Feminism

[slapdash21]

skewed has a 'k' in it.

i honestly believe that the man does have a role of protector and not just in the literal sense. in the literal sense, the man protects the family if, say, someone breaks into the house. but also the man has the responsibility of providing the dominant emotional and financial support. its ok if the woman provides the financial support, thats the least important, but the man still should have a feeling of being the 'man of the house' in all other senses.

[wolfpac444]

i honestly believe that the man does have a role of protector and not just in the literal sense. in the literal sense, the man protects the family if, say, someone breaks into the house. but also the man has the responsibility of providing the dominant emotional and financial support. its ok if the woman provides the financial support, thats the least important, but the man still should have a feeling of being the 'man of the house' in all other senses.

Why? Where did this notion come from? Why is it one that should be supported? Why does there have to be a single person providing "dominant emotional and financial support"? It is almost ridiculous to even discuss "dominant emotional support" outside of concrete situations.

If you want to "man of the house' in your idealized world, then go ahead. But, I definitely don't want to be and wouldn't want to force or expect that of anyone else.

[Off-topic: Peter, "it's" and "that's" both contain apostrophes in them, but that is beside the point. I try not to make such a big deal about spelling / grammar / capitalization mistakes (especially in this forum as it avoids the topic at hand). Everyone makes typos once in awhile -- especially me when I am studying scew fields ;-]

[Tsiangkun]

*puts on the rightwinger cloak and cap*

One only needs to look to nature to find evidence of natural preferences of a role to play in society. Generally these roles are divided along gender lines with some frequency of crossing gender to perform a role being noted as natural. God is infallible, and as such, does not make mistakes. Therefore we can determine that these differences in role are the natural correct way.

I think the feminist movement has become too caught up in taking over the male role in society, and not enough effort has been focused on the very important role females played in the stability of our society. Equal rights are right, but equal roles is a deviation from the natural order.

[slapdash21]

right on.

*puts on the rightwinger cloak and cap*

i guess im one-dimensional, but thats the only cloak and cap i have

[Tsiangkun]

But what if . . . *puts on my left wing conspiracist attire *

Imagine there is a core group of people who control the world. They hold the wealth that buys the policies that keep them in controll in all the major countries around the world. Lets call these people the havits. Who cares about democracy, they own who ever comes into "power".

Imagine there is a plot to disrupt anything that could ever grow into a force that could destroy their stranglehold on the world.

Imagine there is no liberal media, but instead is a myth of a liberal media being propagated to hide information damaging to the havits. Imagine that any voice going against the grain is immediately twisted to create fear and anger at the voices from outside the "allowed" speach rhetoric.

Imagine this group uses the media to twist anything that disrupts, or potentially disrupts the flow of information it uses to maintane their position.

Maybe the images of the left presented are not images of the left. Perhaps they are images of how the havits want you to see the left. Maybe 500000 people did have somehting to say, but what they had to say was not in favor to the establishment of the havits, thusly it was replaced with images of violence and vandalism.

Maybe not all feminists are the shrill man haters that spew on and on about the detrimental effects of a patriachal paradigm, and how everything related to the male is the work of satan. Maybe most feminist are like everyone else in the country who just want to be who they are, without having to defend themselves or the choices they make. Maybe the havits use the image projected by radical feminist spokes peoples to bring about fear of change and each other. Maybe the whole movement has been co-opted as a way to destroy the stability of society and thus prevent any sort of mobilization against the havits.

And Yes, nature does illustrate that beyond sex differences, there are in fact gender differences. I would be suspect of any theory advocating a philosophy based solely on intelligence and rational understanding. Nature does what is right, by definition, without the need for intelligence and discussion on the correct way to be. I think this is what most of us are fighting for, the right to be who we are without having to think about having to justify ourselves and our decisions to anyone else.

So Maybe, women don't want to be men. Just maybe, the havits use the media to convince us that women want to be men, keeping the people fragmented and fighting amongst ourselves over little issues. Maybe if we celebrated our differences and let people be who they are, we could learn to appreciate how much more alike we are than different. Maybe then we could begin to make a serious stab at the havits hold on the world and the inequality the havits propagate.

