Born under a bad sign? Or just woke up in a nasty mood?
NOW is an organization aimed at personal profit and progress - not equal oppurtunity
Actually, according to some, that
is equal opportunity.
Take an old, basic difference between Democrats and Republicans that runs all the way back to the Federalists and the anti-Federalists.
What is freedom?
The left says it's freedom to speak, think, worship, and live as an individual.
The right says it's freedom to accumulate wealth.
While I do think that NOW, even more so than ACLU, opens its mouth when it shouldn't, the measure of equality as profit and progress is a long-standing American debate.
How about how it's now socially acceptable to make fun of Calista Flockheart and such for being too skinny yet we musn't say a bad word about that overweight woman on Law/Order.
It is insensitive, but it's also not as simple an issue as that.
Would you make fun of someone for looking funny because they were born with a birth defect?
Would you make fun of someone who cut their hair really weird because they thought it would be cool?
The obese person may or may not be genetically predetermined for obesity.
The mega-skinny, even the neurotic skinny, are overemphasizing a choice.
I would no more make fun of a person for being born with a predisposition to obesity than I would make fun of an albino because he was born with red or pink eyes. But if someone chooses to obsess themselves with superficial appearance-politics (e.g. getting skinny) I'm going to make fun of that choice and its thorough shallowness.
When it progresses to anorexia or other eating disorders, one must aim that amusement toward something happier.
But someone who simply
is obese does not deserve the kind of ridicule we rightly award to someone who makes their appearance so important. I personally think that if the "beautiful people" were destroyed or taken away tomorrow, the world might have a better shot.
And that's an interesting stat on child support. Maybe we should fix that disparity then, and institute the common-sense policy of non-discrimination, in this case "equal pay for equal work"?
And as to that poem
Thor posted ... I can't help but wonder what issues that poet has with his/her mother.
Just a few notes:
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Work too hard: Men built that economic system. Why should they whine about it? Perhaps if men didn't want to be the center of the family's financial power, they shouldn't have set it up that way.
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Boring job, bad pay: Such as? You mean like my female counterpart at my last job with more experience and, technically, a higher title, who still made exactly 15.7%
less than I did?
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Promotions: I won't pretend that some minorities and women are getting a bit of an advantage. But I'll say to white men--
You made your bed, now lie in it. Or, as my grandfather used to joke,
Those who fart in church must sit in their own pew. I made my company promote someone else, a woman, once, instead of me. I pointed out that she was more qualified on paper, demonstrably more organized in her work habits, and actually
wanted the job. Apparently my qualification was that I was a man and could therefore allegedly do the job better. That and apparently people thought I was charming. In fact, when I finally did take over that job, I found out why the one I supported eventually quit. But the fact is that she was still better at the job than I was. People were, for some reason, anxious to promote me on that count. Yes, it would have been favoritism. I'm a man with long hair, a glittering smile, and who can double-talk upset customers like nobody's business. Sure, I did the job okay, but I never actually
did anything. Once I was in the position, all I did was smile and double-talk and flip my hair to distract distressed customers. People were more peaceful during that period of my stewardship than at any other period preceding it. But absolutely
nothing of substance got done, a danger I warned them about the first
and second time. But I have the unique experience of direct comparison in my own workplace.
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Crying: Again, men made their own bed on this one. This is a standard set by men. If anything, it implies that "men can't win" because they're too busy defeating themselves.
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Decisions: Depends on the decision. How can my decision to get lemonade at the store be considered chauvinist? Only paranoid gender-warriors would bother at that point. What do those decisions pertain to? It's merely a cheap slogan invented that sounds rather as if it was invented by a guy who got sent to jail for beating up his wife after she decided something against his will.
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Domination/favor: Depends on what you're asking. Anal sex or the opera? After watching my partner cook for ten people on an occasion that I wish to have a party, the least I can do is sit through a paid dinner at a nice restaurant because she wants me to meet the people from her work.
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Vain/slob: I know very few "fitness freaks" who do it for their health. I know some people who like to keep themselves in shape, and they're not particularly vain. But the "fitness freaks" are definitely vain. Think of it in terms of a woman who goes to the gym, tones her body, wears skimpy clothes, and then gets pissed because people look at her as delicious. Think of it in terms of a guy who goes to the gym, eats no normal food, and can't stop talking about himself. I'm an outsider here; I do very little to keep in shape, but have never, ever again weighed as much as I did during my senior year of high school.
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Flowers: Perhaps it's a matter of social expectation.
Such ideas have merit if we presume that the culture starts today.
Look around as if life is a freeze-frame.
The couplets sound nice, even relevant.
But I find it a little like bully theory. "Men" (as such) could beat up on whomever they wanted, but as soon as someone nailed them cleanly in the public arena ... they cry for their mommies.
