aliantha wrote:rusmeister wrote:aliantha wrote:Is it your contention that women have not been discriminated against?
No, it is not.
Well, that's a relief. Otherwise I was going to start being very worried about you.
Just as a caveat, Rus: As a former broadcast journalist, I tend to get huffy when people do the knee-jerk "blame the liberal media" thing. The so-called "liberal media" is the fashionable thing to blame the ills of society on, but it's my informed belief that it doesn't exist. But that's another rant.
I understand what you're saying -- that anecdotes may have become "common sense" or "common knowledge" simply by being repeated so often. I grant that it's possible in this case. But it's pretty much beside the point. While I'm sure it's important to understand the underpinnings of our current situation, it doesn't change the fact that women *have* been subjected to sexual predation and limits on their financial and educational opportunities, among other things, simply because they're women. (I'm trying to be sensitive to your objection to the use of the term "discrimination" in this context.) However this state of affairs began, we are where we are. How do we fix it?
You say -- if I'm understanding you correctly -- that we should celebrate the differences between men and women, and that there's nothing wrong with women staying largely in the home and men staying largely in the public realm. I say that I agree with you about celebrating the differences between men and women, but that your approach simply redefines the status quo to keep men dominant. It amounts to slapping a new coat of paint on an eyesore to make it more presentable. I also say that it's a grievous mistake to prevent women from participating in public life. They have public contributions to make to society, and our culture would suffer for their lack. In addition, it's insulting to women to expect them to channel their contributions through their husbands while they stay home and keep house.
I expect this is another of those things we will have to agree to disagree on.
(Totally up to the mods here whether to split off this conversation.
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Hi, Ali, and thanks!
(Happy New Year!!!)
Trying to get things out in the early morning hours before my sleepy wife brings out my baby daughter to me so she (my wife) can get some more sleep - I'm the early bird in my family.
Having a wife and two daughters, I also am interested in a society where they are not treated unfairly due to their sex... Indeed, this is one of my big points - that we are NOT just individuals - that society cannot survive if we remain merely individuals, that the family has always been the basis of successful society.
I think I dealt with the central problem in my response to Fist - we may agree on the facts, but disagree on the interpretations. I further charge that most people have been taught (primarily by schooling and the media) to take one particular interpretation for the truth and have been essentially taught not to question that interpretation; thus, making my contradictory posts seem shocking, at least at first.
One thing I am grateful for your responses on - it gives me the chance to clarify things that you may incorrectly read into my position. For example, i do not blame the media as being 'liberal' at all. I would say that it is neither 'liberal' nor 'conservative' - the great modern canards - if anything, it is corporate, and that is much more of a real enemy to the common man (which I use in the old (and essentially Germanic) sense of being "gender neutral". (That I reject the modern usage of the word "gender" is another topic. I use it here for expediency of communication.)
So I agree, as far as that goes, on the non-existence of a 'liberal media'.
Again, I agree that women have been preyed upon because they are/were women. I would further say that poor men have been preyed upon because they were poor, and that genuine minorities have been preyed upon because they were minorities. Again, though, I insist on the fundamental difference between women as a group and differing economical or racial groups as I referred to above (if we didn't read that, then the conversation is pointless).
Your question of "how do we fix it?" is to the point. That is why I suggested taking a look at the first chapter of "What is Wrong With the World" as a foundational dismantling of the popular assumptions and a rational look at the nature of the problem.
On your view on dominance, we will have to "agree to disagree" because if, in a business partnership, one person handles accounts payable and the other is the salesman, then speaking of "domination" makes no sense. Both parties do what is necessary to make a unified entity - be it a family or a business - function successfully. We would probably agree almost everywhere on freedom and opportunity for both sexes. But if a man and woman have married, they are no longer free from each other. And if they have had children they are not free from the children. They are no longer individuals, but, by their own free will, have chosen to become part of something bigger, and something that they may not simply abandon because they are not happy with how the business or family is running. (And that's a point - that a family is NOT a business, which really CAN be abandoned if you don't like it.) If (a la "Little House on the Prairie") the man is out hunting geese and the women is washing and cooking at home, is the man "dominating" the woman, or is the woman thereby insulted? Of course not. They are both doing what is necessary for the successful functioning of the family. They are no longer individuals seeking individual freedom. Perhaps, if the woman really IS the better shot, and the man better able to care for and feed children, the roles should be reversed. (But usually, the man has some difficulty in breastfeeding an infant, just to cite one obvious problem.)
In our modern world, most of the raising of children has been turned over, effectively, to the state - or to businesses. Poor women have not been 'given the chance of self-realization' but have been forced to go work for McDonald's or whatever to (barely) make ends meet - if they can. The so-called emancipation of women has resulted in at least as much enslavement as freedom, and I would say much more - for it is poverty that loses when the family is broken up, and its various members parceled out - mothers to simply do what the poor fathers (also enslaved in the modern business world) were already doing for minimum wage, and children taught what and how to think by strangers, mostly state employees. In any event, if we pose the question of who has the greatest interest in and love of the child - parents or teachers, the answer is clear.
I am not talking about "preventing" women from doing anything. If anything, I am talking about what has been done to women in the name of "emancipating" them. (And yes, wealthy and well-off women have generally benefited by the modern changes - but I would say that they are in a clear minority of all women.) But most of all I am talking about what has been done to the family, and of how we take things for granted in our time that our ancestors would find absurd, and even insane. If your view were inverted to see being ALLOWED to stay home and keep house, rather than being FORCED to stay home and keep house, you might see how healthy a society is when someone is actually keeping the house (and raising the children, btw). Ask the average lower-class woman - if given the chance, and the money she is being paid at Wal-Mart, would she stay home and keep house and take care of her own children for it? Or would she prefer to go and work at Wal-Mart?
As Chesterton says, our painful public fracas will occur outside the good public house.
) I suspect that fuels, in part, the drive to insist that women are oppressed - because it is an advantage in our time to be an aggrieved party. I maintain that the perception of competition between the sexes is a false one, and that it is possible today, with our public schooling and mass media, to spread any number of false ideas that would die certain death (over time) in societies that do not have them. Of course, as long as one believes in the premises they promote, one will likely see them as good things - but then, they form most of our premises. The difficult thing is freeing ourselves from the preconceptions of that formation and becoming genuinely free thinkers.
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