[junkyardjew]

man, you guys are really depressing

I think the feminist movement has become too caught up in taking over the male role in society, and not enough effort has been focused on the very important role females played in the stability of our society

you've got to get out into the real world and experience the full range of interpersonal relationships. you can't push people into little boxes and say "men do this - women do that". even in 'traditional' marriages it's never that clear cut - and if it is, it's often because the relationship is either pysically or emotionally abusive.

the idea that women might be naturally better at childcare or men better at 'providing' for the familly is ludicrous and baseless. 'women' as a group and 'men' as a group cannot be defined and categorized as easily as that.

that being said, if a woman wants to escape from the sexist gender roles assigned to her, she has a lot of trouble because of people who think like you. if you have to work twice as hard to impress a boss that you're competent because he has a preconcieved notion that women are weaker or less skilled than men, than you're less likely to succeed.

That's what the women's movement is trying to achieve: an end to discrimination based on sex. look at it this way - nobody thinks that rascism is a good thing right? black kids still get a second class education in a lot of american schools, and can't afford a post-secondary education so they can't get good jobs so they aren't the boss, so they can't hire other black people, so more kids grow up in slums and don't have a good education.

this is a systematic repression that is still rampant in the united states, and it's a terrible injustice. well, the same thing is and has been happening to women, but because people still believe that 'women and men have different roles to fulfill' it's passed off as 'nature' and not gross discrimination.

The think about the internet is that I have no idea what anybody else is like. I don't know how old you are or what you do, but I think you should think long and hard about how you treat the women around you, and how they are treated by society. I think you might be appalled by what you see if you think about it.

[Tsiangkun]

the idea that women might be naturally better at childcare or men better at 'providing' for the familly is ludicrous and baseless.

*slips on the moderate conservative Armbands of miscommunication*

But it's been well studied that women are better than men at detecting and understanding non-verbal communication signals. Something that would seem to suggest a gender specific enhancement in dealing with non-verbal communications. Perhaps this could be useful for those first few years when children aren't particularly gifted with the vernacular of the culture.

It's also well accepted that the physiology of a woman is naturally better at carrying a child for two thirds of a year, and then has the ability to nurse a child after the birth.

I'm not saying women should be in the kitchen bare foot and pregnant, or that the role they should play is care taker, childraiser, homemaker, etc. I'm saying it's real-ludacris-taculating to think that there is no natural preference for certain roles. I think that's it's anti female to suggest that they are not better equiped to handle childcaring. Probably more insulting than saying a women can't perform the job of any type of professional man. You can't deny that when most kids are hurt, they want mom.

[slapdash21]

science tells us that women have a better instinct to nurture than men do, and thats why, as Tsiangkun said, children tend to run towards their mom. the mom is known as the nurturing one (its starts partly because the mother has a special connection with the baby because of the birthing and nursing)

(off-topic...i must say, tsia, you play the conservative pretty well...it almost sounds like, based on your post, that you would be against homosexual marriages...)

[Tsiangkun]

February 20, 2005-=-Summers Falls In Winter's Spring
-=-Fred Reed

It seems that Larry Summers, a timid man mysteriously president of Harvard,
has suggested that men might be better than women at mathematics. He has been
beset by the fanged mouselets of academe, and is now busily cringing like a
puppy who has wet the rug. We must not mention what the correct do not want
to hear.

Yet maybe we should. Let us reflect on differences between the sexes:

Men are taller, heavier, stronger, more durable, and more enduring. They have
higher erythrocyte counts, greater cardiac volume, build muscle faster with
exercise, and are more strongly constructed. All of this is perfectly well
known scientifically, having been studied to death by exercise physiologists.
It tracks with daily observation, with athletic records, with attempts by the
military to train women as soldiers (they are much weaker and have many more
injuries in training). It is why you dont see women in the NFL, why the
sexes have separate athletic teams. On the other hand, women live longer.

Intellectually the differences are more complex, but equally well known among
people who study such things. Men are distinctly better in mean
mathematical-logical-spatial reasoning, and either very slightly ahead or
very slightly behind in mean verbal ability.

Crucial here is what in mathematics is called a distribution. In comparing
two groups, the meanaveragetells only part of the story. To see this,
consider an imaginary group of fifty women, all having an IQ of exactly 100.
Their average IQ is 100. Now consider a group of fifty men, half of whom have
IQs of zero, and half of whom have IQs of 200. The average IQ also is 100but
you would expect very different performance.

The way the human distribution works is that as you move toward the extremes
of intelligence, both high and low, men increasingly predominate. Again, this
is well known. At the highest and lowest ranges of intelligence, you find
almost entirely men. The effect is stark in math, less so but inescapable in
verbal ability. It shows up on every known test of mental capacity. It is why
there are almost no female Nobelists in the mathematical sciences, and no
world champions in chess. It is the glass ceiling. It is also much of why
the prisons are full of men: the stupid tend to end up as criminals, and
there are many more truly stupid men than truly stupid women.

