Feminism, Chivalry and Gender-Roles

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So, let's talk about feminism, shall we?

First of all, I'm a guy and a heterosexual. Even so, I'd like to say that I'm a feminist or coming close and having strangely opinionated views if I'm not.

As it probably came clear in the 'Chivalry is not dead' -thread, I think that women have more worth than men. The reason is simple, women are essential for giving birth and raising new generations, men are not so. It was summed up pretty neatly by jaded empath:

But that's not all. I'm saying that not a single good thing our culture has produced by men could be accredited for the fact that they were men. Women could have made all the exact same inventions, would women be valued more through their intellect. And there's no reason it couldn't be so. Men could nurture their offspring just as well as women could. There even has been several cases of men lactating to feed babies. Men have mammary glands, but of course to a lesser extent than women. But even that's beside the point.

The point is that most people sytematically think less of a woman than a man, less of a girl than a man; of her capabilities, both pshysical and intellectual, and that there's no good reason for it. I dare you to give me one. And since both women and men are equal, but women are needed to give birth and men have the qualities to make them more expendable, women should be valued more than men as a rule of thumb and not the other way around, as it has been for who knows how long.

I'm hoping that this discussion would find itself dealing with chivalry and gender-roles as well, but if I would've started to rant about them, then this post would've been too long. But now, get to it, discuss.

 

Only because you dared me - and because you mentioned 'physical' - I can easily think of a reason: I would back any male club rugby to beat the world champion woman's rugby team.

 

Not again. Again the age-old trick of "I'm woman! I'm a victim! Give me more rights!" -repeated. It's getting old, especially since the trend of gender-quotas is taking place in certain countries (here, in Scandinavia). How does this sound: half of the leaders of the private company must be females. Not because the applicants are any better or more suited to the task, but simply because they have a vagina instead of a penis.

Reproductive capability does not matter when evaluating your value as a human being. Both genders are the same and, likewise, should have the same rights and responsibilities. We could begin from arranging mandatory military-service for all women too. They have slacked off long enough. Then we could cheer them up by demanging the same, paid vacation from work they usually get automatically after giving birth.

 

@Wordplay: Here, men have the same right to take parental leave - which is UNpaid - that women do. And I'd like to point out that, AFAIK, women never demanded to be exempted form military service, this was something that men decided was right.

 

Personally, I think this is not the best reason for establishing "worth" when it comes to gender. (For example, that theory may lead to the idea that women have a primary "use" as childbearers, or that it's okay to maintain a "stock" of women.) Or going on, does this mean a sterile woman has less intrinsic worth than a fertile one? Ought we give more rights/privileges to fertile women?

 

Let's not get started at how you can be taken to court for 'undressing a woman with your eyes' if you admire her beauty and you happen to share the same workspace *sigh*.

Wordplay has hit a few nasty nails on the head: gender quotas, military service and pregnancy leave. I'd dare say there's a gender imbalance in society yet the party being discriminated against isn't the usual suspect.

Strange that women are so adamant about being granted the same rights as men yet not the same responsibilites... And women in my country are granted pregnancy leave and are paid for it yet men are not. The interesting thing is the number of cases that an employer will not hire a pregnant woman often get referred to as gender based discrimination and the employer is forced to hire the pregnant woman and then she gets paid leave anyway. Seems a mite unfair.

 

Umm... I'm sure when science developes enough that men can get pregnant, then they would be given the same rights here.

 

I mean if a woman is pregnant she can get paid leave however if a man's partner or wife falls pregnant he can't recieve leave to take care of the child and be paid for it still.

 

I kind of get what you mean, but the funny thing is that I'm not a woman. Rallymama's right, and you're right too. If there's a mandatory military service written in the law saying that all citizens should partake, then why are women excluded? Because they're not citizens? They don't even have the same proceedings as those men with birth defects. Thery're less citizens than invalid men? That's worst kind of sexual discrimination and it's written in the law, by men I might add.

Pregnancy leave is something that's been bothering me as well. As a man, I wouldn't be expected to nurture my children if I'd ever choose to have any. Another case of sexual discrimination, assuming that women are mainly childbearers, first and foremost. This kind of thinking wastes perfectly good, valuable human resources. Another type of arrangement should be made.

