Don’t you understand? They’re bothering Catsix ferchrissake.
When the board was besieged by six cats, who saved us? Catsix. That’s how she earned her name.
When the boards lone good cat turned six, who threw the birthday party? Catsix, further reenforcing the name that she had already recieved from the earlier incident.
When a bunch of cats showed up out of nowhere with a massive case of the ix, who cured them? Okay. That one was Giraffe. Still, two out of three isn’t bad.
I already said my husband does this all the time. I see other men do it for US all the time.
He does more than just shoot stray ones.
Sick bastard.
I like your style! 
So he drowned them in order to avoid problems for unlawful discharge of a firearm. Dead’s dead. When I was a kid, people used to routinely drown whole litters of unwanted cats or dogs. Shooting the stray/feral dogs doesn’t shock me either. You should see what they do to the whitetail deer in my area, especially the fawns in spring. Stray/feral cats and dogs aren’t pets. They’re pests. Drowning a stray cat is no different from drowning Japanese beetles in one of those bag-a-bug traps.
Crafter_Man’s blind-sided attack on Guin was one of the least classy posts I’ve ever seen on this board. But his plan back-fired because instead of losing respect for Guin, we’ve lost respect for him. Karma. It’ll bite you in the ass every time.
This assumes that you respected him in the first place, which I do not believe was the case. It also assumes that his goal was to make you lose respect for Guin, which I also do not believe to be the case. I think he had no further goal than expressing his existing dislike for her.
BTW, unless you also have a mouse in your pocket, speak for only for yourself. I’ve lost no respect for Crafter_Man.
There is exactly one difference in the way I hold the door for men and women - for men, I hold it until they can catch it, and precede the guy through the door; for women, I hold the door, step aside, and allow them to precede me. If a woman prefers to bitch me out instead of getting to the on sale Haagen-Daaz before I do, that’s her problem.
I will offer a seat on the bus to anyone - man, woman, child - who is obviously not completely able-bodied. A woman who is heavily pregnant is obviously not completely able-bodied.
(bolding mine) So would you have picked up a flyer dropped by a young, healthy-appearing male?
Yes? Then why was she upset with you? Perhaps she must assumed you picked it up because of the antiquated, patronizing attitude that older people are incapable of retrieving their own objects. You were just trying to be nice? Sorry, like it or not you are kowtowing to deep societal age-bias. What you see as politeness, she saw as oppression. Treat people equally and you shall be treated as an equal. Once society is age, gender, race, ability and sexuality-blind, then we will all pick up our own goddamned stuff, because free people no longer do nice things like that for one another.
No, catsix has made quite clear that the problem is that the holder is doing so because the holdee is female. And this is a problem because the holder would (presumably) not do the exact same thing for a man. Gender is the sole criteria, not a set of assumptions based on gender.
catsix believes - and I’m paraphrasing here - that true equality between the sexes can only come when all gender differences are completely neutralized. No one is treated specially because of their gender, period. And that accepting even the slightest gender bias in my benefit, such as accepting a seat on the subway, is an obstacle toward creating that equality.
Not that I agree with it entirely, but I see the point. If you want to refuse that offered seat on the subway on principle, fine. As long as you are polite about it (and it sounds like most are, even catsix), then that’s your stand for your principles. Carry on and good luck.
But, XJET GIRLX, that woman at the grocery store was flat-out rude to you. Those who want respect, treat others respectfully. Using nastiness as a means to achieve an ideal society will just create a society full of nasty people.
On a side note, principles or not, I object to people refusing to walk through an opened door or get into some “no, you first,” “no, YOU first” back-and-forth. If the door is open, fucking walk through it. Those of us behind you have places to go, you know.
It’s both, kambuckta. Maybe it doesn’t happen in Austrailia. But certainly where I live, if a woman goes with the man to buy a car and the salesperson is about forty-five or older, most of the comments are directed to the man. It has happened too many times. In the situation I described, it happened despite my repeated reminders to the salesperson that I was the one buying the car and that he should direct his comments to me.
Even the auto mechanics teacher at one school where I was a teacher admitted that he actively discouraged girls from signing up for the course. Yet an older female teacher in the school could take an engine apart and put it back together again. Such discouragement should be a crime. It certainly is illegal.
The incident at the car show room is only one example of many. Another is how few women are in administrative positions in our educational system compared to men – yet the teaching positions are overwhelmingly female and lower paid.
Another example is that women my age receive less retirement pay because we were required to stop teaching when we were five months pregnant. They didn’t want pregnancies to be obvious to the students. Therefore, many women my age had fewer days in at retirement time and got less credit for time on the job. That makes a big difference on a day to day basis. And that time has not been compensated for with retirement credit to this day.
(BTW, the irony is that we often taught students who were pregnant. I was required to administer a test to one in labor once.)
The little things wouldn’t be indicators if there were only one or two of them. But they are numerous and pervasive – so much so that many people, both male and female, don’t notice how often discrimination is present.
If all things are socially, economically and politically equal in Austrailia for women, I congratulate you!
Personally, I think that (as a clever poster said early on) that’s it’s gone from that, to being more about “checking out our asses”, though not literally.
Let’s see if I can make that make sense, (migraine and the brain is semi-absent).
So, while I seriously doubt most men have any kind of holdover beliefs in our being “too too delicate”, I do believe that for some (those that aren’t just being nice, and are holders for just about anyone), it’s a matter of a subconscious thought along the lines of “oooh, woman…Nice, me do something nice now!”.
