andrewducker | Quick poll before bed

I am a man and I am SPARTACUS.

To qualify my declaration: I believe that women, whilst different in many ways, inferior in some, superior in others (probably more), merely different in yet more still, are personalities with the same motivations and emotions as men however they are balanced, and deserve equal rights and opportunities.

No. I'm Spartacus!

Egalitarian feminist, though.

That's what the definition says...

I said yes under that definition, assuming that equal /= identical, etc. In practice, a lot of feminists don't seem to want equality - I tend not to identify as feminist because of the loud subsection going, "Society doesn't let me run the Bank of England on a two-day-a-week basis, taking time off early to pick my kid up from school, and pay me the same as a man doing it 80 hours a week would get. It's SO UNFAIR!!"

is that the same loud subsection politiely pointing out the results of the Women and Work Commission Study which found that women in full-time work are earning 17% less than men, despite the fact that they are performing much better academically?

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4753360.stm)

I would doubt it - the ones I'm talking about rarely do anything politely, especially if they're talking to blokes.

(And don't get me started on statistics, either...)

I can understand some womens lack of politeness, men have been rather rude (not to mention murderous etc) to them for some time now. Its bound to get you riled.

I dont think it's the statistics that are the problem here...but ok, i won't get you started

Go on - describe your problem with these particular statistics.

Problem? Singular? Ha :)

1. Women choose jobs that pay less. They're more likely to take up public sector work - nursing, teaching, care - and public sector always pays less. The article does say that, but it seems to think we should "fix" this by stopping job segregation - I don't think that all nurses secretly want to be engineers and are only nurses because of the power of Society, I think that men and women, being different, tend (and of course this is a tendency) to have interest in and aptitude for different types of job.

2. Women take time out to have babies, for childcare, for looking after people. This is *their choice*, and I don't think it's fair to expect someone who's worked full time for 10 years, part time for 5 and not at all for another 5 to be paid the same as someone who's worked constantly for 20 years. We can do a bit to fix this with paternity leave and stuff, but most of the time the mothers want to be at home.

3. As a rule - and there are always exceptions either way, as with everything - women just won't sublimate their life to their work the way some men do. They won't work 80-hour weeks, they won't take so much work home, they're less likely to thrive in competitive high-stress being-a-wanker environments like the stock market and financial jobs in general. A lot of high-paying jobs that mostly men do - IT and finance are the ones that come to mind - you won't be successful and get promotion unless you're willing to pull allnighters, weekenders, stay till 11 at night to close a deal/ debug a program, have a ten-minute lunch break at your desk, all that stuff. I wouldn't stay in a job that expected me to do all that, and I don't know many women who would.

So essentially, I'm not really querying their stats, but more their conclusions...

"I wouldn't stay in a job that expected me to do all that, and I don't know many women who would."

I dont know, your description of these all nighters and 80 hour weeks sounds suspiciously like bringing up children, except less gruelling, more fun and much better paid.

"most of the time the mothers want to be at home"

well I wonder, for most people one of the partnership has to take care of the children, manage the household etc. This has historically devolved to women, what is still called "womens work". Its what allows the males to pull the all nighters, the eighty hour weeks and the massive pay packet.

"Women choose jobs that pay less"

bit of chicken and egg here i think. Why should nursing pay less than engineering, teaching less than stock-broking. Isn't it historically that we have always undervalued "womens work" - caring, nurturing, enabling professions? There is no innate reasons these jobs should attract less cash.

Why should nursing pay less than engineering, teaching less than stock-broking?

It shouldn't, and I will rant at length about the undervaluing of these people, but there's just no way the public sector can afford the salaries the private sector does, and I don't want schools and hospitals privatised any more than they have been either.

What, so you want people to work for less in the public sector for the sheer love of it?

Did you miss the "It shouldn't" at the beginning of the comment?

I don't have all the answers, and I'm happy to admit that. Nurses and teachers are underpaid, yes, but the only way to pay them the same as accountants or whatever would be to privatise the NHS and the education system and run it as profit-making ventures, which I think would be far worse for the country than the under-paying. It's not just a "women don't get paid enough, pay them more" issue - the world just doesn't work like that. Sorry.

Or we could pay them more out of money collected in taxes?

If you can persuade people that they aren't already paying enough tax then good luck...

1. Given your assumption is true (that women tend to have different interests and aptitudes for different kinds of jobs) which I don't think we still have enough evidence for - why do you think that public sector jobs are not paid more? Shouldn't they be, if that's what many women choose to do, and for many women the sole way in which they support their families? Are you saying, for example, that an engineer should be paid a lot more than a nurse?
2. Women generally, still have babies *with* men. Isn't this the man's choice as well? Shouldn't the man be given the chance to spend time at home with the baby, and shouldn't there also be provisions in the workplace (for both men and women) for proper child care and baby care?
3. Do you have any actual proof for this statement? Proof enough to counter the statistics?

Short answer as need to work - women do not "choose" to have the babies - many many people want children, society needs us to have children as a public good, and it's only women who can do it - so I've heard :-). Show me a society where a couple can decide which one physically has the kids, or even a society where it is conventionally accepted that either man or woman may be the primary carer (for real, not just for the first si8x montsn or so but for 16 years, not just in terms of what people talk about at dinner parties), then talk to me about "choice".

And before you say people can "choose" not to have children - people can also choose not to have sex, choose never to have a partner or choose to cut their left leg off. Do you think this is really the main option you want to present to women as the alternative to systemic underpay and lack of equal opportunities?