No, since it's not only giving birth that gives women more worth. Now we get to culture and behaviour. Let it be biologically hereditary or based on learned traits, human female culture is better for survival than male. In most of the harvester-gatherer societies about 80-90% of food is gathered by harvesting. Guess who does the harvesting and brings the food to the table? Guess what the men do most of the time while women are harvesting?

 

In all fairness, it still isn't the guy with the embryo developing in his womb (or equivalent body part)...

I agree though. There should be no classification as Man and Woman. There is just "Person" or "Home sapiens" if you are being pedantic. ANYTHING else, such as deciding whether one gets a job or not, or certain privileges or not, should be based on an objective assessment of the person in question.

If a woman is applying for a post of an executive, evaluate her skills fairly, and then give her the job or not. If a man is applying, and he happens to have better qualifications and better skills give it to him. If you give the job to the woman, JUST because there are laws which tell you to do so, even though the woman did her MBA through correspondence and the guy went to Harvard...eh, thats bull.

Of course, such evaluations would need to be objective, so have a group of people decide, with a mixed gender composition.

I'm all for equality of gender and all that, but in the NAME of equality of genders, giving women rights without responsibilities that go with them is completely unfair IMO.

 

The law actually says that all male citizen are to partake in military service. The point of this is mainly not to discriminate women it's to point out that you can't have 100% population on the front line when the war begins. In the winter war women were at the home front and produced supplies, clothing and even weaponry for the men who fought on the front. Now this may seem discriminate but then, being an officer and drinking cognac in Helsinki is a slight better than being on the front as costlajaeger with the life expectancy of about fifteen seconds. Point being that in war you need to classify people somehow and I find very few other easier factors than gender to make an approximate 50/50 divide of the people. In war everything needs to be done efficently and practically, you can't and you won't stop and thinking if that hurt someone's feelings or not.

EDIT: Naturally it would be great to have a greater reserve and it would not hurt women to do their military service (and they can do it as voulenteers). The economical expenses of giving military education to both genders would be quite great and with the current budget we can barely deal with the male ones so without a greater restructuring of the military service it's very hard to make military service mandatory for women.

This is indeed very stupid. I found it quite appropriate how they questioned the social and healthcare minister Haatainen about why men don't have quotas to universities were women are the vast majority. Naturally Haatainen said that in order to get the most fitting students for each specific line you must rate them by skill not gender. Guess it's all different with corporations then.

 

I do not think that this is a valid reason for believing that one group of people has more worth than another. I really fail to see your reasoning here - sure, women do that ... so what? It's not like we're in desperate need of more children and thus every woman must be cherished for her child-bearing abilities. It's a non-issue that women can do this - elevating them up over men because of it seems rather strange to me.

We do not need ten children by ten women and one man every nine months - so why make a big deal of this?

 

Personally, I think that those of you who complain about women being overly advantaged are missing a vital point. There’s a difference between being granted the same rights and having the same esteem and standing in society. The first is necessary for the latter, but it is not sufficient.

Now, if we look at the rights of individuals, we’ll find that, yes, women have the same rights as men. Then we look at the social situation today and we’ll find that, strangely, although women share the rights of men, they are in no way treated as equals when it comes to getting paid the same amount of money for the same kind of work, getting access to the same highly esteemed and paid positions, and paying the same amount of money for their insurances – just to name a few.

Check out the statistics of your country and have a confused look at the percentage of women in leading positions in economy or politics or – and here we’re all expected to share a good laugh – the percentage of women holding leadership positions in the churches of the world.

Please remember that the basic premise is that women have the same mental capacities as men – intellectually, socially, concerning wisdom, what have you.

Understandably, those of you living in the naïve “equal rights generate equal opportunities” world stand back in awe and bewilderment in face of this seemingly contradictory situation. But we, the clever feminists, simply know that we’ll have to help matters along a bit if we wish to achieve the perfect world.

So, in order to establish a homogenous society, where women have the same chances (note: chances ≠ rights) as men, we have to be unfair to the men. Such is the nature of the weird world we live in! Impede the chances of some to further the chances of others to generate overall equality! Wow, what a concept!

