I thought it was amazing that she noticed that, but even more amazing that the camera never happened to move to follow a female character once in an entire TV show season.

That observation is just one of many observations that make up the theory of "the male gaze," which is that, since men make up a large number of the creators of popular media, that popular media has a distinctly male perspective. My supervisor argued that the camera movement being reserved for the male characters implied that men had more agency and drove the scene forward, whereas women were static and held the scene back, which is fucked in her opinion. The male gaze theory argues that this has a ripple effect and influences how regular people perceive men and women or what they believe their roles should be.

She showed me another talk online of a gender studies professor who had amassed thousands of images of advertisements, and argued that men were more often than not had full body, standing shots while women disproportionately had only parts of their body portrayed (cutting off the head but showing the tits-to-ass region was a big trend) or were pictured in diminutive/submissive positions, like kneeling or doggy style or laying down.

I mean, I don't know if any of it's true -- if camera movement not following women or if not showing women's heads in advertisements mean anything -- but it's interesting to think about. And if it's true, it really could have society-wide repercussions.

So that's at least some of the stuff you'd find in a gender studies department.

>Camera doesn't follow women
hurr durr hollywood is sexist, doesnt think women have agency
>Camera does follow women
hurr durr hollywood is sexist, women are being objectified

Marxism but replace capitalists with men and labor with (???). When people talk about cultural Marxism they usually use the term incorrectly. What it actually reffers to is other cultural movements that are spin offs of Marxism that have switched around the actors but kept the previous power dynamic and theories of opression. So women's studies is quite literally a class that teaches a particular branch of cultural marxism that hypothesizes that men are inherently exploitative and women need to cast off the yoke of male opression in order to (???). You'll find that most spin offs of Marxism that have nothing to do with economics contain alot of (???)'s because they don't really make sense outside of the context of production and economy.

>In most history classes we are taught to take facts and form our own opinions.

It says it uses 'information'. I don't think it is that different to conventional academia

Fail

The problem with all that is that hwile some of it is probably true, They then go on to assign moral judgments to this and even solutions.

It is certainly not a job of a scholar to decide whether a societal trend is moral or immoral. Just to document it and its effects.

>They then go on to assign moral judgments to this and even solutions.

Do they? Where was the moral judgment in that user's post?

ONly one in that post, but in the larger body of work, especially in opinion pieces its overt.

I read a few pieces back in college and moral judgements were certainly implied if not stated outright. When you actually talked to the authors they were very upfront that they thought all those things were bad. I was shocked by their bluntness in fact.

Opinion pieces aren't scholarship, they're opinion pieces. What may be 'implied' to you can be neutral to someone else, and if the author tells you outside the text that they believe something that is not otherwise in the text you suggest is making implications, then it's clear to me there is no outright statement of moral judgment. Since you're conflating opinion pieces with scholarship you have to accept that maybe you're conflating multiple issues here as people tend to do when it comes to thinking about 'the left'.

You are allowed to argue it actually. So long as you have basis in facts to back it up. I don't know where this idea that you can't argue in universities comes from.

I am distinguishing: the pieces I read in college were professional scholarship. I asked questions because I wanted to confirm I wasn't just seeing things and they actually thought what I thought they did. And if you dont think their scholarly work informs they larger body of "leftist" journalism and activism your being obtuse. Especially when the same people are doing both.

to clarify, I have no problem with professors or students doing both activist work and professional work as long as the professional scholarship keeps to standards. but I feel that line has been crossed. I have a problem with scholarship which isn't pure, with their leftists positions per-say

I had several professors I felt would welcome disagreement and argument. Others I did not. You dont have to do more than a simple google search to find instances of students or professors getting into trouble over an argument that one of them perceived as offensive or antagonistic.

It comes from dumbass trolls who seek out the most eclectic women's studies class for the express purpose to dick around. They roll in with unsubstantiated """facts""" and foregone conclusions and get mad when they get shouted out of the room by extremists (who are often just as incorrect) on the other side of the fence. Then they log onto Veeky Forums and blogpost about how ebul the feminists are

That's not to say I don't also dislike 3rd wave feminism, but I'm only providing the reasoning behind the idea that you can't argue on college campuses

I mean, I don't think it's necessarily outside the context of a scholar to make a moral judgment. But not because they're scholars, because they're people. Whose job is it to make moral judgments if not people? God? The government? It doesn't make sense to me that they should be stripped of the ability to make moral judgments.