"You can earn 40 % more over your lifetime and have a decent pension on etirement if you choose never to have a life partner." Go for it. Sell it to the public. Choice theory is the curse of white liberalism.

1. Women choose jobs that pay less.

I don't like stats because I don't know exactly what they mean a lot of the time. The Wife, though, looked at a chart of pay scales and so forth in the finance sector (in which she works), and the difference (still about 17%) was between women and men in the same jobs.

Statistics? ::holds out hand::

Do you believe that this is the majority of feminists? Or just lots?

A vocal minority, that's all!

I can't even face responding to this. I just feel tired.

"dont flake out on me now, Thelma"

ok see above - I didn't!!!!:-)

That's a mighty fine straw feminist you've constructed there.

With the proviso that this is a principle, and bearing in mind that *most* people, irregardless of gender, are crap :-)

Oh yeah and seconded on what pickwick said, absolutely...

I second what you said, too!

It really should be/if only it were so simple. For me, it is.

Nice idea but as is evident below, this poll merely papers over the problem of anti-feminsism by presenting a definition of feminism that almost no "liberal" can be seen to disagree with. It's rather like asking "do you believe people are inferior because they are of colour?" :- Well of course not BUT.. ) doesn't solve the problem of how you address actual inequality .. the details of what is *required* to provide "equal pay and equal opportunitiea" are where the rub/disagreement is.

The point of the poll was to react to a discussion elsewhere where some people were unwilling to use the word feminist at all, due to bad connotations. I was attempting to get people to say the words "I am a feminist." as a starting point, that being necessary to get them over the psychic hurdle of feminist-aversion.

Think of it as a tiny bit of CBT therapy :->

it's annoying because the term originally refered to a specific movement from a time when the balance was so against women that it seemed only natural to call it that, rather than refering to a philosophical stance, but many people just don't get that without doing some research into the subject. if one was to start looking at a morality that treated the sexes the same from the bottom up, either humanism (which is more or less reaches from the bottom to the top these days) or existentialism (imo it's only logical that every existentialist is a gender feminist) would be the most suitable starting points. what's more annoying is the term 'masculism', where some men, rather than saying "hey, lets take a step back here" and realising that feminism is called feminism because of where it came from, and that it doesn't have to exclude the rights of males, or that it's better to go with a stance that tackles the two birds with one stone (like the two mentioned above), they have to fork off a new camp, seperate from everyone else to try and get their point across.

I think people forget quite how historically recent, and geographically partial, the social enfranchising of women is. women, and men, have fought hard and died for womens social recognition and freedom, and continue to have to do so.

As Dworkin put it, if the crimes that were committed against women on a daily basis were happening to an ethnic group or a country instead of a gender, the whole civilised world would be rushing to their aid. As it is, because it is so widespread and world-wide means it largely passes without comment.

Thats why the caricature of feminism as women whining about not running banks seems complacent at best.

Just to say, I answered the question

andrewducker asked me, but I don't want to get into a debate here because it'll take up my entire day and frustrate me intensely without changing anybody's mind about anything. Didn't want to just ignore everyone though!

I'll post something further on feminism at some point over the next few days, and you can have a proper argument there :-P

Great :-S

It's often not used that way in current practice, though. Let me explain what I mean by it. A lot of modern feminists claim that feminism is fundamentally about women, and that men's problems have nothing to do with the movement and should be disregarded entirely. I think, on the other hand, that men's problems and women's problems are of a piece - for instance, men in our society are socialized to be "tough" and "strong" and to hide or deny their feelings. This can lead to a lot of internal confusion in men, which can in turn be dealt with through violent acting out (since anger is the emotion which is most commonly accepted in men). Basically, in a nutshell, I think our society socializes boys and men men in a very disturbing and potentially damaging way, and I see that as both a feminist problem and a general one - a feminist problem because men who take out their confusion and aggression in this way often take it out on women, and a general problem because I don't think anyone should screw with another human being's head the way that boys' and men's heads are sometimes screwed with.

The feminist movement has done a lot of really great work around opening options up to women and helping them to realize their full potential. That's great, but I feel like boys have been left by the wayside in a lot of ways, and that their requests for help are contemptuously dismissed as "whining". In addition, a lot of the problems that women face, men face as well, and that gets ignored. I think you know my feelings on male rape, and how that gets dismissed because "it doesn't happen/can't happen", and even if it does, "men have been raping and abusing women for centuries, they can sit back and take it themselves for awhile." I find that repugnant, but it's what I've heard a lot of feminists say. I see myself as an "egalitarian feminist" because I *do* want full equality - I want both women and men to be free of gender-based stereotyping and socialization, and there are a lot of factions of the women's movement that don't seem interested in going in that direction.

You know, I totally agree with what you're saying, but I'd just like to mention that this is more a first world post feminist situation - and that there are many countries in the world where opportunities and lifestyles that we take for granted as women haven't even started appearing yet, which is another reason why feminism as being about women's rights still needs to have relevance and resonance.

That's a very good point. I think "post-feminist situation" is an apt description. This is something that relates very specifically to first-world countries, and I don't even know if I can extrapolate it out that far - I'm basically talking about an American problem, and though it may be more far-reaching than that, I don't know enough about that aspect to say much about it. So, yeah. I think the work feminism has done in America has been absolutely crucial, and that there are a lot of other countries that could well use feminism's progress in America as a model.

The thing I would want to add to this definition is "and equal responsibilities"

Quick poll before bed

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject