What Is Your Understanding Of A Feminist? Are You One?

Actually, yes, I have been following this thread with interest. My point is that women cannot do certain “chores” as we have been told “You cannot, because you” have the wrong gonads.

You might be surprised regarding how many emancipated men are walking around. I use to date a guy who was a bit upset that I made tea, and brought him a cup. Why? “I do not want to become dependent on another person.”

:wink:

Did you ever think that a man might be insulted that your offered to help him with the shopping. Or perhaps, a woman might be insulted is a male changed her flat tire, when she is able to??

:sunglasses:

People should only be insulted by an offer of assistance if it is rudely offered. A polite offer should never insult anyone. I don’t know about anyone else but I was taught that an offer of assistance when politely offered is an act of kindness and humanity. To be insulted is to belittle both people and humanity. To return a kind offer of help with insult is the degradation.

I help short people or people in wheelchairs etc… get things from the top shelves at stores is that degrading to them? Or is that caring? Should I let a deaf person walk infront of a vehicle, for fear they might not apreciate being helped? I mean jeez we are a society we are supposed to help each other. I only stated one type that I help I did not mention all the others because they were not pertinent to a gender thread Oh and by the way I have had many people assist me from time to time and never not once did I feel incompetent ,second class or degraded. I guess I am just not sensitive enough. Help does not mean dependence, it just means help/assistance.

Emancapation is great but, shoving people away is an awfully high cost to pay. Should not our hands always reach out to help in case of need? Being afraid to assist someone for fear of insulting them causes a larger breach than the gender one does.

LOL, I am perfectly capable of opening my own door, thank you very much.

Depends on how the individual feels about being helped. Some may be insulted; others may not.

Perhaps you believe it is caring, but the individual may feel inadequate.

When a person can do something with little to no difficulty, and another assumes they cannot because of their disability or gender, they may be insulted.

In case of need, and in need are two different agendas.

Sure, help when needed, but try not to insult.

Smiles,

aspacia

At first I thought you were a man due to your userID and was thinking ‘wow, what a pussy’ but in fact you are a woman talking woman talk, angry woman talk at that by the last few lines.

That’s what makes this admonishment so vain and useless:

Especially when if is followed up by more angry woman talk like this:

I started this thread knowing it would be a hot button, but some of the anger spilled out in tortured prose is more than I expected. A lot of it isn’t about a progressive movement at all, but rather acidic rancour reflecting peoples’ dissatisfaction with there relations with the opposite sex. Angriness is not an attractive quality in either gender, and carrying around a profusion of it that spills onto the cyberscreen may suggest one needs the services of someone who can bring some relief. I mean that soul Ariel just quoted seemed on the brink. This isn’t that much of a philosophy forum but it is clinically interesting.

Well, what did you expect Ric…? Lock a man and a woman together in a box for long enough, and they’ll either come out wreathed in smirks of post-coital bliss, or one of them will come out carrying the head of the other.

I mean… Duh.

which is why we have certain polite phrases in our languge;

Do you need help? Can I get that for you?

Or would you prefer: Hey you are in my way let me get that for you otherwise its going took take all day and I don’t want to wait.

Oh come on I am going to hold that door because you can’t do it and I want out too or in.

Or do you think :

Since you are obviously not as capabale as I am, let me show my superiority and get this done so that I may feel self righteous and superior.

I mean some seem to think I behave, believe and actually say it, so I may as well throw that in there… Hmmm , I may try it just to see the reaction of someone. Might prove an interesting experiment. I do hope I can run fast though.

Because one has a difference in physical ways why would that make them less human or inadequate? It is the mind that counts. Not the body.
being afraid to to help or assist or even offer because you may insult them, you already put them lower than yourself. You would not hesitate to help someone that has no physical differences would you? So why hesitate? It is the person inside that counts not the outside.

Sorry for the delayed response.