Plus the moral judgments that we're talking about here (men and women should be treated equally) may require extra proofs for Veeky Forums, but are more or less givens for the average person. I'm not sure most gender studies professors/majors see their field as a crisis. The humanitarian crisis level of clipping out women's heads in advertisements is, "Uhh, well, I guess that's a small problem?" Nobody's claiming that deaths happen because of showing what's above a woman's neck happens less frequently than that for men. It's just an irritation, an itch that people are being treated unequally in ways that are hard to even see.

In history I studied people doing what by our standards, by my standards are horrible things. But what is horrible in one culture is acceptable in another and I tried, and I firmly believe that when writing you just present the fact as you understand them and present your argument about what they mean. If the guy your writing about is a family murdering opportunist it isn't your job to tell the reader as much. give him the facts and allow them to make their own judgments.

I'd just prefer that getting to college opened up a college reading level, instead of putting me back in 6th grade with 6th grade reading material

Assuming that such small things are done out of malice is fucking retarded. It's much more logical to assume they are either coincidences or done for different motives. Or more than likely, that the reason varies from case to case.

This still reads as vague and misleading. The opinion pieces you read in college were professional scholarship? Even though you imply opinion pieces ('especially opinion pieces') are separate? I've read scholarship too about gender, race, etc. in the context of art but I've never seen a conclusion that suggested moral action. Even in discussions the topic was treated fairly -- sure there were conclusions that pointed to one particular interpretation but stand-alone scholarship doesn't exist; it is produced in context amongst other conclusions in scholarship, some of which are reproduced to show different arguments in a single text -- no 'real' solution was favoured because this is the condition of postmodern scholarship, especially in the preparatory nature of undergrad. So honestly I don't know what you're talking about and there's a very real possibility you have conflated different texts together and in your memory they say a certain thing in a certain way that is absent in the individual texts themselves. The way you are talking about them and changing tactic in your discussion leads me to believe this is the case.

>Especially when the same people are doing both.
Separately? ...

>nd if you dont think their scholarly work informs they larger body of "leftist" journalism and activism your being obtuse

I don't think that but leftist journalism is not the topic of discussion. I'm saying that maybe you are thinking it is part of the discussion because you're conflating your leftisms

>Assuming that such small things are done out of malice is fucking retarded.

Who does this? Non-scholars?

Ah yes, now I understand what you mean. Yes, I too loathe the history book that reminds me every few pages how detestable the actions of whoever are. You're right, it is a mark of professionalism in some disciplines to refrain from moral judgments.

But considering that sociology (and subsequently gender studies) is a field about modern society, its virtues and shortcomings, can we really expect it to refrain from moral judgments? Would we even want it to? It seems like trying to separate philosophy from morals -- a discipline in which an entire sub-discipline is dedicated to making moral judgments and even deciding how to make moral judgments. Do your thoughts change considering this, or do you maintain that scholars should in all scenarios keep from providing their moral input? It's an interesting question, and I just genuinely want to hear your thoughts.

The pieces I read were not opinion pieces. They were published, professional scholarship, mostly on the history of women in certain times and cultures.

I will grant you in most of what I read were more on the facts/moral conclusions side than the proposal side. I though have heard professors advocate in class or private some very radical solutions to proposed inequalities.

Now personally I think even that: making moral judgements in a professional piece: is an act of malpractice for a scholar, certainly for a post grad who should be above such things. But some of those I met took a certain glee in it.

If my experiences are not yours than that is that and maybe the problem is not everywhere, but dont tell me mine didn't happen

The teachers that user talked about assumed that these things happened for a reason. That there was intent behind these actions. And that the intention behind this was to show women as backwards and submissive respectively.

It's /pol/ levels of conspiracy theory to think that.

>That observation is just one of many observations that make up the theory of "the male gaze," which is that, since men make up a large number of the creators of popular media, that popular media has a distinctly male perspective. My supervisor argued that the camera movement being reserved for the male characters implied that men had more agency and drove the scene forward, whereas women were static and held the scene back, which is fucked in her opinion. The male gaze theory argues that this has a ripple effect and influences how regular people perceive men and women or what they believe their roles should be.
That sounds like the most far-fetched bullshit ever. If the camera followed the female characters exclusively, you could make a case how it simulates men ogling women and staring at them.

They learn nothing of value.

>And that the intention behind this was to show women as backwards and submissive respectively.

This is the misstep. Having these ideas -- of what you're used to thinking -- reproduced in your direction of a TV show does not necessarily say that you're doing these things 'maliciously' or even consciously. 'The male gaze' isn't a theory about malicious intent, it's just a particular culturally codified way of thinking about our experiences that is in a way self-reproducing through things like TV shows.

Well if your dealing with something like moral philosophy it would be hard to avoid moral questions. You could keep your questions entirely theoretical but I could see how that would be hard.