All of this is well known and heavily documented.

Psychologically the differences between the sexes are fuzzy and less easily
quantified. On the other hand, they are obvious. Women are more emotional
than men, less aggressive, more interested in people and less interested in
abstractions and machinery.

This, plus the difference in mathematical ability, explains the paucity of
women in engineering and physics, and their high numbers in professions that
involve caring for or dealing with people. They are neither particularly good
at physics, nor very interested. Why then would you expect to find them
there?

The aggressiveness of men explains why they find war fascinating, quickly
look for military solutions, love to study weaponry, glorify martial
exploits, and have through all history fought war after war after war. It is
biological. It is how men are.

A great deal of human behavior is biologically determinedor, if you prefer,
the consequence of human nature. A combination of stupidity and
aggressiveness is conducive to violent crime. What characteristically do you
find in prisons? Stupid, aggressive men. ( One line removed here is the
extent of my editiing) Why are bar fights always between men? Why does a man
going into a tough town get challenges from men and not women? Why do the
challenges diminish when the interloper is too old to be a sexual competitor?

It is difficult to imagine that Larry Summers, president of Harvard, isnt
aware of all of this. In fact, it is difficult to imagine that anyone isnt
at least vaguely aware of it.

The intelligence of men at the high end, plus their assertiveness and their
interest in machines and in building things, is responsible for most of
civilization. The male desire to fight, as innate as a dogs desire to pee on
hydrants, is a most hideously destructive phenomenon. The question for
civilization is how to harness the horsepower of men for useful purposes
without letting them engage in their preferred sports: butchery, burning, the
sacking of cities, and armed robbery.

This is tricky because testosterone has no moral component. Men are happy
spending long hours designing a robotic surgical suite to save lives, or
working together in groups to send men to the moon. They are equally happy
designing a new and better tank, or in bombing cities. Building the Parthenon
and burning Hamburg enchant them equally. How to encourage the one while
discouraging the other?

Men can be civilized at the local or neighborhood level. Well-bred and
preferably educated males, whether in Switzerland, Fukuoka, or the white
suburbs of Washington, go to work, invent things, try to better the world,
and only very occasionally kill each other. Boys, if raised to be gentlemen,
usually will be. Of course this only works if women are ladies. It comes down
to a societys instilling, and insisting on, high standards of behavior.
Dueling should be discouraged.

At the global level, things are more difficult. The male readiness to think
in terms of abstractions makes the world a chess game. Combativeness easily
trumps morality. It is men, not women, who fantasize about nuking China.
Given that almost all countries raise armies and train them to fight, it is
to be expected that they will want to. The unprincipled tend to rise to
power. I suppose the best hope is that countries will become sufficiently
integrated with each other, as Western Europe seems to have done, that
fighting just doesnt seem attractive. Probably a long shot.

Meanwhile we might all be happier if women stopped trying to be what they
arent, and men tried to stop being what they are, if you get my drift.

[habitat]

with all of this talk of equal rights of men and women, where is the inequality at? I see men and women work at every place I go (except victoria's secret ) They get paid the same amount of $$$ for the same job (people that I have talked to, minimum wage for most of my friends guys and girls ) and I don't see a single thing in my life that would constitute inequality in rights between man and women.

Do I just live in a "perfect world"? I have never seen anything but equality in men and women. Am I the only one? Is this on a more professional level here or something? Is there "women only" "men only" bathrooms still?


Now what about BlackEntertainmentTeleveision?

[Moxie]

with all of this talk of equal rights of men and women, where is the inequality at? I see men and women work at every place I go... They get paid the same amount of $$$ for the same job...and I don't see a single thing in my life that would constitute inequality in rights between man and women.

Do I just live in a "perfect world"? I have never seen anything but equality in men and women...

From the US Dept. of Labor:
"By 1998, however, women's earnings were approximately three-quarters those of men."
http://www.bls.gov/opub/ils/pdf/opbils30.pdf

Try checking out some stuff on Walmart. Currently, they're involved in the largest private civil rights lawsuit in U.S. history -which represents as many as 1.6 million current and former female employees - because of the alleged unfair pay and because the higher you look in the company, the fewer women you see working in those higher positions. There are other examples, I'm sure, but Walmart is the easiest to quote:

"Judge Martin Jenkins found that the plaintiffs presented largely uncontested statistics that "women are paid less than men in every region, pay disparities exist in most job categories, that the salary gap widens over time and that the higher one looks in the organization, the lower the percentage of women." "

"...women make up the majority (60 percent) of low-wage workers."

