Men Are Sabotaging The Online Reviews Of TV Shows Aimed At Women (fivethirtyeight.com)

FiveThirtyEight has an interesting article today which accuses men of sabotaging the online reviews of TV shows aimed at women. The publication cites an example of "Sex and the City", a show which apparently won plenty of awards and ran for many years on TV, getting hammered by males on IMDb. Compared to women, who amounted to 60% of the people who rated the show with an average of 8.1, men gave it a 5.8 rating. It's not an isolated case, FiveThirtyEight says, citing several other instances where the male audience has downvoted shows aimed at women audience. From the article: The shows with the largest proportion of male raters are mostly sports, video game web series, science fiction and cartoons. The programs with the highest proportion of female voters are -- at least the American ones -- mostly from The CW and Freeform, the new name of the network previously called ABC Family. This list is pretty hilarious. Beyond the top 25, shown in the table above, male-dominated shows of note include: "Blue Mountain State" (92 percent male), "Batman: Beyond" (91 percent), "Batman: The Animated Series" (90 percent), "The Shield" (90 percent), "Ballers" (90 percent), "Justice League" (90 percent), and "The League" (88 percent). "Star Trek: Enterprise" is the most male-heavy of the various official live-action Trek enterprises, while "Battlestar Galactica" still managed to grab 15 percent of its ratings from women, which is somewhat shocking. For women, other skewed programming includes "Private Practice" (71 percent female), "Gossip Girl" and "Gilmore Girls" (67 percent each), "Grey's Anatomy" (60 percent), "Scandal" (60 percent), and "One Tree Hill" (59 percent).

Comments

Re:Maybe they just don't like the shows?

[Your.Master]

You didn't read the article.

The difference is that when men don't like shows that are aimed at women, they apparently rate the show, but when women don't like shows that are aimed at men, they don't rate the show. There are shows popular with men and unpopular with women, and vice-versa, and the latter get way more "wrong-gender" votes. No particular reason was proposed as to why this is. The call to action was to recognize that single-number rating systems obscure important details in general.

Re:Strong enough for a man, made for a woman

[ProfBooty]

TV is female centric. Check out viewing numbers. Men only watch sports and fox's sunday night lineup, just about everything else on network tv heavily skews female by a wide margin.

Re:Strong enough for a man, made for a woman

[david_thornley]

TFS listed several shows that have a 90% male audience, and none that had a 90% female audience. I wouldn't expect anyone to RTFA, but I thought it was reasonable to RTFS.

Seems biased

[dotslashdot]

"Sabotoging" means deliberately destroying something. The author failed to provide any basis that men want to deliberately destroy programming for women and overcome the glaringly obvious reason men voted against certain shows: they disliked the program. In fact, the article dismisses all men's opinion by calling it "sabotage" rather than a valid expression of their feelings. Men may dislike shows depicting guys as the bumbling idiots often portrayed in shows targeting women. Rather than blame men for their vote, the author should encourage women to vote, or ask why such shows portray men that way.

Re:Sabotaging?

[ScentCone]

So you're suggesting that social justice is an undesirable thing? Or just that allowing oneself to be labeled as a crusader for it is unacceptable?

*sigh*

No. The point is that the people who carry on in this way are generally over-wrought, pretentious idiots that don't understand what the word "justice" actually means, but consider themselves to be passionate warriors for their nebulous cause because they tweet with some magic hashtags. They aren't "fighting" for anything, but they do get their feelings hurt for all the wrong reasons about all the wrong things.

Yes, "social justice" (as the term is used by its shrill priesthood, most of whom make careers out of getting paid to manufacture phony injustice that only they can solve through being paid to blog about it) IS an undesirable thing. Because it's not at all about justice, it's about faux grievances and misplaced senses of entitlement.

Re:Strong enough for a man, made for a woman

[iCEBaLM]

Actually, I think you don't understand Gamergate because it started with a jilted and angry ex-boyfriend's complaints about his game designer girlfriend's cheating ways. There was an accusation of sex traded for reviews, but there was never any evidence to support the accusation, not even superficially, since there was no such review.

Yep, absolutely no evidence at all.

In practice, that seems to be the same thing, in that most of the GameGaters that I've seen go ballistic over anyone saying anything even the slightest bit negative about their favourite games.

There are extremists in everything unfortunately. I personally don't give a shit how someone reviews a game, as long as it's factual and simply opinion. Trying to make an entire community conform to whiny, lying, bitches however is where I draw the line.

Lets not forget that Depression Quest was barely even a game.

Meanwhile... BSG is "somewhat shocking"...

[denzacar]

Cause its audience is supposedly up to 15% female. And that's shocking.
Cause it is clearly a show "aimed at males". So women have nothing to do with such a show, and apparently, should avoid it in favor for shows "made for women".

What? Strong female what? Characters? You mean Starbuck is a girl? And president is a girl?
And a bunch of cylons are girls, one of them portrayed by Xena?
Ah! But I forgot. It is SciFi!
Which means it's automagically "for boys" and not "for girls".

Good job explaining that there. Women shouldn't meddle in things that are not their concern.
Stick with soap operas about shopping and finding Mr. Right. Or Mr. Big. Or the right shoes.
And let's just disregard the fact that apart from "Ballers" and "Blue Mountain State", which are both not shows for men but for sportsball jocks, and which both have quite a lower rating both by men and women - women grade "male shows" similarly to how men do.

In fact... "Ballers" is the only show mentioned that women like less than "Private Practice". Barely. By 0.2 points.
They more like every other "male show" mentioned.
They like "Gossip Girl" less than any Batman show. And none of them have "girl" in the title. And they are all CARTOONS. From two decades ago.
And women only like "Batman Beyond" (out of animated Batman shows) LESS than "Sex and the City". By 0.1 points.

