Okay, do you not see how, even using your own arguments, that this is evidence of sexism against women? Being “too valuable to risk” means “too weak to handle combat”. It’s paternalistic. Of course, based on your other posts in this thread, especially where you said:
I’m inclined to think you are being intentionally obtuse and selectively ignoring the part of what I’m saying that doesn’t fit with your agenda.
Hey everyone this is the guy that he thinks the Southern Poverty Law Center is being so unfair to.
How course, like he ignores those of us in this thread who have said similar things he is only too happy to ignore how the SPLC says (bolding mine): “Some most certainly do have legitimate grievances, having endured prison, impoverishment or heartrending separations from genuinely loved children.”
And another thing, obviously you will never hear anyone in the public sphere of the military say this. To say that would be in and of itself damaging to military cohesion. But if you ask the people who work in the military, or military contractors who are former military who agree with the idea that women should still not be eligible for combat positions, the overwhelming opinion is that they do not possess the upper body strength or physical strength in general to keep up with their male counterparts in combat. This is evidenced by the lower physical requirements the military sets for female personnel. “Unit cohesion” is a politically correct way to pretend like they’re just overly concerned for the women in combat, but it doesn’t prevent female soldiers from being attached to combat units currently or being killed in action. It’s the only way they can argue the case in public without overtly saying that they don’t want women in combat because they don’t think they will be able to keep up.
People: there’s no reason an event can’t be sexist against both genders in different ways. Having a contest to see whether it’s worse for men or women is stupid, and futile. Instead, we should say, “Yes, that is sexist. It’s sexist no matter which way you look at it. It is unquestionably wrong, and we should work to repeal it.” To get bogged down in which gender that act is worse for is folly.
Didn’t read the entire thread, but I doubt this one’s been mentioned before: according to an article I read years ago and cannot find right now, men and women commit parent-child homicides at a roughly equal rate; that is, about 50% of parent-child murders are committed by the mother. However, the rate of criminal convictions of such murders for men is approximately 90% higher than that of women, and when women are convicted, their sentences are approximately 90% lighter than those given to men.
As a society, we are weirdly understanding, and even forgiving, of mothers who murder their own children.
Of course. Just like rape is mostly against women because men are seen as less sexually desirable. Damn those rapists and their bias against men. And, of course, those who beat young boys because of their bias against women.
And if only men were believed incapable of swimming more men might have survived the Titanic, presumably.
To not readily admit that the draft is worse for men displays a lack of honesty I would think since women obviously have a choice to join any branch of the military and men don’t. Men face a “choice” between registering for the draft and jail, I’m not seeing the downside for women here.
““Twenty-five years ago,” he wrote, “the federal government declared war on men. It is time to see how committed they are to their cause. It is time, boys, to give them a taste of war.” Calling for all-out insurrection, he offered tips on making Molotov cocktails and urged his readers to use them against courthouses and police stations. “There will be some casualties in this war,” he predicted. “Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.””
Women don’t have the choice to join any branch of the military. Well, they do, but they are barred from about half of all military jobs (and up to 80% depending on the service).
Listen, nobody is arguing that it’s not worse to die than to not die. But that doesn’t change the fact that the motivations behind why women aren’t included in the draft are based in sexist prejudices, namely that women can’t cut it in the battlefield. And the fact that we only recently were able to join any branch of the military at all shows that the lack of honesty to be yours. Nobody wants to be drafted, period. Dying in war sucks. The question is not “is it worse to die in a war against your will or worse to be prevented from dying in a war”. You think the draft is prejudicial against men, great. But you are ignoring the entire argument for WHY WOMEN AREN’T ALLOWED TO BE DRAFTED IN THE FIRST PLACE.
And seriously, everyone, read the link I posted. The hate and vitriol that is so inherent in so much of the men’s right movement is why some of us are hair trigger in threads like this. It’s why I am.
If you’re interested in fathers being treated equally in court, and ending the perception of men as sexual predators of minors, both of which I whole-heartedly agree are noble goals, these are not the men to align yourselves with.
You seriously don’t get it. At all. I’m book marking this post the next time we have ye olde semi annual “The Dope Isn’t Sexist, GUIZ!!!” thread, because whoo boy!
And on that note, I’m bowing out of this nonsense.
You know, people are capable of having multiple points of discussion within the same thread. Maybe when you come back to read this post, you could try bringing some worthwhile goddamned content for once.
But what he didn’t do, a fact you keep trying to dodge, is actually commit any acts of terrorism, violence, arson, and so on. He set fire to himself, in the manner of a Buddhist monk protesting the Vietnam war, say. He did it on the steps of a courthouse, whereas if he was a terrorist I expect he would have set fire to the courthouse rather than himself.