" Dukes v. Wal-Mart alleges that women earn on average $1,400 less than men per year"

I have experiences sexual discrimination in the work place, and know others who have as well. It exists, and it's still a problem.

________________
Emily Kulczyk

"Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up."

[habitat]

so what your saying is the women have more lower paying jobs, therefore make less money than the men (walmart)? That sounds logical to me.

Or a women and a man hold the same position and the woman gets paid less?

I would think depending on the region, it would be correct to assume that two of the same jobs in different parts of the country would get paid differently, with taxes and other things. I think it would be hard to prove something like that "in a court of law"

[habitat]

sorry to double post, but damn, where is the edit button? please just look over my previous post and look at this



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sorry

[Moxie]

Happy International Women's Day, March 8th.

______________
Emily Kulczyk

"There is nothing in the world so frightening as ignorance in action." - Helen Keller

[junkyardjew]

I think it would be hard to prove something like that "in a court of law"

I know i'm a little late on this, but the whole point of the enormous lawsuit against walmart is that it's EASY to prove in a court of law. thus the "largely uncontested" statistics.

I know it may seem weird to you, clearly having been indoctrinated to believe that everything is fine (ever notice how the people who've never suffered from discrimination are more likely to think it doesn't exist? I wonder why that is...) but women DO get paid less to do the same job, and women generally DO have the jobs that pay less.

I've worked in a lot of shitty factories and warehouses, and generally women work jobs that are just as hard, if not harder than the men, but get paid up to four dollars an hour less. I've worked temp jobs where my employer has asked me not to disclose my salary to the female workers, because then they would try and fight for a higher wage (i was getting ten dollars an hour to do something they were getting eight dollars an hour to do - why? because men can shop around for a labour job that pays more, and women get screwed everywhere).

[slapdash21]

yes...women do get screwed...everywhere.

um yeah. to make this post semi-relevent...i think pay should depend solely on performance, and if that means equality, fine. and if thats not how it is, it should be fixed. *shrug*

[Moxie]

i think pay should depend solely on performance, and if that means equality, fine.

I don't understand why you phrased it that way. Why wouldn't you just say "I believe in equality. Pay should depend solely on performance" or something like that?

_______________
Emily Kulczyk

"And how, you ask, are we to walk the spiritual path?
We answer: say little; love much; judge no man; aspire to all that is pure and good- and keep on keeping on."
--The Quiet Mind, Sayings of White Eagle

[slapdash21]

because, its obvious that men and women ARENT equal in all ways, and im not even positive of how much difference in pay there is...i have seen little or no proof. long story short...men and women are indeed different.

[junkyardjew]

you've "seen little or no proof" because you don't want to look. have you googled women's salary distribution compared to men? Or are you saying that in all the jobs you've worked (and i'm sure you worked lots, right? and you've asked the women you work with what they make, and what their friends make? and compared that to the salary of men you know?) how about this UN Platform for Action Committee article as proof:

How much are women paid?
While women make up nearly 40% of the global paid workforce, they earn only 26% of the world's income.1 In Canada, women earn an average of 72 cents for every dollar that a man earns.
Female-dominated professions in general are valued much lower than male-dominated professions. Child care workers are paid on par with parking lot attendants, plumbers earn more than nurses.
Men outnumber women in each of the ten highest paid occupations in Canada while women outnumber men in all but one of the ten lowest paid occupations in Canada.
In both the highest and lowest paid occupations in Canada, women in these occupations earn less than men in the same occupation. For example, female food and beverage servers earn 76% of what male servers earn while female dentists earn 66% of what male dentists earn.

So you don't think that men and women are equal at everthing. Boy, that's a surprise. And do you think that because women and men don't have the same abilities in all areas, more women should be poor than men?

Recent statistics show that, using Statistics Canada's Low-Income Cut-Offs (LICOs) as a measurement of poverty, 17.9 percent of Canadians live in poverty4. In 1995, 57 percent of all persons living in low-income situations in Canada were women.

(link)

And both of these studies are just about Canada. Canada!!! arguably one of the best places to live in the world. Now you explain to me why this makes sense, in light of the 'inherent differences between men and women'.

[Tsiangkun]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0405-23.htm

I've run into this before . . . seems to be some type of evangelical street justice, not cool at all.