This has not to necessarily affect men alone. We need to prod women every now and then as well. As of today, the percentage of women deciding to study social sciences, education science, or arts is overwhelming, but the number of women going for natural sciences or mathematics is somewhat lacking. How many CEOs do you know who have a degree in education? See? C’mon girls, I know that you can do better!

 

@Morgoroth: Yup, it does actually say 'every finnish man', my bad.

Sounds like to me. As if by now you wouldn't already have as much women that are equally capable than the men in the leading positions. As if they wouldn't choose the applicants by their skills even with the quotas, in fact they're not choosing applicants by their skills as it is, otherwise there would be more women leaders. What you're failing to see is the discrimination preventing more women from getting to leading positions. The gender quotas take the discrimination into account.

@Morgoroth: Why aren't there gender quotas for men in the university? How do you think that the university's top positions are shared? Equally? By the applicants' skills? Think again.

If offices have been filled by the applicants skills, it would mean that for some reason women have gotten a lot smarter within a hundred years than they were before. Do you honestly think that this has happened? Or that during a time period of a hundred years, while there has been equal public education, the women in the beginning of the century just happened to be stupider than the men of the same generation, or women of today?

@Aikanaro: It's not the only reason. There are cultural reasons as well, but that's one of the fundamental reasons.

So we don't need this now. So it's ok to discriminate women because they can bear children? If we have everything in abundance, it's allright if it's not shared as equally as possible? Probably not what you mean...

The thing is that the discrimination of the female has been argumented with biological factors over and over again, and almost every time they've got it wrong. Biological facts come down to survival. If something is based biologically, it's talking about survival and from that viewpoint, men are more than expendable. One thing that makes human males more expendable is that males succumb more easily to infectious diseases.

Or how about this: Longevity is valuable in present-day culture. Women live longer and are more vital when they're older than men. To me that would make them more valuable as assets to the society. This should be taken into account when hiring top-position officials, especially when they're older. The ability not to keel over and die while sitting in the office should be a valuable asset. But because of sexual discrimination, women won't get to be high-up officials as easily as men.

@Darkthrone: Yay! But I'd like to add that we don't have to be unfair to us men. Men should try harder than ever before now that some positions are no longer available in principle to us only because we're men. The male sex has been laying back and letting the slaves do all the work. Same kind of sharing of chores as in a pack of lions. Females do the hunting, males take more than their share by physical force. Despicable.

[ September 25, 2006, 13:39: Message edited by: Iku-Turso ]

 

No, what I'm stating is that it's idiotic requiring gender quotas for anything. Women are interested in different fields than men. As Darkthrone said women seem to prefer social science over economics, which is why they are less likely to get to the position of a CEO. Now I'm not going to claim that there is no discrimination in the corporate world because there probably is plenty but I really don't think that legislating quotas is the appropriate way of dealing with the situation.

Well the trouble is that the ability to learn also becomes less easy the more you age, on both genders. Which means that before the longevity actually has any difference the company is allready pretty much trying to get rid of you because of your inability to cope with new procedures and technology.

 

Personally, I don't like quotas, or affirmative action hires if you prefer that term. To me, it seems like such a contradictory concept. Think about what quotas and affirmative action is basically saying: In order to ensure people are not hired/accepted simply based on their gender and/or race, we are going to institute a policy that requires a certain number of people to be hired/accepted based on their gender and/or race. I know that things have been unfairly tilted in favor of the white males for a long, long time, and that something should be done to level the playing field, but it's just that I can't bring myself to believe the current policy is the best means to that end. I think people are becoming more and more accepting of women in the workplace, and I can only hope that in the years to come, the need for such quota systems will become obsolete.

I'm with HB on this one. While I agree that intellectually women are the equal of men, physically there are TONS of differences you can find. Generally speaking, anything requiring a large amount of strength is going to be performed better by men owing to their greater muscle mass. However, the same muscle mass that makes men stronger at the same time reduces their flexibility and dexterity. Women tend to excel in physical activities that require the same, like gymnastics and figure skating.

