Chianti

Nope, I won't police my tone for you. And my response to you was perfectly civil.
 
However, when someone trots out the dim and anti-intellectual framework of evolutionary psychology to justify discrimination, or to justify dismissing other people's claims of experiencing discrimination, that doesn't exactly deserve some quiet and pleasing diplomatic response. I mean, it's evolutionary psychology. Sorry, but this is a forum for people devoted to higher education. Evolutionary psychology is going to get denounced for the bullshit that it is.
 
 
No one here said that the world is out to hurt everyone.
 
What people here have done, however, is dismiss others' experience with gender discrimination, telling them that they're imagining things, or they're seeing what they want to see, or making too big a deal of discrimination. At the same time, other people in this thread have voiced extraordinarily sexist sentiments. So as much as you want to argue that people here are simply making unsupported assumptions about the existence of gender bias in their everyday lives, the very content of this thread proves you wrong.
 
Additionally, if you think that my "vitriol"--or, in other words, my objection to people's dismissive attitudes--is the equivalent to the societal power imbalance that gender discrimination creates, you need to rethink some things. See telkanuru's post at the top of this page. I'll requote it quickly here: "You cannot balance the scales by adding inequality to one side as a counterweight to inequality on the other and achieve justice thereby. When someone provides an anecdote to illustrate how they felt injured, ignored, or discriminated against because of some inherent feature they happened to possess (race, sexual or gender identity), the correct response is not to provide a counter-anecdote which shows that you, too, have once been injured, ignored, or discriminated against."
 
 
To the best of my knowledge, no one called anyone evil. it's interesting, though, that that's what people hear when others call them on their sexism. To recap: "Hey, guess what, it's not cool to excuse male students for their bad behavior simply because the female TA is attractive. It's also not cool to say things like 'women are just more organized' and 'men are just more entertaining because of mating rituals.'" "You think people are EVIL. You're attacking me!"
 
No. That, my dear, is called derailing. 

What you've written here is just gender essentialism masquerading as the "hard truth" or "simple facts" and "basic biology." Women "in general" are "more organized and willing to go the extra mile to help others"? Gee, I wonder why that is. Moreover, do you want to cite a source for that? And the whole idea of needing to "protect" the special strengths and weaknesses of both genders smacks of paternalism.
 
Seriously, we're grad students. Can't we do any better than this post-feminist backlash biological determinism crap?

You should strongly consider UVA and UNC given your research interests. They're reaches for sure, but fantastic programs!

New Haven is pretty much New York. I mean, Connecticut really isn't a state so much as it is something one has to endure as one travels between NYC and Boston.

@jujubea You have earned admission to the programs of your choice. That achievement makes you intellectually respectable. However, your elation over your very successful application season may be getting the better of you.  
 
If you're going to chastise others for being "self righteous or entitled" you should think twice before jumping into a conversation geared towards historians, especially if you're going to admit that your POV is centered around matters of opinion ("I think the general belief is..." "That'd be my guess, in the absence of other info.")
 
Your success and your time on this BB do not make you a SME on the processes used by professional academic historians to hire other professional academic historians.

This is pretty much true of everything in these forums, haha.

Well since you want to make assumptions, I should say that some of these authors were ones I read in high school, and I actually have shared my reading list with different family and friends interested in learning more about certain subjects. For the most part, everyone is surprised by how readable academic historians can be. We don't need to spoon feed people stuff because they supposedly can't handle historical and critical thinking. That's doing everyone a disservice. I never argued that Zinn and Diamond aren't readable. I'm arguing from my own experience and I "can say for sure" that there certainly are scholarly works that are readable.

Just not necessarily in the positive sense 

I wish I had a slightly more insightful answer for why I like women's history, but actually, it was this book series: 
 

 
The American Girl books were great. Spunky, strong-minded girls in different time periods, getting up to all kinds of adventures? Sign me up. My favorite American girl was Kit, who was from 1930s Cincinnati and wanted to be a newspaper reporter. (I may or may not have pretended to be her.) 

It takes a bit of searching, but they do exist. I was unsure if I wanted a PhD in history, so I applied to terminal MA programs, and was offered full-funding from several. However, I now wish I'd gone to the MA/PhD program I had also applied to.

Just like "Americanist" is a synonym for "didn't want to do foreign language study"  

This thread is amazing.  I have nothing substantial to add beyond that. Also as a white, straight, middle-class man I'm baffled by this statement."I am concerned that white, straight, middle-class men have lost opportunity." Encouraging non white, straight, middle-class men to enter the academy is one the most important shifts in the last 20-30 years.  Diversity of viewpoints can only make the discipline stronger. There is opportunity enough to go around. 

I was once told: "if one of your acceptances is from a school in the top 20 then the decision has been made for you; if none of your acceptances are from a school in the top 20 then you should go where you will be happiest for the next 4-7 years."

We can argue over semantics, but in certain cases it is heavily dependent on subfield. When a program like MSU, ordinarily ranked in the 50s, is ranked in the top 5 for African history, that's a huge difference. That WILL affect your career prospects.

All I'm really suggesting here is that people know their subfield. Don't apply to places that are not strong in the field you want to work.

I just lost a whole post for no good reason whatsoever, so this is going to be more terse than I originally intended.
 
This is not tit for tat. You cannot balance the scales by adding inequality to one side as a counterweight to inequality on the other and achieve justice thereby. When someone provides an anecdote to illustrate how they felt injured, ignored, or discriminated against because of some inherent feature they happened to possess (race, sexual or gender identity), the correct response is not to provide a counter-anecdote which shows that you, too, have once been injured, ignored, or discriminated against. 
 
The correct response is to listen to that person's story and try to understand how their worldview differs from yours, why this might be the case, and how you might act in the future with their personal experience in mind.

No. 
 
I'm sorry, but that's not ok. It's exactly the kind of behavior that makes us feel like we are not being taken seriously. 

Just thought of this and I can't stop giggling. Sums up my semester though. 
 

Just thought of this and I can't stop giggling. Sums up my semester though. 
 

Just thought of this and I can't stop giggling. Sums up my semester though. 
 

Just thought of this and I can't stop giggling. Sums up my semester though. 
 

Bill O'Reilly...with the white hot intensity of a thousand burning suns.
(Points if you get the reference.  )

NETFLIX MARATHON.*
 
*not what I'm doing today, but what I love to do when I've finished a big project. What can I say? I live for excitement. Danger. Intrigue. 

I just want to pop in to defend the social sciences and dispute this implication that people in the "hard" sciences are smarter so going there would solve the problem.  Group discussions give people the opportunity to open their mouths and possibly look like idiots.  You might think that hard science students are more worthy of your time, but it could just be that in lecture-based classes they're not being given similar chances to demonstrate that many are, indeed, also morons.   [Assuming they're actually morons and we don't have an unskilled and unaware situation going on here...]
 
 
My practical advice is that if your advisor relationship is fine, stick with it and focus your outside-of-class time on the students whose contributions you enjoy. Grad school is more about the research than the classes anyway.

I meant the Fairly Oddparents! Haha 

+1 Fairly Oddparents
 
But maybe you meant Shakespeare, in which case I've shown off my immaturity level.