I will also grant you there are fields like economics were it would be hard to avoid proposing possible solutions in some cases.

However, that there are situations were you can't keep scholarship "pure" for a lack of a better word does not mean it shouldn't be standard to try.

I only took one to two sociology classes, but to me it seemed your trying to study and document human behavior and social systems, not necessary say whether those systems are (morally) good or bad.

For instance you could easily right a piece about a remote tribe where women are regarded as slaves and make absolute no moral judgment whatsoever in your writing. You can do the same with modern America

Only if the characters were depicted as like bimbos or something. If they were well-rounded, actual characters with agency and weren't put in situations where they are presented as objects of desire you'd have a weak case.

It's a far fetched conclusion to a curious phenomenon. It's been a long while since I've seen the first season of Friends, so I can't offer a different explanation, but I do think that it's disingenuous to base these conclusions on only a single season. I don't think the producers of Friends were replaced by the second season, and the wording of your post suggests that the female characters were followed off screen by the camera in other seasons. And that places the entire theory on a foundation of wet sand.

Considering you thought it was about malicious intent I think you may be misunderstanding just what the conclusion means.

>My supervisor argued that the camera movement being reserved for the male characters implied that men had more agency and drove the scene forward, whereas women were static and held the scene back, which is fucked in her opinion.

For me she is suggesting intent.
And even if she wasn't, why would she assume such things? Most people would not have noticed at all, and I think it's far fetched to think that the majority of people would interpret such small things in that way (or any way for that matter).

>'The male gaze' isn't a theory about malicious intent, it's just a particular culturally codified way of thinking about our experiences that is in a way self-reproducing through things like TV shows.

I'd still have a problem with that. Assuming that all people act a certain way just because they share a particular trait is just unbelievable to me. Sociologist and Psychologists do this all the time and it always bothers me. You cannot assume you know what other people are thinking.

I don't believe any Hollywood writers are saying to themselves, "Heh, sure put those women in their place!" Ask any one of them and they'd probably say they're a feminist. It's just happening unconsciously.

I actually worked for an advertising agency for a short while, so I know a little about how that process works. At the end of the day, you do what the client wants. If the client wants you to make the whole advertisement yourself from concept to delivery, that's great. But most clients range from having an idea already to wanting to be heavily involved in the production. Because I live in a predominantly white area, most of the actors are white. Nobody's fault, that's just how it is.

But my producers had a subtle hand signal they could flash each other in a meeting with clients for when the clients were suggesting only the names of white actors for an upcoming commercial. They'd scratch their nose with two fingers, and that'd be the cue for one of them to say, "How about Tyson Brown or Jessica Nguyen for that part?" Nobody thought the clients were actively trying to cast only white actors, but it just slipped their minds.

Similar thing works for gender, I think. There's gotta be people out there actively thinking about how people are represented in the media and trying to get media creators to think about what they're making. The trend is basically, nobody's thinking about being unethical, they may just do it accidentally, and so people act more ethical when they're thinking about being ethical. My producers saw something wrong with casting only white people, but didn't see anything wrong with say, making a woman literally a part of a beer bottle. (My agency didn't make this image specifically, but somebody did.) That could be seen as objectifying or problematic or whatever. We don't really think that now, but maybe in fifty years they will. And only if the gender studies professors do influential research on the subject.

>There's gotta be people out there actively thinking about how people are represented in the media and trying to get media creators to think about what they're making.
Why? Why is this important?

>You cannot assume you know what other people are thinking.
>For me she is suggesting intent.

I think you're holding 'leftist' opinions to higher standards than even yourself.

(btw, You are talking to different people).

I don't think it was about malicious intent, I was making up a theory you could come up with when the opposite is true (the camera only following female characters).
I do understand her conclusion, about the 'male gaze', I just think it's far fetched and explained why I think so in the post you just quoted.

I took a class on women in the American West.

It was cross listed as history and fit my schedule.

Only guy there.

It was ok, honestly don't remember it. I do remember it was easy, and not unbearably dumb but not super exciting either.

The way that user wrote it made it fairly explicit that she tough those things.

>My supervisor argued that the camera movement being reserved for the male characters implied that men had more agency
>My supervisor argued

Assuming what someone is thinking based on their actions alone is bound to be inaccurate.
To take the argument a bit farther away, it's always bothersome when people here or in documentals try to say what generals were thinking when they won or lost a battle, for example.

>base these conclusions on only a single season
I don't know man, a single season is a pretty large amount of footage. That professor probably specified just the first season because they didn't do it in the second season, but an entire TV season without following a woman off screen is a pretty long streak already.