That’s HILARIOUS, and a classy way to do loudly drop the hints.
Anybody’s irony meter jump at this juxtaposition?
I agree that there are still inequalities out there, but concentrating on the tangible ones rather than second-guessing a man’s intentions on a bus or at the mall is more effective in leveling the playing field. It seems to me someone should have taken your school system to court because what they were doing was blatantly sexist. Standing by a door trying to sort the oppressors from the nice guys is a waste of time and good will.
I know what you mean about the car salesman, as I have the same issues (not with cars…Mr. K is a better negotiator than I am). I receive calls from people who still ask to speak to the man of the house. I’ve had carpeting salesmen refuse to come to the house unless we were both present, even though Mr. K’s sole involvement with carpeting is walking on it. But my point is, there’s no guesswork here. It’s obvious and can be dealt with effectively by attacking the issue head on (apply directly to the forehead).
Yeah. Fun. Well, anything to amuse the inmates, I suppose. Keeps 'em from ripping up the toilets and licking the grout off of the stalls.
How about you try taking out one of those feral cats mano a mano, no traps, no guns, no sacks, just you vs. the cat au natural? Not as much fun as watching their heads explode from 50 metres out, is it?
Dude, I’m totally on your side. I normally wouldn’t have offered, and waited to see if she looked like she needed help. Count me in the equality camp on this one, but after reading these threads and all this outrage over the situation had me feeling that perhaps I should ‘just try to be nice’. I just thought it was incredibly hilarious because she reacted exactly the way I would have, and illustrated the points that some of us here are trying to make.
She wasn’t rude in the least. She was entirely polite, just firm and determined. Now, if she’d actually said “Suck it, bitch!” that would have been rude. Why is it that any time a woman knows her mind and speaks in a firm and resolute manner, she’s rude or a bitch? Oh well, another argument for another time. Back to the trainwreck people, you’re doing a great job!
You didn’t do so well in debate class, did you?
There’s nothing to debate here.
How about you go mano y mano with my cock?
Well, if I had expressed how much fun it was to shot your cock with a rifle, you might have a teeny little point to go along with your teeny little cock. As it is, you will have to get by with just the latter.
Anyone who would should a cat for fun, but is afraid to get close enough to give the cat a fighting chance, is a chickenshit, needledick, dumbass, loser asshole.
Believe me, I’m quite clear on what catsix believes. The problem is with the ASSUMPTION that the holder would not do the same as a male (I had hoped that my post was clear that holder was male, holdee female, Oh well…see what happens when I try to be even remotely funny?).
Oh, I understand her views on this as well. I just think they’re crazier than a belfry bat. She’s always (on this board at least) confused differences with equality. And **special **with different.
Men and women are different. Unless you are an East German shot putter woman, or in training for Ms. Olympia or the like, in most cases your physical strength is not going to be on a par with most men (and of COURSE as I mentioned, exceptions are always present).
Like catsix, I have worked most of my career in male dominated fields. One of my first jobs was fueling 747s. A blast of a job (no pun intended), but my upper body strength never matched that of my coworkers. You have to be able to lift a 50 foot, 80 pound hose straight over your head, while engaging a semi complicated locking mechanism to the plane’s fuel port. The hose is attached to on one end to the pump truck, which is of course sitting on the ground, and the end of the hose that gets attached to the plane is hooked to the lift which goes up under the wing of the jet. So you’ve got this long hose trailing down that you have to lift and attach.
Well, I couldn’t lift the hose and hold it up to attach it to the lock ring on the fuel port. I just didn’t have the upper body strength for it. But about two tries into my training day, on my first plane, I figured out how to hold the hose steady by clamping my legs around it (about a 6" diameter hose) thus taking up some of the weight.
Worked like a charm and I got to where weak little me could “hook up” faster with my method than the guys could with theirs. The thing about the hook up was that it took more than brute strength, you had to get it on the fuel port JUUuuuust so, or you’d be struggling with that thing until you collapsed.
In the winter the extreme cold would make the hoses very hard to handle and the hook ups really difficult. Some of the guys would try to muscle it on and it was a matter of holding the hose up PLUS finessing the connection.
Nothing we ever did was going to erase those differences in how we (there was one other woman, and 65 men) managed our jobs. We never asked for special treatment (well leggy peggy did, and she lasted all of a week and a half after she DID in fact expect us to “hook the bottom”. “the guys always do” she said. “Ummm, We’RE not guys” we told her. End of Leggy Peggy).
The point is, the differences are not going to be neutralized. And differences are not wrong. Treating someone badly for their difference IS wrong. But using a modification to allow one’s difference (in my case, lack of upper body strength), or being able to sit down when one is tired (whether from pregnancy or whatever) is NOT “expecting special treatment”.
Women and men, for the most part, have very different physical structures and physical strength. Most of us have different views of life, romance, work, family all that rot. That’s unlikely to change as well.
And why would we want it to? Sheesh, let’s all just wear baggy solid grey jumpsuits and all have crew cuts. No make up will be allowed, no plastic surgery other than that which is necessary to make sure we are all the same. We’ll be fed small pellets which contain an exact amount of calories so that we are all the same size and shape…
They we’ll all be truly “equal”. No wait, we’ll all be the SAME…hmmmmmmmm