Satyr, why do you say that physical dominance and mental dominance are necessarily joined? Wouldn’t that entail that humans are the strongest animal, or that whales are the smartest? Or that football players are the smartest people or that Stephen Hawking is among the strongest? I don’t see any reason to suspect that if men dominate physcially they must dominate mentally as well.
How and why did they become the dominant sex? Through physical force. In early society, order was enforced by brute strength. Only the strongest member of a tribe or group could maintain power (it functions the same way in many pack animals today; when the leader’s strength lags, they lose control and they are challenged). As society budded under the control of the strongest, strength was valued primarily for long enough to cement a system where women, who did not evolve to hunt, were considered non-considerations. Leadership was initially defined as strength, and by the time strength was not the foremost consideration, leadership had already come to entail male-ness.

Kris, I read the article. I don’t see where you’re coming from. The conclusions in the article are pretty solid: People choose their mates based on observable similarities (attitudes and values) and marital satisfaction is largely dependent on deeper similarities (personality characteristics). If you could point to the specific parts you find to support your case, it would be helpful.
The criticism that the study is only of newlyweds is misleading. “At the time of the assessment, the couples had been married an average of 153.9 days (range = 25-452) – that is, approximately 5 months. They indicated that they had known each other an average of 4.7 years (range = <1 year-30 years) and had been dating approximately 3.5 years earlier (range = <1 year-15 years).” New marriages do not necessarily indicate new relationships. Though they didn’t follow the couple, they did get a diverse group in terms of relationship length.
Besides, this is the best study that exists as far as I can tell. If you have another study whose methodology you prefer that indicates something different, please share it. But it seems that this minor shortcoming for the study in question doesn’t support your position, it just (ever so slightly) calls into question this study. I also presented two other sources to support my position, so it seems that the findings are corroborated and that my position, that opposites do not in fact attract, is accepted as scientifically tenable.

The more recent discussion of whether you should offer to help people is an interesting one. I can appreciate the view that it is an act of kindness to offer to help someone, and that alone should not insult anyone. But the presuppositions behind it can be highly insulting. Kris, you refer to a number of examples where it would be acceptable to help someone, e.g. the deaf person and the person in a wheelchair. Obviously, helping these people is the humane thing to do, and I am not in the least condemning your compassion (quite the opposite).
But these people are unquestionably disabled. To hold that these examples indicate that it is acceptable to offer assistance to a man shopping or a woman changing a tire, is to hold that being a man is a disability when one is shopping and being a woman is a disability when one is changing a tire. People have every right to be insulted when they believe they are being assumed to be disabled when they are not, and I think the presupposition behind the offer is insulting to any automotively inclined woman or shopoholic man.
So while it is acceptable, even respectable, to offer assistance to the disabled, if your conception of who should be considered disabled comes from bigotry or bias, you shouldn’t be surprised or indigant that someone takes it as an insult.

I think women should be empowered. That way I can use my charm rather than my merit to get places in life. For instance, the person I report to at my job is the #2 person in the whole place. She’s got a PhD in chemistry, and PhD in philosophy, a master’s in physics and did her undergrad in biology. She’s about as empowered as they come. The other lady who I deal with there has a PhD too. They’re both empowered. If these two were guys, they’d get fed up with my smart ass nature pretty quick. But I always get along better with women. I say thank God for empowered women, because they can give me a job.

I am a man, but it really doesn’t matter to this thread.

the last lines are not just “angry women talk,” it is an observation of the way the world is now, with some prose and color ful words to make the sentence less boring to type for me. But yes, I “AM” angry at men who degrade women, and I “will” not put up with it if I am around, nor am I ashamed of my anger at these men. (I am not accusing you in geneneral ariel, but all men or women who continually either degrade or trivilize others in any way from a full happy life.)

the real “pussy men” are the ones who act like assholes, not the ones who stick up for others.

Where do you draw the lines between degrading and opinion with regards to gender talk? I think that some people think they are one and the same, and I don’t think they are.

aspacia!