Don't know if it implies the creators thought of women as lesser or whatever but I'd say that's pretty odd.

because
>That could be seen as objectifying or problematic or whatever.
If nobody thought about how to portray people equally in the media, we might still have blackface.

You need one to become a leftist

The theory was specifically about the first season of Friends though. She's not saying that all of Friends is like this and she doesn't need to. The extent of the scholarship is the first season of Friends and the conclusions don't exceed that extent. I don't think it is relevant critique to bring up other seasons when they weren't implicated by the study in the first place.

And your opposing theory, like I replied before, depends on the depiction of the women. Is the TV show Girls about ogling the women?

>we might still have blackface.

We still do in some countries. We don't think it's a problem.

Why is blackface bad exactly?

Not him, but women don't need to be walking sex machines for men to be aroused by them. If anything i'd argue a lot of men are more inclined to look at a qt3.14 than a blonde with 4kgs of ass.

The supervisor didn't argue about the intent behind the camera movement, which is the point of contention.

I accepted that after your first explanation. But if she isn't arguing for malicious intent, then she is arguing that the camera movement might lead people to think those things.

And if she isn't, then I don't know what she is saying. I can't think of other meanings for those words.

I don't know about leading people to think those things since no one views the first season of Friends in a cultural vacuum. It's more that it reinforces ideas of gender that are argued to exist in the wide range of examples implicated by the male gaze theory. We believe what we see, basically, except that a large part of 'what we see' in contemporary life is specifically produced as media. I don't think it's so crazy to believe that TV shows play a part in our enculturation. I see the opposite argument too, that TV producers shouldn't use media to suggest the middle ages had prevalent numbers of black people. It shouldn't matter, but media plays a large part in shaping our ideas of self and nature. We're not wholly rational.

And we also think things for what seems to be, to us, 'because we think them', i.e. we don't know from what source we have these ideas.

No, you are correct, it's definitely not far fetched to say that TV and movies and other forms of media play a role in our enculturation. And you might have a point if you can prove that the majority of ads and the like show women in positions like doggystyle or something like that.

However, I think that you need things to be fairly noticeably obvious for them to have an effect on people. Like, they might not notice it anyway, but it has to be a relatively major thing, I don't think you can really change people's minds trough small almost impossible to pick up things such as the ones mentioned in the Friends example. Especially as you said, while being affected by a million other factors, and if it does affect you, these other factors would change the result completely.

I would stick to the idea that the main factor in a person's development is environment and family. Everything else will only affect them within this context. Media can only have a major effect when you lack interaction with your family or surrounding people (which admittedly seems to be fairly common in western European and US societies, but I wouldn't know much about that).

I'd also like to add that most people just tune out ads nowadays. They're just white noise and they have to be very particular for people to pay attention to them. So the whole big brother comparison people liked to do during the early 2000s is kind of obsolete.

Arguing against equality in 2017 is like arguing against God in 1417.

The problem with that is we have supposedly moved on from he days of heretic hunts.

Even many private universities have contracts which protect academic freedom and the free speech of students Public universities are of course bound by law to honor such things.

I am not saying you can be dick, but even if you are it should not impact your grade unless you are disruptive.

A professor that doesn't like you can more than likely find an excuse to lower your grade if he wants to.

That's some kind of abstract academic hell you just pictured right there

I can't find my supervisor's paper on Friends (it might have been a dissertation, in which case, I have no hope of finding it), but I did find the video she showed me. It's called Killing Us Softly: [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Us_Softly]. Specifically, I watched the most recent 2010 version. It was like an hour long, and apparently it's locked behind a massive paywall, because it's for educators. So I can't find a link to the whole talk.

But I did find her 16-minute Tedx talk, which is basically an abbreviated version of her full-length talk, which you can watch here: [youtube.com/watch?v=Uy8yLaoWybk]. It can get pretty SJW at times, but you should be able to see the value in this kind of thought/research.

I highly recommend watching the whole thing to get a tight grasp on her argument, but if you can't be bothered to watch a whole 16-minute talk based on some random user's suggestion, I don't really blame you. The most fundamental demonstration of women's vs. men's portrayals in advertising goes from 5:43 to 8:37. And why it's a problem starts at 13:11 and goes to 14:23.

The main argument of the talk is more or less as I've stated. The way men and women (and especially women) are portrayed in media (and especially in advertisements) is unrealistic. This constant unrealistic imagery creates in people an exceptionally high expectation for themselves and of people of the other gender, which can lead to societal problems like depression or sexual violence. And since we see so much media on a daily basis, it's difficult to separate what's possible and what's unrealistic.