I had a similar discussion with a friend about black & white in the US. It turns out that it's a bigoted discrimination against white people to prevent them from maintaining a balance of wealth. Sitting at a table with people complaining about minorities "stealing jobs", none at the table except the black man could say that they had ever lost a job based on race or gender. When the nice, white police officer lets the drunk white lady drive home, it's apparently because she's "charming". When the nice, white police officer arrests a black man for avoiding an impact when someone else runs a light ...? The thing is that most of the people I know who complain about "reverse discrimination", or who bear "Angry Male Syndrome" or any such divisive identity politic, the only people I know are talking about theory. In fact, I can think of one anti-discrimination friend of mine who rejects ethnically-based college scholarships as an idea. When put to him, though, he will express that he fully deserved the scholarship that he got because of his ethnicity.
White men, at least, have made their bed. They are the thing that keeps feminism relevant and necessary.
When men get over themselves, then we can start expecting that the bulwarks against that arrogance will come down.
I don't get it with discriminatory situations.
• Northern Ireland: Will the British ever apologize? No. How many times should the Irish apologize for getting beaten, killed, robbed, raped, and abused by the Crown through history?
•_40 Acres and a Mule: Will American "whites" ever make things right? The only way to make things right, say the white American apologists, is if we end all discrimination now and let human conscience rule, conveniently crushing at least a generation of black and hispanic-Americans with no guarantee that at the end of the period people will have adopted any better regard for one another. Why should we have to sacrifice a generation of other people's children just so we can feel comfortable in "fixing" the situation?
• Islam vs. West: It's a hard situation, but nothing is going to happen until the West recognizes the legitimacy of many Islamic-world complaints about the West. Oh, that Ayatollah ... such a bad guy, right? Except that the US helped support his predecessor's nightmare regime that trampled human rights, civil rights, and Islamic principle. But we're not going to stop doing that to the Islamic world until Muslims apologize for being there to exploit.
•_"It's her fault": Domestic abuse, rape, extramarital affairs by a husband ... it's all the woman's fault, isn't it? She's not a good enough wife? Didn't stay home barefoot and devoted and pregnant like a good woman should? Didn't stay silent in church like the Bible says they should?
You know, it's the year 2002. People need to learn that the
aggressors need to apologize. The British need to apologize to the Irish, the Whites need to make a sincere apology to the blacks in the US, the Americans need to apologize to a number of peoples in Central America, South America, the Middle East and the Orient. Men need to apologize to women for the beatings, the rapes, and the general reduction of women to livestock.
Because the British are frustrated at the Irish resistance. The Americans never understood why there were reds in Central America or how it is a Muslim might have different values than a Judeo-Christian American. Anyone familiar with the term "Jim Crow laws"? Anyone wonder why the "inferior" minority races had such a hard time bringing themselves up to standard? Because
white Americans wouldn't let them! And men: what, we still want the madonna and the whore? And also the hostess and maid?
We pretend we're advanced, but we behave as humans as if we were bonobos. There's just a lot of bells and whistles that convince us we're actually doing something new.
I'm quite tired of people picking on feminism when so little consideration is given to what it opposes. Certes, feminist groups may have the wrong solutions at hand, but there is a difference indeed 'twixt saying that the idea proposed is wrong and saying that feminism is wrong. What, does one misguided, child-exploiting idiot in California mean that "atheism" is wrong? Obviously not. You'll notice that, in the wake of the Soviet Union, Communists are not going away but getting smarter; the failure of the method did not undermine the whole of the principle, since the principle was not executed purely.
Likewise with feminism. I believe it was the 1990s that the UK finally, officially undid their law that said a wife was a husband's property (it may have been the 80s, but it was during my lifetime). And it was the mid-90s when a state in the American south (I believe Alabama) was forced by the courts to stop charging women $1200 to file a rape accusation. (The charge would not be filed without a specific battery of medical tests which ran $1200 and a specifically positive result from the "rape kit". And that applied to raped children, as well.)
Personally, I think it's that men are merely sperm donors in the living scheme, and they're running out of horrible wars and devices to continue to justify themselves. Wait, strike that. They're not running out of wars and devices, but they're having to think too hard to justify themselves, so apparently the best thing to do would be to make women shut up and take it all over again.
I don't get it. Why are criticisms of feminism designed to raise the status of men? Why are they so oppositional? Rarely, if ever, do I see what is absent from much of this topic: discussion of how to better equality. I agree with the topic post that all people should have equal rights. But, you know ... it just ain't that way yet. And I disagree that the solution should always be to sacrifice the oppressed in order to save the rights of the oppressors.
Feminism, true, needs some fine-tuning, but so does its opposition. As I read through the anti-feminist side of this topic, it seems to me that they're merely demonstrating the continued and pressing need for the feminist bloc.
Of course, I'm an American who lives in a culture that vilifies statistical or ideological deviancy unless that deviation promises a capital return.
thanx,
Tiassa