Uh-oh…you’d better watch out, somebody’s stepped up to label you an ‘angry woman talker’. Proceed with caution, as you have now been weakened, they’ve ferreted out your innate female foolishness; that is to say the word’s out that you’re incapable of containing those irrational and unpredictable female emotions that will be your undoing in this den of reasonable, rational and oh-so-secure males.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!

Thanks guys, I needed a good cleansing laugh.

Well, that sounds good in theory, doesn’t it? For instance, men are better at throwing and women have more dexterity. Men are better at mentally rotating shapes and women are better at visual memory. Men are better at solving word problems, women are better at the calculating.

(Oh wait, was I supposed to stick to the ‘men are more intelligent and women are better socializers’ theories put forth by several of our esteemed fellow ILP’ers thus far? Sorry!)

You’d think we’d get that and find a degree of equanimity and happiness in creating and celebrating balance, no?

On the surface, you might think that a particular engineering problem can only be solved by the particular skills (note that I didn’t write ‘superior’; that’s just what those with sexual bias reading this are concluding…) that men, statistically, tend to display more often. But suppose that said task can be accomplished either by representing geometry or by representing individual landmarks. Girls tend to rely on the landmarks, and boys on the geometry. And both can solve it!

But wait…my god, what a despicable, feminine take on things! Where’s that innate masculine drive to stand alone upon yonder hill, flag raised (so to speak), one foot placed before the other in the timeless symbol of leadership, ready into battle, drenched in noble cause, defender of the truth whatever the cost…

[i]“…for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay…”

“Look, your worship,” said Sancho. “What we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the vanes that turned by the wind make the millstone go.”[/i] - de Cervantes

In the end, balance is relative and, even more problematic, in constant flux. Its achievement can’t even be evaluated until after the fact, by which time you’ll be pretty assured that things have shifted some. :slight_smile:

IMO, what matters most is how power is defined and perceived and, ultimately, negotiated. It’s my experience that when a woman and a man with similar understanding along these lines meet up, then that’s great fortune for both. It’s rare, though. So if you got it, savor it. (sigh)

[size=75][Pulls over to the kerb in his Shiny red convertable][/size]

“Uh - S’cuse me ma’am ah’ma lookin’ fer a place called Stepford…?”

Ingenium, the problem I have with the “men are better at x, women are better at y” line is that, even if statistically true (i.e. on average, within the general population and over a large number of individuals the trend holds), the variation within each gender makes the finding practically useless. Even if men are better on average in all aspects of mathematics, there are still women who are better at math than 99.999+% of men, and likewise for any trait where there is some statistical sexual discrepancy. In the workplace, the statistics are useless: since you’re dealing not with the general population but with a biased sample, a woman applying for a math-heavy position who has a comparable resume to that of a man is as likely as not to be a better candidate for the position. The statistics would only make you expect more male applicants to a specific position, or more men with the relevant experiences.

Carleas:

I’m not feeling much inspiration to deal seriously with this thread; however, your participation seems sincere.

I’m uninterested in a brand of feminism that holds the ideal above and beyond valid scientific findings. It would just be a shadow game, adding more fuel to the ‘enemy’s’ fire, as it were. With that said, there’s a difference between the morality of the social and political imposition of gender (or any other) discrimination and empirical findings regarding biological similarities or differences between the sexes. Plain old vanilla information is no threat in and of itself and, in fact, it’s disinformation and ignorance that does us in, no?

That’s true, if you’re considering male curve versus female curve, the means may be different, but at any particular measurement there are always representatives of both genders. But the variance depends a lot on the tails of the distribution curve, populated by the fewest samples. Even when there’s only a small difference in the means of two distributions, the more extreme a score, the greater the disparity there will be in the two kinds of individuals having such a score. That is, the ratios get more extreme as you go farther out along the tail. This is not insignificant in the empirical sense, of course. But there’s a difference between denoting difference and inferring that denotation in a discrimatory manner, which you alluded to in your employment scenario. The problem is that you have some who over-emphasize these outer extremes to justify what are essentially social or political propositions.