Just as a relatable example, think about white knights. Would they behave that way if there were not constant media portrayals of the chivalrous hero winning over the damsel in distress? The only way they learn to act like that is through media, whether or not the creators intended to influence peoples thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

They learn to be oppressed, and learn to hate cis wh*te males properly.

>& humantities

I hate women, this is why I take black cock loads in my ass.

Pretty funny to actually admit that equality is essentially the God of the 21st century West.

I rather not watch it because with a title like that I think I will come out of it a bit annoyed.

And I know this isn't your argument, so trying to press answers out of you is kind of pointless from my part, but still. It might be a problem for women who don't feel appropriate because of ads. But I don't see this having an effect on men, I mean, think of what men actually look for in women: They usually look for women who share their interests and passions. That's why "sport fangirls" and "nerdy girls" are trendy right now.

Sure, some, if not most men, like big butts and big tits, but that's hardly ever what they are looking for in a partner. And this is purely anecdotal, but in my experience, most men find the traditional bimbo model kind of repulsing. Especially if she's obviously using too much makeup, or has surgeries, or something like that. Men like women who are natural.
They might fuck an unnatural women, but they aren't looking for one to be their partner, except for a few exceptions. If this wasn't the case then most women wouldn't have a partner.

And about the white knight example...I'd have to imagine all of them have different reasons to act the way they do, and honestly even tho I laugh when people say they're just trying to get laid, I actually imagine that the majority of them truly believe in what they're saying and doing. Fuck, I believe most SJWs are pretty honest and well-intended, even if I believe their energies are being wasted on destructive activities.

>The way men and women (and especially women) are portrayed in media (and especially in advertisements) is unrealistic.

It's not unrealistic, because some people actually look like the people in advertisement in real life.

The question is why people want philosophical "leveling" to happen in advertisement; e.g why would you want pudgy, fat and uninteresting people on commercials, when that's the kind of people you see every day?

It's like wanting the Greeks to make statues of every day people, or wanting to read novels about people who work in a shoe factory.

But men are also portrayed with high expectations in all media because we all like to look up to our ideal selfs. Maybe there are more le funny fat guy than le funny fat women, but not in anyway compared to human ideal. Hell, in sitcoms even the loser types, lets say ross, are no where near average. The camera thing sounds bullshit and if it isn't, she probably is extrapolating and didn't do proper research on camerawork, because shots have some clear intent that go beyond politics.

Watched the first episode, and in 7:18 they follow Phoebe offscreen. This is bullshit of the highest calibre.

>And I know this isn't your argument, so trying to press answers out of you is kind of pointless from my part, but still.
Well, I mean, I still have my own thoughts on the matter, so I can offer those.

I'm interested in your experience of most men not preferring the unusually polished woman, if you will. I'd certainly say this is true for myself and my male friends. But I admit that my circle is not all circles. If all men liked weird girls, how could I possibly explain the existence of men who liked sorority girls? Not to be too fedora, but sorority girls are anti-weird.

I've only met one man who has ever admitted his desire for sorority girls to me, and he was a coworker. Another of my coworkers, a weird girl, hit on him every day. She was very attractive (to me), and just had a burning passion for him. So I asked him, why not go for it? He said he just doesn't like women like her, with short dyed hair and tattoos. He "only likes sorority girls." His words exactly.

They're out there. And I'd say that they're out there in large numbers, outside of the eyes of guys like you and me. Not because they're hiding, but because we just don't interact with them frequently.

Furthermore, the existence of weird girls does not necessarily mean they are not affected by this kind of media preference for unusually polished women. They may make the conscious choice to defy the expectations. Or they might think that shaving their legs frequently is bullshit, but still put on make-up daily. It's still influence.

And even though we're atypical men, we're not safe from the influence, either. Somehow, I've adopted a vitriolic disgust for fat people, particularly fat women. I can deal whose got her head hair and leg hair reversed. But if a woman is fat, it's like I can't even see her. And I have a huge preference for thin women, even unnaturally thin women. How could I say with confidence that I'm not being influenced by media portrayals of women?

It's a very specific form of study. In the workforce, it's only really useful for corporations working on selling to women and for government relations with women.
In education, the study works as supplemental to other fields. In a university, someone who's taken all levels of world and western history courses may take asian prehistory for example. The same applies to women's history.
Also this

...

...

>If it's anything like how philosophy courses are taught, the objective is more to learn what the prominent theories are, and respond to them, rather than the theories themselves being taught as objective facts.
From what I understand that is the ideal, but the kind of people who become professors for Women's Studies course tend not to be the most unbiased.