And I don't think there is anything inherently sexist about pointing out physical differences between the sexes. Here's two example that just immediately spring to mind: I can bench press 250 pounds when I work out. My wife can barely lift the 45 pound bar. But that doesn't make me any better than her. OTOH, when I lean forward without bending my knees, I can just barely touch my toes with my fingertips. When my wife attempts the same, she can put her palms on the ground. Similarly, that doesn't make her better than me. All this tells me is two things seem self-evident. 1.) Intellectually, there appears to be no difference in the abilities of men or women. I know lots of smart and dumb men, and lots of smart and dumb women. There appears to be no shortage in any of those categories. 2.) When it comes to physical differences, the separation could not be more clear. Men tend to do better in activities requiring strength, while women tend to do better in activities requiring flexibility and/or nimbleness.

[ September 25, 2006, 20:12: Message edited by: Aldeth the Foppish Idiot ]

 

@ Darkthrone

Lucky that I still have my sense of humour intact. Otherwise I might had taken that seriously.

I don't believe that women are discriminated and I do not believe women get paid much worse either. Why? It's not as simple as comparing the salary of person A, who happens to be a female, to person B's salary, who happens to be a dick. If there is any difference, it is because the person is not as capable or has not defended his rights well enough. Gender has nothing to do with it.

That's what people believe in general, but there are exceptions and if the world demanded women to be stronger than men, they would become just that either by natural selection or the social pressure. And vice versa. But that is irrevelant, since humanity's survival has not depended on physical fitness for many milleniums.

One thing I can easily agree on, though; screw quotas and remove all gender-specific references from laws. In my eyes, all people are made of the same block no matter what you have between your legs. Applying to BOTH rights and responsibilities. I'm just sick full of women demanding more and more rights at the expense of the opposite gender. Take another example from my own university: the University of Vaasa has begun a special program to attract more women to the technological study-programs. This costs money. Money spend for the favour of females at the expense of males. So where are the programs that should attract more males to careers like healthcare, governance, and elementary teaching, which are almost solely controller by females?

 

So you are saying that women in the same line of work just happen to be less competent than the men as a rule? That women are less competent than men in general?

Gender has everything to do with how you're taught to stand up for yourself ever since you were a kid. Dress a girl in blue and a boy in pink when they're babies and you should notice something funny, and that's babies we're talking about! Most people treat babies completely different according to external arbitrary appearances, such as clothing. It's ridiculous. This indoctrination to a certain gender is going on almost from day one until you die and it has no relevant basis, especially not in the modern day society.

Exactly, since physical strength is required in that line of work more than in major parts of industrial work. In social and healthcare sectors you can't replace a human with a machine, and having the strength to lift the elderly people all day long is something men would be really good at.

This is yet another case of biased thinking that takes place from the early childhood. Why haven't more men gone to work as nurses? Guys, why wouldn't you go to work as a nurse? I don't know about you, but for me there is that very little uneasy feeling of that making me less of a man, and I haven't even been indoctrinated as much to the male culture as most of you.

 

I think there's a lot of truth to this. I never even considered going to work as a nurse, even with a scientific background and some definite interest in the healthcare profession. I do not doubt that at least part of the reason is that the profession is dominated by women. There's also a huge difference in education, especially the early years. By the time you get to high school, the number of women teachers are still greater than the number of men teachers, but it is starting to even out. I do not doubt that is because by the time you are in high school you are taking courses such as advanced mathematics, biology, chemistry and physics - fields dominated by men. Elementary school is almost entirely a female profession. My wife teaches in an elementary school. She says that there are about 50 teachers in the school, and only two of them are men.

 

How so? I'll bet that it's for the best of you nerds to have some more women around, eh?

Anyway, I'm serious about what I said. I'm big on quotas. And c'mon: a program to make technological studies attractive for girls can hardly be labelled "women never stop demanding more and more rights".

At the time young people reach university it is already to late. Girls get dolls and boys get chemical laboratory kits on their birthdays. While just that little tad oversimplifying this picture explains a lot more about the "preferences" of girls and boys than any evolution referenced pseudo philosophy.

If it's a consolation to you: men hardly establish quotas because they're such good fellas. Or because women would otherwise neglect their marital duties. It is a damn necessity! We need to make jobs more attractive for women, we can't afford to waste half of our populations wits on nappies and needleworks. And we don't need trillions of social engineers either. And since boys are taught to queue up for CEOship anyway, we need a little extra motivation for girls.

Hence we tell them: come here ladies, it is so god damn easy, just learn something useful and a good job is almost guaranteed!

Again: I'm in favour of these things.