Could it be that this is the case of cherry picking?

"Female shows", male votes, male score; female votes, female score, score difference:
Gilmore Girls - Males 17130 7.3; Females 34638, 8.5, 1.2
Scandal - Males 15678, 7.3; Females 23146, 8.3, 1.0
Grey's Anatomy - Males 52515, 6.9; Females 79175, 8.3, 1.4
Sex and the City - Males 27631, 5.8; Females 39410, 8.1, 2.3
One Tree Hill - Males 19575, 7.1; Females 28637, 8.1, 1.0
Gossip Girl - Males 31125, 6.7; Females 64088, 7.8, 1.1
Private Practice - Males 4634, 5.7; Females 11156, 7.1, 1.4

"Male shows", male votes, male score; female votes, female score:
Battlestar Galactica - Males 84715 , 8.8; Females 15521, 8.7, 0.1
Batman: The Animated Series - Males 38196, 9.0; Females 4032, 8.6, 0.4
Justice League - Males 19039, 8.6; Females 2228, 8.3, 0.3
The Shield - Males 41769, 8.8; Females 4737, 8.1, 0.7
The League - Males 27117, 8.3; Females 3577, 8.0, 0.3
Batman Beyond - Males 13466, 8.1; Females 1375, 8.0, 0.1
Blue Mountain State - Males 29078, 8.5; Females 2631, 7.6, 1.1
Star Trek: Enterprise - Males 21473, 7.5; Females 3427, 7.4, 0.1
Ballers - Males 10309 7.5; Females 1201, 6.9, 0.6

But wait. What about arguably THE manliest shows ever?

Band of Brothers - Males 164067, 9.6; Females 16053, 9.5, 0.1
The Pacific - Males 53467, 8.3; Females 4193, 8.4, 0.1
The Sopranos - Males 134921, 9.3; Females 18200, 8.8, 0.5
The A-Team - Males 18727, 7.6; Females 2869, 7.4, 0.2

What about simply the bestest shows evar?

Band of Brothers - Males 164067, 9.6; Females 16053, 9.5, 0.1
Planet Earth - Males 70632, 9.5; Females 9958, 9.5, 0.0
Breaking Bad - Males 559396, 9.5; Females 104158 9.3, 0.2
Game of Thrones - Males 596473, 9.5; Females 162356 9.4, 0.1
The Wire - Males 135691, 9.4; Females 16281, 9.0, 0.3
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey - Males 38626, 9.3; Females 4978, 9.4, 0.1
"Cosmos - Males 14761 9.3; Females 1519, 9.2, 0.1
etc. etc.

Hmm... is it just me... or is there a much lower number of women voting on imdb, even on shows they like, whenever it is not a "female show"?
Also... Looks to me that women tend to like "male shows" more or as much as they like "female shows".
While those average male votes are IN THE WORST CASE only 2.3 points lower. ~1.2 - 1.3 points on average.
That does not look like much of a male conspiracy to !SABOTAGE! "female shows"... or even trying that hard to dislike.

Meanwhile, women on average dislike "male

Re:Strong enough for a man, made for a woman

[PaulRivers10]

The whole gamergate thing was predicated on an effort to stop the production of 'male oriented' games.

Nope. It was started by a man (a misogynist man, at that). A man started making a huge stink because he was dumped by his girlfriend, and accused her of sleeping with everyone to get good reviews for her woman-aimed games. The MRA misogynists all hopped on the band wagon, siding with the lying ex, and woman came to rally for the game designer who was slandered. Are you sure we are talking about the same gamergate?

That's funny, the Gamergate I remember is where a bunch of manipulative dominating feminists tried to tell gamers that game developers weren't supposed to be allowed to do anything in their games that feminists didn't approved of. They created a bunch of absurdly wrong videos, and started a whole group based on lying and manipulating. Gamergate in response was a guy accusing his ex-girlfriend who had clearly cheated on him and lied to him of sleeping with game reviewers for good reviews. Which got a lot of support from people tired of the feminist controlling dominating b.s., some of whom also went on to create their own lying manipulating b.s. in response against feminists. That's the Gamergate I remember, at best it was one lying manipulating group of feminists against a lying manipulating group of men - but those men only showed up in response to attacks by feminists, they didn't start it off.

Re:Strong enough for a man, made for a woman

[PopeRatzo]

Gamergate as said by another was corruption in game reviews.

Nah. It started because some cuck was upset that his girlfriend liked someone else better and it set off a collective howl of protest from a group of young men who've never touched a woman.

In August 2014, Eron Gjoni, Quinn's former boyfriend, published the "Zoe Post", a 9,425-word blog post that quoted from personal chat logs, emails, and text messages to describe their relationship. The post, described as "a rambling online essay" in The New York Times,[7] complained, among other things, that Quinn entered a romantic relationship with Nathan Grayson, a journalist for the Gawker Media video game website Kotaku.[8][9][10] According to Zachary Jason of Boston magazine, Gjoni deliberately crafted the post to resonate with members of the gaming community he "knew were passionately predisposed to attacking women in the industry".[11] The post was linked on 4chan, where some erroneously claimed the relationship had induced Grayson to publish a favorable review of Depression Quest. Grayson had never reviewed Quinn's games and Grayson's only article for Kotaku mentioning her was published before their relationship began.[12][13][14][15]

But that's ancient history. The GamerGate movement ended over a year ago, and its membership has been scattered to MRA websites and the Donald Trump campaign.