On the draft front, we don’t have that where I’m from, but other countries still have active conscription for national service programmes. Norway does, but doesn’t conscript women. Switzerland does, and although women may volunteer for any position they aren’t conscripted. Even Israel, famous for its conscription and female combat troops, only conscripts women for a year less than men.
On the lives of which sex are considered to have more value, I direct towards this study.
But the issue is not whether it ever happens, but whether it constitutes some sort of widespread phenomenon that requires a systematic response.
Look, the world is a big and weird enough place that we can find examples of almost any bizarre and stupid and offensive behavior. I’ve already conceded, right in this very thread, that there is some evidence that male dental hygienists might encounter some problems breaking into the profession. But the evidence i found also suggested that the problem manifests itself more as generalized attitudes than as active employment discrimination, and also that the little discrimination that does exist is rapidly receding.
What that reading also suggests is that generalized beliefs about whether a man is likely to be hired may not actually be reflected in the hiring process. And that’s what i’m talking about in this thread, For example, one person says:
I’d be interested to know who told him this. Because, in the articles i cited earlier about dental hygienists, there were quite a few men in the profession who were told by career counselors and other advisers that they would be unlikely to get jobs in the field, yet they went into the field anyway and still managed to get jobs. The fact that some people believe something doesn’t always mean that it will come to pass; the fact that some people expect discrimination doesn’t mean it will actually happen.
More importantly, i was actually responding to Shagnasty’s (typically) asinine assertion that discrimination was somehow about men being considered to be “all secretly perves.” If there is discrimination against men in some areas of employment—and i believe that there is—it is mainly a result of broader ideas about socially acceptable gender roles, which men themselves have been instrumental in constructing, than about some idea of men as perverts. That is the part of his assertion that i was saying had absolutely no support.
Furthermore, in (typically) weaselly fashion, Shagnasty uses the passive voice as a way of implying a broad societal phenomoenon that he has offered no evidence for:
Are deemed by whom? How widespread is this belief (if it exists at all)? How hard is it, actually, for a man to get hired as an elementary school teacher?
What this also completely (and unsurprisingly, given the poster) fails to acknowledge is that the imbalance in elementary school teaching is not simply a product of job discrimination. As this article notes:
If men have, themselves, “shied away” from this particular profession, how do we know that the lack of men in elementary schools is the result of job discrimination? If you have a bunch of openings for elementary teachers, and 85-90 percent of your applicants are women, isn’t it likely that women will make up the majority of your hires?
And this sex imbalance at the level of career choice persists. At my university, i teach a class that is a required class for anyone who is studying to be an elementary or middle school teacher. The vast majority of these education majors are women. According to the article i just cited, about 1 in 6 elementary school teachers in Colorado are men, and i’d say that this proportion is pretty close to the make-up of the elementary education majors in my classes.
I’m not saying that there’s never any discrimination against men who apply for work as elementary school teachers. I’m sure there is. Even though i don’t have any examples or statistics to hand, i’m willing to concede, for the sake of this debate, that such discrimination does happen in some individual cases. But you can’t simply look at the numbers and conclude discrimination, and you shouldn’t simply cry “discrimination” while willfully ignoring all the other factors that might militate against a larger number of men in the profession. And that’s what simplistic “thinkers” like Shagnasty have been doing in this thread.
For what it’s worth, the United States District Court in Chicago (upheld by the US Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit, 1988) recognized the same principles in deciding one of the most famous cases of gender discrimination in American legal history, the EEOC v. Sears Roebuck case. In that case, the EEOC took Sears to court alleging a pattern of discrimination against women, because women were disproportionately found in lower-paying jobs at Sears, and were very rarely found in the higher-paying commission sales jobs.
One of Sears’ key arguments in the case was that you can’t simply infer discrimination by looking at the number of men and women in each job. Sears argued that women were less well represented in commission sales job because women were less likely than men to actually seek out and apply for those jobs. Sears argued that, despite the company’s own affirmative action policies, women simply didn’t pursue commission sales positions in the same numbers as men. While the case was far more complicated than this mini summary could ever suggest, this issue of women’s interest in the work itself was at the heart of the case and, combined with a lack of actual women complainants, caused the court to rule in Sears’ favor.
Now, just because the court found for Sears doesn’t mean that there was no discrimination going on. It’s highly possible that some women did apply for commission sales jobs at Sears and were turned down by managers who thought that women were no good for these higher-pressure jobs. It’s also possible that some managers discouraged women from applying in the first place, for similar gender-related reasons. But disparities in numbers aren’t always the result of discrimination, or only of discrimination, and an honest and comprehensive attempt to deal with the issue will recognize this, rather than making stupid and simplistic passive-voice assertions that some people “are deemed inappropriate” for certain jobs.