Interestingly, research has shown that candidates for such jobs who are stellar – the highest of the high – are not viewed differently in terms of gender. It’s when you get to the much larger, more average group of candidates that you see gender-based bias when it comes to perceived productivity, quality of experience, suitability as a colleague.

[quote=“Ingenium”]

[quote]
Are you looking in the mirror?

Yes, my significant male other and I are very balance. However, my first husband played the alpha male, power trip, and I divorced him and spent two year in court divorcing him as he did not want it.

You will reap what you sow. :wink:

That’s because I’m pretty much in agreement. Well, at least in terms of balance of power and maturity and personalities in a good relationship.

I think you misunderstood my meaning. See, back in the early days of the women’s movement, if you spoke out against male opinion or the male power structure or status quo, you were labelled an ‘angry, irrational, overly-emotional female’. And, see, some poster had called you angry and other male posters had referred to the ‘natural order’ and that women are less intelligent and more social…oh, never mind.

Sigh. It’s one of those deals that if I have to explain it, it doesn’t matter.

LOL, chill out, I wasn’t arguing with you. I agree, at least in terms of balance of power and maturity and personalities in a good relationship. It’s just not that common that two people maintain such balance over the life of it. Most women I know sacrifice and compromise more than they’d like to and will admit it…to another woman. I’ve never understood why, but have been told crap like, “well, it’s better than being alone” or “they’re all pretty much that way, so I might as well stick with the one I’ve already invested my time in.” I can only shake my head at that logic.

And heaven only knows what their mates are admitting to their male friends.

Uh, because we live in a culture where men have been encouraged in both overt and subtle ways to pursue it and girls have not?

Boys get Erector sets and video games, girls get Easy-Bake ovens and Barbies. With lots of pink dresses and accessories. That was not my experience, although I did get a baby doll or two.

That’s good. Mine are not yet out of school, but I’m encouraging them to make lots of money just in case I need a loan when I get too old and feeble to work. :slight_smile:

I’m not convinced that there are that many on here, and virtually none in the truest sense of the word. I know some in real life, though.

I don’t think you understood much of my post, actually. But no matter. I was actually supporting what you’d written, it just didn’t come through because I was also directing a bit of sarcasm at prior posts by some of the males.

(Damn. I KNEW I should’ve stayed away from a thread on feminism on a predominantly male site! But noooo…)

Are you talking about society in general or me personally? If you mean me, then perhaps you can tell me, are you assuming that I’m a man or a lesbian? Just curious. :slight_smile:

Yikes, that sounds expensive! But no doubt worth it, lol.

:blush: Damn, I can be the defensive bitch— sorry about my misunderstanding :sunglasses: I have been slammed as a misanthrop many times by three males on this board. Chuckle, women making equal wages and burdens helps the household and eases the burden on both parties.

Friends???

Smiles,

aspacia :laughing:

Why hasn’t the Equal Rights Amendment been adopted? After all it was passed by Congress in 1971 and ratified by 35 state legislatures. Only three more states need ratify it for its adoption. Members of Congress have reintroduced the measure every year since its defeat. This year it has been renamed the Women’s Equality Amendment. Do you think that will help? The amendment simply states “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” What could possibly be wrong with that in an enlightened free country like the U.S.A.?

It was defeated because it is redundant. Women are already protected under the Civil Liberties Act. :sunglasses: The laws on the books simply need to be enforced.

aspacia :sunglasses:

If you are referring to the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, it has never been interpreted to grant equal rights on the basis of sex in the same way that the Equal Rights Amendment would. Ratified in the 19th century, the 14th Amendment wasn’t applied to sex discrimination at all until 1971. Even so, the last major Supreme Court decision on sex discrimination, regarding admission of women to Virginia Military Institute demonstrated that males hold rights and females must prove that they hold them. Why is that a good thing? The Equal Rights Amendment would end that disparity and shift the burden of proof to the alleged discriminator.